{"id":2329,"date":"2025-08-05T23:24:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T06:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amplab.ok.ubc.ca\/?p=2329"},"modified":"2025-10-09T20:15:03","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T03:15:03","slug":"poetry-off-the-page-a-conference-in-vienna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amplab.ok.ubc.ca\/index.php\/2025\/08\/05\/poetry-off-the-page-a-conference-in-vienna\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Off the Page: A Conference in Vienna\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Klara du Plessis reading from Post-Mortem of the Event <\/em>at the \u201cPoetry Off the Page\u201d Open Mic. (Credit: Tsepang Malephane<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Klara du Plessis (SpokenWeb UBCO Postdoctoral Fellow 2024-26)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my research and practice, the live performance of poetry and the study of poetry in performance are closely intertwined. This is also true of the \u201cPoetry Off the Page, Around the Globe: Advances in Poetry Performance Research\u201d conference that I was fortunate to attend and present at, 13 and 14 June 2025 at the University of Vienna and the Literaturhaus Wien in Vienna, Austria. The final annual instalment of a five-year project, directed by\u202fDr. Julia Lajta-Novak<\/a>\u202f(University of Vienna), Poetry Off the Page<\/a>, according to its own statement of intent, \u201cinvestigates the significance of poetry performance to recent British and Irish literary history\u201d (Poetry Off the Page <\/em>website), bringing together practitioners and interdisciplinary scholars relating their study to the sounding of literature. As someone who has been associated in various capacities with the SSHRC SpokenWeb Partnership and the Audio Media Poetry Lab in a Canadian context since 2018, Poetry Off the Page felt like a kindred scholarly network representing adjacent cultural and literary heritage from across the oceanic divide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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SpokenWeb represents; Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, and Klara du Plessis together at the “Poetry Off the Page” Conference. (Credit: Henrik Wehmeier)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The two keynote speakers were Shantanu Anand, co-founder of the Airplane Poetry Movement  (India), and Dr. Cornelia Gr\u00e4bner from Lancaster University (U.K.). The former presented a vibrant narrative of a slam poetry community developing in India over the past 15 years, one inspired by an Urdu tradition of poetry recitation called Mushaira that impressively draws thousands of attendees to their performances. Dr. Gr\u00e4bner offered a more theoretical paper, discussing the emergent intersection of practices and methodologies for studying poetry in performance in Anglophone and Hispanic contexts. Contributions by emerging scholars were especially impressive. Sonja Faaren Ruud (KU Leuven), for example, presented ethnographic research based on poetry series in Brussels, Belgium, to consider what is lost and what is gained in the affective and embodied resonances implicit to multilingual poetry performance before audiences who do not necessarily understand all the languages used. Eleonora Fisco (Universities of L\u2019Aquila and Lausanne) studied the function of translation in bilingual poetry slam contests, offering an analytic of different strategies and their respective pros and cons. I presented a paper on archival permissions relating to the audio cassette tapes of the 1994 Writing Thru Race conference (see my earlier blog post here).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference also centered live practice and the first evening concluded with a regulated open mic event that featured four, international spoken word headliners\u2014Shantanu Anand (India), Liz Breslin (New Zealand), Raphael D\u2019Abdon (South Africa), and Katharina Wenty (Austria)\u2014and four additional readers chosen by lottery from the conference participants. I was one of the latter performers, sharing work from my then most recent poetry collection, Post-Mortem of the Event<\/a> <\/em>(Palimpsest Press, 2024). The room at the Literaturhaus Wien was packed after a day of panel discussions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Poets at the “Poetry Off the Page” Open Mic: Shefali Banerji, Claire Palzer, liz breslin, Raphael D\u2019Abdon, unknown, Katharina Wenty, Diana Maria Talida Izdr\u0103il\u0103, unknown, Klara du Plessis, Shantanu Anand. (Credit: Tsepang Malephane)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the purview of the conference itself, I was fortunate to feature in another event on 16 June 2025, organized in collaboration with Viennese media artist Christina Goestl. Goestl and I had originally crossed paths through the 2023 SpokenWeb institute<\/a> hosted at the University of Alberta. We stayed in touch, so when she decided to compile a new artist\u2019s book called fish on a walk*, <\/em>she invited me to write an introductory essay about her work. This publication, slim and minimalist in scope, yet expertly designed and printed on paper specially sourced from Italy, offered the opportunity of a launch event in Vienna. Against the backdrop of Goestl\u2019s video work projected on the wall of the theories.in.mind gallery space, I performed one of my most off the page works to date.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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