Popular Voices pp 107–⁠132

Abstract

Charles Bukowski meant his poetry to be performed. In the 1960s and 1970s his editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others, organised public poetry readings where Bukowski was the star. Some recorded his performances, which were later found on compact disks or in documentaries released after his death. Some shows were retold in books by his friends or scholars. His voice was deep and melancholic, adding value to his words. The purpose of this article is to discuss the transfer of Bukowski’s poetry performance skills online. Indeed, readers of Bukowski have invested time and effort to “remediate” (Bolter and Grusin 1999) Bukowski’s poetry, using a new medium to create new ways of performing poetry. Using the example of the poem “The Crunch” selected from a corpus of 30 YouTube videos created by amateurs and a selection of video excerpts, and studying the use of image and audio within these videos, I will discuss the remediation of Bukowski’s poetry in a new medium and how this can affect its reception. The goal of this article is to decide which methodologies and tools could be practical in such a study. The voice is not the only tool that is used when performing online, sound and images are also taken into account. This article is introductory and reflects on the reception this new form of poetry performance, as we can either read, listen to, or watch poetry independently, or all of the above, using the ImageJ processor and Praat to study the videoed poems.

About

Macaud, A. (2025). An Introductory Approach to the Reception of Charles Bukowski’s Performance Poetry, Reperformed Online. In M. Väina, M. K. Lotman, A. S. Bories, P. Ruiz Fabo, P. Plecháč, & S. Mett (Eds.), Popular Voices: Computational Analysis of Poetry and Song (pp. 107–132). Tartu: ELM Scholarly Press. doi: 10.7592/PP2025.07.macaud

DOI
http://doi.org/10.7592/PP2025.07.macaud

Print ISBN
978-9916-742-77-8

Online ISBN
978-9916-742-78-5

© Estonian Literary Museum
© Authors
© Cover design: Anne-Sophie Bories

Published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)