by MARIE KREBS, University of Vienna
Deconstruction has sometimes been seen as a terroristic belief in meaninglessness. It is commonly opposed to humanism, which is then an imperialistic belief in meaningfulness. […] Deconstruction is not a form of textual vandalism or generalized skepticism designed to prove that meaning is impossible. […] Rather, it is a careful teasing out of the conflicting forces of signification that are at work within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not meaning per se but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. (Johnson 347-348)
Upon first glance, there appears to be a conflict between theories of deconstruction, which aim to de-familiarize and de-essentialize humanist epistemologies, and more author-centred or autobiographical reading practices, which focus on the humanist proliferation of the individual as the entity both producing and articulating meaning. The former work against assumptions of coherence, subjectivity, and notions of unified selfhood, while the latter at least partially rely on them. Within the emergent field of poetry performance studies, more author-centred approaches appear to dominate,[1] potentially because most poetry performance pieces are written, performed, and potentially even distributed by poets themselves (Novak 62, 51). The appeal of poetry performance and spoken-word poetry, particularly when it self-stylises as autobiographical, is frequently traced to its potential to make visible, tangible, and experientially salient the individuality of its author and thus provide an empathetic aesthetic education through teachingits audiences to identify with the lived realities of others (Osborne “Didactic Poetics” 413).[2] While work on deconstructive tendencies in poetry performance studies indubitably exists,[3] there appears to be some resistance to an outright engagement with deconstructive terminologies in such research because of the purported “absence of reference to the sonorous voice” (Silva “Defamiliarisation” 2) in writings by Jacques Derrida, the central figure of deconstructive thinking. However, in this essay, I argue that despite a seeming conflict between the project of deconstruction and (autobiographical) poetry performances’ centring of individual, agential meaning-making, there is much to be gained from drawing on both fields to propel critical engagement with categories of selfhood, identity, and truth beyond essentialist interpretations thereof. In fact, there are many primary and secondary texts which already display an undeniable deconstructive impetus,[4] which is why it may be useful to explicitly deploy deconstructive vocabularies to engender synthesis between the fields of deconstruction and poetry performance studies.
My argumentation is terminologically, methodologically, and epistemologically based in Derrida’s writings on “Différance” as well as (perhaps more implicitly) Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive pedagogies.[5] Both of these thinkers help to add much-needed distance between poetry performance studies as a field and the assumptions and pitfalls of author-centred approaches which focus primarily on the articulation of meaning instead of its construction. There is, from my vantage point, a fundamental value in introducing deconstructive frameworks to readings of poetry performance, particularly for texts which do not self-stylize as autobiographical. This synthesis may help to denaturalize enforcements of coherent subjecthood and individual cohesion. In this, the seeming dissonance between deconstruction and this field of application might be a point of generative friction instead of incommensurability. However, importantly, this should not be read as an attempt to abandon humanist modes of cultural production and reception or to supplant them with the purported meaninglessness of which deconstruction is so often accused (Johnson 347; see also Saïd xxix).[6] Instead, I want to open points of contact that might be explored in future research or have already been made yet not explicitly articulated through deconstructive terminologies. Below, I provide two interconnected working theses to suggest where exchange between poetry performance studies and deconstructive theories may not only be possible, but also greatly fruitful.
Thesis 1: Deconstructive terminologies can be effective in decentring binary relations between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ and thus allow for greater distance between author, performer, and lyrical persona.
As stated above, in poetry performance, poets often perform their own work. Because of this, audiences may assume that there is an autobiographical angle in performances, and thus level problematic expectations of ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ at them: the ‘I’ of the poem approximates that of the author’s own physical voice and thus, their poetry is evaluated differently than written works. In addition to writing and performing their texts, poets are expected to perform an authentic persona and a ‘likeable presence,’ i.e. one that audiences identify and sympathise with. Katie Ailes writes at length about the problematic (and often racialized) implications of this ‘authenticity effect,’ which is often articulated in demands for ‘true’ and ‘real’ performances of the self that centre ‘truth’ as a marker of quality (150). While telling one’s own story is an indubitably empowering act, as it lends visibility to those who have been forcefully made absent from canonized histories (i.e. racialized, non-male, LGBTQ+ or disabled individuals; Hartman 3), it is important not to level authenticity expectations at every text. In the case of racialized, Indigenous, and otherwise marginalized performers, for instance, ‘truth’ is sometimes a cypher for ‘trauma’, which can be mined and extracted by white Western readers to function as pseudo-ethnographic data: “[t]he subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain” (Tuck and Yang 813). Utilizing an approach grounded in deconstruction, however, could provide some valuable tools to destabilize a terminology of authenticity, which, while problematized at length within the poetry performance research discipline, retains a marked epistemological standing within discourses about poetry performance at large.
Poetry performance studies have utilized, explicitly and implicitly, a deconstructive impetus to centre the intricate fabric of meaning-making onstage. Julia Novak’s Live Poetry (2011) is the first study to propose a detailed terminology for each increment of meaning-making, from paratextual framings of poetry to vocal timbre as well as gestures and body language. Novak’s toolkit functions broadly in conjunction with myriad theoretical concepts, and, I argue, also accommodates a deconstructive terminology. For instance, in their work on defamiliarization, Hannah Silva utilizes a close reading of physical gestures and paratextual interventions, based on Novak’s terminology, in the performances of Lemn Sissay. Sissay, in his own words, deconstructs poetry performance traditions by working against audience expectations levelled at the poet as an affable, authentic individual who shares their individual life story onstage. Sissay interrupts his performances with (rather Derridean) false starts[7] and seeming failures or defamiliarizes gestures through repetition, for instance (Silva “Defamiliarisation” 2, 8, 17). While Silva does not explicitly claim a deconstructive focus, their analysis invokes deconstructive vocabularies and thus exemplifies how poetry performance analyses, attentive to the intricacies of performance and performer conventions, can discuss deconstructive gestures undertaken by poets themselves.
To push this existing body of work further, however, I suggest that it may be of use to explicitly name the deconstructive influences present in readings of poetry performances. For an illustration, I briefly turn to the Grenadian poet Merle Collins’ “Crick Crack,” which she delivered at an event staged by spoken word organization Apples and Snakes in 1992, and which overtly deconstructs the binary relation between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ in a postcolonial context.[8] The poem’s title is a reference to a Caribbean storytelling tradition, in which stories (particularly those about the trickster Anansi) end with the phrase “crick crack / monkey break he back on a rotten pomerack” (Baldwin par. 1).[9] Collins also explains in her paratextual framing that this phrase, often performed as a call-and-response (“I say crick / you say crack”), indicates that the story being told is fictional. In view of the poems’ sparse self-reference (“Once an African child told me” (Collins 195, emphasis added)), the autobiographical mode is, at best, tangentially evoked. Rather than showcase a narrative of self that centres on the personal truth of a sovereign subject, the poem alludes to historical ‘truths’ which are predominantly enforced throughout Eurocentric historiography – e.g. the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, or the abolition of slavery in the United States by Abraham Lincoln (who is described as a “tall, tall, tall white man / in a tall, tall, tall hat”). This is followed / preceded by the phrase “not a krik or a krak” – i.e., the poem indicates that the factuality of these events is, at the very least, debatable. At the same time, however, there is no outright assignment of fictionality to these items either. Instead, the poem places them in an in-between space, a third option between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’.
This is reflective of an understanding of historiography being a highly constructed narrative which cannot be posited as a universal ‘truth’ of any kind, especially in a colonial context. What Collins’ text deconstructs, in this context, is the claim to unequivocal domination of Eurocentric historiography. While it may have been true that Columbus saw the Americas (or, more accurately, the Caribbean) for the first time in 1492, the poem implicitly refers to the fact that this is not the only truth in this context. All of the Americas were already inhabited; Indigenous populations had already known the land. In a similar vein, Abraham Lincoln’s abolishment of the legal frameworks of enslavement was only made possible because of the resistance of the enslaved population, global networks of solidarity and, to a degree, the allyship of (white) abolitionists. While the text does not outright place a “crick crack” next to these narratives, it comments on its absence, thus remaining suspended between reinforcing or denying their factuality. What is more, it does so in a way that is particularly suited for performance: Collins’ delivery of “Crick Crack” occurs in a humorous tone, with a sarcastic inflection on the rhetorical question “I say for true?”. I will discuss the performance aspects more under Thesis 2, but for now, it is important to note that part of the poem’s deconstructive thrust stems from its playfulness, the laughter it evokes, and the voices of the audience joining in on “crick crack.”
Collins’ text thereby sets itself apart from the epistemological violence of Enlightenment humanism, which suggests the existence of a truthful, objectifiable historiography. This reading is usefully traced through a deconstructive approach to categories of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’. This mode of historicization, thoroughly inflected by the vocabularies of colonialism, has been criticized at length, not least by postcolonial thinkers Dipesh Chakrabarty (4) or Michelle Wright (40). Importantly, however, both these thinkers work at the intersection between poststructuralist and postcolonial or deconstructive and decolonial thought. In this, I want to stress that the value of deconstructive approaches should not be read apolitically, but significantly also in its potential to decentre the coloniality that is implicit in (some) humanist thought.
Thesis 2: Deconstruction and différance provide the vocabulary to consider oral modes of delivering poetry in their difference to written forms, yet they do not enforce a qualitative judgement in this regard.
Theorists of poetry performance have laboured for a long time to dispel the qualifying language of prescriptive literary studies, which somehow posits oral modes of poetic delivery as ‘lesser’ than printed poetry. This is a necessary argument; an overly zealous emphasis on print culture enacts racialized, gendered, and otherwise epistemic oppression in traditionally gatekept modes of production (Silva Live Writing 33; Dawes 44). However, it is also impossible to suggest that written and oral poetries function in precisely the same ways – in this case, différance may provide a prism through which difference can be acknowledged but not hierarchized, i.e. that allows for examinations of the specificities of delivery forms without arguing about the superiority of one or the other. A deconstructive consciousness may thus help to tease apart the congruent, conflicting, or mutually constitutive mechanisms of meaning-making through spoken and written poetries.
This argument is based more directly in Derrida’s “Différance,” in which he refers to his “discreet graphic intervention” (3) explicitly as a contrast that can be seen but not heard: It is impossible for a listener of his lectures to discern whether he is referring to ‘différance’ (his neographism) or ‘différence’ (the ‘correct’ French spelling), which is why it has to be verbalized as ‘différance-with-an-a’ or ‘différence-with-an-e’. Thus, the word itself needs written modes to produce difference. At the same time, however, the written version ‘différance’ does not explicitly transport the ambiguity, simultaneity, deferral, and overlapping or conflicting meanings of the term (4). Only when voiced, its dimension of simultaneity (in the parallel evocation and existence of both difference and deferral) can be grasped. This indicates that deconstructive thinking does not assign orality or orthography a subordinate or dominant role in the cosmos of communication. Rather, it acknowledges that an utterance is very much defined by how it is uttered; i.e. that the medium is (part of) the message.
Analogously, it can be posited that performed poetry and written poetry carry respective absences and presences that function in dialogue and conflict with each other. For instance, Merle Collins’ “Crick Crack,” as noted above, exists both in a written version from 1996 and a performance in the Apples & Snakes Archive from 1992. Neither can be posited as a deficient variant of the other – they are simply two texts, closely resembling each other, but articulated in different ways and thus expounding different meanings. In Thesis 1, I argued that the poem humorously refers to practices of Eurocentric historicism. However, here, I aim to illustrate that the performed poem, read parallel to and in conflict with the printed version, articulates “différance” in a way that dispels hierarchical thinking about the written/spoken divide.
Collins’ delivery of “Crick Crack” effectively utilizes the affordances of poetry performance through its navigation of vocal timbre, intonation, and a reliance on collectively uttered call-and-response forms of “crick crack, monkey break he back on a rotten pomerack.” Through this, I argue, the text becomes différance performed. It functions as a carrier of difference on the one hand, as the performance creates a humorous, lightly sarcastic tone that is not clearly present on the page. Furthermore, the recording also features laughter from the audience which stress the text’s playfulness. In this regard, the difference to the page version of the poem lends more impact to the cursory reading I provided under Thesis 1: the tonal delivery destabilizes the idea of clearly delineable ‘truth’ and ‘fiction,’ as the laughter following the sarcastic “I say for true?” stresses the outlandishness, from a non-white/non-European vantage point, of claiming that North America was discovered in 1492, for instance. On the other hand, deferral is also enacted through Collins’ performance in that the ‘event’ character of the text may not make it possible for listeners to grasp ‘the entirety’ of the poem. Complete reading is deferred in that sounds are muffled by laughter; the poet omits verses from the printed poem (or perhaps adds more verses for the printed version?); listeners may get distracted and miss a few lines. “Crick Crack” is différance: In performance, it is experientially different from a written poem and simultaneously enacts deferrals of meaning, all at the same time, in its artistic complexity and articulatory specificities. Deploying Derrida’s deconstructive vocabularies, in this sense, addresses a facet that poetry performance studies have always been aware of – that written and spoken poetry are not the same and that neither one is a deficient variant of the other – and expands the critical vocabulary used to trace the meaning-making mechanisms of poetic texts.
Embracing Différ( )nce
Ultimately, there is no single way to productively read (with) poetry in performance. It is certainly useful for critical engagements to operate from a biographically situated standpoint, in which the performer’s individual identity and articulatory agency are centred; however, I argue that it is equally fruitful to approach texts with a deconstructive framework. This, I believe, creates necessary and important distance between notions of unified ‘selfhood’, which are too often inflected by the language of Enlightenment coloniality, and the poet-performer, who writes themselves live and onstage.
The two theses above suggest some of the ways in which it may be useful to work with and through Jacques Derrida’s différance, which articulates the importance of acknowledging the simultaneous existence of different subjectivities and meanings. I hope that in this article, I have managed to open potential fields of contact between deconstructive theories and the field of poetry performance studies and to contribute to this rapidly expanding field by arguing against a sense of theoretical incommensurability and for an ultimate embracing of both différance and difference.
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Marie Krebs (she/her) is a doctoral candidate and university assistant at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her current research focusses on the politics and poetics of contemporary genre film, television, literature, and audiodrama, primarily within the realm of horror. Her PhD thesis will examine and theorize the temporalised and temporalising aesthetics of 21st-century horror across multiple media contexts.
In addition, she works as an administrative and research assistant for the ERC/FWF-funded project “Poetry Off the Page”, which investigates the history of UK and Irish spoken word poetry and poetry performance from 1965 to the present day.
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To cite this blog post: Krebs, Marie. “Deconstruction and the Spoken Word, or: Embracing Différ( )nce.” Poetry Off the Page, 23 October 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/deconstruction-and-the-spoken-word-or-embracing-differ-nce/.
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Bibliography
Ailes, Katie. “‘Speak Your Truth’: Authenticity in UK Spoken Word Poetry.” Spoken Word in the UK, edited by Lucy English and Jack McGowan, Routledge, 2021, pp. 142–53.
Baldwin, Lenore. “Crick Crack Money Break His Back.” Naturaleza, 2008, https://naturalesa.wordpress.com/2008-writing-about-nature-pages/crick-crack-monkey-break-his-back-lenore-baldwin/.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Collins, Merle. “Crick Crack.” Conjunctions, vol. 27, 1996, pp. 193–96.
—. “Crick Crack.” Apples and Snakes Archive, Master, Cassettes, 1992, 3 Merle Collins Progress, 00:00-05:15.
Dawes, Kwame. “Black British Poetry, Some Considerations.” Wasafiri, vol. 18, no. 38, 2003, pp. 44–48.
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.
Johnson, Barbara. “Teaching Deconstructively.” The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, edited by Melissa Feuerstein et al., Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 347–56.
Novak, Julia. Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance. Brill, 2011.
Osborne, Deirdre. “Black British Writing: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Didactic Poetics.” The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication, edited by Guido Rings and Sebastian Rassinger, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 412–31.
—. “The Body of Text Meets the Body as Text: Staging (I)Dentity in the Work of SuAndi and Lemn Sissay.” Crisis and Contemporary Poetrs, edited by Anne Karhio et al., Palgrave, 2011, pp. 230–47.
Phillips, John W. P. “The Poetic Thing (On Poetry and Deconstruction).” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 33, no. 2, 2011, pp. 231–43.
Saïd, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.
Silva, Hannah. Live Writing: A Psychophysical Approach to the Analysis of Black British Poetry in Performance. 2018. University of Stirling.
—. “Lemn Sissay: Defamiliarisation and Performed Palimpsests.” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–29.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2013.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 6, 2014, pp. 811–18.
Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
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[1] For instance, see Andrea Brady’s Radical Tenderness (2024) or Deirdre Osborne’s work on Benjamin Zephaniah (“Didactic Poetics” 2020) or SuAndi and Lemn Sissay (“Staging Identity” 2011).
[2] It is worth noting that particularly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has problematized the concept of ‘aesthetic education’ extensively, as it functions as an extension of Enlightenment-imperial epistemology (9).
[3] For instance, see Silva (“Defamiliarisation” 2020).
[4] Importantly, deconstruction should be understood as an aesthetic practice by authors and artists instead of an act inflicted upon texts by critics – primarily because the latter would imply a violence not unlike the “textual vandalism” (Johnson 347) of which deconstruction is accused. A deconstructive reading utilizes terminologies of deconstruction to trace a text’s conflicting, overlapping, or parallel lines of meaning.
[5] The overall pedagogical focus of deconstruction is explicated in detail by Phillips (235).
[6] For examples of this, one might look toward the utterly scathing obituary “Why I won’t be mourning Derrida” by Johann Hari (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/why-i-won-t-be-mourning-derrida-543574.html), which makes a strawman-shaped argument about the seeming ‘meaninglessness’ of postmodernism and calls Derrida, with palpable malice, “the mad axeman of Western philosophy.”
[7] Particularly in “Différance,” the false start plays an important role. The text repeatedly gestures at ‘beginning’ through phrases like “first let us” (8) or “first off” (5) almost halfway through the text, yet the beginning is perpetually deferred.
[8] This reading is based on an audio-only recording taken from the Apples and Snakes archive. Therefore, I unfortunately cannot rely on any imagery from the event, but the sound recording alone provides many fascinating leads for analysis. However, for any transcribed portions, I do rely on a printed version of the poem from 1996, in which the spelling varies between “crick crack” and “krik krak”.
[9] There are many variations on “crick crack,” cf. also Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Krik? Krak!. In this article, I mostly use Collins’ spelling of “crick crack” for the sake of consistency, except in verbatim quotations where it is spelled “krik krak” in the printed version.