by Claire Palzer, University of Vienna
If you want to know how people understand their world and their lives, why not talk with them? (Kvale 1)
When I began my PhD work on spoken word poetry in Ireland in the fall of 2021, I realized that learning about poetry performance in Ireland from written scholarship would not take me very far. I found a handful of subsections in articles (Mulhall, “Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry”; Mulhall, “Arrivals”), as well as magazine and newspaper articles on the topic, but there was no book I could turn to for a history of the scene, let alone for the answers to my specific questions. It was clear that a different method was needed: interviews.
My PhD research is part of Poetry Off the Page (PoP), a five-year project investigating the significance of anglophone poetry performance in British and Irish literary history from the 1960s to the present. The project aims to take account of the aesthetics and politics of poetry performance in conjunction with the alternative institutional structures, publication channels, career pathways, presentational formats, styles, and poetic genres that have emerged from its dynamic performance scenes. It is directed by Julia Lajta-Novak at the University of Vienna and began in the fall of 2021. It is supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant and the START-Prize of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and maintains ongoing collaborations with Apples and Snakes, Goldsmiths, University of London, Queen Mary University of London, University College Dublin, and the National Library of Ireland.
Alongside archival research and close listening/viewing of poetry performances, interviewing serves as one of PoP’s three methodological pillars. To date, the PoP team[1] has conducted 79 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with participants – including poets and organisers – in the British and Irish poetry performance scenes. Together, these audio recordings contribute to “An Oral History of Poetry Performance in the UK and Ireland”. By elaborating on our process and experiences here, I aim to provide not only a background for future research drawing on the interviews we have conducted but also to explore the challenges and potentials of interviewing from the perspective of literary scholars interested in poetry performance.
Conceptualisation & Design
As I outlined in my previous blog post, “The Role of Interviews in Poetry Performance Research,” interviews are a touchstone of poetry performance research in the UK. Interviews conducted by researchers with poets and members of poetry performance scenes are used to provide context and details for individual events. Moreover, they contribute to the writing of literary history and are often conducted as oral history. Finally, interviews often provide vital insider perspectives on a scene that is in the ongoing process of being defined and theorised.
For these reasons, from the inception of PoP, interviews have played a crucial role in our project. PoP’s approach to analysing poetry performances focuses on the performance, the event, and the overall scene. Our work is centred on the life worlds of poetry performance practitioners as we analyse poetry performances in their respective contexts. The aims for the PoP interviews were to contribute to answering specific questions that drive the PoP project or its individual sub-projects, and to create what Lajta-Novak refers to as a “historiophony” of poetry performance in the UK and Ireland – a truly oral oral history (Lajta-Novak 8) that includes a multiplicity of voices. These two objectives guided the conceptualisation and design of the interviews.
Developing the Interviews
In November 2021 and May 2022, Rosa Reitsamer, a music sociologist from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, conducted workshops with us, as most of the PoP team had limited experience with interviewing as a method. In these workshops, we discussed the creation, practice, and interpretation of interviews. This initial period involved establishing a shared approach to interviewing, which required us to navigate expectations and differences arising from the team’s various academic backgrounds and experiences. Additionally, throughout the process of designing the interview inquiry – including all stages from conception to analysis and publication – the PoP team engaged with critical scholarship on oral history and qualitative research processes to ground our research and practice.
Oral history holds an important place in poetry performance research. According to historian Donald Ritchie, “oral history collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews” (1). Furthermore, oral histories “should be collecting not what is already known but information, observations, and opinions unavailable elsewhere” (35). This is clearly the case in our area of interest. Poetry performance in the UK and Ireland has been – and frequently still is – neglected by reviewers and literary historians (Marsh et al. 46). Only recently have written poetry performance histories of these regions begun to emerge, drawing heavily on the authors’ experiences and oral sources (English and McGowan 2021; Marsh et al. 2006; Casey 2022). While some archival material documents past poetry performances, much of the history of the practice is accessible only through practitioners’ recollections. Given the advanced ages of key figures from the 1960s poetry performance scene – a period often considered the beginning of contemporary poetry performance in the UK – conducting oral history interviews becomes a matter of urgency if these stories are to be preserved. Even for more recent events, the ephemerality of performance poses a challenge for scholars, and conducting interviews about both practices and individual performances can support future research.
Oral interviews can uncover new information, events that might otherwise be lost, or minutiae of events that we – or, in the future, other researchers – might be keen to investigate. Naturally, this new information, like all other forms of information, must be verified according to good scientific practice (Portelli 52). Interviews enable researchers to hear stories from different perspectives instead of simply repeating what has been written in books and other publications. They provide a means for us to hear and learn about significant performances and performers that we may not have encountered otherwise, who have been deemed relevant or significant by the interviewees themselves. Furthermore, as Alessandro Portelli describes, there exists “the unique and precious element” of oral sources, namely, “the speaker’s subjectivity […] Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did” (52). Poetry performances are embodied, culturally situated practices; meanings are continuously being created around the practices and decisions made by poet-performers and organisers. Thus, documenting and preserving practitioners’ accounts is crucial for understanding the poetry performance scene(s).
Furthermore, the interviews aimed to explore hypotheses related to poetry performance practices, such as the presentation of autobiographical material and the influence of specific oral traditions on poets’ work. These more specialised research questions were developed by individual researchers in relation to their research strands. The combination of specific individual interests with a broader historiographical remit required a careful balance of the questions to consider. Interviews serve as a method to evaluate our hypotheses against the knowledge generated by the community itself. Sometimes, the interviews confirmed our ideas, while other times they contradicted our positions or those found in other scholarship. These contradictions are neither inherently good nor bad; rather, they highlight how knowledge can be constructed by either reiterating familiar narratives or by putting forth different perspectives from the participants.
Our approach was informed by grounded theory, which Reitsamer introduced to us in our second workshop.[2] Grounded theory is a bottom-up approach that involves developing theories about specific phenomena based on interrelated categories discovered within the collected data (Flick 428–42). While we did not adopt grounded theory wholesale for our inquiry, our stance toward the data was informed by grounded theory’s emphasis on data as the foundation for theories. Many ideas that we developed were significantly informed or even generated by the interviews themselves. Additionally, in my work on Irish spoken word poetry, I found thematic coding of the interviews quite helpful, as it allowed me to triangulate similarities and differences across interviews related to certain categories. These sociological approaches to qualitative material enabled us to discover new phenomena; they validated and occasionally challenged our perspectives and findings.
It should be noted that, while the interviews were generative, poetry performances have always been our primary objects of analysis. In addition to helping us answer specific research questions and validating or contradicting our hypotheses, the interviews made substantial contributions to our analyses of poetry performance recordings. They enabled a richer analysis by providing facts, opinions, narratives, and a variety of perspectives and personal theories on the practices of poetry in performance. Learning directly from a poet about their work allowed us to critically incorporate meanings constructed by the poet into our analyses of the performances.
We understood that our interviews would be hybrids combining traditional qualitative research and oral history. Further, Reitsamer encouraged us to consider the interviewing process as something active. As James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium argue,
Both parties to the interview are necessarily and ineluctably active. Meaning is not merely elicited by apt questioning, nor simply transported through respondent replies; it is actively and communicatively assembled in the interview encounter. Respondents are not so much repositories of knowledge – treasuries of information awaiting excavation, so to speak – as they are constructors of knowledge in collaboration with interviewers. Participation in an interview involves meaning-making work. (Holstein and Gubrium 114)
While Holstein and Gubrium are referring to interviews as part of qualitative research, theorists of oral history interviewing similarly foreground how interviews are indelibly shaped by the interviewer’s interpretations both during the interview and afterwards, and the meanings extracted from it (Ritchie 123). It is important for researchers to remain aware of what they are bringing to the interviews and to their interpretation.
After clarifying our research objectives and envisioning how the interview inquiry would support those aims, we began creating interview guides which reflected these various intentions. These guides can be conceived of as “a script that structures the course of the interview more or less tightly” (Kvale 56). For the PoP interview inquiry, three interview guides were developed: one for poets, another for organisers/programmers/journalists, and a third specifically focused on memories of individual events or performances. Before the first workshop, each researcher independently formulated questions related to their research strand and to the overarching project. These questions were clustered around the following topics: the performance scene, the practitioner’s career in poetry performance and their craft, and specific events. During the workshops and in a series of follow-up meetings, these questions were refined, rephrased, and added to as necessary.
Each of the three guides began with a broad opening question that we hoped would elicit a narrative, centring either on the interviewee’s biography or a specific event. The poet-performer interviews typically began with a generative question about how they came to poetry, which, in my experience, often led to lengthy answers that could spark new avenues of inquiry. The guide would then transition into various areas of interest, asking interviewees to define and discuss their artistic practices, explore their influences and networks, delve into the minutiae of their writing and performance practices and reflect on economic aspects.
As we developed the guides, we began adding examples, alternate questions, potential follow-up questions, instructions to ourselves, and transition sentences to enhance the flow of conversation. During the interviews, we asked follow-up questions and requested clarifications. Asking for specifics, even if the interviewer already had that knowledge (e.g., the year of a performance), makes the interviews more comprehensive and useful to future researchers. The interview guides were edited throughout the spring and summer of 2022, and we always had the option to ask personalised questions at our discretion.
Research Design Ethics
An interview inquiry includes ethical decision-making at all stages of the process, from the project’s inception to its final publication (see also Kvale 23). In the next paragraphs, I discuss how the PoP team reflected on ethical issues concerning our research at the design stage, which fundamentally shaped the interview work.
An essential component of ethical research practices regarding interviews is obtaining the informed consent from participants. For the PoP project, the basis of this informed consent was based on a three-page information sheet. This document outlined the study’s purpose, the broad interest of the interview questions, an explanation of data handling, as well as outlining the risks of the study, and whom to contact for further information. This information sheet, along with the declaration of informed consent to be signed at the end of the form, was provided to interviewees ahead of time for them to peruse at their convenience. It was important to emphasise to the interviewees that their participation was voluntary, that they could withdraw from the process without it being to their disadvantage, that their written consent was indispensable, and that we were available to answer any questions regarding any aspect of the process.
Participants were also informed about how we would store their data and the options available for controlling and reviewing their contributions before these were made public via the University of Vienna’s digital repository, Phaidra. These methods of control were especially important since we did not default to anonymisation for our interview material. As Ritchie states, “anonymity clashes with some of oral history’s most fundamental objectives. Having sought to give ‘voice to the voiceless,’ it is inconsistent to render them nameless” (120). Identifying and naming major stakeholders in the history of poetry performance is key to the PoP project’s research aims, so defaulting to anonymisation would not have been ideal. However, participants had the option to request the anonymization or pseudonymization of parts of the interviews.
The PoP project underwent ethical approval processes at both the University of Vienna and the funding body, the European Research Council. Initial approval was granted by the ERC in January 2021, contingent upon certain changes to the informed consent forms and the approval of the University of Vienna. The interview study was submitted to the University of Vienna’s Ethics Committee in November 2021 and was approved in December 2021. Further confirmation was provided by the ERC in January 2022. All concerns were addressed, and adjustments were made to further secure the security of participants’ personal data. It is worth noting that ethics monitoring continued until 2023, when an additional statement was required. Researchers interested in conducting interview studies should plan for the considerable time and effort involved in the ethics review process.
In addition to these institutional mechanisms, we consulted with poets from the UK poetry performance scene, who advised us on the interview guides and the informed consent forms. We are indebted to these consultants, namely Patience Agbabi, Kat François, Amerah Saleh, Russell Thompson, and the late Benjamin Zephaniah, for their invaluable oral and written feedback and reflections on our questions and our research overall. These consultation sessions made our interview guides more collaborative and better attuned to the concerns and requirements of our interview constituency. The consultants were acknowledged in the informed consent forms. We discussed certain decisions we had made, reflected on and addressed gaps in our work, and reviewed the interview guides and informed consent forms based on the poets’ feedback. Broadly speaking, the feedback fell into the following categories: elaborating on the formal procedure (the informed consent form), phrasing of questions, the length of the guide, accounting for our positionality in terms of ethnicity and distance to the poetry scenes, and our relationship with the interviewees and the scene we are researching.
As regards phrasing, the language of our initial interview guides was unnecessarily elaborate or complex. Where possible we rephrased questions to be clearer. In other instances, we added examples to clarify our meaning or provided alternative phrasings in simpler terms; as ideally, interview questions should be brief and simple (Kvale 60). The poets highlighted questions that would be difficult to answer spontaneously and suggested providing participants with the interview questions in advance. We implemented this option moving forward: participants could receive the questions or topics before the interview if they wished, although we stressed that we were not asking them to prepare for the interviews, as we did not want to add to their workload. Moreover, the poets we consulted shared their answers or concerns about some of the questions and suggested new questions that they believed would be relevant to our research.
Another issue raised by consultants, which we were aware of, was the length of our interview guides, and consequently the duration of the interviews themselves. Our interview guide for poets was indeed quite lengthy; the final Word document spanned seven pages. One challenge we faced as interviewers was balancing the number of questions with the available time, particularly since we wanted to give interviewees the opportunity to share what they felt was important. This issue persisted throughout the interviewing process, requiring us to adapt to/in each individual interview situation.
Furthermore, we specifically asked the consulting poets about the issue of gatekeeping within the poetry performance community. We wanted input on how to best create space in the interviews for interviewees to speak to this, especially poets of colour. The responses from the consultants generally indicated that it was important to inquire about barriers, but that there might be communication challenges since at that time (June 2022), we were a team of only white researchers. We needed to be mindful of our positionality not only when asking about the barriers poets faced but throughout the entire interviewing process. It was crucial that we signal our awareness of our ethnicity and our status as outsiders to the scene at some point in our communication with interviewees. Only by acknowledging our own positionality, sensitively engaging with participants, and creating space for interviewees to share their perspectives at their own pace would it be possible to gain insights into the power dynamics in the lifeworld we were researching.
One theme that emerged in several sessions was the relationship between the researcher and the interviewee, as well as between the researcher(s) and the scene(s) overall. This meant establishing trust with our interviewees prior to the interviews. Therefore, we approached the interview situation having conducted thorough research and demonstrating our familiarity with and appreciation of their work and their participation in the project. We aimed to create a caring environment during the interview, which involved emphasising the option to decline questions, take breaks, and ensuring there was space for participants to share what mattered most to them. Building relationships also meant creating a connection with the scene, both as individual researchers and as part of the project. The consultants supported our intentions to engage with the people we intended to write about, making these relationships mutually beneficial for the poets and the broader scene. We undertook research stays where we not only interviewed people but also attended performances and spoke informally with practitioners. Individual researchers hosted spoken word events in the UK[3] and invited poets from both the UK and Ireland to perform, conduct workshops, or give talks in Vienna[4].
We finished the development of the interview guides in the summer of 2022, though more questions were added as researchers joined the team. With these guides in hand, we began the procedure of actually interviewing poets and organisers across the UK and Ireland. To learn more about the relationships facilitated by the interviews and how we prepared for, conducted, processed, and preserved the individual interviews for posterity, make sure to return for part two of this blog post series, “The Poetry Off the Page Interviews 2: The Interviewing Process,” which will be published shortly.
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CLAIRE PALZER is a PhD researcher at the University of Vienna in the Poetry Off the Page project. Her doctoral work focuses on spoken word poetry in Ireland from the 1990s to the present day and the particularities of this performative and situated art form. She has conducted over thirty interviews to date with participants in the Irish poetry performance scene. Other research interests include Irish Studies more broadly, historical fiction, cultural memory, feminist, and queer studies. She is also a published poet.
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To cite this blog post:
Palzer, Claire. “Developing the Poetry Off the Page Interviews.” Poetry Off the Page, 08 May 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/developing-the-poetry-off-the-page-interviews/.
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Casey, Paul. “Spoken Word Poetry in Ireland: 1990-2014.” The Stinging Fly: New Writers, New Writing, vol. 2, 2022, pp. 221–30.
English, Lucy, and Jack McGowan, editors. Spoken Word in the UK. Routledge, 2021.
Flick, Uwe. An Introduction to Qualitative Research. 4th ed, Sage Publications, 2009.
Holstein, James A., and Jaber F. Gubrium. “Active Interviewing.” Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice., edited by David Silverman, Sage Publications, 1997, pp. 113–29.
Kvale, Steinar. Doing Interviews. SAGE, 2010.
Lajta-Novak, Julia. Poetry Off the Page: British Literary History and the Spoken Word, 1965-2020. ERC Consolidator/FWF START Project Description.
Marsh, Nicky, et al. “‘Blasts of Language’: Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain since 1965.” Oral Tradition, vol. 21, no. 1, 2006, pp. 44–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2006.0016.
Mulhall, Anne. “Arrivals: Inward Migration and Irish Literature.” Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020, edited by Eric Falci and Paige Reynolds, vol. 6, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 182–200. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564373.013.
—. “Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, Beyond the Now.” A History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 431–51. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108778596.026.
Portelli, Alessandro. “What Makes Oral History Different.” The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, Routledge, 2015, pp. 48–58. www-taylorfrancis-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315671833-5.
Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. Oxford University Press, 2014, https://web-p-ebscohost-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzgzOTEwOV9fQU41?sid=cf712377-4122-49cb-8765-f3f688ea71ba@redis&vid=0&format=EB&lpid=lp_xi&rid=0.
[1] During the initial interview and critical path creation, the PoP team consisted of Franziska Klein, Marie Krebs, Julia Lajta-Novak, Claire Palzer, Martina Pfeiler, and Emily K. Timms. In 2022, Shefali Banerji and Shalini Sengupta joined the team and contributed to the interview guides and critical path. In 2023, Helen Thomas and Rachel Bolle-Debessay joined the team and have since contributed to the interviewing component of the PoP project.
[2] In this workshop, Reitsamer also introduced us to the software programme MAXQDA, a tool for analysing data. I was the only researcher who proceeded to use the programme, as it was not as useful for the other research strands as it proved to be for my sub-project.
[3] Shefali Banerji, a PhD researcher with the PoP project, hosted a spoken word event in collaboration with Safe Word Poetry at Goldsmith’s during their stay in the UK in 2023.
[4] Shefali Banerji invited Birmingham poet Jasmine Gardosi to perform and host a workshop in Vienna in fall 2023; Julia Lajta-Novak invited Ty’rone Haughton to facilitate a workshop with her class in spring 2023 and I was lucky enough to have Irish poet Kalle Ryan host a Q&A session with my students via Zoom after teaching his work in summer of 2024.