Spoken Word Poetry and the Wonder of the Archive

Spoken Word Poetry and the Problem Wonder of the Archive

by SHEFALI BANERJI, University of Vienna

“Archives can […] open a metaphorical window onto the past” (04:24-04:28)“Archives are the first draft of history” (09:14-09:17) (Sara Wheeler, “The Joy of Archives”)

Introduction

I arrived at the writing of this blog entry out of a desire: a desire to address the dearth of poetry performance archives in the UK, suggesting (however subtly) it was a matter that required ‘urgent fixing’. Hence the title’s erstwhile declared, now discarded, ‘problem’. This approach stemmed from a reverence for the archive, mostly institutional archives, which I had inherited in the course of my university education. However, over the past three years, as my understanding of archives and the associated methods of engagement evolved, so did the intent of this blog entry. This entry now seeks to explore the wonder of and potential for archival research in poetry performance studies. The aim here is twofold: 1) To reflect on the evolving role of archives in poetry performance studies and how they shape legitimacy, memory, and scholarly practice; 2) To suggest alternative archival methodologies beyond institutions (personal collections, community-created repositories, and practices of listening and documentation that resist the idea of a single ‘official’ record). Here, I am only concerned with archives containing audio-visual recordings of poetry performances, rather than ephemera and interviews, since these recordings serve as the primary material for my project, and are crucial for close analysis and critical study. My doctoral project investigates the origin, development and influences of spoken word theatre in the UK and is part of the “Poetry Off the Page” project at the University of Vienna, directed by Julia Lajta-Novak.

On Archives

Archives engender legitimacy. They not only record but write histories. So, what are archives? Achille Mbembe considers the dual nature of the archive – first, as a brick-and-mortar building, an institution, a relic of architecture; and second, as documents, or fragments of documents, or the spectre of a past, that dwells in the institution and gives it meaning (19-20). Similarly, Laura A. Millar defines archives in three primary ways:

1. Documentary materials created, received, used and kept by a person, family, organization, government or other public or private entity in the conduct of their daily work and life and preserved because they contain enduring value as evidence of and information about activities and events. 2. The agency or institution responsible for acquiring and preserving archival materials and making those items available for use. 3. The building or other repository housing archival collections. (4)

In this entry, I am concerned more with the second and third classifications, that is, organisations and entities who acquire and archive materials as well as the repositories and platforms holding these materials. However, the joint power of all three components of archives defined by Millar elevates the archive’s status, entangling it in bureaucratic rituals of safeguarding and seeking, of inclusion and exclusion. Herein lies the paradox of the archive. In trying to preserve certain records, it chooses to forego others. Mbembe informs us: “The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’” (20). The unarchivable and the unarchived are what become forgotten histories.

However, alternative archives exist. Whether manifesting as community archives, self-archives or accidental ones, there is room for alternative histories to be recorded. In a performance practice such as spoken word poetry, which has its origins in countercultural movements within the practice of poetry as an art form, alternative archives appear to be more effective than institutional ones. While institutional archives could imply different things for different disciplines, in this blog entry, institutional archives “are defined as repositories that operate within the traditional archival framework and are attached to larger organisations such as government archives, university archives, and historical societies” (Galper). This categorisation also includes public libraries.

In the context of institutional archives in the UK, while the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image Collection, the National Poetry Library, the Scottish Poetry Library and the National Library of Wales hold some audio-visual poetry performance recordings from the past few decades, there are significant gaps that make tracing the history of poetry performance in the UK a task laden with frustration. For the most part, poetry performance has remained unarchived, owing to, firstly, its marginalised status within both poetry and performance studies; secondly, it having been considered inchoate for decades, stuck in a perpetual state of nascency, forever in the ‘now’, such that the archival fever never arrived in its full force. Nicky Marsh et al. write of this unarchived history in “‘Blasts of Language’: Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain since 1965”:

Since the proliferation of readings and other more performative, theatrical, and musical forms of poetry events has not attracted historians, much of this work is already lost—neither recorded nor reviewed, despite its evident importance for poetry, for both poets and audiences. (46)

If the history of poetry performance or spoken word poetry in general is cast with gaping holes, institutional archival traces of spoken word theatre are even more difficult to come by. Spoken word theatre is an art form comprising shows that are typically hour-long in duration, written and performed by poets themselves in their customary oratory styles, incorporating poetry performance. The art form arrived in the UK in the 1990s and its scope ranges from one-person shows with minimal or no props to complex, multimedia productions. Since my research is focused on spoken word theatre, it is important for me to examine archival material, especially audio-video recordings, pertaining to the art form. The next section of this blog, for this reason, relates my experience of looking for and working with audio-visual archives of spoken word theatre. The typology of archives found and the associated methodology that arises out of it, which form the latter sections of this blog entry, however, can be applied to most poetry performance research.

Journeying into Performance Archives

As noted earlier, my project traces the origins, developments and influences of spoken word theatre in the UK. For such historical research, engaging with archives is crucial. If one has not familiarised themself with the carefully curated records of an art form’s past, how could they possibly imagine untangling its process, progress, and presence? I started working with archival material within the first few weeks of beginning my PhD, thanks to the work done by the Poetry Off the Page team previously. In November-December 2021, the PoP team undertook a research trip to the archives of our project partner in London, the British poetry organisation Apples and Snakes, and worked with its archivist Russell Thompson to procure digitised audio-visual recordings of poetry performances. Apples and Snakes has recently started archiving four decades of their spoken word history on the Spoken Word Archive website. The vital digitised material procured through the efforts of the team made it possible for me to already delve into archival recordings and engage with spoken word theatre shows when I joined the team in June 2022. For this introduction, I am grateful. I was provided access to recordings of early spoken word shows such as Roger Robinson’s Shadow Boxer (2001) and Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark (2005), among others, through the Apples and Snakes archive. However, the London-centricity of the archive implied that I also had to look elsewhere, if I wanted to do justice to the geographical remit of my project. This led to my own archival journey, which complemented the interview element of my methodology. PoP PhD researcher Claire Palzer has already provided a detailed account of the team’s interviewing process and its importance to our project of creating a “‘historiophony’ of poetry performance in the UK and Ireland” (“The Role of Interviews”) in previous entries published in this blog series (“The Role of Interviews”, “Developing the Poetry Off the Page Interviews” and “Implementing the Poetry Off the Page Interviews”). In January and February 2023, I visited the archives of the British Library Sound and Moving Image Collections, Scottish Poetry Library and the National Library of Wales in search for audio-visual recordings of spoken word theatre. On my visit, I was able to procure historic material pertaining to poetry performance such as audio recordings of Cathal O’Searcaigh and Gwyn Parry’s readings from the “Poetry Meets Music” event at the 1999 Gwyl Ty Newydd Festival from the National Library of Wales, and poetry reading recordings of David Dabydeen, Lynford French, Edwin Morgan, John Agard, Liz Lochhead, Fred D’Aguiar and Grace Nichols from the “Rum and Scotch” event, hosted by Joy Hendry, at the 1986 Commonwealth Writers Conference from the Scottish Poetry Library. These recordings, especially those acquired from the Scottish Poetry Library, have proven useful to other researchers on the team for their research strands. However, I was unable to find any recordings of spoken word theatre shows at these archives. In fact, a significant number of the archival recordings for my project came from poets themselves, who often, though not always, maintain an audio-visual record of their own performances and productions. Additionally, where I was unable to establish contact with poets, I was able to find traces of their shows, or even full recordings on online platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. A few of these recordings were uploaded by the poets themselves, others by the organisations that hosted the performances, some by the videographers of the performances, and others by untraceable users who may have either attended the event in person or received the recording through unverifiable channels. Thus emerged the outline of non-institutional repositories of poetry performance recordings, scattered all over the place (mostly the internet). The survey of institutional archives prodded me to consider archival research differently. I now looked for leads elsewhere. The resources I primarily consulted beyond the institutional ones then can be divided into three categories: community archives, self-archives and rogue archives.

Before expanding upon these categorisations, a note on the materiality of archival recordings, that is, the first classification of archives. While deliberating the use of analogue resources vs. digital ones may be fruitful for discussions on other forms of archival resources, for audio-visual recordings of poetry performance, it is irrelevant. Most analogue items have been digitised by archives, institutional and alternative, due to the delicate conditions of cassettes, vinyls and other formats of recordings, and in a move towards digital preservation. To access audio recordings at both the Scottish Poetry Library and the National Library of Wales, I had to place requests in advance so that the materials could be prepared for digital access upon my visit. While the Scottish Poetry Library has digitised a lot of its analogue audio material in a joint project with the National Library of Scotland, at the time of my visit in January 2023, there were still some recordings that could not be accessed because they had not been digitised. At the National Library of Wales, I had placed my request to access audio material about 3 weeks in advance so that the recordings could be digitised into audio files from cassettes and CDs for research access. The British Library’s Sound and Moving Image Archive has also largely digitised its collections and on my visit in January 2023, I was able to access audio recordings of poetry performances on library computers.^[1] In terms of materiality hence, all audio-visual resources I have ever consulted, whether in institutional archives or others, have been either digitally recorded or remediated to the realm of the digital. What is of importance here is the form of archive that holds this material and the kind of access they provide. For most institutional archives, definitely for the ones I visited, it was important to be present on-site to access audio-visual material, before requesting for copies to be made. As a global majority scholar who required a visa to even enter the UK, these archival trips were only made possible because the Poetry Off the Page project covered not only the travel but also the (hefty) visa costs. These forms of structural barriers can hinder a researcher’s ability to access even digital resources that are restricted by procedures of access at institutional archives. This is another way the institutional “archive preserves and reserves, protects and patrols, regulates and represses” (Voss and Werner i). Most alternative forms of archives, on the other hand, are more accessible or flexible in their modes of access. In the following section, I discuss the three categories of alternative archives I consulted in my project, as outlined earlier.

A Typology of Alternative Archives

Alternative archives allow researchers to not only engage in the wonder of archival research, but also to unsettle it by bringing in diverse voices that contest archival silences, where, “[b]y unsettling and speaking back to the silences found in institutional archives, [researchers and alternative archivists] contribute not only to ‘remember[ing] differently’ […] but also to creating more socially just futures that center previously marginalized or untold narratives” (Carvajal Regidor 109). Further, while institutional archives insulate the material from community members and partakers through restrictions and controlled access, alternative archives allow us to access them with ease as well as to come in contact with the people who constitute these archives. The quest to trace the origin and history of spoken word theatre brought me in contact with three forms of non-institutional archives that became key resources for my project, as I “[strained] against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history” (Hartman 11). These three types of archives, namely community, self and rogue, are discussed below.

1. Community Archives

Community archives emerge out of “the endeavour by individuals and social groups to document their history, particularly if that history has been generally subordinated or marginalised, is political and subversive” (Flinn and Stevens 3). It entails “the (often) grassroots activities of creating and collecting, processing and curating, preserving and making accessible collections relating to a particular community or specified subject” (5). These archives, aimed at filling gaps in cultural history recorded by institutional archives, depend on the (often unpaid) labour of community members. In the case of poetry performance, several such community archives exist. One vital archive is Apples and Snakes’ Spoken Word Archive, which has been discussed above. The archive preserves about four decades of the organisation’s history as well as records of their programming. The archive’s digitisation and cataloguing on the Spoken Word Archive website was overseen by Russell Thompson and also relied on volunteers. Thompson himself is not an archivist by training but a poet and former programmer for Apples and Snakes, who “entered archiving through a back door” (“2,500 Poets and Counting”), as he states in an entry in this blog series. More recent poetry organisations and communities formed post 2000s already maintain a digital record of their history and programming. For instance, Manchester-based Young Identity platforms videos of their shows and events on their YouTube page. Up north, Scotland-based Loud Poets has a comprehensive archive of their events, shows, poetry slams, films and more on YouTube. They also provide access to additional spoken word resources and exclusive videos through their Patreon. In Ireland, Cork-based Ó Bhéal has a substantial audio and video archive of their own dating from 2007 to the present-day^[2]. Another remarkable initiative is poet-photographer-video editor Tyrone Lewis’s Process Productions which largely documents various spoken word events, performances and scenes in the UK. These are, of course, only few of the community archives of poetry performance found in the UK. There are many others. What differentiates community archives from institutional ones is that “[m]ost, if not all, community archivists are prompted to act by the (real or perceived) failure of mainstream heritage organisations to collect, preserve and make accessible collections and histories that properly reflect and accurately represent the stories of all of society” (Flinn and Stevens 6). These extensive archives maintained by organisations, communities (and even individuals) recording the poetry performance history (and present) of the UK, thus redress the informational gap of institutional archives, and are a valuable resource for poetry performance research.

2. Self-Archives

Most poets and practitioners have a detailed record of their own performance journey. On the one hand, this aids them in tracing their own development as an artist. On the other, it builds a record of their work within a practice that is yet to be instituted into the formal architecture of an archive. “[I]n absence of any sustained attention or critical dialogue with the dominant institutions of the art world and given a systematic marginalisation over the years […] practitioners themselves have been obliged to act first as curators, and now as archivists” (264), observes Stuart Hall on the constitution of the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive in the UK. While stated in the context of a community archive, this statement not only holds true for self-archives but also the case of spoken word theatre, and poetry performance at large, since a) both the practice and the art form have been marginalised within the literary and performance establishments, and b) both have been hugely shaped and advanced by Afro-Caribbean and Asian diasporic communities in the UK. It is widely recognised now that both points are the mutual basis for each-other. Apropos the practice, spoken word theatre is a new and exciting, yet narrowly recorded art form. So, practitioners build their own digital record to sustain its memory, its history. Most contemporary poets have their work saved as audio/visual files in digital storage systems, whether it be cloud servers or their own devices. Many poets, such as Imogen Stirling, Clare E. Potter, Mark Blayney, and Ross McFarlane, were kind enough to share these performance files with me using file sharing systems during our interviews. Other poets also upload their work to YouTube or Vimeo and limit access to only those with a link to the video. Poets Luke Wright and Kevin P Gilday shared their work with me through this mode. Poets also archive their work on their personal websites. These websites often have a record of their appearances, their accomplishments and sometimes videos of their performances embedded into individual pages. For instance, Hannah Silva has embedded the archival recordings of their shows Schlock! (2014-2017) and Total Man (2014) on their personal website. The video recordings were originally uploaded to Vimeo by their publisher Penned in the Margins and then linked through embedding on Silva’s website. In our personal communication in November 2023, Silva expressed their intention of making more of their performance work publicly accessible on their website. In this way, the poet becomes a self-archivist, partaking in a democratic form of digital archiving, countering the structural deterrents of institutional ones.

3. Rogue Archives

Ephemeral traces of spoken word theatre shows surface all over the internet in the form of photographs, video snippets, reviews, social media posts and comments, and in some opportune instances, as full-length audio-visual recordings. These traces demonstrate the archival impulse of audience and community members of the art form. I borrow the term “archival impulse” from Hal Foster who uses it to refer to archival art created by artists out of fragmentary bits of history and creative work, where “these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again” (5). While Foster uses the phrase to describe the conscious work of an artist, I use it to denote both the conscious and unconscious impulse of audiences and spoken word community members to weave traces of the performance, its existence, and their experience of it into public memory. Whereas community archives are driven by the desire to constitute an archive, to build a record of the art form’s history, rogue archives are born reflexively out of an enthusiastic impulse to record a specific work of art or an individual poet’s oeuvre. This impulse takes over enthusiasts of the art form, who then act as what Abigail De Kosnik calls “techno-volunteers” (46) and create rogue digital archives. According to De Kosnik, rogue archives are defined by:

constant (24/7) availability; zero barriers to entry for all who can connect to the Internet; content that can be streamed or downloaded in full, with no required payment, and no regard for copyright restrictions (some rogue archivists digitize only what is already in the public domain); and content that has never been, and would likely never be, contained in a traditional memory institution. (10)

While De Kosnik considers specific websites that collate different records of a specific subculture as rogue archives, to me, social media websites and video streaming platforms too can host rogue archives through their various features like playlists, dedicated accounts, story highlights, tags and so on. Scrolling through platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (now called X), I have often stumbled upon photographs, video snippets, audience reviews of spoken word shows which became part of my corpus. The story feature on Instagram has often enabled me to virtually experience, albeit in fragments, a poet’s live show. I have borne witness to performances through a borrowed digital lens, through the eyes of an audience member via the virtual medium. And this audio-visual material has refined my own engagement with spoken word theatre. Sometimes I come across rare footage of poetry performances whose details are hard, though not completely impossible, to trace. For instance, this old video of Benjamin Zephaniah performing “Dis Poetry” at “Narberth Children’s Festival in West Wales” (sic) on YouTube is a valuable resource for our project that I found while looking for poetry performances through YouTube. Beyond audio-visual material, comments by audience members on poets’ social media posts after a show, detailing significant elements of the performance or memorable moments during the entire event, have also served as valuable information pertaining to the work. Indeed, using any of this material requires permission from the ‘uploader’ and then potential anonymisation. However, this gives us another chance to engage with the community, to build relationships, and adds to the wonder of archival research. After all, “[a]n archive too can be built; we can be more or less at home there, even if we assemble our own archives from bits and pieces that are available because of where we have been” (Ahmed 20). Here, researchers take on the role of techno-volunteers themselves as they collate these disparate resources into their own personal research archives. Where institutional archives fail, audiences, community members, enthusiasts (and researchers!) of spoken word step in to fill the gaps, each contributing a thread to the vast web of material that constitute unstable, volatile, yet autonomous rogue archives. ^[3]

Developing a Methodological Framework for Poetry Performance Archival Research

Alternative archives invite alternative methods of entanglement. Accessing alternative archives requires a methodological framework that considers the volatility of these archives and the distinct needs of the researchers. Indeed, there is no fixed method to undertake archival research. As Sara Ahmed proposes, “[m]aybe methods are not simply tools, or if they are tools, maybe they are different things depending on who uses them, with this who being understood as not simply an individual but someone shaped by many histories – intellectual, social, other” (17, emphasis in original). Our methods are informed by the type of material available and in the case of poetry performance and its limited records, it is imperative to broaden our approach. My archival research journey taught me to look for material elsewhere, everywhere, and to patch it together to form my corpus. While adopted intuitively, out of necessity, these methodologies do have names and frameworks of their own: namely, scavenger and patchwork methodologies. I was first introduced to scavenger methodology by poet and scholar liz breslin over personal communication in March 2024, who later also incorporated it in their conference talk exploring “the interactions between funding bodies […] and embodied poems in long-form spoken word shows” (Abstract Booklet 9) at the Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe conference in June 2025. I further explored the framework using sociologist Sophie Marie Niang’s work, who posits that scavenging as a methodology “believes that the valuable knowledges created and shared by marginalised groups outside the bounds of academia need to be meaningfully engaged with, even if that requires bringing disparate or less traditional material together and finding new methods to work with them” (54–55). In the case of poetry performance archival research, especially in the case of audio-visual recordings, this means looking for sources beyond institutional archives, and often making peace with the fact that we might not have access to every detail pertaining to these informal resources and we might not always find what we need, especially when engaging with rogue materials on the internet. The idea however is “to look towards and meaningfully engage with existing material” while refusing the “imperative desire to know extensively, to catalogue and categorise” (Niang 54). Instead, we accept these imperfect resources and practice “[n]arrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure” (Hartman 12). The next step then becomes the reconciliation of these disparate materials, ranging across institutional and alternative archives. Scavenging can be complemented by patchworking as a methodology. Once we have gathered the bits and pieces and scraps of material, it is possible to patchwork our narrative using these sources. As Marc Higgins et al. explicate, “[p]atchwork methodologies take shape as key theorists and theories pierce, (un)stitch, snag, embroider, patch, and mend the fabrics of distinct research contexts, components, and commitments” (16). A typical metaphor for patchworking as methodology is the quilt. Psychologist and scholar Lori E. Koelsch proposes “virtual quilting as a research method and product” (825) which takes into account and builds upon all “the disparate elements that combine to form what is experienced as a unified identity” (823). To this end, patchworking for poetry performance research not only limits itself to stitching together disparate archival materials as primary resources for analysis but also considers these materials as vital sources for theory-building. For instance, a professional recording of a spoken word performance and an audience’s video clip of the same performance can offer us two perspectives and gazes/lenses through which to analyse the performance and contextualise it. It can then be linked to similar instances of informal and formal recordings to theorise upon the various ways performances are experienced by different partakers, and the theory can serve as batting of a quilt, wedged between layers of material. Here, the idea is not to disregard an amateur, informal recording to favour an official record, or to create hierarchies within primary material, but to treat both materials as equivalent sources that add to the fabric of theory and analysis.

Both scavenging and patchworking as methodologies, the former more than the latter, has been intuitively deployed in my work, throughout my archival research journey, in varying degrees. (And my conversations with colleague Claire Palzer have revealed a similar process on her part.) However, what began as an intuitive response to scarcity of material has now evolved into a purposeful commitment to alternative methodologies, having found the terminology and framework that accommodates non-institutional archives and histories and helps us “[reassess] the roles that institutional archives play in our scholarship” (Carvajal Regidor 108). Throughout this entry, I have used disparate sources to build my narrative and to practice scavenging as a continuing research method. For a tangible example of a virtual patchwork quilt as a method, see Koelsch. With this blog entry, I hope I was able to offer you a glimpse into the wonders of archival research and of engaging with alternative sources and (hi)stories in poetry performance studies.

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SHEFALI BANERJI is a poet-performer from India, currently a PhD researcher on the ERC project “Poetry Off the Page” at the University of Vienna. Their research investigates the origin, development and influences of spoken word theatre in the UK. Their recent academic publications include “Digital Spoken Word Theatre in the UK: Navigating the Theatre Screen with Rose Condo’s The Geography of Me” in Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 13(1) and “Staging Intermediality and Queerness in Jasmine Gardosi’s Dancing to Music You Hate” in Open Library of Humanities Journal, 11(1).

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To cite this blog post: Banerji, Shefali. “Spoken Word Poetry and the ~~Problem~~ Wonder of the Archive.” Poetry Off the Page, 28 August 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/spoken-word-poetry-and-the-problem-wonder-of-the-archive/.

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Thumbnail by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

^[1] However, the British Library was cyberattacked in October 2023 (“Cyber-attack recovery update”), and on subsequent visits, I was unable to access any audio recordings.

^[2] I was introduced to this archive by Claire Palzer.

^[3] While digital archives in all their forms may seem more accessible and democratic than analogue ones, the unpredictability of the virtual medium as a whole make these archives volatile. As mentioned in Footnote 1, due to a cyber attack on the British Library in October 2023, visitors lost access to all digital material archived in the institution for months. For alternative archives not maintained by institutions, risks of losing access for good for researchers are higher. Websites falter, social media posts can be ephemeral, videos on YouTube and Vimeo disappear. Or, as is the case of a recent 2025 update, Vimeo in the UK and EU is no longer searchable. Researchers must take cognisance of the precariousness of digital material when making use of it, and where possible, have backup files, save offline versions and screenshots, and make notes to mitigate the loss.