De-poeticizing poetry, De-semiotizing performance: A reading of Benjamin Zephaniah’s “Dis poetry”

Abstract

Often described as Performance Poetry or Dub Poetry, the poems of the Jamaican-British poet, novelist, actor, singer, and playwright Benjamin Zephaniah (1958 - ) seem to destabilize all cultural, aesthetic, poetic, political, and philosophical assumptions and, by so doing, seem to destabilize poetry itself. “Dis Poetry” (with ‘dis’ read, simultaneously, as a demonstrative pronoun – slang for ‘this’ – and as a prefix that ‘un-poeticizes’ poetry – anti-poetry) is a poem that has been chosen as the focus of this research project for two main reasons. While the first reason has to do with the poem’s performativity and its idiosyncratic parole, the second is rather related to its self-reflexive summary of Zephaniah’s dispoetic ‘achievements’. The paper will address issues that relate to the poet’s performance while reading the poem in public, his gaming with and parodying of the poetic tradition since Shakespeare, the transcendence of semiotics (hence, desemiotics) and all meaning-production apparatuses in his poetry, together with the erasure of the gap that has for a very long time of human art history distinguished ‘High’ Art from ‘Low’ Art. The poem will be shown to de-create itself, among other systems of meaning, as it refuses to perform both theatrically as well as poetically.

Keywords

• Performance poetry
• metapoetry/dis-poetry
• parody
• semiotics/desemiotics

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