Books

The cultural phenomenon of poetry slam was born in Chicago and today is widespread all over the world. This is a new poetic practice that involves a fixed format for a competition of performed poetry. There are few simple rules: every poet has three minutes to propose his/her performance; costumes, music and props are not admitted; texts have to be original; the jury is strictly popular and five people randomly selected among the public compose it.

This work aims to analyse the Italian slam scene through the application of Erving Goffman’s Frame analysis (1974) hermeneutic tools and through the reader-response criticism interpretative approach. The final objective is to understand how slammers create their performances having in mind a certain implied audience (Iser, 1978).

After a brief historical presentation of the movement, this research is divided in two chapters. The first is about the frame analysis of poetry slam that is the definition of the social situation created in the event that influences the public’s expectations. The second chapter focuses on the phenomenology of the performance staged by the slammers, through an actualization of Wolfang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response that examines the construction of the meaning created by the relation between text and reader. In addition, the author proposes a categorization of the most representative slam styles based on the criterion of the effect that the performers try to stimulate on their audience.

Through her experience as a slammer, an organizer and a spectator of many poetry slams and the interviews to some of the main figures of the national scene, in this book Eleonora Fisco proposes the first ethnographic study of the Italian poetry slam published in Italy.