In celebration of the ephemeral contemporary poetry communities beyond insitutions in Albany, New York

This dissertation studies contemporary poetry open mic reading communities in Albany, NY, and argues that, whereas poetry in academia is based on preservation, poetry in these communities is based on engagement, and thus on ephemerality. Reading the rhetoric of poetry's disappearance from the American public sphere through the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I frame the testimonies of poetry's death beyond the academy as an offensive strategy employed to delimit the definition of poem and poetry. The success of the New Critics and the creative writing program garnered the educational institution's authority over the legitimate composition and reception of poetry; the merger of poetic production and preservation within the site has enabled its poets' and critics' exclusive orientation toward the static, ahistorical text. The reading communities in Albany, in contrast, which have neither strived for nor attained recognition within cultural institutions, are oriented according to present engagement.;Approaching the space of the public reading through the work of Walter J. Ong and Jean-Luc Nancy, I rearticulate the voiced "poem" and the "community" as finite, singular completions mutually constituted by poet(s), texts, listeners and social contexts. While any poetry reading is inherently manifested through this complex network and exists only in the space and time of the event, the structure of the open mic uniquely recognizes and values ephemeral engagement. The Albany communities enact the aesthetics of openness: they welcome any poet to the stage, refuse hierarchical valuation of poems and poets, and celebrate the scene of and as a perpetual series of temporal moments. This stance necessarily locates the gatherings outside the economy of literary recognition; more significant, it engenders modes of poetic composition, performance and reception that the cultural institution cannot accommodate, and a concept of poetry as sacred within but not segregated from public spaces. Addressing the distances between the poetic praxes of these communities and our academic institutions reveals the severe delimitations imposed by canonical biases and opens literary discourse to a more expansive appreciation of poetry's continuing vitality.