Abstract: What is the relationship between a poem as a written artifact, something that appears on a page, and a poem as something performed, that is, read aloud, recited, or sung? Often the poem-on-the-page is imagined to serve as a score for oral performance: it provides words, line breaks, word spacing, and other cues that suggest how a reader might render the poem as an audible speech-act. The Asian-Australian poet A. J. Carruthers has recently been exploring the unspoken assumptions that inform treating a written poem as a score for performance. In his poem “Music, After Michael Dransfield” (2016), he offers us a short, typographically anomalous, grid-like lyric by Dransfield first published in Voyage into Solitude (1978). Carruthers reproduces the earlier poem in its entirety, and he positions above each word a musical staff, on which he has apparently scribbled a curve or arc, as if indicating a glissando-like smooth movement across several pitches. In this paper, I wish to investigate the pressure that Carruthers places here on terms such as setting, score, and performance by asking us to think about writing as a performative act whose proper theater is the page. He asks, too, where and when the music of poetry occurs, and he troubles the presumption that the written text is an original and the performed version of a poem is secondary or derivative. Finally, he ponders whether and in what sense poets re-perform or re-set the writings of the precursors and the national traditions in which they work whenever they begin to compose “new” verse.

Key words: A. J. Carruthers, poetry, performance, written text