Vol. 8, Issue 1, Part B (2026)

This article proposes a voice-space-performance framework for analysing contemporary British spoken word poetry, treating poems as relational events rather than stable texts. Building on orality studies, performance theory, and voice studies, it argues that meaning in spoken word is co-produced by embodied vocality, socio-material venues and formats, and the dynamics of liveness. Methodologically, the study combines an integrative literature review with illustrative close readings of two UK practitioners, Raymond Antrobus and Hollie McNish, to operationalise the framework. Antrobus’s work exemplifies how access practices and measured delivery make listening itself a formal and ethical concern; McNish’s sets demonstrate accessibility as an ethics of address through single-hearing clarity, humour-to-turn pacing, and room-aware dramaturgy. Across both cases, audience feedback functions as live editorial input, yielding performance-specific variants of ostensibly “the same” poem. The analysis advances three claims: (1) embodied audibility is part of form; (2) rooms, formats, and paratexts co-author dramaturgy; and (3) relational authorship with audiences is constitutive of poetic meaning. The article concludes with implications for pedagogy, curation, and criticism, advocating performance literacy (breath-scored drafting, mic technique, just-listening norms) and venue practices that treat access measures as aesthetic affordances rather than add-ons.