A loan note from the mouth: How the Practice of Creative “failure” in Experimental Poetry Performance Can Address failure-affect and Capital F Failure

This thesis uses practice research to investigate the relationship between failures that take place in the context of creative practice and everyday failures, drawing on Dewey’s writing to establish a conception of the ‘everyday’. Creative failure has been explored in the fields of experimental theatre (Bailes), visual art (Cocker) and experimental music (Priest). These theorists have established the role of impossible or Sisyphean tasks in generating creative failure and have investigated the generative properties of such tasks. They have also suggested that Sisyphean tasks may evoke difficult everyday tasks. Through my creative practice and analysis, I determine how the Sisyphean task can function in the field of experimental poetry performance. I also consider how Sisyphean tasks can be used to explore everyday failures. I define three different modes of failure which I term creative “failure”, failure-affect and Capital F Failure. I devise and publicly present two performances, Catastrophising and Physical Culture, which enable me to explore the relationships between these failures and challenge failure-affect and Capital F Failure through my use of creative “failure”.