The Consolation of Poetry, Barbara Neri
Abstract

Why would a contemporary artist choose to become the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and how would she do it? This becoming is revealed as more complex than it seems and there is much to be considered in these pages documenting the premiere performance of Barbara Neri's The Consolation of Poetry. Neri's performance might be called a one-woman show, but her possession and the many voices speaking across time in monologue and dialogue both digital and live reinvents that genre. It might also be said that Neri's work is parasitic upon EBB. Or is it the other way around? Barrett Browning's work is revealed in this performance as parasitic upon the discourses of those precursors she wished to subvert. Neri's subversion in The Consolation of Poetry is not so much of Barrett Browning and her work but rather the performance assigned to EBB and her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Likewise, Neri sees the role of the contemporary artist as assigned. She trains her body and oneirocritical mind on Elizabeth and supplants what we think we know with what we experience in her becoming performance.

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