This paper is an introduction to and critical review of studies on verbal art in the United States from the early 1970s to this day. This study starts with pointing out the oxymoron of the term ‘oral literature’, which lost currency among most ethnographically oriented scholars with the advent of the performance-centered perspective. In turn, it introduces terminology such as verbal art, performance, and oral poetics, essential to this new perspective that refashioned the text-centered perspective to the practice- centered one, emphasizing artistic uses of language in everyday life and formal performance settings. Sharing perspectives from sociolinguistics developed by challenging structural linguistics, the performance-centered approach highlights the performance itself as a creative accomplishment rather than neglecting it as mere error, as in Chomskian linguistics. Insofar as the approach emphasizes heterogeneity of diverse speech communities and their different views on performance, the performance-centered approach rests closely upon ethnographic research. In particular, the ethnography of oral poetics seeks the aesthetics revealed in actual performance events and defined culture-specifically, and emphasizes ethnographic fieldwork and faithful transcriptions/translations of the original performances. The performance-centered approach has been in continuous dialogic process while expanding its perspectives in response to criticism from outside and within.