Sound Poem
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Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging
literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, ...
and
musical composition Musical composition can refer to an Originality, original piece or work of music, either Human voice, vocal or Musical instrument, instrumental, the musical form, structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new pie ...
, in which the
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional
semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
and
syntactic In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...
values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for
performance A performance is an act or process of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Performance has evolved glo ...
.


History and development


20th century

While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in oral poetry traditions, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th-century phenomenon. The
Futurist Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futures studies or futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities ...
and
Dadaist Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
Vanguards of the beginning of this century were the pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti discovered that onomatopoeias were useful to describe a battle in Tripoli where he was a soldier, creating a sound text that became a sort of a spoken photograph of the battle. Dadaists were more involved in sound poetry and they invented different categories: *''Bruitist poem'': a phonetic poem, not so different from the futurist poem. Invented by
Richard Huelsenbeck Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck (aka Charles R. Hulbeck) (23 April 189220 April 1974) was a German writer, poet, and psychoanalyst born in Frankenau, Hessen-Nassau who was associated with the formation of the Dada movement. Life and work Afte ...
. *''Simultaneous poem'': a poem read in different languages, with different rhythms, tonalities, and by different persons at the same time. Invented by
Tristan Tzara Tristan Tzara (; ; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, c ...
. *''Movement poem'': a poem accompanied by primitive movements.


Later developments

Sound poetry evolved into
visual poetry Visual poetry is a style of poetry that incorporates graphic and visual design elements to convey its meaning. This style combines visual art and written expression to create new ways of presenting and interpreting poetry. Visual poetry focuses on ...
and
concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
, two forms based in visual arts issues although the sound images are always very compelling in them. Later, with the development of the magnetic
tape recorder An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present ...
, sound poetry evolved thanks to the upcoming of the concrete music movement at the end of the 1940s. Some sound poetics were used by later poetry movements like the
beat generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by members o ...
in the fifties or the
spoken word Spoken word is an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a 20th-century continuation of an oral tradition, ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetic ...
movement in the 80's, and by other art and music movements that brought up new forms such as text sound art that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry".


Early examples

''Das Große Lalulá'' (1905) by
Christian Morgenstern Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern (6 May 1871 – 31 March 1914) was a German writer and poet from Munich. Morgenstern married Margareta Gosebruch von Liechtenstern on 7 March 1910. He worked for a while as a journalist in Berlin ...
, in the collection '' Galgenlieder''. :::Kroklokwafzi? Semememi! :::Seiokrontro – prafriplo: :::Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi: :::quasti basti bo... :::Lalu lalu lalu lalu la! :::Hontraruru miromente :::zasku zes rü rü? :::Entepente, leiolente :::klekwapufzi lü? :::Lalu lalu lalu lalu la! :::Simarar kos malzipempu :::silzuzankunkrei (;)! :::Marjomar dos: Quempu Lempu :::Siri Suri Sei :::Lalu lalu lalu lalu la! '' Zang Tumb Tumb'' (1914) is a sound poem and concrete poem by Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti. Hugo Ball performed a piece of sound poetry in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916: :"I created a new species of verse, 'verse without words,' or sound poems....I recited the following: :::gadji beri bimba :::glandridi lauli lonni cadori..." ::::(Albright, 2004)
Kurt Schwitters Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist. He was born in Hanover, Germany, but lived in exile from 1937. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dadaism, Constructivism (a ...
' ''Ursonate'' (1922–32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example: The first movement
rondo The rondo or rondeau is a musical form that contains a principal theme (music), theme (sometimes called the "refrain") which alternates with one or more contrasting themes (generally called "episodes", but also referred to as "digressions" or "c ...
's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced ''Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu'', from a 1918 poem by Raoul Hausmann, apparently also a sound poem. Schwitters also wrote a less well-known sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter W. (Albright, 2004) Chilean Vicente Huidobro's explores phonetic mutations of words in his book "Altazor" (1931). In his story ''The Poet at Home'',
William Saroyan William Saroyan (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film ''The ...
refers to a character who practices a form of pure poetry, composing verse of her own made-up words.


Female practitioners

It has been argued that "there is a paucity of information on women's involvement in sound poetry, whether as practitioners, theorists, or even simply as listeners". Among the earliest female practitioners are Berlin poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who experimented in what she called "Ursprache" (Ur-language), and the New York Dada poet and performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness's poem "Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)" was published in ''The Little Review'' in March 1920 to great controversy. Written in response to her husband Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven's suicide, the sound poem was "a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries". The Baroness was also known for her sexually charged sound poetry, as seen in "Teke Heart (Beating of Heart)", only recently published. Europe has produced sound poets in the persons of Greta Monach (Netherlands) and Katalin Ladik (Hungary), who released an EP of her work, "Phonopoetica", in 1976. In England, Paula Claire has been working with improvisational sound since the 1960s. Lily Greenham, born in Vienna in 1924 and later based in Denmark, Paris and London, developed a so-called neo-semantic approach during the 1970s. She coined the term 'Lingual Music' to describe her electroacoustic experiments with tape recordings of her voice. During the 1950s she became involved with the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) and was an accomplished performer of sound & concrete poetry by many artists such as Alain Arias-Misson,
Bob Cobbing Bob Cobbing (30 July 1920 – 29 September 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival. Early life Cobbing was born in Enfield. He attended Enfield Grammar School and ...
, Gerhard Rühm, and Ernst Jandl. This was due in part to her training as an operatic singer and the fact that she was fluent in eight languages. ''Lingual Music'', a double CD collection of her work, was released posthumously in 2007 by Paradigm Discs in the UK. Her archive is now held at Goldsmiths, University of London. The United States has produced accomplished sound poets as well: Tracie Morris, from Brooklyn, New York, began presenting sound poetry in the mid-1990s. Her live and installation sound poetry has been featured in numerous venues including the Whitney Biennial in 2002. Experimental vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara has also successfully explored the realm of sound poetry. Composer Beth Anderson has been featured on several sound poetry anthologies such as "10+2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces" (1975) and the Italian 3vitre series. Other women practicing sound poetry in the US were, for instance, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono,
Laurie Anderson Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting,Amirkhanian, Cha ...
and the Australian poet Ada Verdun Howell. The online
mixtape In the modern music industry, a mixtape is a musical project, typically with looser constraints than that of an album or extended play. Unlike the traditional album or extended play, mixtapes are labeled as laid-back projects that allow artists mo ...
"A Sound Poetry Mix Tape" (2021) features excerpts by over thirty female sound poets.


Other examples of sound poets

Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin,
Bob Cobbing Bob Cobbing (30 July 1920 – 29 September 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival. Early life Cobbing was born in Enfield. He attended Enfield Grammar School and ...
, Ada Verdun Howell,
bpNichol Barrie Phillip Nichol (30 September 1944 – 25 September 1988), known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, writer, sound poet, editor, creative writing teacher at York University in Toronto and grOnk/Ganglia Press publisher. His body of work ...
, Bill Bissett, Adeena Karasick, William S. Burroughs, Giovanni Fontana, Bernard Heidsieck, Enzo Minarelli, François Dufrene, Mathias Goeritz, Maurizio Nannucci, Andras Petocz, Joan La Barbara, Paul Dutton, multidisciplinary artists Jeremy Adler, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Giorno, Steve Dalachinsky,
Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...
, and
Jaap Blonk Jaap Blonk (born 1953, Woerden) is a Dutch avant-garde composer and performance artist. Blonk is primarily self-taught both as a sound artist and as a visual/stage performer. Jaap Blonkat Allmusic He studied physics, mathematics, and musicology ...
. The poet Edith Sitwell coined the term ''abstract poetry'' to describe some of her own poems which possessed more aural than literary qualities, rendering them essentially meaningless: "The poems in ''Façade'' are ''abstract'' poems—that is, they are patterns of sound. They are...virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music." (Sitwell, 1949) An early Dutch artist, Theo van Doesburg, was another prominent sound poet in the early 1900s. The comedian and musician
Reggie Watts Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts (born March 23, 1972) is an American comedian, musician, beatboxer, and actor. His improvised musical sets are created using only his voice, a keyboard, and a looping machine. He refers to himself as a "disinfo ...
often uses sound poetry as an improvisational technique in his performances, used with the intent to disorient his audience.


Theories

In their essay "Harpsichords Metallic Howl—", Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo review the theories of sound by Charles Bernstein, Gerald Bruns, Min-Quian Ma, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jeffrey McCaffery and others to argue that sonic poetry foregrounds its own corporality. Thus "the Baroness's sound poems let her body speak through her expansive use of sound, the Baroness conveys the fluidity of gender as a constantly changing, polysemous signifier." In this way, somatic art becomes the poet's own "space-sound." Of course, for many dadaists, such as Hugo Ball, sound poetry also presented a language of trauma, a cacophony used to protest the sound of the cannons of World War I. It was as T. J. Demos writes, "a telling stutter, a nervous echolalia."Quoted in Gammel and Zelazo, "Harpsichords Metallic Howl." 259.


See also

*
Abstract art Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a Composition (visual arts), composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. ''Abstract art'', ''non-figurative art'', ''non- ...
and
asemic writing Asemic writing is a wordless open Semantics, semantic form of writing. The word ''asemic'' means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of ...
—equivalents in the visual arts *
Angel Exhaust ''Angel Exhaust'' is a British poetry magazine founded by Steve Pereira and Adrian Clarke in the late 1970s. Andrew Duncan took over as editor in 1992, and by 1993 it was one of the first poetry magazines to appear regularly on the internet. The ...
*
Bob Cobbing Bob Cobbing (30 July 1920 – 29 September 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival. Early life Cobbing was born in Enfield. He attended Enfield Grammar School and ...
*'' Crosstalk: American Speech Music'' *
Electroacoustic music Electroacoustic music is a Music genre, genre of Western art music in which composers use recording technology and audio signal processing to manipulate the timbres of Acoustics, acoustic sounds in the creation of pieces of music. It originated a ...
* Jas H. Duke *
Magma (band) Magma is a French progressive rock band founded in Paris in 1969 by self-taught drummer Christian Vander, who claimed as his inspiration a "vision of humanity's spiritual and ecological future" that profoundly disturbed him. The style of progr ...
* Line (music) *
Line (poetry) A line is a unit of writing into which a poem or play is divided: literally, a single row of text. The use of a line operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentenc ...
* Phonaesthetics *
Scat singing Originating in vocal jazz, scat singing or scatting is vocal Musical improvisation, improvisation with Non-lexical vocables in music, wordless vocables, Pseudoword#Nonsense syllables, nonsense syllables or without words at all. In scat singing, t ...
*
Sound art Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary Time-based media, time-based Artistic medium, medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in Cross-genr ...
* Tracie Morris


References


Sources

*Albright, Daniel (2004). ''Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources''. University of Chicago Press. . *Sitwell, Edith (1949). ''The Canticle of the Rose Poems: 1917–1949'', p.xii. New York: Vanguard Press.


External links


UbuWeb


by
Steve McCaffery Steven McCaffery (born January 24, 1947) is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the David Gray Chair at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. McCaffery was born in Sheffie ...
*
10 + 2 = 12 American Text-Sound Pieces
The first major recorded anthology of American sound poetry, edited by Charles Amirkhanian for 1750 Arch Records, released on LP in 1975, re-released for CD/download by Other Minds in 2003.
Sound poetry—concrete, abstract, and postmodern.Sound poetry in French with audio files, Mitocarpe
By PAUL KRESH; New York Times, April 3, 1983,
Sound Poetry on 57productions''"Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art Sound and The Literary Connection"''
by Kenneth Goldsmith NewMusicBox, March 1, 2004
Poesy Planet, Eight GeeseMessagio Galore
{{Authority control Genres of poetry Dada Poetry movements Phonaesthetics Contemporary classical music
poetry Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...