Sound poetry

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging

semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance
.

History and development

20th century

While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in

Dadaist 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:

Later developments

Sound poetry evolved into

beat generation in the fifties or the spoken word movement in the 80's, and by other art and music movements that brought up new forms such as text sound art[1] that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry".[2]

Early examples

Das Große Lalulá (1905) by Christian Morgenstern, 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![3]

F. T. Marinetti.[4]

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' Ursonate (1922–32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example:[5]

The first movement

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 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".[6] 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".[7] The Baroness was also known for her sexually charged sound poetry, as seen in "Teke Heart (Beating of Heart)", only recently published.[8]

Europe has produced sound poets in the persons of Greta Monach (Netherlands) and

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, 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 and the Australian poet Ada Verdun Howell.

The online mixtape "A Sound Poetry Mix Tape" (2021) features excerpts by over thirty female sound poets.[9]

Other examples of sound poets

Later prominent sound poets include

Andras Petocz, Joan La Barbara, Paul Dutton, multidisciplinary artists Jeremy Adler, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Giorno, Henrik Aeshna,Steve Dalachinsky, Yoko Ono and Jaap Blonk
.

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 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."[12]

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."[13]

See also

References

  1. ^ Kenneth Goldsmith, Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 244
  2. ^ Kostelanetz, Richard. "Text Sound Art : A Survey". UbuWeb. Archived from the original on Jun 3, 2023.
  3. ^ Germany, SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg. "Alle Galgenlieder von Christian Morgenstern - Text im Projekt Gutenberg". gutenberg.spiegel.de.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ Mizar4590 (2 June 2011). "Zang Tumb Tumb Filippo Tommaso Marinetti". Archived from the original on 2021-12-12 – via YouTube.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ Laurent Cournoyer (24 October 2010). "Kurt Schwitters - Ursonate (1932)". Archived from the original on 2013-12-21 – via YouTube.
  6. ^ Gammel, Irene and Suzanne Zelazo, "Harpsichords Metallic Howl—": The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's Sound Poetry." Modernism/modernity (Johns Hopkins UP), 18.2 (April 2011), 259.
  7. ^ Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 243.
  8. ^ Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von. Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 184-85.
  9. ^ "A Sound Poetry Mix Tape", edited by sync.ed & spoken matter, online at Mixcloud, "[1]"
  10. ^ it:Giovanni Fontana (poeta)
  11. ^ en:Giovanni Fontana (poet)
  12. ^ Quoted in Gammel and Zelazo, "Harpsichords Metallic Howl." 259, 261.
  13. ^ Quoted in Gammel and Zelazo, "Harpsichords Metallic Howl." 259.

Sources

External links
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