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Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound PDF

352 Pages·2009·2.68 MB·English
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THE SOUND OF POETRY THE POETRY OF SOUND Marjorie Perloff is professor of English emerita at Stanford University and author of many books, including Wittgenstein’s Ladder and Th e Futurist Moment, both also from the University of Portions of the introduction are reprinted from Chicago Press. PMLA (May 2008) and appear here in revised, expanded form. Reprinted by permission of Craig Dworkin is associate professor of English the copyright owner, Th e Modern Language at the University of Utah and the author of, most Association of America. recently, Language to Cover a Page: Th e Early Writtings of Vito Acconci. A slightly diff erent version of the chapter by Susan Howe appeared in Souls of the Labadie Th e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Tract, copyright © 2007 by Susan Howe. Th e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London Reprinted by permission of New Directions © 2009 by Th e University of Chicago Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5 Th e sound of poetry, the poetry of sound / edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin. isbn-13: 978-0-226-65742-4 (cloth) p. cm. isbn-13: 978-0-226-65743-1 (paper) Includes index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-65742-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-65742-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-65743-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-65743-4 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-65742-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-65743-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sound poetry. I. Perloff , Marjorie. II. Dworkin, Craig Douglas. pn1525.s66 2009 809.8´14—dc22 2009020245 Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. CONTENTS / Introduction: Th e Sound of Poetry / Th e Poetry of Sound 1 Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin Prelude: Poetry and Orality Jacques Roubaud / 18 (Translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel) PART I TRANSLATING SOUND Rhyme and Freedom Susan Stewart / 29 In the Beginning Was Translation Leevi Lehto / 49 Chinese Whispers Yunte Huang / 53 / Translating the Sound in Poetry: Six Propositions 60 Rosmarie Waldrop “Ensemble discords”: Translating the Music of Maurice Scève’s Délie Richard Sieburth / 66 / Th e Poetry of Prose, the Unyielding of Sound 79 Gordana P. Crnković PART II PERFORMING SOUND Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde: A Musicologist’s Perspective Nancy Perloff / 97 Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality: Th e Fate of the Dada Sound Poem Steve McCaffery / 118 When Cyborgs Versify Christian Bök / 129 142 / Hearing Voices Charles Bernstein 149 / Impossible Reversibilities: Jackson Mac Low Hélène Aji 166 / Th e Stutter of Form Craig Dworkin 184 / Th e Art of Being Nonsynchronous Yoko Tawada (Translated by Susan Bernofsky) PART III SOUNDING THE VISUAL 199 / Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in Time Susan Howe 205 / Jean Cocteau’s Radio Poetry Rubén Gallo 219 / Sound as Subject: Augusto de Campos’s Poetamenos Antonio Sergio Bessa 237 / Not Sound Johanna Drucker / 249 Th e Sound Shape of the Visual: Toward a Phenomenology of an Interface Ming-Qian Ma 270 / Visual Experiment and Oral Performance Brian M. Reed 285 / Postlude: I Love Speech Kenneth Goldsmith / 291 Notes / 333 List of Contributors / 337 Index INTRODUCTION: THE SOUND OF POETRY/ THE POETRY OF SOUND Th e Sound of Poetry An onomatopoeic expression automatically entails the specifi cation of what is being described. A pattering sound cannot come from a block of wood. But when I was listening to [Peter Ablinger’s Berlin sound] recordings, I some - times couldn’t tell whether a sound was coming from thunder or a sheet of metal. I wanted to represent the sound, not the person who was producing it, nor its metaphorical signifi cance. It took me quite some time to come up with a solution: My solution was not to fi nd a solution, but rather to enter into the crevice between sound and language and make countless little notes. Yoko Tawada, “Th e Art of Being Nonsynchronous” Th e Sound of Poetry / Th e Poetry of Sound had its origin in the Presidential Forum and related workshops and special sessions held at the Modern Lan- guage Association annual convention in 2006. Our organizing theme was prompted by two fairly simple and self-evident propositions. Th e fi rst is that poetry (the word comes from the Greek poiesis, a making or creation; in Medi- eval Latin, poetria, the art of verbal creation) inherently involves the structur- ing of sound. As Roman Jakobson put it, “Poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent into patent and mani- fests itself most palpably and intensely.”1 Th e second proposition — or more properly conundrum — is that however central the sound dimension is to any and all poetry, no other poetic feature is currently as neglected. Indeed, the discourse on poetry today, largely fi xated as it is on what a given poem or set of 1 2 / MARJORIE PERLOFF AND CRAIG DWORKIN poems ostensibly “says,” regards the sound structure in question — whether the slow and stately terza rima of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” or the phonemic/morphemic patterning of monosyllabic words like “cat,” “top,” “pit,” “pot.” and “foot” in the “free verse” of William Carlos Williams’s “As the cat . . . ” — as little more than a peripheral issue, a kind of sideline. At the same time — and here “the poetry of sound” comes in — the many exhibitions of sound art, performances of sound poetry, and studies of sound mediation in the case of radio, television, performance art, and the digital environment suggest that what the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada calls “the crevice between sound and language” has never been more challenging to explore. What accounts for the large-scale indiff erence to sound structure in the current discourse on poetry? One problem, it would seem, is that “scientifi c” prosodic analysis, as practiced by linguists and rhetoricians over the past few decades, has relied on an empiricist model that allows for little generalization about poetic modes and values: the more thorough the description of a given poem’s rhythmic and metrical units, its repetition of vowels and consonants, its pitch contours, the less we may be able to discern the larger contours of a given poet’s particular practice, much less a period style or cultural construct. Th en, too, conventional prosodic studies cannot allow for the diff erence in- dividual performance makes, much less for variants of individual and cultur- ally determined reception. Still, linguistic studies of prosody, however specialized, have done much less to dampen the interest in poetic sound than has the continuing dom- inance of romantic lyric theory, with its equation of “poetry” and “lyric,” coupled with an understanding of “lyric” as the mode of subjectivity — of self-refl exiveness, the mode in which a solitary “I” is overheard in medita- tion or conversation with an unnamed other. Harold Bloom, who referred to such lyric as “the romantic crisis poem,” insisted in his Agon that “from 1744 [the death of Alexander Pope] to the present day the best poetry internal- ized its subject matter, particularly in the mode of Wordsworth aft er 1798. Wordsworth had no true subject except his own subjective nature, and very nearly all signifi cant poetry since Wordsworth . . . has repeated Wordsworth’s inward turning.”2 Th e representation of “inwardness” demanded, in its turn, that the reader would pay the closest possible attention to a given poem’s fi gurative language. Here the paradigmatic study remains Paul de Man’s “Lyric and Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight. De Man, who uses the terms lyric and poetry interchangeably, casts his eye on such tropes as prosopopoeia, metaphor, and catachresis, so as to show that in Mallarmé’s lyric, “language is INTRODUCTION / 3 representational and allegorical at the same time,” that indeed Mallarmé “re- mains a representational poet as he remains in fact a poet of the self, however impersonal, disincarnated, and ironical this self may become.”3 “Lyric and Modernity” dates from 1969, Bloom’s Th e Anxiety of Infl uence from 1973 and Agon from 1982. In the decades that followed — decades in which literature departments turned increasingly to Cultural Studies and Postcolonialism — the lyric paradigm, when it was invoked at all, remained the same. As recently as 2008, a “state of the art” collection of essays pub- lished in PMLA called Th e New Lyric Studies tacitly accepted the premise that poetry equals lyric, with its corollaries that poetry is distinguished from prose by its lineation and that the domain of lyric is subjectivity, however displaced or ironized.4 Oren Izenberg’s “Poems out of Our Heads,” for ex- ample, argues that “poetry is an extraordinary kind of thinking.” Examin- ing Emily Dickinson’s “I think I was enchanted” as an exemplar of the role qualia (“the subjective or phenomenal aspects of conscious experience” as defi ned by recent philosophers of mind) can play in poetry, Izenberg con- cludes that in this and related poems, Dickinson is “addressing — by means of form — the ontological problem of constitutively fi rst-person experiences, precisely by worrying the epistemological problem of third-person access to fi rst-person states.”5 What does the word “form” mean in this sentence? Presumably, Izenberg is referring to Dickinson’s fi gurative language: “the overloaded and overde- termined signifi cance of Dickinson’s metaphors encourage us to attend to the fact that the primary modality of change attested to in this poem is not of kind at all . . . but rather of scale or quality: small things seen as large, dark things seen as bright.”6 Suggestive as this reading of Dickinson is, one is left wondering what is exclusively “poetic” about Dickinson’s epistemol- ogy. Doesn’t, say, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, concern itself with the “ontological problem of third-person access to fi rst-person states”? Con- versely, what would Izenberg make of Yeats’s short lyric poem “A Deep-sworn Vow”? : Others because you did not keep Th at deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine; Yet always when I look death in the face, When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, Suddenly I meet your face.7

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performance, to Ian Hamilton Finlay's poem-sculptures at Little Sparta. (Scotland), to poetry is atonement not critique, articulate language is a homunculus, and “plain” prose (sermo simplex) naturally remains a.o., Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, George Orwell, Stephen King, Ian McEwan,.
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