Sound poetry

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Sound poetry is a form of literary or musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded at the expense of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.

Contents

[edit] History and development

While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in oral poetry, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a frankly ludicrous phenomenon. Early examples include F. T. Marinetti's "Zang Tumb Tumb" (1914) and a piece performed by Hugo Ball in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1915:

"I created a new species of verse, 'verse without words,' or sound poems....I recited the following:
gadji beri bimba
glandridi lauli lonni cadori
glu gla glee glo...
shitfogigls fidlmafud"
(Albright, 2004)

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1921-32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example

The first movement rondo'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-received sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter q. (Albright, 2004)

[edit] Example sound poets

Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing and Ada Verdun Howell.

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)

Bob Cobbing, a tireless innovator and publisher, began his sonic explorations as an integral step within concrete poetry. One of Cobbing's lasting contributions to text-sound activity is his revolutionising of what can constitute a 'text'. Cobbing (along with Paula Claire) has frequently abandoned the graphic imprint and received 'song signals' from natural objects: a cross-section of a cabbage, a stone, a piece of rope, the textured surface of bricks, cloth etc.


[edit] Text-sound

Text-sound may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry" ([1]).

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources

  • Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
  • Sitwell, Edith (1949). The Canticle of the Rose Poems: 1917-1949, p.xii. New York: Vanguard Press.

[edit] External links

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