The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound

352 Pages·2009·2.59 MB·English

by  Marjorie Perloff

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