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The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound

”Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin break that critical silence to readdress some of the fundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.
Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, the connections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essays take on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s Délie, Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing.
A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.
The sound of poetry / the poetry of sound / Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin 1
Prelude: Poetry and Orality? / Jacques Roubaud (translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel) 18
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 / Rosmarie Waldrop 60
“Ensemble discords”: translating the music of Maurice Scève’s Délie / Richard Sieburth 66
The poetry of prose, the unyielding of sound / Gordana P. Crnkovi 79
Part II. Performing Sound
Sound poetry and the musical avant-garde: a musicologist’s perspective / Nancy Perloff 97
Cacophony, abstraction, and potentiality: the fate of the Dada sound poem / Steve Mccaffery 118
When cyborgs versify / Christian Bök 129
Hearing voices / Charles Bernstein 142
Impossible reversibilities: Jackson Mac Low / Hélène Aji 149
The stutter of form / Craig Dworkin 166
The art of being nonsynchronous / Yoko Tawada (translated by Susan Bernofsky) 184
Part III. Sounding the Visual
Writing articulation of sound forms in time / Susan Howe 199
Jean Cocteau’s radio poetry / Rubén Gallo 205
Sound as subject: Augusto de Campos’s poetamenos /Antonio Sergio Bessa 219
Not sound / Johanna Drucker 237
The sound shape of the visual: toward a phenomenology of an interface / Ming-Qian Ma 249
Visual experiment and oral performance / Brian M. Reed 270
Postlude: I love speech / Kenneth Goldsmith 285
Notes / 291
List of Contributors / 239
Index / 333

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Differentials: Poetry, Poetics and Pedagogy

1. Crisis in the humanities?: reconfiguring literary study for the twenty-first century 1
2. Cunning passages and contrived corridors: rereading Eliot’s “Gerontion” 20
3. The search for “prime words”: Pound, Duchamp, and the nominalist ethos 39
4. “But isn’t the same at least the same?”: Wittgenstein on translation 60
5. “Logocinema of the frontiersman”: Eugene Jolas’s multilingual poetics and its legacies 82
6. “The silence that is not silence”: acoustic art in Samuel Beckett’s radio plays 102
7. Language poetry and the lyric subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo 129
8. After language poetry: innovation and its theoretical discontents 155
9. The invention of “concrete prose”: Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias and after 175
10. Songs of the earth Ronald Johnson’s verbivocovisuals 194
11. The Oulipo factor : the procedural poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall 205
12. Filling the space with trace: Tom Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 227
13. Teaching the “new” poetries: the case of Rae Armantrout 243
14. Writing poetry/writing about poetry: some problems of affiliation 258