bigideas

I’ve been listening to a lot of sound poetry lately, and came across Dick Higgins’s short essay A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry on the estimable ubuweb. I was particularly interested in the boundary between this kind of poetry and music, and Higgins makes a useful suggestion that’s at least part of the story.

The kind of work I’m talking about looks, on paper, like the page on the left; the “words” are nonsensical strings of letters composed not for any lexical meaning but for their sonic effect when read aloud. (You’ll notice that this example, by Hugo Ball who also wrote the poem that supplied the words to the Talking heads song “I Zimbra”, uses different fonts to create a visual effect, too).

Here’s how this piece sounds when performed:

In a similar vein, although less playful-seeming, is Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate. In an interview sound-poet Christian Bok referred to the way original performances of these Dadaist works seem to mimic and caricature the solumn but incomprehensible rituals of the establishment of the time, perhaps especially the Latin mass. His own performances have a shamanic quality, perhaps poking fun at our postmodern spiritualities instead. For contrast, here’s Jaap Blonk giving an almost conversational, and very sing-song, rendition of the same text:

In a sense, this kind of thing doesn’t seem wildly different from vocal music that uses nonsensical “words” and vocal sounds purely for their effect on the ear, as in Berio’s Sequenza III:

A big difference here, of course, is that the various things the voice can do all form parts of a collage that Berio creates and the stuff that’s reminiscent of sound poetry isn’t the only thing he’s doing; we also hear laughter, exaggerated speech and a lot of traditional classical singing in the piece, too. Somewhat similar, although with a lot more humour, is this performance by the great Cathy Berberian of a piece called Stripsody (I don’t know the composer, possibly it’s Berberian herself):

Berberian’s snippets of cheesy dialogue decontextualised for comic effect remind me of hip-hop DJ Kid Koala:

but other sounds she uses are derived from Dada and other sound poetry as well as, as in the Berio piece, the classical vocal repertoire. All of this is jump-cut postmodernism, of course, but it reminds us that sound poetry is about sound, and is therefore very close indeed to music.

But as Higgins points out, music and poetry do different things, even when the poetry doesn’t make any sense:

sound poetry [...] [is] inherently concerned with communication and its means, linguistic and/or phatic. It implies subject matter; even when some particular work is wholly non-semantic [...] the non-semantic becomes a sort of negative semantics-one is conscious of the very absence of words rather than, as in vocal music, merely being aware of the presence of the voice. Thus, for the sound poet certainly and probably for the audience as well, the creation or perception of a work as sound poetry has to do with questions of meaning and experience which are not essentially musical. We identify what we are hearing more than we would if we were listening to music. We are very concerned with just who or what is saying or doing what.

I think Higgins is right, but I don’t think there’s anything essential about, say Ursonate that makes it poetry rather then music. Rather, it’s the fact that it’s called poetry that really matters here.

A sound poem, like any other work of art, comes at us surrounded by a frame that sets our interpretative expectations. If part of the frame is the designation “poem”, we expect to hear words that we understand and we expect our attention to be focussed on the lexical level. If the frame says “music”, on the other hand, we don’t necessarily care about the words too much. We can appreciate a piece of music in which the words are inaudible, or are in a foreign language, but to appreciate a poem we have to understand it.

I think this makes sound poetry rather disturbing, because we’re listening to something that has some of the sounds of language, and that’s framed in a way that means the words should be comprehensible, but it’s complete nonsense. Sound poetry is often funny, but there’s a serious idea there too, and at first it feels weirdly as if we’re just not quite getting what we should be; there’s a void in it were there should be content. In an odd way this reminds me of Paul McCarthy’s films that I wrote about a week or so ago, expecially Saloon, which this doc has some clips about (NSFW):

You’re told by a host of visual cues that you’re watching a Western, and everything looks and sounds right, but again there’s a great yawning gap where any kind of sense ought to be. This, it seems to me, is a characteristically modernist trope.

This effect even works when the poem is in fact composed of ordinary English words, but chosen for sound rather than sense. Here’s bp Nichol’s 1971 Love Song for Gertrude Stein:

In a similar vein, you can listen to Christian Bok’s poem Ubu Hubbub here (warning: this is perhaps the loudest sound on the internet). With Nichol’s poem we can put together a reading based on the meanings of the words — it seems to all be about beginnings and endings, after all — but it’s clear that the chanting rhythm and the chiming vowels are more important than the semantic content. With Ubu Hubbub, you’re on your own, although since there are words there a clever critic could certainly find some meaning.

Of course, this takes us on to the idea that what we call “sound poetry” is just at one end of a scale that includes Hopkins:

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

It’s certainly possible to enjoy a Hopkins poem without understanding it; Dylan Thomas, too:

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.

There are certainly bits of Browning that are intoxicated by sound as much as by meaning:

Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine…
‘St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r–you swine!

and so on; poetry has always been about sound as well as meaning, since the first loud “hwaet” of Beowulf

The sound poet isolates and makes us sensitive to a part of the art form that’s always been there, just as painterly abstraction was about brushstrokes, say. There are two aspects to this: one is the sensitization we achieve by focussing on one aspect of an art form to the exclusion of the others, especially when those others (meaning, narrative, representation, melody, harmony) were so dominant. The other is the creative stimulus that constraints have always given, especially in the twentieth century when so many traditional constraints had been removed. If free verse was “tennis without a net” then sound poetry puts up a different kind of net for a similar purpose.