Week 10
We began our semi-random walk through Aural Poetics with Polina’s script for a collective recitation of Cecilia Vinuña’s “I Only Ask” (301), which combined unison recitation, repetition in series, individual voices, and a whisper at the end. It activated the category of RITUAL (which we could roughly define, with the anthropologists, as enactment of a repeatable script that serves to maintain personal or social identity, especially across important transitions, like marriage, death, etc.; and that invokes some more than merely instrumental, often magical, means to do so). I mentioned Roland Greene’s definition of lyric poetry as a combination of ritual and fiction. Here we were pulled strongly toward the ritual side, and felt both the risk of fragmentation when we were out of step, and the deep satisfaction when we were all together. We said very little about what the poem means, or at least, we did not paraphrase it. But we certainly had an experience of the poem, one that seems in keeping with its idea of “seehearing.” One question for us is whether there is some element of this ritual synchronization and surrender in the reading of any poem—whether any poem is a script for a ritual, and what it could mean for interpretation to be alert to that potential. How might a poem signal that it wants to be read that way? (You might think of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which has passages that are demandingly discursive, but ends with a Sanskrit prayer, “shantih shantih shantih.” Does it by offer us, exhausted by interpretation, a ritual, or a prayer, to recite together? Can poems move in and out of this ritual mode?)
Next up was Mitchell Akiyama’s “Total Reality” (194-199), brought to us by Anha and Willem. This was probably the selection that made least claim to being, itself, a poem—taking the form of a parafictional email exchange between Akiyama’s son and a friend, in 2067, about the decision to purchase a Total Reality implant that would allow for the experience of an entirely virtual music (the experience of music, that is, without any acoustic input; music and everything else!). Anha had us listen to the song referenced at the end of the exchange, Lylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You out of My Head,” and asked how it remains present to memory; Willem gave us a voice-synthesis recording of the exchange that sounded like a step on the way to its full virtualization. For us perhaps the deepest questions are, what does it mean to separate the VIRTUAL from the actual poem; or perhaps, the EXPERIENCE of the poem from its text? The exchange is a little elegiac—the virtualization of music seems to be the end of the friendship. So we might think of the ways in which a relation to poetry, even allowing for the way it sometimes privileges solitude, is sustained by collective experiences of it—which are secured best by reading aloud together. (So much more powerful, in synchronizing us, than reading silently.)
And then on to Nicholas Komodore’s “Study for Opticochorus,” sponsored by Nse and Yende. The work itself is an intricate diagram, a series of intersecting paths among its basic elements, at three levels at least (the hollow circles, the smaller black circles, the still smaller red circles, each linked to the others along a line-path). Nse took it as a model to draw, and recorded the sound of his pencil tracing its network. Is this graphic reproduction the equivalent of reading a poem aloud? Yende’s acoustic rendering captured the three levels with three voices in parallel, moving by near-rhymes and metonymy (associations of sound and sense) from word to word. In this latter case especially it was a score for performance, and we could ask, if this was a poem, where is that poem primarily to be found—in the diagram, or in the performance it occasions? We have encountered that problem before, and it can be understood as one of the basic ways a poem can figure itself and orient its reader. That is, not a question settled in advance, but one that the poem must decide for itself. Last week we wondered, with the Dada sound-poetry experiments, what becomes of a poem when we pare away its about—that question haunts us here too. (And “Optichorus”: doesn’t this diagram, as a script for performance, also resemble a picture of so many rolling eyes?)
Before the break, Sophie Seita’s “A Laboratory of Sensations: Listening for Texture.” Perhaps the piece is just as much not a poem as Akiyama’s, but Celine developed an exercise from the performance of Polymorphic Microbe Bodies that Seita describes. We listened, three times, to the beginning of Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” (what a song!): first, each of us finding a way to play along, tapping, singing, moving; then, the same again, with our eyes closed; then in sequence, each person around the circle adding a new percussive element. The experience let us feel the solidarity of performance, and some of the forces that encourage (the opportunity to play!) and discourage (shyness! self-consciousness!) participation. Hanna Sybille Müller and Erin Robinsong, who made Polymorphic Microbe Bodies, were especially interested in creating a visceral experience of the sonic porousness of our bodies—making sounds in a room (by slicing fruit etc.) that sound like the sounds inside ourselves, so that we might relax a little about policing the difference. In some sense we were back in the problem of the poem as private and the poem as public, the poem in the mind and the poem among people. Again without quite having a poem in front of us—but scouting the boundaries, by way of the experience of sound.
After the break, Ida Marie Hede and Steven Zultanski, “Two People Walking Around An Apartment Carrying Very Full, Very Hot Mugs Of Coffee”—Wendy’s offering, by way of a recorded performance of the dialogue. We had a very interesting conversation about the problems of introducing sound effects into the recording—how obdurately alien the commercial floor-creaking foley recordings proved to be; trying to match them, is this like achieving consistency of diction in a poem, and why do we want consistency of diction, anyway? (And what happens when we violate it?—see, e.g., Terrence Hayes.) This was a script of a performance, rather than a score for one, but also blurs the boundary a bit, insofar as it immediately tempts you to try it yourself, or develop a variation suited to your own environment. It is also wonderfully contingent, and emergent—the more you think of a poem as a monument, something built to last over time, secured for the passage by its form (form being one way of ensuring that it will hold together in heavy weather—the damages of forgetting are more apparent, and easier to remedy, if you know what the form is, and can see what’s missing or broken), the less you will think that such an ordinary improvisation could be a poem. But we have stretched in that direction—you could say, in the direction of sound’s own ephemerality—before.
Finally, we had Kelly’s realization of Raven Chacon’s “Duet,” a proper score, in musical notation, but all in rests. The film Kelly made marked the rhythm of silence with movement (and the sound of movement) and breath. A performance? A reading? It did seem like an interpretation—treating the work as an exercise in the pleasures and challenges of intersubjective play. A patter of applause after; it was quite a moving performance.
What do we walk away with? I think it was an especially concentrated encounter with the relation between poetry (and art generally) to ritual. Also with the double identity of poetry, and most works of art, as artifact and experience. In the case of those arts that primarily structure experience in time (poems, music, dance), that relation is often between a score or script and the event of its performance. I have been struck by how a focus on sound keeps bringing us back to that problem. There are many classes in poetry when it never comes up!—because we are simply on the page, and we take for granted the circumstances (reading in the library, reading in class) when the poem is brought into time. But to take the question seriously is to see that it is always there for any poem, and that every poem needs to find a way of relating to it, whether that means insisting on its identity as a permanent artifact, a lasting text; or encouraging us to take care to imagine the experiences that we have of it, because experience is all we really get. Different attitudes to life, really. That distinction is not exactly the distinction between private and communal—but there is some overlap.
Week 9
We have been, so far, concerned with the sound of poetry, but this week was our first turn in earnest to “sound poetry”—a pretty open term for poems that are imagined primarily in terms of their performance aloud (or reproduction as recorded sound), particularly engaged with and dependent on the resources of the voice in time. And pretty quickly, we found ourselves scouting around the boundaries of one of our two central terms. What we heard was definitely sound. Were these poems? By what definition? We had the benefit in our inquiry of a collection of work assembled for us by Craig Dworkin, poet and critic, and so we listened together to see what we could derive from these cases. (All of those files are now posted to our website under “schedule.”)
We began with a Ripley’s Believe It or Not segment on Hugo Ball, featuring Marie Osmond introducing and reading his poem “Karawane”; then we listened to Jaap Blonk read another Ball poem, “Seepferdchen und Flügfische.” Osmond makes much of the idea that “Karawane” is written in a new language. Is that the right way to describe it, or “Seepferdchen”? Their words evoked a wide variety of different language-sounds, more invented-African in “Karawane,” more German in “Seepferdchen.” Their structures of repetition and variation seemed musical rather than syntactic. (Their morphology, which is to say their word-forms, did not obviously define syntactic relationships in the way that a piece of nonsense like Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” does.) All that alliteration and assonance made them playful, delightful, pleasurable; it was possible to imagine interpreting them as orchestrating affect, shaping mood, in the way that music does. How much was missing when we could not easily say what these poems were about? How important is that aboutness to our understanding of what poetry is?
Already we were asking about performance and virtuosity: how important are they are generic characteristics (i.e., as characteristics of some genre of “sound poetry”)?
Next we turned to Tracie Morris’s “Slave Sho to Video,” which begins, “Ain’t she beautiful she too Black” and permutes and deconstructs those sentences, and their sounds, in a rhythmic performance with a pitch-range that at moments resembles a rapid-fire exchange between two voices. If I’m right, this was the work that seemed to many people to inhabit most fully this designation “sound poetry”: it was working with the poems in the ear (the “booty” and “full” in “beautiful” etc.), but the various recombinations, and its general evocation of ballroom and slave auction, allowed for a lot of thinking about Blackness, beauty, pride, advertising, etc. The fact that we could paraphrase it seemed to bring it close to poems we have regarded as unproblematic specimens. “Slave Sho” develops techniques of repetition and variation that we have explored as fundamental to poetic language—develops them intensively, but without our being able to move the work simply into the category of music.
We paused to think about this question of aboutness. Perhaps poetry has three relations to the idea that it might be about something: to work with its sensible sentences (in the sort of collaboration/contestation between semantic and musical aspects of language that we have been thinking about all along); to refuse propositions, stories, and other forms of sense-making (in favor of word-strings that outstrip semantics in their acoustic play); or a third possibility, the sort of aboutness we associate with conceptual art (the art that is organized primarily around its relation to the question of art’s identity and place in society—e.g. a urinal on a pedestal, another Dada artifact, which asks to be understood as an intervention in our understanding of what a museum is, what belongs there, etc.).
After the break, we took up Christopher Knowles’ “Emily Likes the TV,” the day’s most determined exercise in repetition, over its seven minutes—though its ingenious circularity (does Emily watch TV because she likes it or does she like it because she watches it—what is our agency in the face of the invitations of mass entertainment?), and its various strategies of addition, subtraction, and intensities of pitch and affect, gave us a lot to make our interpretive claims about. Still something important emerged from the time spent with a piece that could, in its structure, be summarized much more swiftly than the time it takes to listen to it. Namely, that such sound poems insist not only on experience in time, but also experience of time. The sheer duration of “Emily Likes the TV,” enforced by the fact that it must be received not according to the variable rate and skipping and skimming of page-reading, but by patient listening, does something to how we know what they are about. Does television repeat itself that much? At what scale? How different are The Flintstones and I Love Lucy, anyway? What does it do to how we think about that repetition to feel it so acutely?
As questions of what-do-we-mean-by-poetry-anyway became more acute, I briefly summarized Roman Jakobson’s argument in his essay “Linguistics and Poetics”: that poetic language is that in which the poem’s significant relation to itself is prominent, or dominant (as opposed to relation to its message, to its channel, to its sender, its receiver, etc.). Here’s that article, for anyone with a spare couple of energetic and caffeinated hours to consider it. We’ll come back to these questions I trust. We also talked just a bit about the difference between poetry as a GENRE and as a MODE. (Where genre means, a poem as a recognizable kind of thing, with relatively clear boundaries; and mode, more a way of being, as a novel, for example, may have passages that we think of as poetic, in the mode of poetry, without itself becoming a poem.)
OK! There were a couple of poems we didn’t get to, which you can find on our “schedule” page. Tristan Tzara’s “Brüllt” is worth a listen if you want to interrogate the idea that sound poetry and virtuosity are always to be identified. (Though it is also most repetitive of all, at least along the axis of language: does repetition always musicalize?) We won’t leave these boundary questions behind in taking up Aural Poetics next time—we’ll be back on the page, but the volume will strongly encourage us to read with our ears. For some specifics on the assignment, see our “exercises” page. Thanks to all for the experiment—it was great fun for me to be surprised along with you by what we heard, and enlightened by what we said about it.
Week 8
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation was a claim that I don’t know if I articulated in as many words, but that has been important to my own work: style is a way of telling time. That is, the way we judge the history of the spaces and objects among which we move is by their style, a car from the 70s, a song from the 90s, a building like McCosh that was built in 1906* but wants to look like a building from the 1560s which itself wanted to look like a building from the 14th century. History as names and dates, the cause and effect of successive events, is pretty abstract. We feel that history in styles: walking into the Hagia Sophia, for example, and encountering the competition between church and mosque in the sites of stripped ornament, the bones of a Christian architecture and long use for Islamic worship. Time to be sure also tells in the use and ruin of all material things. Things look old if they are cracked or worn or overgrown and so on. But history, human history, is present to the present as style.
That kind of historical knowledge is greatly complicated by Michel Serres’ notion of the polytemporal object, and his sense of history not as a string stretched from then to now, but as a ball of string, or a crumpled handkerchief, so that moments widely separated by chronological time might touch in (for example) a coffee cup that was mass-produced yesterday with an art-deco design from the 1920s using factory adaptation of ancient ceramic firing techniques and so on. Therefore, with a poem, we are really thinking about two kinds of time: 1) the dates of writing and of publication, the particular moment when the poet set pen to paper (though of course writing a poem can take a long time, it can be revised, etc.!), and 2) the various times evoked in the poem by its style, especially any archaism, allusion to other poems, and of course whatever time the poem evokes as a matter of what it is about.
And how do you tell time in a poem—what are the parameters that allow history in? Well, almost anything! No feature of a poem’s making is not subject to time’s conditions and the poetic impulse to stylistic differentiation—to making things new, as Ezra Pound put it; and of course, when you succeed in making things new, you also succeed in making them distinctively and specifically old for generations to come. (Though their newness may last too—I loved that moment when we discussed the fierce compound of “Christ-side-piercing spear” in Herbert—which felt strange to its moment and to ours.) We discussed the way in which the use of meter has evolved over time (very generally speaking, from stricter regularity, toward free verse), syntactic changes (like the paraphrastic do, “as he did think”), slow changes in vocabulary and fast developments of slang. We talked about use of myth, too. Even phonetics can tell us stories of changing pronunciation, which is reflected in some rhyming words. Wendy helped us bring in Lucy Munro’s work on archaism, and her sense of the strong emotions that can be produced by the crossing up of time in a poem.
I was glad the spin of the wheel took us to Shakespeare, because that sonnet more than any other captures the promise that poetry might transcend time—which is part of the explanation for the persistent association of archaism with poetic diction; by including past and present in itself, perhaps a poem expresses its ambition for the future? I was glad to be brought to Terence Hayes, too, as a poem that fights with the idea that poetic diction requires a high style—his American Sonnets let in all kinds of slang that tells time very precisely, takes up the fast cycles of contemporary culture (the “sleeper hold” of professional wrestling) along with Aristotle’s idea of catharsis, which has had a more than two-millennium run.
The more poetry you read, the more these sorts of historical recognitions become part of your set of readerly intuitions—the more you can catch a poet calling out to the past of the art, whether to insist on distance or to bridge it, to recover a past potential or critique a past failing. History has a sound, and you can start to hear it almost without thinking, as you hear the date of a song (or see the date of a poem). Or, of course, the dates. But let me close with that side-piercing spear again, for if there is no art as determinedly polytemporal as poetry, so too we have to credit that impulse in many poems to project themselves out of history—to be new forever. Dickinson is like that, for me, 1860, absolutely, but also now, and maybe not yet.
On to sound poetry next week!—in particular, poems that are imagined as being primarily in sound and in the time and the place of sound (as opposed to poems that might, rightly or wrongly, be understood to live primarily on the page). This session will be a little different in a couple of ways. 1) I am not going to circulate the poems in advance; we will listen to them, and discuss them, together in class on Monday. 2) I don’t know all that much about what we will encounter. This is the area of our common project in which I am least expert, and I decided to ask Craig Dworkin (author of the Handbook of Protocols for Literary Listening) to curate for us a set of interesting sound poems. So we will explore them together! With Craig (who teaches at the University of Utah, and used to be at Princeton, where I met him when I started teaching here), we are in good hands.
Finally: remember that the week after next, we start two weeks of presentations on final projects; and I have randomly separated everyone out between the two available dates: on APRIL 14, Willem, Kim, Eojin, Dana, Celine, Anha, and on APRIL 21, Theo, Kelly, Yende, Nse, Polina,
Wendy. See the description of the project for guidance on the presentation, and do come talk to me about your choice of poems etc.
Until Monday!
JAD
*McCosh Hall: not built in the 1920’s as I thought (and so not part of that story of depression-era immigration of skilled stonemasons that I told; though that accounts for e.g. almost all of Yale’s collegiate gothic), but in 1906, and officially opened in 1907. You can read a little bit about the building here.
Week 7
Let me begin with a few words about Dolar and the linguistics of the voice—it’s on my conscience that I didn’t make time for Polina and Celine to offer some reflections in class; imagine, if you will, their voices! as I make this hasty substitute/apology.
Dolar’s chapter is worth attention for students of the structure of the essay (and aren’t we all?). He is interested in the idea of a formal linguistics of the voice, as distinct from linguistics as we have it, the study of language—he provisionally defines voice as “what does not contribute to making sense” (15). So grammar and syntax won’t give us our answer. Neither will phonology, which is the study of speech sounds in their systematic difference, the differences that matter to meaning. (As opposed to phonetics, the study of any sound the mouth can make.) Accent, intonation, and timbre can all be measured and made meaningful; they too contribute to making sense. He is peeling away layers—that’s what I mean by structure, as though his chapter were an onion, and what he wants is in the middle. He finally seems to get there when he talks about pre- and post-linguistic sound, coughing and hiccups, laughter and singing, respectively. But even those can signify and be systematized (singing, for example, has its own, musical formalizations). So we are left with an idea of voice that is not quite the cri pur, but not articulation, either, but “situated in this gap” (31) between them.
This voice is a little hard to hold onto, conceptually; it’s like Barthes’ grain, of which Willem asked us, is it real? Whatever these thinkers are after, it does seem to require a negative definition—it’s not this, not that, not that either, etc. What the voice is most not for both is expressive, a servant of linguistic meaning. It can do that, of course, but there is something left over, the object voice, the voice as such. (I may be a little hasty in bringing Dolar and Barthes together here?—but that’s how I best understand them, and they do both respond to something stubbornly mysterious about the voice—maybe, the part of it that just can’t be written down.)
Our discussion of Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” went straight to that mystery, Aunt Consuelo’s “Oh!,” which precipitates that crisis of individuality that is the poem’s subject—the seven-year-old’s astonishment that people are so like each other that they might be the same person, the same sound in the same throat; even as she is so alienated and even horrified by those pictures in the National Geographic, and so contemptuous of her aunt. There was so much we could learn about Bishop from the voice, for example the sounds of Canada and Massachusetts; but we were also struck by its flatness, its refusal to amplify the expressive cues in the poem. Is this a way of emphasizing the grain of the voice, something below expression, which is either what we all share, or what distinguishes us most? (Paradox seems to be native to our subject.) That restraint on expression seemed to have something to do with memory, too—Bishop controlling the fluctuations of immediacy and distance in those old emotions. When is the voice of the poem that of a sixty-five year old woman, when of a little girl? “(I could read).” That’s an interesting question for any poem, what it’s tense is, and the voice’s relation to that tense—present in it, distant from it.
Eisen-Martin’s voice was interesting not least for its continuity with the rest of his conversation, his patter—it was hard to tell when the poem had started, it didn’t proclaim itself as an occasion, and yet, once you’re in it, it’s definitely a poem. I loved that idea that he does not rely on formal activations of the voice (meter etc.) to define the boundaries of the experience. His stops and starts, surges and lapses, the weary suppression of affect, especially at the end—different from Bishop in so many ways, but could you say that he, too, was contesting the role of the voice as expressive servant of the text, amplifier or dramatizer of its meanings? It was provocative that we wondered if his poem had been written down before it was spoken, or spoken before it was written down. If you heard only one performance, you might even imagine that it was improvised; but it was not, rather, memorized.
We spent too little time with “Roles,” the first poem in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution. But enough time to appreciate its extraordinary interlingual ingenuity, and how the voice of the Guide (and of the poem) seems to be a mash-up of so many other voices, literary sources, advertising, other travelers—as singular as a voice may be, as recognizable, we can also recognize so many other voices in it. Hong’s virtuosity as a reader has a lot to do with her ability to manage by inflections of quotation and irony the coming and going of different voices in the Guide’s voice: when they were aspirationally self-identical and when they were held up for critique or ridicule.
A quick formal interlude again, five ways of describing voice:
FORMAL: pitch (range), timbre (formants), phonation (rasp or fry), articulation, resonance (throaty, nasal, chesty), rate of speech? (Where we are talking both about broad tendencies, which make a voice recognizable, and particular inflections, which make a voice expressive.)
IMPRESSIONISTIC: adjectives (pace Barthes), sweet, angelic, warm, cold, etc.
AFFECTIVE: angry, sad, assertive, confident, ironic; related to impressionism.
GROUP IDENTITY: gender, age, race, class, origin or habitus.
INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY: the voice as singular and recognizable, but also the voice as it might contain the voices of other individuals.
When we returned from break to talk about O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You,” we indulged a little more thinking about the voice’s specific expressive capabilities. (Sorry Roland, sorry Mladen!) O’Hara’s cadence can be pretty flat, too, but we ended up picking out a few moments of phrasing that felt like interpretations of the poem—like that slightly sharp, slightly finger-wagging “why I’m telling you about it,” as though his little tussle with art wasn’t settled quite as cleanly as all that dismissal of Duchamp and Leonardo and Michelangelo might suggest. I thought the discussion of sarcasm was really interesting—it is so basic to the voice’s capacities, but so difficult to describe; or do we not want to describe it, does it only really work if we can’t? (Even truer for irony?) Anyway—“Having a Coke” is a great poem for wrestling with the voice’s double life as expressive instrument and as something stubbornly resistant to signification, to expression, to meaning.
Forgive me! That was a long one. Forward, or backward, next time, to history!
Week 6
Thinking about lyrics, as I said at the start of class, puts us in something like a middle position between poetry about music (thinking, talking about music, whatever its ambition to be musical; words that insist on their power to make propositional meaning), and poetry as music, its tendency to become pure musical sound. With lyrics, the words and the music collaborate without being identical, and the challenge is to understand the nature of the collaboration (or contest?).
Jorgens gives us a useful, fundamental distinction, which Theo helped us see, between 1) songs where the lyric is basically subdued to the formal properties of the music, and 2) songs where the music is at the expressive service of the lyric. These are poles, between which most actual songs will move, but they will certainly tend toward one or the other. Ramazani is particularly good at drawing out the potential for agon between words and music: he quotes Jacques Roubaud, “It’s an insult to poetry to call it song. It’s an insult to song to call it poetry.” Ramazani polemically exaggerates the dispute, but gets at something important, especially how the rhythms of language are inevitably distorted by being set to the rhythms of a song. That may madden a poet.
In the first part of class, we listened to a few examples along Jorgens’ spectrum. The seventeenth-century setting of Shakespeares “The Wind and the Rain” was song controlling poetry—the melody, the rhythm was constant across the highly varied stanzas. (Though we did detect an impulse to expression in Deller’s voice, e.g. the swaggering of “swaggering.”) Text and tune were matched to each other in mood, but in the main the melody had a kind of detachment from the particular words it carried, something like the Fool’s detachment from the play (Twelfth Night) he sings it in.
Next up was John Dowland’s famous lute song, “Flow my Tears.” There was again a prevailing melancholy, but more local expressiveness—the repeated falling lines that elegantly imitate the motion described by those opening phrases, “Flow my teares, fall from your springs” We are closer to what Jorgens calls “word painting,” music that tries to do what the words are saying. At the same time, there was an interesting line of talk about melisma and ornament—ways in which the melody might linger out or embellish its text, particularly the second time around. Here is Ramazani’s agon, perhaps, and the song’s confession that however sad the lutenist may be, music is pleasurable. One feels that here, the agon is very much under the song’s control, part of its exploration of the richness of despair.
Perhaps there is a missing piece in this trajectory—the nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical art song, which takes word painting to its limit of expressiveness; the words call the shots altogether. But we went on to “The Only Tune,” Nico Muhly’s arrangement of the folk song about the two sisters. There, the music interprets the lyrics at a different scale, repeating the story twice in two very different arrangements. The first is cacophonous, tuned to the tragedy and the grotesque repurposing of the drowned body. The second is lyrical and serene, managing to find some peace and even beauty in the story—whether an ecological solace, that everything that dies is of use again, or the solace of art, as the tragedy literally provides the stuff to make the instrument that can sing of the tragedy. Interesting to think of whether these two different musical interpretations represent a contest with, or over, the text of the old song.
At all events—when we came back from break, a succession of amazing songs. I’ll just say a few words about each. Queen’s “Somebody to Love”: especially interested in the potential for isolation and community in song, when Freddy M was singing alone, when that chorus answered and then joined him; the play with pronouns (you vs. he). Frank Ocean and Andre 3000’s “Solo”: the incredible, dare we say (and we did dare) Miltonic intensity of serious wordplay; the flashes of conflict with the form at moments like “im- / ‘Pression”; that fiercely intricate piano run, half Modernist, half bebop, that so exactly captured the rhythm of the rapped line “Regardless of winning, instead of pretending.” Buju Banton’s “Murderer”: the use of the reggae beat to maneuver particular words onto points of emphasis (especially that third beat in the 4/4); the flexibility of the improvising on top of that steady rhythm, and the provocative contrast of tone; the voice, how it can dial the grit down (as with the couplet that beings “You could wash your head”) and up again. Ethel Cain’s “Strangers”: a song intermittently dissociated from its terrifying subject, but especially committed to word-painting, especially with pitch, the drawing out of “cry,” there sudden spike of “all” in “she’ll cry and wait up for me / we’ll make love in your attic all night.”
Throughout, you could say we were interested (yet again!) in the various interactions between scheme and trope. Some songs ask you to understand the meaning of the music holistically in relation to the words. They are adapted to each other in mood, but not in the local meaning of words or phrases. Other songs are constantly asking reflection on that relation, raising possibilities of agreement or irony. Pitch, rhythm, tempo; melisma, vibrato; dissonance, consonance: most any formal feature of music, and most any device of performance, can carry meaning (can be troped) in relation to the text it carries. It is the art of song to orchestrate those figurations.
Week 5
Thanks first off to Kim, Eojin, and Yende for getting us into some challenging texts. We were thinking both about poetry about music, and also poetry as music—what I introduced at the start as Walter Pater’s notion of Anders-Streben, the striving of the arts at their limits to become other arts (so, poetry to make pictures in our minds; and most directly relevant to our discussion, poetry’s longing to become pure sound, and music’s longing for articulate meaning, for storytelling, etc.).
Jason Moran started us off with his project of extrapolating pitch and rhythm from spoken language—in his case, a recording of a telephone conversation in Turkish. That got usefully described as something like auto-tuning the words, or as the audio engineers might say, quantizing the pitch and rhythm to stabilize them. Those musical properties are latent in all language, and like meter, can be brought out by emphasizing patterns—or indeed, by sheer repetition. Yende’s exercise provided a great bridge, as he moved from something like a Jason Moran imitation of the melody of some lines of Keats, to repeating a phrase in a way that made it sound more and more like a proper melody. (“Perhaps the self-same song that found a path”—it didn’t occur to me till just now, the ingenuity of repeating the “self-same song.”)
We are now in the territory of Diana Deutsch’s speech-song illusion, how, as she puts it, repetition musicalizes—music itself is basically organized and enabled by repetition, and the more language repeats, the closer to music it comes. If poetry is characterized by greater tolerance for repetition than other kinds of language (it has repetitive rhythm, structure, rhyme, and also often recirculating motifs, language, refrains), its relative proximity to music is at least partly explained. And Chua and Rehding make their grand claims for repetition as the basic organizational principle of everything—so music and poetry bid to be something like the universal language, insofar as they participate with particular intentionality in those cosmic rhythms, along the sliding scale of vibration from rhythm to pitch.
(We spent a little time with the problem of the definition of music itself, especially in terms of repetition, but also other possible aspects, including and social bonding effects and individual pleasure. Perhaps we need a family resemblance theory of definition for this case, a field of associated qualities, some number of them present in music, but none essential? And the shifting cultural and historical uses of music mean, at the least, that any given moment arranges this field differently. Always good to remember Nietzsche’s polemical warning: “Nothing with a history can be defined.”)
In spite of my maladroit pdf’ing, once we clarified that “At a Solemn Music” was a twenty-eight line poem by John Milton, I thought we did a beautiful job with a beautiful poem, exploring his dream of an original “consent” of voice and verse, lost by the Fall, preserved (ever and unchanging in its ordered change) in heaven, and pledged to us again at the end of time. The poem helped us enter into a few of the historical questions having to do with the difference between music mundana (music as mathematics, the beautiful fixed harmony of the spheres) and music humana (music down here, that gives us such strong feelings and makes us dance). Milton’s poem prophecies an eventual attunement of mortals to that divine harmony. We will want to keep following this basic division, between a music of transcendence and a music of the body and desire. It does not exactly correspond to the distinction between describing music technically as an object, and in terms of our feelings about it, our responses; again, something like music as math and music as rhetoric. Hollander tells the story of a large shift from the first to the second—but neither possibility ever leaves us.
We also had a really interesting conversation about how all this related to valuation—how assessments of formal complexity might enter into judgments of whether a poem is good or bad (let alone “great”). That’s not our main subject here, but it’s an important one, and let’s keep tracking it; along with the equally complex question of intention. If I get going on those right now I’ll never finish these notes, but let’s keep them alive…
…and meantime, just a nod to a great discussion of Keats at the end. You can feel him poised between the evanescent transcendence of pure song, and the somehow rich suffering of life on earth; called by the bird, but also wishing to give up the chase, to sink into a narcotic slumber that becomes an “easeful death.” So much about how song is and isn’t among us and of us; such chaotic ecstasy (“Already with thee!”) and despair (“forlorn”). But I thought that discovery of a kind of sonic counterplot, phonemes moving from unvoiced to voiced, was a lovely way of appreciating the poem’s determination to continue to be a poem.
Week 4
Thanks for a great discussion of rhyme yesterday, and to Polina, Willem, and Kelly for special guidance. Let me pull out a few themes that I thought were important. Pope let us work through some of the questions that Jarvis raises about the relation between logical and musical rhyming. The “logical” approach, which might better just be termed the interpretive, takes each rhyme as incitement to think about the relation between the terms: so, for example, what it says about wisdom to rhyme “wise” with “denies” (and to displace “gives,” which earlier rhymes as “giv’n / heav’n,” to the middle of the line). Rhymes that demand interpretation will tend to emphasize conceptual and grammatical dissonance (i.e., they rhyming words are different parts of speech). Musical rhyming, by contrast, is a more holistic encounter with the sound of the poem, and is sometimes charged with teasing us out of thought (as Keats might say). These rhymes go down easy, tend to be the same parts of speech, etc.
The problem of course is telling the difference. The end rhymes that define Pope’s couplets suggest an ordered and predictable universe within which his claim that “whatever is, is right” could only be obvious. But we found such intricate textures of internal rhyme and assonance and other figures of sonic similarity (“purling rill”), and also rhythmic symmetries that seemed to suggest other kinds of rhyme (we talked about “op’ning ears / of the spheres”). Which way does this poem really tend, toward the sonic architecture of its argument, or the pleasure (sensuous? childlike?) of its mere sound? And what kind of a choice is that? Jarvis poses it but doesn’t seem satisfied.
One basic question for interpretation, of poetry and possibly of all language, arose as we finished: where is this thinking happening; is it in the poem, and we follow it, or does the poem provoke it in us? It may be most interesting to ask how particular poems bear themselves toward this old puzzle: is it fair to say, as I did, that Pope’s poetry presents itself as knowing what it is saying? What about all that vagrant sound? Sound itself seems to test our ideas about intention. We are more in control of what we say, you might say, than of how we sound, yes? And logic is a business for the eye more than the ear. Hmmmm.
Dickinson gave us slant rhyme, and also those dashes. Does a dash rhyme with a dash, silence with silence? If so, not with the sense of cinching off a stage in an argument that you get with Pope’s end-rhymes. We talked a bit about how her dashes disrupt the hymnal consensus of the ballad meter, and how the slant rhymes make the argument always feel like it is shifting terms as it goes. We observed that pattern of near rhyme on “-on” and asked whether there might be some notion of a core rhyme?—in a complex of sound, the one word with which all the others rhyme, like spokes in a wheel rather than a series or a network.
Then Hayes, a sonnet that takes both rhyme and meter close to the limits of anything we could call a “contract”: the poem begins in pentameter, but strays; it offers the off or slant rhyme “animal / shell” in the first and third line, but the fourth line “black” does not rhyme with the second (“bird”), so expectations of an ABAB rhyme scheme are quickly dismissed. But there is such intricate sound-work in the poem’s interior, the pattern of confinement that develops around that terminal fricative l (small, stall, shell, balled), how it returns in “wild wings bewildering,” and is then suddenly, starkly replaced by the stops of that monosyllabic last line, “With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt.” Hayes also gave us a way of opening Susan Stewart’s question of rhyme and freedom, and her account of how it can be not bondage, but opportunity: “Artistic freedom reaches its apogee when intention approaches the rich cognitive moment on the brink of realized structure” (30). A complicated thought! But I take it the thought is something like: freedom is fullest at the moment when you are poised to make something, when you have choices, and whatever you choose, whatever structure you commit to, those other choices unmade will remain intelligible in the work.
I’ve only begun to peruse the exercises, but they show just how extensive a concept rhyme can be: summoning the uncanny magic of coincidence, the intuition of conspiracy, the intimation of order and structure, or even friendship or love. How far can we really extend the analogy into the world? Pretty far, I think—rhyme may be the best concept we have for capturing a similarity that is not (yet) explained in terms of genealogy or design, but that we can’t help hearing. Muldoon seems to be the great poet of that predicament. Isn’t it the merest, most trivial accident that “afikomen” rhymes (kind of) with “Kikkoman”? But there they are in the mud room together—I thought we did a beautiful job describing that space, between inside and outside, where we put all the stuff that’s otherwise unplaceable or in transit etc. The poem keeps us off balance between a world of free association and free play, and a world of exile and jeopardy. Perhaps the final question is whether the structure of rhyme, open and bi-directional and as nimble as that she-goat, might provide us with an alternative to the logic of sacrifice (figured in the binding of Isaac). That is, can rhyme offer us an endless chain of redemptive substitutions?—not just a lamb for a son, but a goat for a lamb, and so on and so on, dodging tragedy every time. Maybe this concept of, and hope for, rhyme is a way out of the music/logic binary?
Week 3
I hope everyone is still a little self-conscious, now we’ve got to the middle of the week, about the words in our mouths. If there is one basic idea I want to carry forward from the first quarter of our seminar, it is how poetry organizes and makes meaningful very physical (somatic, bodily) aspect of language: how we lean into what we say with stress, how they way our mouths shape the vowels and stops and fricatives and so on of the words we say can feed back into what those words mean when we use them. Efficient communication means not noticing any of this. We talk in prose. It is a poem’s business to disrupt this efficiency (which is also ideology), to make you notice, to make you feel the language and think with it. SOUND IS SLOWER THAN SIGHT and so it has advantages for the poet who wants to make you stop and think.
Harryette Mullen’s “Coo/Slur” re-spells a set of color words to get us thinking about how colors get coded, especially in relation to race—opening up the pain (“yell ow”) in that bright word “yellow.” We responded both to the playfulness of the poem, and to the provocation of its ad hoc etymologies (as though that question “why it” were where “white” came from). Think about how you had to read the poem to begin to interpret it—dialing up the inner ear, even if you weren’t reading aloud.
There were some great general questions about the status of the syllable (thanks to Eojin and Wendy for bringing us into the technicalities of phonetics). McGregor points out that syllables have greater “psychological reality” than phones (the sounds represented by the IPA)—so what are the advantages of slowing language down until it becomes strange, naming phones, counting syllables? (Cue the Russian formalist critics, who took the very purpose of literature itself to be making the familiar strange.)
Christian Bök’s Eunoia is the book of vowels, and from the start it explores the scandal that the one letter A (“a slapdash arc and a backward zag”) has so many different sounds (the low-frontal bat, low-back bard, mid-front say). A vowel is the voiced breath without impediments, and Bök’s poem seems to be driven along by its own fluent invention. Though we observed about A, and it’s true of the others too, that a celebration of avant-garde liberty (what this new rule makes possible!) is also a rigid prescription that may come to have the inhibiting force of a religious law. We thought a bit about how sound can include and exclude (see the Biblical story of the word “shibboleth” at Judges 12:6). And about the different experiences of the different vowel climates, rigid, stiff, potentially narcissistic I versus brutal U.
Jordan Scott’s Blert gave us, by contrast, a world of consonants—the poems in that book are written to make trouble for the speaker, especially the speaker with a stutter. McGregor’s observation that speech is a continuous stream, rather than a series of discrete word- or syllable-units separated by silence, makes the stutter’s interruptions both a discomfort, and an analytic tool. We observed how Scott composed the poem in variations that explored different ways to get through a hard word. A deep analogy between the interior of the mouth and the interior of a cave made the poem into an exploration of a strange space, not less strange for being inside us. (Is the mouth really inside? Its situation is a little uncanny.) As a poet, Scott is a virtuoso organizer of obstructions and impediments.
Plato’s Cratylus (helpfully introduced by Anha) and some modern speculations on sound symbolism framed a basic question. When we find sound to be meaningful, where does that meaning come from: is it purely arbitrary, a function of a community’s agreement, or even an individual’s choice, or power; or is it somehow natural to the shape of words, the association of r with running motion that Socrates points out, or our own speculation about the trans-linguistic m of “mother”? Poets and philosophers have been spellbound by both possibilities—the truth must lie in the middle, I would say; but we will have to listen out for poets who try to push in one direction or the other. Words do have a magic about them, and activating their sound is often something that happens in spells (“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”).
Too little time with Stevens at the end, but I hope we got a feel for his questions—that poem by the sea, with the sea itself, the singer, her song, and the listeners. What do you hear? Is it the sea, as the song sings it? Is it the sea singing through the singer? How the poem activates these questions by calling attention to its own sound—the “mimic motion” (but what is imitating what?) and those hard, categorizing c’s. (I also love that phrase, “body wholly body / Fluttering its empty sleeves.”) There is the question of sound symbolism in a community of language users, and sound symbolism in the sonic ecosystem of a particular poem.
Next time—rhyme! Enjoy the exercise, another expedition intended to get us thinking about rhyme and recurrence across many domains of experience. I will see you Monday.
Week 2
I want us to be comfortable with the technical side of English meter: to get used to using its terms (iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl; tetrameter, pentameter) as a way of talking about the patterns that we hear in verse. Hollander is always there as a refresher, and we’ll practice in class. Here let me just play back a couple of fundamental ideas. Foot scansion, which is what we were doing in counting iambs etc., is a pretty crude technology for representing the complexity of spoken rhythm—but it helps us hear the fundamental pulse that organizes verse and makes it sound different from ordinary speech. Attridge’s point that “the natural response to rhythmic sound is muscular participation, whether in the tapping of a finger or the movement of the whole body in a dance” (77) is important to remember. Speech rhythm is in our bodies. Meter is the project of organizing that rhythm, so that we can sing with it, dance with it, and make meaning with it.
And meter means (or its scheme is troped) in two basic ways. 1) The choice of meter, and of form generally, is meaningful; so, the four-beat or tetrameter line brings us close to song, hymn, spell, while the five-beat or pentameter line brings us closer to conversation, argument, rhetoric. That’s a choice the whole poem makes, what Hollander would call the metrical contract it establishes with the reader, setting expectations. And 2) any variations of rhythm that test or break that metrical contract are potentially meaningful: when your expectations are violated, you ask, why?—which is to say, you have to interpret, to explain the variation. So that opening line of Paradise Lost, “Of MAN’S first DISoBEdience AND the FRUIT”—if instead we hear “Of MAN’S FIRST disoBEdience” etc., what does that make us think about the poem’s obedience to its own laws? So: the choice of a meter matters, and so do the moments when the poem tests that choice. The sound of a poem is the general sound of its metrical kind and the local sound of its rhythmic behavior in relation to that kind.
Some poets and some readers treat meter as a rule to be obeyed, and judge actual poems by their success or failure in upholding those abstract patterns. It’s good to be interested in those judgments: they mattered for a lot of poets in the past. But we don’t have to make them ourselves, or not that way. The variety of contracts a poem might make with a reader now goes well beyond the canonical types of verse—still I hope we will still find these terms useful for naming some of the rhythmic phenomena we encounter as we go.
I’m working backwards here a bit—we started by thinking about rhythm, with Lefebvre’s help. I loved our rhythm census: the footsteps, the laughter, the clock; the visible traces on the tabletop of the rhythm of labor, wiping it clean; the lovely account of the rhythm of writing, how you hear the enjambment when the pencil lifts from the end of one line and carries back to the beginning of the next; also larger rhythms, like the schedule of a seminar. And of course breathing, the rhythms of the body. This is the work of the rhythmanalyst as Lefebvre imagines it, who sees the world not as a collection of discrete things arranged in space at a particular moment; but rather as a network of overlapping rhythms, which carry from the past and project into the future. Try to take a few moments this week to see if you can hear or see the world that way! To do so is to recognize a special power in poetry, in its aspiration to make art out of such fundamental patterns of felt experience. We revolved some deep questions about whether keeping time with a rhythm is an act of agency (freedom) or submission (bondage); what might make it feel which way. We thought about daily life, bodily experience, attention and ADHD; about the rhythms of city and of country, mechanical and organic; about what would happen if we slowed down a city rhythm: does it become rural? (What is the experiential difference between mechanical and organic rhythms?) Poetry can affect us profoundly when we can understand its rhythms as both participants in, and representations of, this larger world of rhythm where we live (or better, when we live).
OK—I did a little better this week, length-wise. For next week, the exercise is in the sounds of words. Enjoy it! The reading from McGregor and the IPA overlaps a good bit, but it is worth encountering the material twice. After this week, no more tidal waves of technical vocabulary—but if we carry these languages with us, scansion and phonetic analysis, they will serve us well. For example, with Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West”—give some extra time to that poem, which we’ll take up in earnest in the second half of class next week.
The complete Alvin Lucier, “I Am Sitting in a Room”
Beethoven, slowed way down
Week 1
Thanks, everyone, for such a thoughtful start to class yesterday. I’ll write every Tuesday with a page or so of thoughts about our discussion, and those follow below. But first, plenty of start-of-term business!
1) Our class website is https://commons.princeton.edu/eng266-s25/. You’ll find all the readings, the syllabus and schedule, and details for the exercises there. (I will continue to hand out xerox copies of the readings each week, but there will be some framing remarks on the schedule page.)
2) Please sign up for an Amazing Sound of the Week!—particularly important to get people for next week; special thanks to the ice-breakers.
3) And please sign up for reflections/questions; here too, we need people for next Monday. Thank you! I’ll reach out to whoever is signed up midweek to discuss what you might focus on.
4) My office hours are 2:30-4:30 on Tuesdays; you can sign up via the link under my signature way down below. If that time doesn’t work for you, just let me know and we can find another.
5) Remember that going forward we won’t have screens (laptops, tablets, phones) open in class. I’ll try to contain any interjections from Siri or her associates.
OK! So, together we attended to four poems, first listening to them, then listening and reading together: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” (read by Jaap Blonk), Tongo Eisen-Martin’s “I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money,” and Susan Howe’s “Frolic Architecture.” We spent the longest time with the first, the Tennyson, and talked about the sound of it before we read the text. It was recorded in 1890, on a wax cylinder, and it was very difficult to make out the words. Without knowing the words, what did we hear?
Lines: discrete groups of words with (in this case) a regular, repetitive structure. How basic to poetry is the phenomenon of the line? It has a complex relation to the sentence and to the phrase, two other structures we detected. We’ll think more about this play between prosodic and grammatical structures as we go (i.e., between lines and sentences).
Music: a couple of people were tempted to talk about the musical quality of the speech, its unusually strong sense of pitch and of rhythm. And what is music, exactly? We’ll get to think about that—but something in the difficulty of making out the sense pushed us in that direction.
Affect: a catch-all term for emotions, and for what some of us called the sound of “urgency.” This is clearly a poem of heightened, and complicated, feeling. (The strangled pride in senseless sacrifice?—something like that.) We’ll want to think about how feeling gets into language.
Rhetoric: closely related to affect, in that several people pointed out that this poem also sounded preacherly or oratorical, like a public performance; and we will want to think about the relationship between rhetoric (the formal art of persuasion) and poetics, which have a long history in the West of ambivalent, mutual recognition and contempt. With the idea of rhetoric comes audience. Does an audience have a sound? The whole question of broadcast, of the difficulty in controlling the direction of sound, came up.
Medium: what to make of the sound of the wax cylinder? Was that part of the poem, or something we had to listen through, and set aside? Signal, or noise? When and how, and why, might a sound poem call attention to its medium? The medium might include the voice, the breath, etc., as well as technologies of transmission.
Some basic questions ran through all of it. One was a point made early and much developed, about the difficulty of making out the words, and what happened when they snapped into place (either in moments of aural recognition, or after, reading along). The associated affects were so interesting: some people reported a feeling of delight, of freedom from the semantic order; others frustration or even anxiety at not understanding. So important to recognize that a poem can occasion both. I want to cultivate as much as we can delight in perplexity—any new idea is going to begin there. But also not forget the frustrations and anxieties of difficulty, for they are real too, and poets may have an interest in exploring them. The analogy between this kind of recognition and higher-order interpretation (what does this poem mean?) is one we’ll explore a lot I expect.
Related was the signal-noise problem: is the poem an ideal text that we attempt to abstract from its occasion, its material circumstances; or is the poem the experience of the poem, everything about it, changeable from reading to reading? The ephemerality of sound pushes us to think especially hard about the latter possibility, but we’ll see lots of different attitudes toward this fundamental puzzle.
So, I am reading back into Tennyson some ideas that came up in discussion of the poems after; let me swiftly gather a few more impressions about them. The Schwitters, at another remove from words and any obvious about-ness, pushed us further toward music; its sonata form, its manipulation of a defined set of phonemes, felt musical, and yet, the text is punctuated as speech. Very interesting questions about whether we could hear a story, a narrative in it; also about the tension between a sense of it as improvisation, and its very exacting text, or should we say score. Similar questions about improvisation and script arose with Eisen-Martin, what makes a poem sound improvised when it is not. He seemed to raise the question especially acutely: is the poem complete on the page, or in its performance? What does it matter that he performs his work from memory? (Not reading from the page, as most modern poets do?) This poem was more clearly about something than the first two (at least, than the Tennyson recording was). The tones of rage, irony, resignation, were so flexible and unpredictable—how does the poem control them? And how does it position the audience—are we to sing along (as Schwitters pretty unproblematically invites us to do; there are so many recordings on the web of people trying the “Ursonate”)? Or not? How united or divided is that we—between people with experience of the anti-Black violence that he is working/thinking through, as victims, perpetrators, bystanders, if there are any bystanders? Finally the Howe. Were those fragments lines? How much can you fragment a poem and still have a poem (if it is supposed to be an “organic” whole)? What to make of that broken speech?—that refusal of fluency; the voice pressed toward forms of damage or pathology? A very different approach to activating the voice than Schwitters’: his, a playful virtuosity; hers, obstruction, limit, failure. Or is that the sound of the medium, of the archive that she has cut up, collaged? Is that the sound of historical distance in its assault on speech?
Well, I could go on—there was so much! I’ll just conclude with a brief comment on the last part of class. We talked about emphasis, or what next week we will formalize as stress or accent. Our great example was the found sentence, “That ice cream was goated, is all.” The main stress seemed to fall on “GOAT,” but we explored alternate patterns of emphasis, for example “That ice cream WAS goated, is all,” which would suggest that it is not goated anymore—a phenomenon known as contrastive stress (I emphasize WAS to make clear that it no longer IS), which we’ll discuss next time. And I made the suggestion at the end that rhythm IS intentionality; that what we miss in the more rudimentary voice synthesizers, at least, is the lively rhythm of meaning it. We can talk more about this idea next time; Mutlu Konuk Blasing gives a great account of the idea in these pages of her Lyric Poetry, if you want to follow up.
I meant to keep this to a page. So much for that. To close, just a few thoughts about next week. The Hollander makes an excellent basic introduction to scansion, the notation of meter in poetic lines. Attridge uses a different system of scansion, which we won’t learn, but will glance at—what’s important in those (difficult! coraggio!) pages is his sense of the difference between the four- and five-beat lines, between tetrameter and pentameter. The Lefebvre, finally, is an extravagant essay in the direction of seeing/hearing the world as rhythm. It’s sort of conceptual background for what, next Monday, will be a fairly wonky discussion of iambs etc. The poems over a traditional array of metrical possibilities. They’re amazing, all of them, but they will serve us mostly as examples of metrical effects. As the semester goes on, we’ll dive deeper into particular poems I promise.
Enough! See you next week!
JAD
