Exercise 10 (Week 11)
Consider the sound of and/or in Anne Carson’s “Book of Isaiah: I” and prepare one contribution to class discussion. There are at least three forms that contribution could take: 1) a thought (which you can record in a brief paragraph of prose to submit—though in class, you’ll want to explain it to the class on the fly), 2) a recording (some brief rendering of the poem’s sound, in a way that will open up questions for the class; send that recording to me in time for me to prepare to play it, and submit a brief rationale as well, just a sentence or two or three), or 3) a script (some activity, ritual, what have you that the class can do together to open up the poem’s sound—submit that script and a brief rationale). This exercise is meant to be shorter than what we have done for the rest of the semester—but hopefully they will spark good conversation when we meet.
FINAL PROJECT
For the final project, you should prepare an analysis of the sound of one poem, to take the form of an eight-to-ten page essay (2800-3500 words), with supplementary illustrative materials, visual and acoustic, as your poem and your approach warrant. A successful essay will offer an interpretation of the poem in terms of its sound: that is, give an account of what the poem means when you listen to it with intensity and curiosity.
How you meet this challenge is very much up to you. Sound has so many aspects, as our work together demonstrates. You might, for example, undertake an exhaustive metrical analysis, illustrating points of ambiguity or decision with audio recordings of readings. You might make a study of the sound of the poem’s place or time, with reference to linguistic and acoustic markers of its origin. You might find (and/or make) several recordings of the poem being read and compare the various voicings. You might study one or more musical settings as an interpretation of the poem, and/or make one of your own. You might use a mix of approaches in order to give a comprehensive account. And so on.
The structure of the written part of the project is similarly open. It might take the form of a continuous essay, of a lab report recording a series of experiments and their results, or a dialogue between two readers of the poem. It might integrate visual or audio materials as it goes or as appendices. And so on. Whatever its form, it should be written with care and purpose toward the end of convincing your reader that the poem, heard as you heard it, is a poem to learn from and perhaps to love.
The project is due on Dean’s Date, May 6. You will also give a preliminary presentation about it on one of the two last sessions of class. These presentations, ten to fifteen minutes in length, should introduce the poem to the class, and give an example of your approach to it, with at least some multi-media example of the work you are doing (be it a recording of a reading, a Praat analysis, an example of a musical setting, and so on). The purpose is to give the class a strong enough sense of your interests and direction that we can all make useful comments, which you can then weigh and incorporate in the final project. (So you want to leave lots of time for discussion: no more than five minutes of set-up.) The project is in this way collaborative, and I hope we will all have a sense of investment in one another’s undertakings.
Exercise 1 (Week 2)
Take four lines of a tetrameter poem from this week’s assignment, and turn them into four lines of pentameter. You should conserve as much vocabulary as you can, but you can adjust word order and introduce synonyms and paraphrase as needed (i.e., do not simply add a new, two-syllable word to each line).
Conversely, take four lines of a pentameter poem from this week’s assignment, and turn them into four lines of tetrameter, following the same guidelines (i.e., you do not need simply to subtract two syllables from each line, but can move things around more freely).
In both cases, preserving the rhyme, if any, is optional.
Finally, write a two-hundred-word explanation of what you did, and any difficulties you encountered, drawing on terms and concepts from our reading for the week.
Exercise 2 (Week 3)
Choose one word from this week’s poetry readings—any word—and spend the next week listening and looking out for interesting instances of its use. After a few days, write up a one-page report on your findings, based on at least four instances. Any encounter, visual or acoustic, deliberate or accidental, counts, but you should try to mix these kinds.
Begin with a phonetic description of the word, based on what you learn from McGregor’s chapter on phonetics. After that, draw on whatever resources serve your curiosities: these might include, but are not limited to, the OED (including its account of the word’s etymology), Google n-grams (which will give you a sense of its recent frequency), an analysis with Praat (a good opportunity to explore that software). If your examples are from recordings or videos, provide a link so that I can find it easily. You are not required to make your own sound recordings, but feel free to do so (e.g. of different people saying the word, of the word as digitally processed in revealing ways, etc.). You can submit those via email with your text. The exercise is intended to open up the word’s poetry and its affordances for poetry, that is, what it offers to the art, always coming back to its sound.
Exercise 3 (Week 4)
As with sound last time, this week’s exercise asks you to be something of a rhyme-ethnographer: to observe the behavior of rhyme at large in the world. And rhyme in a very expansive sense, rhyme between words, but also rhyming of sounds, visual rhymes, perhaps rhymes in the other senses as well. What rhyme might mean when it is extended into these domains is up to you to decide. Find three instances (which is to say, three rhyming pairs, or groups), of at least two kinds. (Rhymes between kinds, say a rhyme of an image with a sound, are of a very high degree of difficulty, but if you find one, bring it back!) Again, write up a one-page report of your findings, with such auxiliary materials (sound files, images, etc.) as are necessary to illustrate.
As you will discern, the point of the exercise is to stimulate our thinking about sameness, difference, and time in ways that can inform our discussion of rhyme in poetry when we convene.
Exercise 4 (Week 5)
Take four lines from this week’s poems and explore their musicality, using whatever vocabulary from the course so far (prosodic, phonetic, theoretical) is useful to you. You should submit a page of prose, supplemented by an illustration/demonstration, visual or acoustic. Visual versions might include diagrams or notations, conventional or invented ad hoc. Acoustic versions might include performances, musical settings, or other realizations. Using Praat or other visualization tools is welcome too if it serves your curiosity.
Exercise 5 (Week 6)
Choose a song in English where you think there is an interesting interaction between the music and the lyrics, and submit by noon Friday via email 1) a recording of the song and 2) a pdf printout of the lyrics (try to get everything on one page if you can). The song you can submit as a link (to a Youtube video) or as an .mp4 file, whichever is easiest. The lyrics you can copy from whatever source you find on the internet and transcribe. They should be prefaced by a brief headnote in which you identify a short passage (anywhere from a word to a few lines) where you think something especially interesting is going on, some particular intense conversation between the music and the words. You don’t need to say why—that, we will take up in class. Just give us someplace to focus. When you identify the lines, also indicate the time at which they appear in the recording.
Once I have the submissions, I will randomly assign each of you to introduce someone else’s song to the class. I’ll send those assignments by the end of the day Friday. Your job in class will be then to tell me what to play (I’ll have all the songs) and have an observation and a question to pose to the class. Pay special attention to the passage the song’s sponsor has singled out, but you need not confine yourself there. There’s a risk that we won’t get to them all in class, but we can try!
Exercise 6 (Week 7)
Choose ten lines from one of the poems assigned for this week, and make three recordings of them, in three different voices. What voices you use, is up to you: your own, the voices of friends or strangers, processed voices (electronically or otherwise), found or collaged voices, the voices of animals (if you can induce them to read the poem), etc. Accompany your recording with a page or so of analysis that describes the voices and the difference they make to the reading of the poem, drawing on the week’s critical readings as they are useful to you. You might also comment on the poet’s own voice as you can hear it in the assigned recordings.
Exercise 7 (Week 8)
You have a list of fourteen sonnets from the history of literature in England, in scrambled order. The exercise has three parts:
1) Read them through, put them in chronological order, earliest to most recent. Do not consult any outside sources. Record that order.
2) Write a page or so explaining your order. You might make a few general reflections on the process, and the kinds of evidence that you used, and also on a particularly tough or interesting case. (Justifying the place of every sonnet would be an endless task! Find an instance that exemplifies what you found most interesting, difficult, etc.)
3) Only when you have gotten this far, you can now look to see the authors, titles, and dates here. How does this list correspond to your own? Write a half-page coda thinking through the relation between the two, and this experience of listening for the sound of the past.
You can rely entirely on your historical intuitions at every stage: the interest here is not in whether we got things right or wrong, but in how we experience history when we read. (If we all got everything right, it would be a lot less interesting!) If you like, in part 3), you can do reading on your own about the history of the language or even consult AI, which is especially good at assessing questions of style. Asking ChatGPT to guess the date of a sonnet could be pretty revealing. But this is not required—just an opportunity (since an ear for the present moment, from the future, will surely involve listening to us try to work out our relation to this revolution).
Exercise 8 (Week 9)
Choose one of Craig Dworkin’s protocols for literary listening, and do it. This may involve choosing a poem to be the object of the exercise. It might be a good occasion to start exploring a candidate for the final project. But your choice is open!—and not all exercises work that way; some generate their own text, and those are good, too. What you submit should consist of 1) the result of the exercise, however you capture it (words, audio, video, etc.), and 2) a page or so of commentary on what you think the exercise is for, and what you learned from it. The idea is to expand and reflect upon your own repertoire of ways of listening.
Exercise 9 (Week 10)
Last time we were dealing with sound poetry as a phenomenon of performance, in the air; this time we are back to texts, though texts that have a wide variety of relations to sound (as scripts, as scores, as comment). Choose one entry in Aural Poetics to sponsor for class discussion, and come prepared to present it to the class. Your submitted exercise should consist in an attempt to realize that entry as sound. You can do this in the form of verbal instructions, or as a sound file; you can construe “realize” as a call for performance, or a script for other people (for example, our class) to do together, or any other way of bringing the silent page into what Oliveros calls the sonosphere. Your realization should be accompanied by a page of commentary on what you have done and why you did it that way.
