Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies

by Adalaide Morris (Editor)

By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to 'turn up the volume' on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life.

The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist 'sonosphers' to Henri Chopin's electroacoustical audio-poames, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements--statements held only partially in check by meaning.

The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

Genres: Poetry

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 19, 1998

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that has sat on my shelves so long I couldn't remember if I bought it or someone sent it to me. Probably the latter. Generally speaking, I don't like to read a whole lot of academic writing on poetics, it thins the blood and softens the brain. And what it does to poetry is often inexcusable. But there are some really exciting essays in this book when you wade through all the gobbledygook, including great pieces by Fred Moten, Loretta Collins and Michael Davidson (Davidson contributes a brilliant--although by no means exhaustive--history of how tape-recording assisted in the recovery of spontaneity, particularly for poets like David Antin, whose work I first discovered and admired when I was an undergrad). Some of it, of course, is shear nincompoopery. "The technosciences affect the arts in multiple ways with technologies that impoverish and ones that fecundate. In hyperspatial technology, especially, the hegemony of the digital and binary come close to eradicating the simple fact that the cognitive is contextualized within actual human bodies." That's Steve McCaffery, a poet whose work I've enjoyed many times, but I don't know if I can forgive the word "fecundate," nor the sentence that follows. One could pluck one's own eyes out and feel less oculary pain than one experiences trying to unpack academic jargon. Yes, I used the word "oculary." That gives you some idea of the ways in which this book hurts one's head, especially when it falls from a high shelf. Do not stand under this book. There is a bonus CD, though, and that's cool, because instead of reading some high-falutin textbook, you can just listen to Kamau Brathwaite's "Wings of a Dove." Four stars for the good parts.