The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound - Tapa dura

"While it in no way poses a closed and declarative opinion regarding the relationship of poetry to sound, what Sound/Poetry is attempting to relay is that text and sound coexist, embracing one another in a graceful symbiotic ballet of infinite variables where separation is the hallmark of their togetherness." --Margarita Shalina"Poetry Project Newsletter" (03/01/2010) "Ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum: poetry. TTA TTATTATTA TTA TTATTA TTA TTAAAA SZSZSZSZSZSZS: poetry. My tongue muttering / An unsung lettering: poetry. Come all you, listen to the best experts, a dream team of poets and critics, they will lead you like Orpheus and instruct you in the arts of hearing voices, accents, dialects, chants, refrains, mute alphabets even, when you read, translate or perform poetry. Hoorhay! Ay! Whrrwhee!" --Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania "This superb collection of essays by poets and scholars provides an original and comprehensive inquiry into the complex relations between sound and poetry. Complexity is the key word. Sound is not just one thing but an array of phenomena (noise, music, voices, echoes) at play in all varieties of poetic experience--innovation, translation, performance, even visual construction. One of the most important contributions to poetics in years." --Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame "This collection assembles a brilliant group of scholars, poets, and translators, many of whom qualify in all three fields, to discuss what until recently was a surprisingly neglected topic, the value of sound in the creation of poetic meaning. These writers take a global perspective on the aural complexities of the music of poetry in many languages, histories, modes of performance, and literary experiments. They also practice what they theorize and take care with the sounding of their own language. The result is a highly intelligent, wonderfully readable, and accessible collection that will be essential for anyone interested in what is happening now in literary studies, poetics, and at the sonic edge of articulation." --Peter Middleton, University of Southampton

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 Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound" explores 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 and 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 Sceve's Delie, 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.