Kenneth Sherwood
Abstract: A study in poetics, The Audible Word examines the province of sound in modern and postmodern American poetries that manifest an appreciation for the materiality of language. It argues that the antithetical figure of the lyric voice, which takes linguistic transparency as its governing paradigm, obscures the range and plenitude of audible practices. Positing the "audible word" as a synecdoche for the characteristic foregrounding of the "heard materiality of words" in such poetries, it further elaborates a continuum between orality (grounded in embodied enunciation) and aurality (oriented towards the receptive ear). At the oral end of the continuum, "Phatic Voicings: The Modernist Body Sounds These Syllables" interprets the audible dimensions of the experimental poetry of William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy, which positions the physical body as the medium of contact and a gestural tool for disrupting both social order and linguistic limits. Moving from avant-garde to traditional oral poetry, "Ethnopoetics: Tradition, Transcription, and the Culture of Sound" surveys the reception history and recuperation of traditional oral poetry in the twentieth century, then looks at how Cecilia Vicuņa's work extends ethnopoetic theory into practice through performance. In the aural mode, "Hearing Ear Language Sound: The Aural Resources of Louis Zukofsky's ‘A’" analyzes Louis Zukofsky's constructivist, reception-oriented practice as confirming the viability of an audible poetry that is thoroughly disengaged from lyric voice. Inviting further investigation into the audible word, the study as a whole proposes that the phatic, oral traditional, aural, and yet emergent modes of audible poetics be understood as constituted by sets of formal choices correlative of philosophical, ideological and socio-historical contexts as much as literary tradition.
(William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Cecilia Vicuna, Louis Zukofsky) Author(s): Sherwood, Kenneth Degree: Ph.D. Year: 2001 Pages: 00328 Institution: State University of New York at Buffalo; 0656 Advisor: Major Professor Charles Bernstein Source: DAI, 61, no. 12A (2001): p. 4770 Standard No: ISBN: 0-493-06790-6