Melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. (Ezra Pound, Literary Essays 25)

It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose. In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. (Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," 615)

"Modern American poetry is one of the major achievements of human culture" (Nelson xxiv). Intended for the ardent, who assent with nodding heads, such laudatory claims as the foregoing may hold some truth but are not really meant to be argued. How would we even begin to substantiate such an assertion, what is it that distinguishes this poetry, how might its range be sounded? Modern American poetry has been critically celebrated in terms of the poem's sound, its elegant music or authentic speech rhythms. The poets themselves also emphasize sound. T.S. Eliot, for instance, writes appreciatively of the quality he calls "instrumental music" which allows us to "be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem in a language of which we understand no word" ("The Music of Poetry" 22). Eliot qualifies the assertion with the emphasis that "the music of poetry . . . must be . . . latent in the common speech of its time" (24), while Ezra Pound relies more heavily on analogy to music in defining melopoeia as that poetic element in which "words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning . . ." (Pound Essays 25). In a particularly succinct variation on Pound's well-worn triad, Louis Zukofsky observes that the "test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as . . . sound . . ." as well as sight and intellection. (Prepositions 16) And Charles Olson picks up the torch, writing: "Listening for the syllables must be so constant and so scrupulous, the exaction must be so complete, that the assurance of the ear is purchased at the highest—40 hours a day—price" ("Projective Verse" 615).

Perhaps this emphasis on music, sound, syllables, and ears can be explained by the fact that among the distinguishing characteristics of twentieth-century American poetry is that much of it is written in free verse. With its feet in Whitman, American poetry of this past century gave us the formal innovation of: Pound, Williams, Stein, Loy, cummings, Zukofsky, Tolson, Hughes, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Blackburn, Ginsberg, Baraka, and Howe. After Gertrude Stein's salon, the century gave us poetry via radio broadcast, MTV, poetry slams, and internet audio-file. Coined in the nineteenth century, "Free verse" itself was first used by a French poet, so it hardly remains an American property. (Wesling and Bollobas 435-427) Yet as a self-conscious working outside of the prosodic norms established by meter, free-verse is a twentieth-century phenomenon most enthusiastically adopted by American poets and productive of a consequent shift in the regularity of poetic rhythm, which renders the word audible in an unprecedented manner. The general sense that the changes undergone by twentieth-century American poetry, as it shifted away from the calculated forms of prosody, effected an almost revolutionary transformation in the audible dimensions of poetry, one which calls for a consequent shift in critical appreciation, provides one impetus among many behind this study.

When recognizing "musical" or sonorous pleasures of poetry, the reader, teacher or critic often seeks refuge in imprecise musical analogy or vague approval of the "poet's ear"–particularly when considering free verse, where the resources of traditional prosody seem mismatched to the occasion. This difficulty bred its own notoriously imprecise theorization from the poets under such rubrics as the "variable foot" and "composition by field." More conventional appreciations, if they do not cede all ground to textuality, making the audible a secondary effect or bauble, often retreat to impressionistic, metaphoric praise. One may read, for instance, that poet Louis Zukofsky has the "best ear" of the twentieth century. However predisposed we may be to assent to this judgement, we will find it difficult outside of traditional prosody to articulate just what qualifies a good ear. The movement away from pre-given metrical forms opened up poetry to a range of sounds previously unavailable and encouraged their orchestration as an essential part of the poem's architecture; but the reliance upon analogical terms causes it to be consistently under-appreciated. This study will not take evaluation as a primary concern, arguing say for the aesthetic superiority of a given poet's sound or the criteria for making such a judgement–but it will attempt to elucidate just what the phrase "poet's ear" might entail and, further, to interrogate some of the qualities at work in those poetries often judged to be "musical" or sonorous, developing a vocabulary pertinent to readers' ears that does not rely upon the analogy to music.

Oral poetry, aural poetry, oral tradition, spoken word, word music, sound poetry, performance poetry, text-sound, audio poems. . . , we begin amidst a confusion of terms, the seeming synonyms and near-homonyms that afflict discussions of the "audible word." In repositioning these terms and injecting new and less common ones, I aim to clarify rather than further muddy the waters. The "audible" is offered as a neutral, all-encompassing term to designate those kinds of sound patterning characteristic of the various forms above and included in such prosodic effects as rhyme or alliteration—Pound's melopoeia at its greatest breadth. A strange consequence of textual criticism after Derrida has been the relative silencing of language. Despite the contrary gestures of Derrida's own frequent use of aural puns, grammatology has had the effect of squeezing the audible materiality out of language, and most dangerously, out of poetry. Approached from the converse, the audible word is the word which is no longer silent.

Poetics designates the approach to literature that finds structure immanent in the object while extrapolating toward "the general laws that presides over the birth of each work" (Todorov 6). A consideration of audible poetics looks at the way language calls attention to its own acoustic materiality. Language crosses the threshold into perceptibility as aesthetically patterned sound in various the ways which the terminological shift towards "audibility," by eschewing musical terminology, allows us to think about again. The audible encompasses the range of such variously motivated instances as: traditional oral performances, where chanted vocables may advertise the "audibility"; avant-garde efforts to rupture literary conventions or achieve universal ur-language; postmodern shifts from voice to hearing ear and away from traditional forms of rhyme and meter.

Paul Valery qualifies the implications of poetics in ways that accord well with the present study. He urges against using poetics "in the restricted sense of a collection of aesthetic rules or precepts relating to poetry" (qtd. in Todorov 7). Instead, poetics should be taken in "its etymological sense, that is, [as] a name for everything that bears upon the creation or composition of works having language at once as their substance and as their instrument." Thus it is the substantiality of language that necessitates thinking about poetics, and this study is involved in just such a poetic naming. The expansiveness of this definition of poetics is echoed by Henri Meschonnic, whose formulation leads us to the audible—the domain of this study. "If everything in language is the play of meaning, which is necessarily so, since nothing that is in language can fail to have an effect on meaning, then not only do rhymes have meaning, and meters, but also each consonant, each vowel, all the seen and heard materiality of words that contributes to meaning" (Meschonnic 93). Doing justice to the "heard materiality of words" as instanced in the more audible poetries of the last century involves a rethinking of the poetic function of sound. (Traditional prosody emphasizes the general laws of which the particulars of a poem are mere, and necessarily imperfect instances.)

Noting that otherwise diverse groups of modern and postmodern poets exchange the governing paradigm of lyric voice for an appreciation of the materiality of language, this study discerns among these poetries an implicit gravitation toward either body or ear. Using a range of works, the chapters that follow demonstrate that the audible word can be further elaborated as a continuum between orality and aurality—between a poetry grounded in the body and enunciation and a poetry oriented towards the ear and reception. The oral pole refigures the restrictive binary opposition to writing, reclaiming so-called primitive poetics, as well as the somatic and rhythmic elements of sound; the aural pole designates sound-play derived from language's ability to speak itself, involving a postmodern heteroglossia that problematizes reference, closure, and voice.

The texture of the representative works embraced by these three groupings invites the development of a poetics accounting for the materiality of the audible word. Using this continuum to distinguish the audible word from the effectively problematized association of speech with the metaphysics of presence, I employ the distinct modes of audibility to read the rich and complex relationships between poems engaged in: modernist voicings of the body; oral performative traditions; and aural textuality. The "range" of works entertained should be understood as suggestive rather than comprehensive. The poetics ventured is, consequently, a local endeavor, an attempt to elucidate the expressive audible features common to a select range of texts. It looks at how the audible effects in the poems detailed call hearers' attention to the audible dimension of language. Their successful analysis requires attendant methodological work, including the employment of: (1.) a vocabulary and structure for addressing aural effects in poetry(eg sound symbolism etc.); and (2.) the practice of close-listening as a parallel to the more familiar, text-based 'close-reading.'

Whitman: 'americanizing' tradition, oratory, orality, meter, ordinary langauge, organic language conceptions (autocthonous), bardic stance and public poetry;

Historical pattern of engagements with 'sound', 'speech', and 'ordinary language'. Disjunctive Poetics argument for effects of non-native-ness and larger sense of felt lack of native or 'peasant traditions' (WCW) to build on.

General critical neglect (except re: poetry of the 60s) of aural dimensions of poetry from Modernists through Language poetry. Task of this study to limn the various engagements with orality and simultaneously help develop a vocabulary for attending to the aural, helping to make 'close listening' as common as close reading once was.

Justification for this 'priviledging' of the aural comes from sense that it contribute to the appreciation of poetry, that we often lack the reading habits to render this dimension of the work audible, but also from suspicion that the full range of important poetries (particularly the work of Zukofksy, Howe, Williams, Vicuña, Olson, Bernstein) treated in the pages that follow remains unavailable without a general retuning of our poetics–that these works suffer underappreciation from failure to adjust our ears to their poetics.Readers should not expect that a general theory of audibility will follow. Rather we will note the different conceptualizations of the audible at work in the poems, as established by a multi-dimensional approach to poetry in the form of texts and through live readings and recorded performance documentation.

The theoretical underpinnings of this study are set out and developed in the course of the analyses to follow. To aid the reader, several primary operating principles might be noted in summary form. The study proceeds under the influence of arguments by Garrett Stewart and Reuven Tsur that suggest (1.) the sound patterns of language are expressive in themselves, quite apart from the meanings assigned to arbitrary phoneme clusters (words). While this premise challenges the Saussurean premise of the arbitrary signifier and so complicates the Derridean critique of phonocentrism, psycho-acoustic research confirms that, at some level, raw vocal sounds have near universal qualities. Bearing in mind David Antin's contention that treatments of poetry in relation to song generally trivialize the resources of language, this study also proceeds from the conviction that (2.) music is more than analog or historical accompaniment to poetry but less than a sufficient rubric for its analysis. Granting the inadequacy of the musically based analogies in discussions of poetry helps to reveal the aural and oral qualities of the words themselves. A final operating principal is derived loosely from the work of Jerome McGann,also see Drucker on materiality as relevant which suggests that (3.) the audible dimension of poetry is a critical dimension of the text's material instance, both as an unsounded phonotext implicit within the printed page and in the performances and recordings that insist on making poetry literally audible.

Chapter one, "Modernist Voicings: The Body Sounds These Syllables," explores the way experimental modernists William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy associate the materiality of language sound with the physical body. I interpret the rhythmic patterns and stylized vocalizations of Williams' early Kora in Hell and Spring and All as gestural disruptions effecting an escape from social propriety and the perceived limits of language. Within a physicalized, erotic context, Loy's "Love Songs" engage in a related mode of sound play, characterized most dramatically by alliteration, in a self-consciously gendered pursuit of personal liberation through the manifestation of language's excess. In dialogue with the theoretical insights of Henri Meschonnic and Jean-Jacques LeCercle, I conclude that the poetry of Williams and Loy, in anticipation of post-structuralism, causes the body itself to speak from within the text.

Chapter two, "Ethnopoetics: Tradition, Transcription, and the Culture of Sound," considers the recognition, misapprehension, and reevaluation of traditional oral poetry in the twentieth century. I show how Native American poetry in particular was subject to distorting cultural and aesthetic assumptions as it gained prominence in the early part of the century through such Modernist venues as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. I outline the development of methodologies for translating, presenting, and interpreting this work, which culminates in the advent of the interdisciplinary field of Ethnopoetics in the 1970s. I argue for an ethnopoetics-oriented presentation of oral poetry through context-thick performance scores and demonstrate, through the retranslation of an exemplary Ojibwa song, how such a methodology can be used to recover and re-oralize ethnographic texts. Finally, I consider how the poetry of Cecilia Vicuña, an expatriate Chilean who incorporates Andean and avant-garde sources, extends ethnopoetic theory into practice. I audit Vicuña's exceptional, cross-cultural work through a "close listening" analysis of a recorded performance with an ear tuned by ethnopoetic concerns.

Chapter three, "Hearing Ear Language Sound: The Aural Resources of

Louis Zukofsky's Late 'A'" further extends the range of the audible word by outlining the ear-oriented poetics of Louis Zukofsky. I argue that Zukofsky's poetry, particularly portions of the long poem A, can serve as a model for appreciating an audible poetry which is not grounded in expressive voice. I show how the how the element of design common to Pythagoras and Bach induces Zukofsky to incorporate constructivist proto-forms such as the annals and cento into "A," which positions its audibility within the aural mode. In line with the philosophy of language and the theoretical formulations of Roland Barthes, Zukofsky advances the possibilities for an aural poetry as a mode of listening, reception rather than expression. I conclude that the exploration of the audible word–the way sounds shape meaning, the aesthetic pleasure of sound patterns–remains a major preoccupation of twentieth century poetry, one which is sustained and extended in the work of subsequent postmodern poets.

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1984.

Antin, David. "Talking to Discover," Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics A First International Symposium 2.2 112-119.

Eliot, T. S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry," On Poetry and Poets. NY Farrar Straus Giroux, 1975.

Meschonnic, Henri. "Rhyme and Life," trans. Gabriella Bedetti. Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 90-107.

Nelson, Cary. "Introduction," Anthology of Modern American Poetry. NY: Oxford U P, 2000. xix-xxxi.

Olson, Charles. "Projective Verse." Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Ed. Paul Hoover. NY: Norton, 1994. 613-621.

Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996.

Perloff, Marjorie. Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998.

Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1993.

Pound, Ezra. Literary Essay of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. NY: New Directions, 1968.

Silliman, Ron. "Afterward: Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading," Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles Bernstein. NY: Oxford U P, 1998. 360-378.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1981.

Weinberger, Eliot. "Introduction" The Name Encanyoned River: Selected Poems 1960-1985, by Clayton Eshleman, Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1986. 9-15.

Wesling, Donald and Eniko Bollobas. "Free Verse." Preminger and Brogan 425-27.

Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Expanded Edition). Berkeley, U California P, 1981.