The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound
Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin
Prelude: Poetry and Orality Jacques Roubaud
(Translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel)
PART I Translating Sound
Rhyme and FreedomSusan Stewart
In the Beginning Was TranslationLeevi Lehto
Chinese WhispersYunte Huang
Translating the Sound in Poetry: Six Propositions
Rosmarie Waldrop
“Ensemble discords”: Translating the Music of
Maurice Scève’s DélieRichard Sieburth
The Poetry of Prose, the Unyielding of Sound
Gordana P. Crnković
Part II Performing Sound
Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde:
A Musicologist’s PerspectiveNancy Perloff0
Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality:
The Fate of the Dada Sound PoemSteve McCaffery0
When Cyborgs VersifyChristian Bök
Hearing VoicesCharles Bernstein
Impossible Reversibilities: Jackson Mac LowHélène Aji
The Stutter of FormCraig Dworkin
The Art of Being NonsynchronousYoko Tawada
(Translated by Susan Bernofsky)
Part III Sounding the Visual
Writing Articulation of Sound Forms in TimeSusan Howe
Jean Cocteau’s Radio PoetryRubén Gallo
Sound as Subject: Augusto de Campos’s Poetamenos
Antonio Sergio Bessa
Not SoundJohanna Drucker
The Sound Shape of the Visual: Toward a Phenomenology
of an InterfaceMing-Qian Ma
Visual Experiment and Oral PerformanceBrian M. Reed
Postlude: I Love SpeechKenneth Goldsmith
List of Contributors
Index
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
Art: Art--General Studies
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
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