Sound poetry

Sound poetry is a form of literary or musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded at the expense of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.

Related Topics:
Semantic - Syntactic - Performance

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While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in Oral traditions, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th century phenomenon. Early examples include F. T. Marinetti's "Zang Tumb Tumb" (1914) and a piece performed by Hugo Ball in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1915:

Related Topics:
Oral - Hugo Ball - Cabaret Voltaire

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:"I created a new species of verse, 'verse without words,' or sound poems....I recited the following:

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:::gadji beri bimba

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:::glandridi lauli lonni cadori..."

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::::(Albright, 2004)

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Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1921-32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example:

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: to a short extract from Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. (160kb; more info)

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The first movement rondo's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, from a 1918 poem by Raoul Huasmann, apparently also a sound poem. Schwitters also wrote a less well-known sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter W. (Albright, 2004)

Related Topics:
Rondo - Theme - Raoul Huasmann

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Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing.

Related Topics:
Henri Chopin - Bob Cobbing

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The poet Edith Sitwell coined the term Abstract poetry to describe some of her own poems which posessed more aural than literary qualities, rendering them essentially meaningless: "The poems in Façade are abstract poems--that is, they are patterns of sound. They are...virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music." (Sitwell, 1949)

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