Tuesday, Sept. 10th: Walt Whitman

The good, grey poet in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1860s, as photographed by Matthew Brady.

One could make an argument that — in spite of the achievements of Wheatley, Longfellow, Dickinson and Poe, among others — American poetry truly begins with the 1855 publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  In large part, that argument would rest on whether you define a national literature as merely having its origin in a given location, or whether it must reflect and embody the nature and spirit of its homeland.  Whitman is a great cataloguer, a voracious explorer of the things that filled up the world around him, and one major part of that was the soundscape of a nascent America, something that had never occurred to his predecessors, who measured themselves against continental aesthetics.  

While this goal fits beautifully within our understanding of the sonic and performative origins of poetry, and even more so the symbolic role song (in its myriad guises) plays within Whitman's poetics, we must understand that his attempts, while radical for their times, were still somewhat constrained by the ongoing evolution of American English.  Lew Welch (who we'll read later this term) speaks briefly to this when he observes that:

Now, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson were working on [authentically rendering American speech] around 1908 on. The reason that they could start working with that at this time was that for the first time in history, the first time in the world, there was such a thing as American speech. Whitman had no language to write in. If you read Whitman with this in mind you’ll notice these incredibly clumsy frenchified funny words. It’s just amazing that the man wrote such great, you know, really world poetry, when he had no language to work in. He just had a hodgepodge. He’s working in the rubble of Europe and he’s sitting in the smokes of industrial America. Wow, how he ever put anything together out of that is a sign of his true greatness.

In other words, poetry doesn't catch up to language (and vice-versa) until we get to the 20th century, but without the heroic efforts of Whitman, we might have waited a lot longer.

Our readings for Tuesday will focus primarily on Whitman's magnum opus, "Song of Myself," with three other poems added to the mix.  While we'll address these poems in a general sense, you'll also want to keep an eye out for their aurality and orality: their internal music and the sounds they document.

• "One's Self I Sing"
• "I Hear America Singing"
• "Song of Myself"
• "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

Thursday, Sept. 5th: Foundations 3: de Saussure / Kristeva / Barthes

Roland Barthes cultivating an air of disaffected intellectual coolness.

I've put all of our readings for Thursday in one PDF, which you can find here.  The first four excerpts are taken from the first edition of A Critical and Cultural Study Reader, ed. Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan, while the fifth is from Barthes' Image, Music, Text.

As has been the case with our other two foundations classes, these readings are significantly more complex and theoretical than the majority of the work we'll be doing this term, but if you're able to keep with them, particularly through our class discussions, you'll have a strong body of critical tools with which to begin the rest of that work.  Do your best to navigate them, using the pointers below, and don't worry if you're not feeling 100% sure of what you've read (or 70% for that matter).  What's most important is that you've made an effort and have digested some of the ideas at play here — we'll work quickly to figure out the rest in our class discussion.

We'll be leapfrogging quickly from reading to reading, and I might even set a timer to keep us on schedule so we can get through everything.  

things to look out for:

• de Saussure: definitions of the sign/signifier/signified; general defining characteristics of language; 
• Barthes (from Mythologies): first and second order signification

(note: these readings are being provided as groundwork to set up the other readings by Kristeva and Barthes)

• Kristeva: definitions of phenotext vs. genotext; "poetic language"
• Barthes ("The Grain of the Voice"): characteristics of the grain of the voice
• Barthes (from The Pleasure of the Text): definitions of pleasure vs. bliss

Take notes as you read(!) and try to jot down some rudimentary answers to these questions, and you'll be well-positioned for us to start unpacking these ideas.  Also, try to look for connections to some of the texts we've already read this semester.  Finally, take heart!  We begin looking at poetry as soon as we're done with this!

Tuesday, Sept. 3rd: Foundations 2: John Cage

One version of the score for 4'33", Cage's most (in)famous composition.

I like to think of my life as being divided into two eras — BC (before Cage) and AC (after Cage) — and for me that division came when I accidentally stumbled upon Michael Nyman's classic Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974) in my college library.  Certainly, I'm not alone in this; Cage is a figure of such monumental, groundbreaking ideas that his influence transcends boundaries of genre, not unlike Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol.  Many of the poets we'll be reading this term have been shaped by Cage's music and his writings, and so it's fitting to spend a little time with him.

Alex Ross, "Searching for Silence: John Cage's Art of Noise" (n.b. this is a good introduction to Cage, but I'd prefer our student respondents focus on Cage's own writings rather than report on this)

from Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961)

• "Lecture on Nothing"
• "Experimental Music"

from A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967)

• "How to Kick, Pass, Fall, and Run"

Cage performs 4'33" in Harvard Square in 1976


the BBC Symphony Orchestra performs the piece in 2004 (read more about it here)


Cage talks about silence in a 1991 interview

Postscript: read about a 2010 campaign to make Cage's 4'33" the X-Mas #1 single in Britain

Postscript 2: consider Aram Saroyan's © 1968 by Aram Saroyan as a sort of textual analogue to Cage's 4'33".  Already known for his hyper-minimalist poetry, this book — which consisted of a standard ream of typing paper stamped with a copyright notice and price ($2) — takes that concept to its most extreme permutation.  Read more about it and view a copy here.

Foundations 1.5: Brian Eno on Ambient Music

Consider this a supplemental reading/listening that you can do either for tomorrow's foundations class on listening or next Tuesday's foundations class on John Cage.  We mentioned Brian Eno yesterday, and among his long and prestigious career as both a musician and producer, perhaps his greatest achievement is the conceptualization of ambient music.  Below you'll find two masterpieces of the genre, along with their liner notes, which provide a surprisingly succinct explanation of the ideas behind these works.

Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) [liner notes]




Discreet Music (1975) [liner notes]

Thursday, Aug. 29th: Foundations 1: Perspectives on Listening

We'll begin our work for the quarter with a three short essays that will offer a few general perspectives on modes of listening, the sounds that surround us and the special types of listening that are endemic to the study of poetry.

• Michel Chion, "The Three Listening Modes"
• R. Murray Schafer, "The Soundscape"
• Charles Bernstein, "Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word"

All three of these pieces are excerpts from larger works, and are fairly complexly interwoven with all sorts of contextual allusions that might not be familiar to you — try to ignore that and focus on distilling a few salient points from each essay.  Our class discussion will help to fill in the gaps.

Additionally, I'd like everyone to take part in a collaborative audio experiment that will serve as one focus of discussion for Thursday's class.  For this, you'll need to either download the SoundCloud app for your phone or use the SoundCloud site to record a short snippet of sound and upload it to our class group:

1. You'll record a ten second audio clip at a time that corresponds to your birthday (mine is May 17th, so that'll be 5:17 — choose AM or PM by whatever's most convenient for you).  Record whatever's around you wherever you are at that time.
2. Follow the necessary steps to upload the track to SoundCloud and give it a title that includes your name and the words "Sound Snippet Experiment."
3. Once you've joined our class SoundCloud group, you'll want to add your sound to the group, using the "Add to Group" button under the waveform display.

Please make sure that you've recorded and uploaded your ten second clip by the end of the day Wednesday.

Welcome to Poetry and Sound

This is a brand new class, and one that I'm very excited to be teaching.  I hope that you'll be excited about the work as well, and better still that this course will be useful and rewarding to you, even if you're serving as guinea pigs.  Towards that end, this course will be organized in a somewhat organic and ramshackle fashion — I've been thinking about what we'll be be working on for a year now, and yet I've kept tinkering with the topics and readings up until the very last minute.  So the class schedule, while more or less formalized, is subject to change, albeit little ones.  On the bright side, you don't have to buy any books!

Poetry and sound should seem like natural complements, however that's not often been the case until the recent past, with the written text being given primacy over any sonic or performative aspects.  Nonetheless, so much of what we recognize as the hallmarks of poetry — set meter, rhythmic feet, and rhyme — are sonic phenomena, and more importantly the reasons why the genre survived and thrived prior to the inventing of the printing press: all of these things serve as mnemonic devices, facilitating the memorization and passing down of texts during epochs when the majority of people couldn't read or write.  Still, we won't be covering topics like the rudiments of poetic meter — which you can read all about here — so fear not, you won't have to count beats or know how to tell a trochee from an iamb.  Likewise, we won't be focusing on traditional forms, or considering rock lyrics (or hip-hop lyrics, or showtune lyrics for that matter).  Basically, we're making a distinction between popular song and poetry, though a number of our texts will have musical accompaniment.

So what will we be studying?  We'll start with a few foundational classes covering the basics of sound studies and semiotics, as well as some of the groundbreaking ideas put forth by composer (and poet) John Cage before moving into a number of units (some lasting just one day, some stretching out for two or three weeks), including the interaction between poetry and musical forms, compositional processes influenced by media and technology, poetry in performance, and a number of authors who reduce (or deconstruct) poetry to its most fundamental sonic rudiments.  You'll also learn a little about editing and recording sound, and will have two assignments where you'll be handing in audio in addition to written essays.

While some of these ideas and readings might be challenging or confusing, we'll work together to overcome the "shock of the new" and in the process expand your poetic horizons.