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.