Un-Sounding: A New Method for Processing Non-linguistic Poetry

Un-Sounding:A New Method for Processing Non-linguistic Poetry Kristen Smith (bio) Textuality, sounded, evokes orality," Charles Bernstein argues in Pitch of Poetry; the acclaimed poet and academic continues: "textuality is a palimpsest: when you scratch it, you find speech underneath. And when you sniff the speech, you find language under that. The alphabet is frozen sound" (33). Graphic markings may be "frozen sound" on the page or screen, but these graphemes animate and resound in the reader's mind. Considering the significance of sound in the reception and interpretation of poetry, my research examines the multifaceted presence/absence of sound in varieties of visually-oriented transnational poetry from the 1950s to the 2010s, interrogating the intersections of aesthetics, cognition, and ethics. This essay examines how the seeming absence of sound in non-linguistic poetry stalls traditional reading practices and critique, which challenges readers to re-evaluate their relationship to sound, poetry, and communication. Building upon my method to identify and examine sonic elements in page-based poetry, I assert that visually-oriented poems thwart traditional methods of literary analysis. After delineating linguistic systems (referencing Donald Shankweiler) and diverse writing systems (citing Ignace J. Gelb), I argue that accessibility and performativity increase if these difficult visual poems are treated outside traditional linguistic frameworks [End Page 235] and methods by being recontextualized as para-graphic devices. Three works of non-linguistic poetry are examined in this essay: Mary Ellen Solt's "Moonshot Sonnet," Caroline Bergvall's Drift, and Eric Schmaltz's Surfaces. Each text demonstrates the importance of sound (and its absence) in the communication of meaning. These three works also demonstrate, to a small degree, the variety of non-linguistic poetry and the challenges that such poems generate. Instead of "reading" these poems as traditional literary texts or "viewing" such works as visual art, non-linguistic poems need to be processed through alternative means, such as the un-sounding method. The authors of these non-linguistic poems have forgone sound in their works, and this refusal to sound is encoded in the work. These authors are choosing to communicate outside of language in order to demonstrate the limits of language, to signal new systems of communication, and to challenge readers in their relationship to the written word/work. Un-sounding non-linguistic poems as para-graphic devices situates them as unique works that communicate outside of the conventional methods of reading and viewing; the primary encounter with these non-linguistic works is processing, taking in the materiality (sonic, or un-sonic) and working to understand its communication. When considered alongside graphic scores for their similarities, such non-linguistic poems are works to be performed by the reader/viewer/processor/sounder. Such un-sounding facilitates the poem's becoming. Several theorists contribute to one's understanding of sound, its reception, its effects, and its presence in poetry. Jonathan Sterne and Brandon LaBelle explore the nature and definition of sound as well as the role of the human as a receiver and projector of such sounds1 Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, provides in-depth explorations of significant terms relevant to sound such as hearing, listening, and noise. Regarding the reception of sound, Don Ihde's Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound deals with cross-disciplinary considerations of sonic origins and reception, providing the first comprehensive phenomenology of sound. Also, Lisbeth Lipari's Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement illustrates the complexity and necessity of active and intentional listening in the act of communication. Another source, [End Page 236] David Suisman and Susan Strasser's Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, effectively addresses the shift in the critical reception of sound in modernist and postmodernist texts and how sound can be the means to exert cultural, social, and political power. Regarding the effects of sound, Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music argues that noise, a particular subset of sound, is a harbinger of forthcoming social formations; emphasizing the relationship of culture to economy, Attali contends that noise is model of cultural historiography2 One particular source which shifts the primary site of critical analysis from the written text to...

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