Sound - one of the central elements of poetry - finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin break that critical silence to readdress some of the fundamental connections between poetry and sound - connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies. Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, "The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound" explores such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, the connections between 'sound poetry' and music and between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essays take on the 'ensemble discords' of Maurice Sceve's Delie, Ezra Pound's use of 'Chinese whispers', the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball's Dada performances, Jean Cocteau's modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing. A genuinely comparatist study, "The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound" is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called 'articulations of sound forms in time' as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.

About the Author
Marjorie Perloff is professor emerita of English at Stanford University and the author of many books, including Wittgenstein's Ladder and The Futurist Moment, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Craig Dworkin is associate professor of English at the University of Utah and the author, most recently, of Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci.


Book Information
ISBN 9780226657431
Author Marjorie Perloff
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 15mm * 2mm