Performance: Listening Bodies

Discussion of Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie and artist Christine Sun Kim draws attention to the embodiment of sound performance, which is considered in this chapter in relation to technology, race, gender, bilingualism and, though the parallel performances of humans and birds, ecology. The work of poets such as Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin offers examples of how sound poetry of the 1960s explored a liberated listening through recording. Yet such a listening, enabled by machines, draws attention back to the capacities of the human body. Serres’ simultaneous emphasis on the centrality of the senses and the space of codes and messages in which the body moves frames a discussion of various boundaries between language, sound and noise in the work of Emma Bennett, Jonathan Skinner, Holly Pester, Tracie Morris, Hannah Silva and Rhys Trimble.

Conclusion

Because listening is a form of attention not only to language but to all physical phenomena, listening to and through poetry is a means of rethinking continuities between human and non-human environments. The poem’s aurality activates a listening that links imagined, remembered, recorded, and live sound, as well as the multiple inferences between them. Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation of listening, to which this argument has returned at several points, points to listening as a turn, even a straining, towards the other and the unknown. Poetry has a vital role in creating and articulating such forms of encounter.

Resounding: Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins

The listening of translation, an underlying theme in much of the book, is the subject of the final chapter, which describes the noisy reversionings of sonnets by contemporary UK poets Peter Hughes, Jeff Hilson and Tim Atkins, and their work of defamiliarising song so that it can resonate in new relationships. It explores their experimental approaches to translation via the contrasting repetitions and temporalities of recorded song. As the voices of the dead come over the airwaves of their poems, the logic of the cover version makes temporality audible through difference and variation. Rather than narrowing in on myths of Petrarchan obsession, these translations turn outward to the peripheral sociality of song and the new contexts in which it is heard.

Song: Denise Riley’s Lyric and Rock Echoes

Denise Riley's poetry and prose is pivotal in framing voice as social, resonant and material, rather than as an emanation from the private depths of an individual interior being. Examination of a range of her work published over the last two decades shows how the inner speech of thought may be conceived as a replaying of language encountered in the externally sounded world, from fragments of lyric to verbal abuse. Her sustained engagement with lyric and song, whether in poems that quote song lyrics, or in her recent work that argues with and comments on its own use of traditional lyric forms, links the sounding of poetry with musical listening to articulate a position in which emotions are mobilized rather than ‘expressed’. Through the materialist imagination of her poems, continuities are created between the voicing of the poem, the voices of the dead, and the sounding of the non-human world.

Improvisation: Tom Raworth’s Intuition

Tom Raworth's poetry, often startling in its innovative approach to lyric, responds to ideas about listening that are shared with improvising musicians such as Derek Bailey, for whom listening to others and listening intuitively to a whole environment is key to the responsiveness of their work. Attentiveness to listening imposes a temporality on the compositional process, emphasizing the role of speed and perception. In its response to shifting awareness of place, Raworth’s work may also be understood in terms of the vocabulary developed by Augoyard and Torgue to describe sonic experience, a set of changing phenomena that help to reveal Raworth’s acute attention to sound environments.

Listening to Lyric and Noise

Listening has been changed by the advent of recording technology. This changes contemporary poetry's relationship to the lyric tradition and offers new ways of imagining sound. Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Serres have challenged the primacy of the visual, leading to a renewed focus on the role of the senses, particularly listening and touch, in creating new forms of knowledge. New materialist approaches show how an emphasis on listening might reveal poetry's entanglement in matter. This monograph draws on what poems have to say about listening, but it also makes the case for listening to poems within continuities and communities of listening that extend beyond the human.

Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Synaesthesia, whether physical experience or a literary device that foregrounds the interconnectedness of the senses, is a starting point for discussion of the Chinese-American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Carol Watts from the UK. The interplay between hearing, listening, sight and touch in their work becomes a means of challenging traditional forms of subjectivity and exploring the ecological dimensions of their poems. Forms of reciprocal and receptive listening are discussed in relation to Berssenbrugge's Buddhist sensibility and Watts's charting of relations between the auditory and the visual. For Watts and Berssenbrugge, music is a means of imagining but also testing and investigating perception of the other-than-human world from a necessarily human auditory perspective.

Echo: Claudia Rankine and Vahni Capildeo

Considering the effects of harmful speech, as developed by Denise Riley, this chapter considers the after-echoes of speech in relation to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. An emphasis on listening, as opposed to looking, is for Rankine a means of countering the extreme exposure or hypervisibility experienced in the face of racism, as harmful speech is echoed back to the reader. The assumed transparency of the visual is problematised by various forms of noise, while Rankine's echoic practice also draws attention to white listening, and what that sounds like. A contrasting approach to echo is suggested by the work of the Trinidad-born, UK-resident poet Vahni Capildeo, which is read in the context of Édouard Glissant’s échos-monde in order to reveal sonic attention to what bounces back from layers of cultural and linguistic history.

Noise: Sean Bonney’s Resistance

Sean Bonney’s work shows how noise may be deployed within a lyric structure to interrogate political relationships. Challenging Jacques Attali's view of noise as the clash of the new with what is culturally dominant, Greg Hainge argues that noise is a relational ontology that can best be understood through resistance within an 'expressive assemblage'. With reference to Hainge’s analysis of noise, this chapter explores the aurality and noise that inhabit Bonney’s reworking of lyric forms, from folk songs to the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Bonney’s reading of Rimbaud, in which the dérèglement de tous les sens is a challenge to collective reordering of political senses, offers a guide to a politically disruptive listening. If the senses are socially mediated, but society is dominated by late capitalism, who owns what is heard? What forms of power are made audible and how? Listening, against the white noise of the neoliberal acoustic field, is the urgent political task to which Bonney’s poetry sets its readers.

Acousmatics: Sounded/Silent Text in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift

Rather than accepting a particular language as a bounded entity, the UK-based French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall positions her multimedia work Drift within the oceanic fluidities of linguistic and etymological change. Despite the passage over centuries and languages of her main source text, the anonymous Old English poem The Seafarer, the movement of contemporary migrants at sea is brutally constrained. This conflict is an acoustic paradox: if language is already resonant with the echoes of so many transitory pasts, how it can be used to sustain rigid identities and borders? These questions of orientation and direction are posed in relation to acousmatic listening, where the source of a sound is not revealed, as well as through the affordances of collaborative sound and visual performance. Listening becomes a critical process of locating oneself in social, ecological and political contexts.