Content provided in partnership with

Writing the elephant: Five books on modern poetry

College Literature, Fall 1999 by Thurston, Michael

<< Page 1 Continued from page 1. Previous | Next

Even the more straightforward or standard (non-experimental) pieces theorize their reading practices and explore the practical consequences of their theoretical explorations in ways that make them models of the contemporary critical essay.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

Susan Stewart's "Essay on Sound," for example, takes up Howe's suggested link between poetry and sound, a connection with its own long critical history, in order to explore their differences. Chief among these is the fact that lyric is not heard as music is heard but is instead always recalled sound. This distinction provides Stewart's opening for a fascinating and precise account of the ways readers recall the originating auditory moment of lyric, how they provide from their cultural experience of language a sounding of the lyric's composed play of stress and silence. Grounding both traditional prosodies and the experiments wrought upon them in culturally specific modes of speaking and conceiving sound, Stewart trains her theoretically informed close reading on English accentual-syllabic meter, which introduces a tension "between the intentional and volitional dimensions of both sound-production and listening and the involuntary dimension of hearing-the unregulated openness of the ear to the world and the infinite nuance of the unsaid" (38). Working especially effectively through a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins's prosodics and poetry, Stewart shows how, in the English lyric at least, "the rests and caesuras, the line and stanza breaks of lyric are 'sounded' or measured" so that "the human voice both reenacts the conditions of its emergence from silence and wrests that silence into the intersubjective domain of made and shaped things" (38).

Johanna Drucker's essay exerts a similar close attention and theoretical sophistication in "Visual Performance of the Poetic Text." While Stewart's discussion of sound was exactly the sort of essay one might expect in this collection, Drucker's was a bit of a surprise (at least to me). Visual performance does not as readily leap to mind as something of which the poetic text is capable. Any doubts, though, are quickly dispelled as Drucker argues cogently and quite persuasively for the significance of such visual data as "typefaces, format, spatial distribution of the elements of the page or through the book, physical form, or space" (131). Simply put, "these visual means perform the work as a poem that can't be translated into any other form" (131).

Readers will be most immediately familiar with the early twentieth-century avant-garde poets Drucker briefly discusses-Mallarme, Apollinaire, Dadaists like Huelsenbeck and Tzara-but the main character in Drucker's essay is the rather less well-known Russian zaum poet Ilia Zdanevich (known by his pseudonym, Iliazd). Drucker traces Iliazd's career from his early work with orchestrated sound to the work with layout and typography she finds more important. A printer himself, Iliazd "was clearly convinced that the page is a space of performance," and he not only experimented himself with the size and shape of individual letters, with the interplay between type and white space, and with images and/or as text, he also edited the great mid-century anthology of similarly experimental poetry, Podsie de mots inconnus (Poetry of Unknown Words). In her analysis of this anthology, its editorial agendas and its contents, Drucker makes good on her essay's promise: she demonstrates, with a welcome wealth of visual aids, that "the visual value in these works does not reside in their invocation of a verbal performance. . . nor in their relation to a pictorial referent (there is none), but in the use of visual information as material in its own right."

Writing the elephant: Five books on modern poetry

College Literature, Fall 1999 by Thurston, Michael

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Business

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts