Sound poetry is a form of literary or musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded at the expense of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.

While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in Oral traditions, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th century phenomenon. The first sound poem was performed by Hugo Ball in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1915:

"I created a new species of verse, 'verse without words,' or sound poems....I recited the following:

gadji beri bimba

glandridi lauli lonni cadori..."

(Albright, 2004)

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1921-32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example:

Schwitters Ursonate.ogg to a short extract from Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. (160kb; more info)

The first movement rondo's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, from a 1918 poem by Raoul Huasmann , apparently also a sound poem. Schwitters also wrote a less well-known sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter W. (Albright, 2004)

Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing.

Edith Sitwell's poems are barely on the poem side of sound poems: "The poems in Façade are abstract poems--that is, they are patterns of sound. They are...virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music." (Sitwell, 1949)

Sources

• Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.
• Sitwell, Edith (1949). The Canticle of the Rose Poems: 1917-1949, p.xii. New York: Vanguard Press.

External links

• UbuWeb
  • Sound Poetry - A Survey by Steve McCaffery
• List of sound poets with links to audio files