How to crack a word in half
How to crack a word in half is a research into sound poetry.
To precise a field of sound poetry in question, allow me to shortly refer to Dick Higgins’ Taxonomy of Sound poetry. Among several categories of this genre, the following work places itself into a class of poems, in which semantic meaning is subordinate to expression of intonation. The latter, together with rhythm, is usually beyond the scope of ability of phonetic writing. Although phonetic writing does reduce language to a set of basic sounds inscribed spatially as letters, it eliminates the complex nuances of language as sounded in speech, one of the core working elements of the poems that follow.
This research explores how texts are accessed aurally and are still made (even more) sensical when experienced as sound, without completely abandoning their semantic value or disguising it into a song. Examples of written scores presuppose the dynamics of speech as conditions of writing. Performing and writing are therefore inextricable in the creation of the poems.
image1: "Sound Poetry: A Catalogue" by Stephen Bann and Jean-Pierre Faye, published in 1978.
In the investigation process of the visual, phonetic and kinaesthetic aspects of sound poetry, or (written/spoken/gesticular), I have produced various strategies of translation between the three modalities. My focus has sharpened since the beginning of this research in 2017. I have reoriented myself from narrow interest in ineffective speech to the materiality of language and the importance of orality within processes of composition, documentation and publication.
The following visual examples are scores written as exercises of translation from an existing text, or body of writing of a particular author into a sound poem.
All the scores are a tryout to make homage to female writers and other voices that I want to surround myself with and develop a practice that could easily host them as well as visibly entangle their voices with my own.
- Georges Aperghis’s compositional work for female voice was a departure point of interest, as in how a voice might be composed/choreographed (by a male composer), particularly a female voice, a site of so much contention in the past recent years. Following closely the visuality of his scores, I have developed a system of notation for sound poems with visual codes indicating the diction of the word.
2. Interest in intonation strengthened through reading of Gertrude Stein. Her paradigmatic repetitiveness of words and construction of sentences that make the experience of reading more present than the thing being read triggered a method seeking that would turn something that on the page seems redundant into a suddenly lucid thing when experienced as sound rather than as text. Here, the main task was to revolve around repetition and breaking the word into ever smaller units, morphemes that at least phonetically still produce an element that could be said is infected by meaning, even though that charge of meaning enters musical notions, combining singing, speech and paralinguistic expressions. Stein’s interest in the sound of voices as source material for poetry and her “retrofitting the alphabet with those features it must renounce - voice, body, context” ( S. Pound) continues to be an enormous pool of inspiration for this research.
3. Ora-Fice is a sound poem inspired by the work of Anne Carson, Canadian poet and essayist, scholar of greek classics, more particularly her hypothesis, how historical transition from verbal to written culture has helped shape a very particular sense of self. Based on her idea, as humans started concentrating on a page, due to advent of new technology - writing, and focus their attention to writing, the edges of the page induced a sense of our physical bodies being the vessel of our selves, therefore changing the perceptual apparatus. The idea of the score was that a sonic continuity is provided with an existence and establishment of an orifice, a multiplicity of orifices/mouths constitutes a continuous space of a collective. Once “a gape, an orifice, a mouth” is closed, voice is limited to the inner-readerly voice that paradoxically shapes a person.
4. Pocket poem was conceived based on Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier bag theory of fiction, where she asserts a carrier bag for food to be the first tool of prehistoric human rather than a piece of weapon. However necessary a container might be, it was the phallic shaped tools that where starring in first story telling practices, as nothing much exciting happens during an activity of collecting - stones, berries and sticks, putting them into a pouch, continues Le Guin. The visual score was designed to put into juxtaposition a “nesting”, container-like part of the text, that is based on the breath and repetitions re-establishing the space of the poem and the second part of the poem, that is visually resembling a skewer, a stick that can cut through words and images and collects them, no matter how estranged they are from each other.
5. “1&” is a score constructed on the stereotype as well as a well-established method of counting in dance; this basic rhythm is the rhythm of the poem that among words tellingly chosen from the practice of a dancer also confuses the performer of the score by forcing her to switch between the hemispheres of the brains, while reading numbers and words, switching in great tempo.
