Welcome to Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance

This is the second time this course has been offered and I'm very excited to get the opportunity to teach it again because the work is so near and dear to my heart, my editorial work, and my poetic practice. I hope that you'll be excited about the work as well, and better still that this course will be useful and rewarding to you — even if it might be intimidating at times (or often) — because our success will largely be a product of your efforts to engage with our readings. While it's officially listed as Poetry and Sound, its fuller name is Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance, and that name change is an attempt to more faithfully encapsulate the full scope of the areas we'll be investigating this term.

Because this course is a work-in-progress, it's organized in a somewhat organically ramshackle fashion, and it's possible that our schedule might change depending on the shape of our inquiry over the course of the semester (or if we wind up getting hit with a half-dozen snow days). On the bright side, you don't have to buy any books!

Poetry and sound should seem like natural complements, however that's not often been the case until the recent past, with the written text being given primacy over any sonic or performative aspects. Nonetheless, so much of what we recognize as the hallmarks of poetry — set meter, rhythmic feet, and rhyme — are sonic phenomena, and more importantly the reasons why the genre survived and thrived prior to the inventing of the printing press: all of these things serve as mnemonic devices, facilitating the memorization and passing down of texts during epochs when the majority of people couldn't read or write. Still, we won't be covering topics like the rudiments of poetic meter — which you can read all about here — so fear not, you won't have to count beats or know how to tell a trochee from an iamb.

So what will we be studying? We'll start with a few foundational classes covering the basics of sound studies and semiotics, as well as some of the groundbreaking ideas put forth by composer (and poet) John Cage before moving into a number of units (some lasting just one day, some stretching out for two or three weeks), including the interaction between poetry and musical forms, compositional processes influenced by media and technology, poetry in performance, and a number of authors who reduce (or deconstruct) poetry to its most fundamental sonic rudiments. You'll also learn a little about editing and recording sound, and will have two assignments where you'll be handing in audio in addition to written essays.

While some of these ideas and readings might be challenging or confusing, we'll work together to overcome the "shock of the new" and in the process expand your poetic horizons.