Discover Top Posts Tagged with #franz mon

261: Various Artists // Poesia Sonora

Poesia Sonora Various Artists 1975, CBS

Assembled in 1975 by Italian conceptual artist and sound poet Maurizio Nannuci, Poesia Sonora (Sound Poetry) was one of the first attempts to anthologize the then-predominantly European literary genre. Subtitled an “International anthology of phonetic research,” it emphasizes the experimental nature of these compositions. Sound poetry was on one hand the logical next step in the development of free verse (i.e. if a composition can be a poem without rhyme or meter, it can also be a poem without words), and on the other an outgrowth of currents in linguistics and semiotics that distinguished between language as a system of meaning and its arbitrary phonological characteristics. In other words, it freed writers to use language and the building blocks of language non-representationally, akin to music or abstract painting. Many early sound poets presented their works as conceptual experiments—to give but two examples, in his manifestos Kurt Schwitters, a key figure in early sound poetry thanks to his 1923 Ursonate (trans. Primeval Sonata), urged other artists to explore words and verbal sounds as entities independent of meaning, while Nannuci’s liner notes mention the Italian futurist Fortunato Depero, whose “‘onomalingua or abstract verbalization’ verbally reconstructed the noise of machines, trams, trains, cars, and natural forces including wind, thunder, and rain.”

Obviously, while these “experiments” wear pseudo-academic garb, this was a thoroughly poet-brained endeavor, and the reality of the genre was one of (predominantly) men flecked with spittle and profuse sweat honking and braying at vexed audiences. It was conceptual, but also an excuse to make strange noises. The terms of their experiments were not (and could not be) empirical, but the results could be as transfixing as the best avant-garde music of the 20th century, with the unchaining of the human voice giving performances a uniquely primal immediacy.

Sound poetry’s earliest texts date from the 1910s and ‘20s, but its real boom came with the wider availability of magnetic tape in the middle of the century. With the exception of the Swiss Arthur Pétronio, whose concept of “verbophonie” (a combination of abstract vocalizations and acoustic sounds) dates back to at least 1919, Poesia Sonora focuses on the generation of sound poets who came to prominence in the 1950s and ‘60s. The poems are presented almost without pause, giving each LP side a collage-like quality. The brilliant Englishman Bob Cobbing’s polyvocal mosaic “Hymn to the Sacred Mushroom” practically segues into Frenchman Henri Chopin’s “Dinamisme integral,” a percussive wave of minutely-chopped unidentifiable vocal sounds that conjures a sense of many dusty wings fluttering in an enclosed space, or Aphex Twin at his most minimal; Chopin’s piece gives way to the German Franz Mon’s “Articulation,” which utters individual consonant and vowel sounds in such a way that it gives the impression of an aphasic trying to recover their language.

Despite sound poetry’s mission to abstract and defamiliarize language, the international nature of the compilation does present challenges to the monoglot. Many of these poets still play with the meanings attached to language (for example by breaking down an emotionally- or politically-charged word into atomized nonsense), and that sort of resonance is lost when you’re just listening to a guy slowly spelling out words in Italian (?) (Nannuci’s “Spelling”). I’m therefore most intrigued by the pieces that are more purely sonic, like Chopin’s piece or François Dufrêne’s “Crirythme,” an athletic spectacle that finds the artist tormenting his throat into sounds resembling a coffee percolator, a whistling kettle, and the soup-slurping of a demented dinner guest. I’ve also long had a special fondness for British-Canadian Brion Gysin’s “I Am,” a piece I’ve heard performed as a lengthy koan-like meditation (by contemporary sound poet Jaap Blonk) and here as an echoing hell of tape manipulations.

I am far from a true connoisseur of sound poetry (and in fact, can almost hear Ottawa poet, publisher, micropress archivist, and good-natured curmudgeon jwcurry hollering at me for mistakes in this right up), but for those with a taste for the field and an interest in its history, Poesia Sonora (and the useful circa-1975 discography offered in its liner notes) is a good grab.

261/365