Ben Jonson, 1641

The (unaccompanied) performance of poetry has as its upper limit music, as realized in what has come to be called sound poetry, and its lower limit silence, as realized in what has come to be called visual poetry. Visual poetry gets us to look at works as well as read them, while sound poetry gets us to hear as well as listen. Curiously, these two limits intersect, as when a visual poem is performed as a sound poem or a sound poem is scored as a visual poem (a phenomenon that is relevant to the explorations, in this volume, of Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Steve McCaffery).
The strongest link between visual and sound performance is their mutual emphasis upon material as a primary, rather than incidental or secondary, consideration. But where the visual material has a presence, that is, is in a condition of being a poem while remote from an author spatially and temporally, sound poetry consists of a presencing, a bringing into being in a spatial and temporal location of the performance. While a recording of a sound poem obviates certain literal aspects of this limitation, it does not alter the basic distinction between the way visual and verbal/vocal signs exist materially. The foregrounding of the performative aspects of material over and above the linear, normative logic of conventional linguistic formulations is a shared feature of visual and sound poetry—and certain correspondences can be drawn between the idea of a "field" of page and a field of vocalization. Visual poetry and sound poetry also share the quality of being untranslatable (even more than other poetry) because of their emphatic insistence on the bond between material form and performance.
Sidney Lanier's 1880 Science of English Verse opens with an "Investigation of Sound as Artistic Material"; and the very first definition of verse he offers is that "when formal poetry, or verse . . . is repeated aloud, it impresses itself upon the ear as verse only by means of certain relations existing among its component words considered purely as sounds, without reference to their associated ideas."15 As a practical demonstration, Lanier proposes "the simple experiment of substituting for the words of a formal poem any other words which preserve the accentuation, alliteration, and rhyme, but which convey no ideas to the mind,—words of some foreign language not understood by the experimenter being the most effective for this purpose." This exercise is strikingly suggestive of the homophonic translations of Louis Zukofsky (of Catullus), Ernst Jandl (Wordsworth), and David Melnick (Homer). These recent poetic exercises admit a certain measure of se- mantic recuperation, of course, so that the estrangement of the borrowed soundscape is internalized to English (or German in Jandl) where it ventriloquizes a different semantic dimension. Lanier's experiment is more radical in its affirmation that "all ideas may be abolished out of a poem without disturbing its effect upon the ear as verse" (21).
The procedure of writing sound poetry explicates still another interesting feature of the "materiality of blah-blah." As Friedrich Kittler authoritatively points out in his analysis of Christian Morgenstern's "The Great Lalula," before this authors "1905 collection Gallows Songs, no poem had existed as a small discourse network. Literary historians have sought classical-romantic models for these poems and have found some nonsense verse here and there. But even the 'Wien ung quatsch, Ba nu, Ba nu n'am tsche fatsch'... is at least speakable. No voice, however, can speak [(;)] the parentheses that enclose a semicolon (as specified in 'The Great Lalula') or even – to demonstrate once and for all what media are – brackets that surround an empty space [()]."13 13 "Music," in this expanded field, may no longer be especially useful for defining poetry, but as several of the contributors to this volume show, it may be a productive tool for understanding poetry and for thinking in new ways about what poetry might aspire to do. Nancy Perloff 's insightful parallel history of sound poetry and avant-garde composition makes a clear case for the extent to which an expanded definition of music can expand the definition of poetry. In the musical field exemplified by John Cage's double deconstruction of both "silence" and "noise" as well as "noise" and "music," sound remains central to music, even as it "discards lyricism." Christian Bök's essay on his own bravura athletic sound poetry similarly argues for the degree to which poetic practice can be expanded by enlarging the scope of what we consider "musical": techno, electronica, beat-boxing, the soundtracks to video games, the noise of power tools. "In order to explain avant-garde sound poems through the trope of music," Bök explains, "poets of today may have to adopt a genre better suited to express our millennial anxieties in an era now driven by the hectic tempos of our technology." [...] Rethinking the nature of sound, as Nancy Perloff explains, led to new understandings of music in the twentieth century, and rethinking the nature of music, as these essays evince, can lead to new understandings of poetry. Or, to paraphrase David Antin's aphorism on the connection between modernism and postmodernism: from the music you choose, you get the lyric you deserve.
Even though Marinetti might beseech the poets of the future "to listen to motors and to reproduce their conversations," the dubious, aesthetic merits (if not the dubious, political themes) implicit in his protofascist Lautgedichten have, no doubt, caused subsequent versifiers to balk at the artificial enhancement, if not the prosthetic replacement, of their own vocalizations. Even though a vanguard novelist like William S. Burroughs might later argue that "a tape recorder is an externalized section of the human nervous system," only a spartan coterie of sound poets have ever committed themselves to the use of such technology — among them, Henri Chopin (the inventor of the audio-poème). When, in his poésie sonore, Chopin modulates an audiotape of his own buccal output — excising, then splicing, the smallest vocables of his voice, attenuating them and overdubbing them — he frees his utterances from any anatomical constraint, doing so by using the microphone as a kind of probe, ready to extract an unexamined repertoire of sounds from all the resonant chambers in his organs of speech. Even though Chopin might celebrate the invention of such a magnetophone, saying that "without this machine, sound poetry . . . would not exist, as no human diction, however . . . skillful, could produce it," other poets have, nevertheless, rebuffed these tech- nocratic opportunities for innovation, often doing so in order to preserve the performative authenticity of the human voice itself.