Adagio (youtube)
- Sounds of poetry
- Sound represented in poetry
- Sound Poetry
T U T T I - F R U T T I (youtube)
( Dorothy LaVostrie, Richard Penniman & Joe Lubin )
A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam bam
Tutti frutti, oh rutti, tutti frutti, oh rutti
Tutti frutti, oh rutti, tutti frutti, oh rutti
Tutti frutti, oh rutti
A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam bam
I got a girl named Daisy She almost drives me crazy
Got a girl named Daisy She almost drives me crazy
She knows how to love me, yes indeed
Boy, you don't know what she's doin' to me
Tutti frutti, oh rutti, tutti frutti, oh rutti
Tutti frutti, oh rutti, tutti frutti, oh rutti
Tutti frutti, oh rutti
A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam bam
/ INSTRUMENTAL /
A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam bam
I got a girl named Sue I said, she knows just what to do
I got a girl named Sue She knows just what to do
She rocks to the East, she rocks to the West
But she's the girl that I love best
Tutti frutti, oh rutti, tutti frutti, oh rutti
Tutti frutti, oh rutti, tutti frutti, oh rutti
Tutti frutti, oh rutti
A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom
1.Sounds in/of poetry -
where sound assists the development of meaning
www.textetc.com/traditional/sound.html
Sound-patterning is a feature of the great majority of poems, and only in the last few centuries have readers become accustomed to silently reading a printed text.
Poems were previously written for performance, and only committed to print subsequently, if at all.
The notion of poems for the page is very much a contemporary one. And even when we read an example of poetry crafted for the page we are hearing the words as we read them. Or do we?
How we make sound?
Phonetics is the study of the sounds made by human voice.
Relevant to poetry because phonetics describes the differences inherent in the way we articulate different sounds and gives us terms that we can use to categorise them.
Some of the terms we use to describe the sounds of poetry
Alliteration;
repetition of an initial sound in two or more words of a phrase.
Consonance
the repetition of consonant sounds within a line of verse. Consonance is similar to alliteration except consonance does not limit the repeated sound to the initial letter of a word; the repetition generally occurs at the ends of syllables.
Assonance
(repetition of vowels).
Rhyme
(assonance and consonance combined)
Onomatopoeia
a figure of speech that employs a word , or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush" or "buzz", or animal noises such as "moo" or "quack" or "meow".
Why different sounds in different languages?
Sounds that animals make in different languages
Euphony (smooth, pleasant sound)
as opposed to Cacophony (rough, harsh sound).
Dialect
the attempt to write in such a way as to represent non-standard English
We can also talk about the structure (the patterning) of sound and the kind of textures they produce. This is related to but not the same as rhythm.
Look at some poems and try to see where and how these techniques and effects are used. Don't forget to keep in mind the issues discussed in previous weeks.
Beach Burial by Kenneth Slessor
Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.
Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;
And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity
The words choke as they begin -
'Unknown Seaman' - the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips;
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men's lips,
Dead Seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
El Alamein.
from "Through the Looking-Glass" by
Lewis Carroll
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
'Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
Beware the jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious bandersnatch.'
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought.
Then rested he by the tum-tum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One! two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snickersnack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjious day! Calooh! Calay!'
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Sound represented in poetry
How do poets represent sound? Hone Tuwhare in the following poem about rain might have used simple onomatopoeia: eg splish splosh plink plunk. He avoids this; but does he use onomatopoeia of a more complex kind?
- physical structure of the poem
- creation of a tone or a mood that enables us to 'hear' the rain
- occasional subtle onomatopoeia
Rain
I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain
If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut
And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind
the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground
the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops
But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you
you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain
Hone Tuwhare
Sound Poetry
-
definition of sound poetry (wikipedia)
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.
None of which should be taken to suggest that sound poems don't have meaning. There is a radical suggestion that sounds do have inherent meaning and that this meaning is -- one way or another -- communicated to us.
Let's listen to some -- remembering that the pattern of sound is probably more important that anything else:
Play CD of sound poems:
- first is a sound poem for four voices: PiO, Sandy Callow, Lica Cecato and Nojiro Takuya
- the following are all by the dadaist poet Jas H. Duke
or listen to them here
Jas H. Duke Hot Dragon Day | No You can't do that | Mirror Man
Dadaism
"Dada is a state of mind... Dada is artistic free thinking... Dada gives itself to nothing... ." So is Dada defined by André Breton. This is not to say that Dada is definable, for it was one of the primary goals of Dada to avoid the labeling and legitimizing of the establishment. Early on in the development of the trend, Hugo Ball made it quite clear, "How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, enervated? By saying Dada..." The principles of Dada had existed before in the schools of Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, but the principles had a change in language. The formation of these ideas are worth further examination.
dadist poetry characterised by
- nonsense
- babytalk
- joyous rejection of rules, conventional forms and meaning
- political anarchism
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