Read "A Short Defense of (Sound) Poetry." What is Bruns saying about the kinesthetic experience central to this kind of poetry? Identify one of his key arguments. Explain and defend that argument in a detailed and specific way. Your post should be 300 words.
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The idea that Bruns has about poetry in general is that it can be made of anything, the "unprincipled principle." This is true once people sit there and think about poetry being anything and everything. An example would be The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal. Heikkenin uses random things that people said online or orally in the poems. People can write a poem using almost any kind of words so why not include sound in this as well. When people say certain sounds, it still portrays an emotion just like poetry. Poetry has no rules and limits at this point and that is what makes it an unprincipled principle. The fact that there are no limits to poetry also make it unprincipled. Anyone can create any kind of poem through writing, sound, visual, and many other types. Poetry is endless with its own creativity by not having the set rules that Bruns is pointing out. The fact that this seems unorthodox in a way makes the thought even more absurd but that is why poetry is a great thing. It is unpredictable and just unprincipled. Honestly this is one of the reasons why I love poetry is because it is just rule free and honestly can just come to you. I do not sit there and try to force poetry anymore, it just comes to me in an unprincipled way that I just love. In a way poetry creates itself through people and can be expressed through sound poetry. Instead of writing down words they are expressing that same feeling through a sound instead. Bruns defense for sound poetry is brilliant and I accept the fact that everything can be considered poetry because it is true. Recycled words can be poetry, like Bruns points out, newspaper clippings can be poetry.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most interesting, and baffling ideas brought up in the essay, is when Bruns says that the sound of words contains meaning above and beyond what those words signify. To simplify, he is saying that in everyday life a word is like a sign post pointing to a physical idea or object. For instance, the word ‘chair’ is pointing to a concrete or, perhaps hypothetical in this case, object. ‘Chair’ means an object that typically has legs and you sit on. However, Bruns is saying that the word ‘chair’ might contain other meaning as well, in a strictly aural sense. That is, even if someone did not speak English (thus had no idea what that word meant) and they heard someone say, ‘chair’ then that word’s unique sound would be aurally interesting. The meaning of the word is unimportant in this sense. Instead, all that matters is that the word has a specific sound and that it can be appreciated as a sound. Bruns talks about the example of Greek poetry, which sounds quite evocative of something to a listener who doesn’t understand Greek. It is interesting in a strictly musical sense, not an intellectual one. This concept is in large part responsible for the difficulty with listening to sound poetry. It is simply not in a format that the average person is familiar with. We are used to reading a narrative, even if it’s a pretty poor one insofar as coherence and development go, as in the case of Book of Frank. When we do this, we are appreciating words on an intellectual basis. We aren’t actually interested in the words themselves at all. All we care about are the objects and concepts that they represent. Sound poetry takes all this and tosses it in the trash. Instead of signposts, words are themselves to be appreciated. There is no information to be gained, only enjoyment from the sound produced by each word.
ReplyDeleteIn the article A Short Defense of (Sound) Poetry by Bruns argues a lot of where poetry comes from. Poetry he argues comes from not only the language that a poet knows but how it sounds and how it feels being spoken. He said that the language isn’t just what is written on a page. It seems like he is arguing that poetry also is how it affects the writer. He also talks about how a poem is in the writer already also, that poems aren’t written but are found and have always been in the writer. He also talks about how Levinas talks about proximity and sensibility, “how we exist in the mode of being touched rather than in the cognitive mode of grasping or appropriation (43)”. Listening though involves a different experience and that it is different from other senses. Even if you have the same exact experience it with a different sense it will be different. His second idea is about the sounds and the ability to feel and to experience something that others might not be able to. In the writing he talks about how “the sounds of natural thing” come from. He argues that listening and hearing allows people to have an experience that the words move them. I found it very interesting how he described the composer. Saying that there are many different methods that the composer can use, but with all of these different methods he can over complicate the music and change the story that he wants to tell. He goes on to say that ever sound is perfect. No matter what the sound might be that every sound has to be perfect. He says that ever sound has a short life and must make the most of the short existence that it will have; because once it is gone it is gone. The noise could be as simple as a laugh or word.
ReplyDeleteBruns is saying that an essential portion of the experience of poetry is being able to understand the grandeur which sound can produce by “expanding the protosemantic dimensions of language” (Bruns 41). This idea suggests that despite the sophistication of language that we possess, there will always be greater depth of portrayal within sound.
ReplyDeleteIf Homo sapiens’ first communicated, at least partially, through unorganized sound, then it would follow that language was produced in order to satisfy the goal of giving referable, concrete structure to a particular concept or meaning, increasing the effectiveness of sound. Just as a definition of a word does not encompass all of the meaning it conveys, it is an understood disposition that language is also limited in the portrayal of meaning, but is constantly being altered through sound. Bruns also believes that alterations can occur through “sounds overloading the function of language” (44). Evidence of this can be seen in any pun, creation of a new word, or in an acronym. Language is constantly evolving because it is not complete. Humans are continuously molding language to alter meaning, a current example of which is seen constantly in social media, T.L.A., three letter acronyms. There are always new T.L.A. being produced, just as sound is always producing new language.
Our own thought patterns were able to evolve through the structure of language. In a protosemantic world, thoughts consisted of desires, but nothing concrete to categorize or organize them. With the introduction of language, thoughts likely were transformed by “physical excess or remainder of what it (language) otherwise accomplishes as a medium that expresses a meaning, a psychological interior, or a cognitive presence” (50). Sound organized in language is able to produce an internal entity, our conscious, which mediates the use of sounds constantly. Although some large concepts became categorized into small words, minimizing allows for more simple organization, which eventually blossom into more complex forms. Language is a branch of sound; the entirety of the meaning becomes less as it stretches out from a trunk into a branch.
As Bruns says "Sound bleeds self" (Bruns 45). The sound-forms that are used in this poetry brings one into a language devoid of sign and signifier, where the audio content no longer is complicated with identity and meaning, it simply is. The reader's ego and what they have written no longer is ' "predatory" in relation to things such as sounds" (Bruns 46). I suppose one could think of it as listening to somebody speaking in a unknown language, but still getting the gist from their tone, emphasis, and body language.
ReplyDeleteBruns writes of sound in poetry mirroring the ethical obligation people have towards caring for somebody else. John Cage's idea of "our responsibility for sounds corresponds to our responsibility for others" (Bruns 46) helps give an example of this line of thought. I would say that by retreating one's urge to command a space audibly for the sounds surrounding them, just as in Cages 4'33", a reader (or is it listener or both?) of sound poetry is showing their ability to clear their needs and instead allows the Other, other people, other animals, other organisms to leave an audio footprint. In this poetry "one...may give up their desire to control sound" (Bruns 48) and instead allow the sound surrounding them run their natural courses, uninterrupted by the hubbub of humankind's complicated words, flowing with simple sound.