“The mind / is listening”: Aurality and Noise Poetics in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

| This article considers Williams’s prosody as the result of a modern habit of listening that is at once subtle and vast, a habit that comes to modern listening from the technologies of audio recording and playback. Perhaps speech is central to Williams’s style and prosody, but it is less the speaking voice than the ear that hears the voice. This is not a revival of oral poetry but a new kind of aural poetry. The article thus aims to attend to the sound of Williams’s poetry and to his poetry’s attitude toward sound, as well. So often, the focus of criticism of Williams’s work has been on the visual aspects of form and content, but his poetry also sounds like little other work before its time. Furthermore, it traces the progression of Williams’s style in the work of later poets, especially Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner, and turn briefly towards Williams’s influence more broadly in the sound arts by considering works by composers Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier, which have referenced Williams’s poetry.