Archives Sonores de la Poésie ed. by Abigail Lang et al. (review)

The spread of new sound recording technologies at the end of the nineteenth century has modified not only our perception but also our use of spoken and written language. It has signified the end of print—that is, of visually remediated language—as the hegemonic way of saving, storing, retrieving and transmitting language while announcing a new era of reborn orality. Oral language is now more present than ever, and the kind of direct, face to face, physically embodied communication that it supposes is no longer culturally and ideologically dominated by the written model of distant and delayed communication with an absent author. Poets rapidly became aware of these new possibilities. Yet in spite of the glowing commitment of modernist poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, an early defender of the new media poetry of his times, and in spite of some attempts to constitute sound archives in view of scientific research or the involvement of writers and poets in radio broadcasting, the real and systematic exploitation of sound technology in poetry did not start before the 1950s, in the double context of the revival of public readings and the larger availability of personal tape recorders. In the beginning the renewed encounter between poetry and sound technology remained rather "passive" (the technology was mainly used to record and archive), but after some years its use became more "active" (the technology started to be used as a creative tool, transforming the way in which poetry was made and performed). In the end, it is poetry as a whole that will be radically changed. One shifts from "writing" poetry to "doing" or "performing" poetry, making room for what had been repressed for so many centuries, namely: orality.

In the Anglo-Saxon scholarly tradition, the study of this reborn orality in poetry has taken two forms—theoretically very different, in practice closely intertwined. The first one is that of the systematic building of specialized archives, with UbuWeb and PennSound as the flagship realizations of a wide and generally well-organized open access policy at various levels. The second form is that of the elaboration of a specific theory of what is meant by sound in poetry, beyond the traditional rhetorical concepts of prosody and rhythm. The key feature of this new theory is the distinction between "orality" (referring to the way in which a written text is orally performed) and "aurality" (referring to the way in which a text is capable of provoking sound effects, however different they may be from what can be heard during a normal "declamation"). Today, both poetic practice and the scientific study of poetry heavily tend to prioritize aurality at the expense of "orality," generally accused of remaining text-bound. Aurality, instead, is considered a way of liberating the full spectrum of sound aspects, including those that were long seen as marginal if not utterly futile (either "nonmeaningful" aspects such as stuttering or inaudibility during a performance, or "external," such as the impact of a microphone, echoes, surrounding noises during a recording, etc.). In short, what "aurality" imposes, beyond the human, now mechanically enhanced voice, is the very body of the poet, now seen as a fundamental feature of any poetic production as well as reception.

Reviews Panel: Kathryn Adams, Jan Baetens, John Barber, Catalin Brylla, Rita Cachao, Judith A. Cetti, Chris Cobb, Giovanna L. Costantini, Edith Doove, Hannah Drayson, Phil Dyke, Ernest Edmonds, Phil Ellis, Anthony Enns, Jennifer Ferng, Enzo Ferrara, Charles Forceville, Gabriela Galati, George Gessert, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Daisy Gudmunsen, Craig Harris, Jane Hutchinson, Amy Ione, Boris Jardine, Jacqui Knight, Mike Leggett, Ellen K. Levy, Will Luers, Robert Maddox-Harle, Roger Malina, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Stephanie Moran, Mike Mosher, Sana Murrani, Frieder Nake, Maureen Nappi, Jack Ox, Jussi Parikka, Ellen Pearlman, Robert Pepperell, Ana Peraica, Beate Peter, Stephen Petersen, Michael Punt, Aparna Sharma, George Shortess, Brian Reffin Smith, Eugenia Stamboliev, James Sweeting, Flutur Troshani, Ian Verstegen, Anna Walker...