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  • Jack Spicer’s Articulatory Correspondences, or Why Should We Have to Use Our Mouths to Hear Messages?
  • Benjamin Kossak (bio)

The Head and the Tongue Had Separated

Jack Spicer famously blamed his vocabulary for his demise, but as Robin Blaser’s recollection of his final words shows, it is perhaps mouths that gave him more trouble while he lived. On his deathbed, drifting in and out of his alcoholic coma, Spicer’s “speech was a garble,” coming out as “nonsense sounds” as he “struggled to tie his speech to words” and finally “wrenched his body” to produce his last lines (Blaser, The Fire 162). After this, Spicer “tried again, frowned, and failed to put his head and his words together again.” Or, as Blaser puts it in his Astonishment Tapes, “The head and the tongue had separated and you got nothing but a garble” (64). This last moment of heroically trying to marshal his uncooperative body to bequeath a final bit of language to the world sums up Spicer’s life’s work maybe better than the words his body finally (and finally) produces: “My vocabulary did this to me; your love will let you go on” (Blaser, The Fire 163). While Blaser resolves the scene of illegibility into this line on love and language, the struggle to produce that language (to mark that love) highlights the nontrivial effort it takes for our physiology to produce speech. Putting one’s head and words together requires lungs, a diaphragm, vocal chords, the tongue, lips, hard and soft palates, and oral and nasal cavities. As Brandon LaBelle writes, voice and mouth are so wrapped up in each other “that to theorize the performativity of the spoken is to confront the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and the throat; it is to feel the mouth as a fleshy, wet lining around each syllable” [End Page 237] (1). This is an aspect of voice that is often ignored even in conversations on its “materiality,” a term that tends to point toward acoustics and can elide other material relationships. Mladen Dolar, for example, allows that voice must be “attached to bodily mechanics,” but distances voice from the body, describing the resulting “mere oscillation of air” as “materiality at its most intangible” (59).1 Before this “intangible” action in the air and on the ears, there is a fleshy orchestration that is usually performed without an audience, only calling for attention in its failures.

To reconnect this materiality to the separated tongue, I begin by surveying literature in experimental studies of inner speech to outline how these bodily apparatuses are involved even in silent reading. While the inner voice that accompanies reading is often thought of as analogous to hearing oneself read out loud, this acoustic imagination shares its stage. Alongside and sometimes in place of the auditory experience is an inner speech that involves not acoustic but kinesthetic performance―a rehearsal of the throat and mouth muscle movements that would voice the text. Rather than simple kinesthetic imagery, this performance is enacted through inaudible speech (subvocalization) or dummy signals in the motor nerves attached to that musculature that do not cause actual movement. This range of covert articulation, speech movements rehearsed in the musculature, shows a very tangible bodily mechanics conjured into action by the page.

Using this insight into covert articulation to shift attention from the acoustic to the articulatory voice begins to suggest a very different vocal poetics. What research into covert articulation in reading shows is a reader called to provide a body to support a voicing abandoned by the author’s mouth. This call to voice is in some ways an alien and an alienating relationship with poetry. In the same way that Spicer’s deathbed struggle foregrounds his vocal apparatus just as (and insofar as) he is disconnected from it, the shift in focus from [End Page 238] the familiar voice to opaque and inaccessible vocalization calls into question a notion of the voice as a pure outpouring of the soul or as a neutral carrier of thought and calls on us to give more attention to the fleshy underpinnings of voice in ways that make that vocal apparatus...

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