Timbral Poetics: Samuel Beckett and the Impossible Voice

Beckett’s poetic sequence “mirlitonnades” both thematizes and tests the possibilities of human voice. The title invokes a mirliton, a kazoo or a toy instrument that produces a buzzing timbral sound, something the poem emulates through various kinds of sound patterning, phonetic assonances, and resonances. Shaping a soundscape full of timbral and vibrational registers with no significant metrical or prosodic purpose, Beckett situates his poetic speaker in the valley between sound and sense, partly mocking the annexation of sound by meaning and expression. Timbral poetics is thus defined here as the production of a distinct noise or resonance in poetry that resists all signification.