Insound, Outsound, Unsound: Re-Sounding Poetry, 1950s to 2010s

Examining the multifaceted presence of sound in varieties of visually-oriented texts written from the 1950s–2010s by transnational poets, my project considers how sound (both actual and metaphorical) affects readers’ expectations and experiences when performing and interpreting poetry. The dissertation probes the cognitive science of reading, the sonic interchanges made possible by texts, and the implications of this work for discussions of intermediality and the cultural inflections of gender and race. I begin by considering cognitive processes fundamental to reading: how Ignace J. Gelb, Walter J. Ong, S. J., and Donald Shankweiler demonstrate that sounding is foundational to the reading process. Building upon research by Charles Bernstein, derek beaulieu, Craig Dworkin, Johanna Drucker, Don Ihde, Brandon Labelle, Marjorie Perloff, and Jonathan Sterne, my project presents an innovative method of sound as an analytical tool. Chapter 1 defines and explains three original categorizations: insound, outsound, and unsound. I present the critical means for examining these distinct sonic forms along with visual representations of the methods. Subsequently, each application chapter examines the three sound types in a different form of visually-oriented poetry (concrete, erasure, and non-linguistic). The selected poets’ works share formal characteristics but are diverse in historical and cultural experiences and the gender expressions they constitute. Chapter 2 argues that using sound as an interpretive tool for Eugen Gomringer’s “silencio” and Steve McCaffery’s Carnival reanimates the temporality of these concrete works. Chapter 3 reveals the biases in sounding and the power inherent in wielding sound in two exceptional erasure poems, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps. Chapter 4 examines how the seeming absence of sound in non-linguistic poetry stalls reading practices, using Mary Ellen Solt’s “Moonshot Sonnet,” Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and Eric Schmaltz’s Surfaces. With the efficacy of Insound and Outsound approaches in question, this chapter suggests alternative processing methods and concludes that non-linguistic poems eschew any totalizing approach. Instead, they need to be considered individually to discover the works’ aesthetic and semantic complexity. The final Coda provides a preliminary exploration of the In / Out / Unsound method’s future, organized in terms of applications, transpositions, and extensions.