Sound poetry
Sound poetry makes vocal sound, rhythm, and performance central, often loosening or abandoning conventional semantic meaning.
Phonetic poetry: Poetry that foregrounds speech sounds, sometimes using invented syllables instead of ordinary words. It concentrates sound poetry’s attention on the acoustic qualities of speech.
Futurism: An early twentieth-century avant-garde movement that sought to break with inherited artistic forms and celebrate modern life. Italian Futurists made noise, speed, and disrupted language into poetic material.
Kurt Schwitters: A German artist and poet whose Merz practice combined collage, typography, and experimental performance. His poem “Ursonate” developed a sustained composition from phonetic material.
Ursonate: Kurt Schwitters’s long-form sound poem, composed from phonetic syllables and structured like a sonata. It is a canonical demonstration of sound poetry’s large-scale formal possibilities.
Lyrical poetry: Poetry that presents a speaker’s thoughts or feelings in a concentrated, often musical voice. Sound poetry may reduce the expressive role of recognizable words and statements.
Vocal performance: The use of the human voice to present artistic material before an audience or recording. Breath, pitch, timbre, and delivery shape how sound poems work.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: An Italian poet and theorist who founded Futurism and promoted experimental literary forms. His parole in libertà experiments helped establish a precedent for sound-centered poetry.
Raoul Hausmann: An Austrian-born Dada artist and writer who worked in Berlin and experimented with visual and acoustic poetry. His phonetic poems treated spoken syllables as material independent of ordinary words.
Poésie-action: A French sound-poetry practice that treats performed speech, recording, and surrounding events as compositional material. It frames sound poetry as an action unfolding in a particular time and place.
Spoken-word poetry: Poetry composed or presented for oral performance, commonly retaining intelligible language and rhetorical content. Its emphasis on articulated meaning distinguishes it from sound poetry’s frequent use of nonlexical voice.