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Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Yopie Prins
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Extract

“The sound of poetry, the poetry of sound” resonated as Marjorie Perloff's theme for the 2006 MLA Convention, where one could hear about this topic at panels, poetry readings, and the Presidential Forum. Addressing a large audience at the forum, Charles Bernstein tapped the microphone and loudly intoned, “Is this working? Can you hear me?” The moment was a self-conscious performance, perhaps parody, of lyric utterance addressed to “you” from “me”: even before beginning his speech, Bernstein called our attention to the amplification of voice. Instead of addressing any particular you, singular or plural, he seemed to address the microphone, a mediating apparatus that makes possible but also interrupts the intimacy of address that lyric poetry (after John Stuart Mill) invites us to overhear. Through the microphone, Bernstein gave new overtones to Mill's definition of poetry as “overheard,” which could also mean hearing it too much, making it too loud, overworking the metaphor of the voice that we think is speaking directly to us. Although we tend to think of sound as immediate (is it?), the sound of poetry is never heard without mediation, and we should attend to the medium.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 229 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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