Making Speech-Matter: Recurring Mediations in Sound Poetics and its Contemporary Practice

This thesis produces a critical and creative space for new forms of sound poetics. Through a reflective process combining theoretical research and poetic practice – performances, text-scores and installations – the thesis tests the contemporary terms of intermedial poetics and sound poetry, establishing a conceptual terminology for speech-matter. Beginning with a study of 1960s sound poet Henri Chopin and his relation to the tape machine, I argue that this technological mediation was based on a poetics of analogue sound hinged on bodily engagement. Social and physical properties of the tape machine contribute to a mode of practice that negotiates the body, machine, and effort. Exploring Michel Serres’s concept of parasitic noise and the relation of interference to lyric appeal, via the work of Denise Riley and Hannah Weiner, I understand sound poetics as a product of lyrically active noise. Through an analysis of radio address, a conceptual link is drawn between lyric poetry and technological mediation, which posits the radiophonic as a material effect of transmission and also a mode of hailing. This is tested through sound poems that are investigative of distortion and echo. Addressing the conceptual limits of Intermedia, a new critical model is established for a poetics of sound operating in present-day media technologies. This alternative model, based on a concept of milieu, is a means of negotiating a poem’s materiality and context, in order to posit a work’s multiple connections and transmissions. This model is tested through the text and installation work of Caroline Bergvall, and subsequently realised in my own gallery installation that investigates links between sound, milieu and archive. Through this research into mediated speech, new platforms for intermedial sound poetics are produced. This project offers a model for practice-based research that produces knowledge of speech-matter by way of the ‘black box’ of poetic practice

Making Speech-Matter: Recurring Mediations in Sound Poetics and its Contemporary Practice

This thesis produces a critical and creative space for new forms of sound poetics. Through a reflective process combining theoretical research and poetic practice – performances, text-scores and installations – the thesis tests the contemporary terms of intermedial poetics and sound poetry, establishing a conceptual terminology for speech-matter. Beginning with a study of 1960s sound poet Henri Chopin and his relation to the tape machine, I argue that this technological mediation was based on a poetics of analogue sound hinged on bodily engagement. Social and physical properties of the tape machine contribute to a mode of practice that negotiates the body, machine, and effort. Exploring Michel Serres’s concept of parasitic noise and the relation of interference to lyric appeal, via the work of Denise Riley and Hannah Weiner, I understand sound poetics as a product of lyrically active noise. Through an analysis of radio address, a conceptual link is drawn between lyric poetry and technological mediation, which posits the radiophonic as a material effect of transmission and also a mode of hailing. This is tested through sound poems that are investigative of distortion and echo. Addressing the conceptual limits of Intermedia, a new critical model is established for a poetics of sound operating in present-day media technologies. This alternative model, based on a concept of milieu, is a means of negotiating a poem’s materiality and context, in order to posit a work’s multiple connections and transmissions. This model is tested through the text and installation work of Caroline Bergvall, and subsequently realised in my own gallery installation that investigates links between sound, milieu and archive. Through this research into mediated speech, new platforms for intermedial sound poetics are produced. This project offers a model for practice-based research that produces knowledge of speech-matter by way of the ‘black box’ of poetic practice

‘I did not know till afterwards: Curating an Archive Installation’

It is a remarkable phenomenon that the foremost among recent sites of this interrogation of boundaries has been a series of festivals located in Bury, on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. World leading artists and poets have been brought together in a range of exhibitions and performances that demonstrate a new and productive collision of different cultural enterprises and expectations. Among those shown at the Text Festivals are Fiona Banner, derek beaulieu, Caroline Bergvall, Joseph Beuys, Christian Bok, Brass Art, Marcel Broodthaers, Pavel Buchler, Augusto de Campos, Zeynep Cansu, Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Liz Collini, Philip Davenport, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Eugen Gomringer, Robert Grenier, Alan Halsey, Alexander Jorgenson, Satu Kaikonen, Martin Kippenburger, Karri Kokko, Marton Koppany, On Kawara, Helmut Lemke, Richard Long, Tony Lopez, Jackson Mac Low, Hansjorg Mayer, Steve Miller, Kerry Morrison, Maurizio Nannucci, Patrick Fabian Panetta, Holly Pester, Tom Philips, Shaun Pickard, Kate Pickering, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Spencer Roberts, Ed Ruscha, Ron Silliman, Mary Ellen Solt, Magda Stawarska-Beavan, Harald Stoffers, Carolyn Thompson, Nick Thurston, Aysegul Tozeren, TNWK, Tony Trehy, Nico Vasilakis, Carol Watts, Lawrence Weiner, George Widener, Ming Wong, and Eric Zboya. Artists, poets and curators working in these overlapping fields have written this book. It includes new essays by Tony Trehy (director of the Text Festivals), derek beaulieu, Christian Bok, Liz Collini, James Davies, Philip Davenport, Robert Grenier, Alan Halsey, Tony Lopez, Holly Pester, Hester Reeve (HRH.the), Carolyn Thompson, and Carol Watts

City State: New London Poetry

City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident, entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from London

Visual Poetics and a Play on Shortness

This paper investigates how concrete or visual poetry has an inherent 'conceptual quickness'

Review of Robert Shepherd’s When Bad Times Made Good Poetry

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