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On Voice in PoetryGetting the Measure of Voice

On Voice in Poetry: Getting the Measure of Voice [Voice, I have been suggesting, can only ever be grasped by being figured: not simply a ‘figuring as’ — as speechsound, as metonym for subjective expression, as pre- or proto-verbal effusion, as possession by language, initiation into language — but also a ‘figuring through’ — figures which comprise gestures of apostrophe and interjection, the sonic world of glossolalia and onomatopoeia, and the prosodic figures shaping cadence, inflection, tempo: nodes and vectors of condensation, intensity, and release, vocal attitudes, vocal lines, through which poems make conflicting demands on our own voicing, a voicing at once necessarily finite and yet always bound up in that tacit plurality by which all phone tends toward polyphony. To speak of voice is, in this sense, to attend to its configurations, to the patterns of its self-configuring, but it is also to reconstruct voice as necessarily ec-static, necessarily medial: voice only becomes ‘voice’ as outside itself, other to itself (all of which is to leave — provisionally or definitively? — a blank or x wherever it is we might wish to posit ‘voice itself’). But it is precisely this ecstasis, this mediality, which makes ‘voice’ the starting point and vehicle for a metaphysics that aims to orient us both within language and within the world, for a politics founded out of our collective subjectivity in order to envisage a future freedom.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

On Voice in PoetryGetting the Measure of Voice

Part of the Language, Discourse, Society Book Series
Smith, David Nowell
On Voice in Poetry — Nov 10, 2015
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25 pages

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References (4)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
ISBN
978-1-349-45588-1
Pages
137 –162
DOI
10.1057/9781137308238_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Voice, I have been suggesting, can only ever be grasped by being figured: not simply a ‘figuring as’ — as speechsound, as metonym for subjective expression, as pre- or proto-verbal effusion, as possession by language, initiation into language — but also a ‘figuring through’ — figures which comprise gestures of apostrophe and interjection, the sonic world of glossolalia and onomatopoeia, and the prosodic figures shaping cadence, inflection, tempo: nodes and vectors of condensation, intensity, and release, vocal attitudes, vocal lines, through which poems make conflicting demands on our own voicing, a voicing at once necessarily finite and yet always bound up in that tacit plurality by which all phone tends toward polyphony. To speak of voice is, in this sense, to attend to its configurations, to the patterns of its self-configuring, but it is also to reconstruct voice as necessarily ec-static, necessarily medial: voice only becomes ‘voice’ as outside itself, other to itself (all of which is to leave — provisionally or definitively? — a blank or x wherever it is we might wish to posit ‘voice itself’). But it is precisely this ecstasis, this mediality, which makes ‘voice’ the starting point and vehicle for a metaphysics that aims to orient us both within language and within the world, for a politics founded out of our collective subjectivity in order to envisage a future freedom.]

Published: Nov 10, 2015

Keywords: Lexical Stress; Alphabetic Script; Speech Stress; Diacritical Mark; Intonation Contour

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