Read e-book Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate Voice Volume 1

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate Voice Volume 1 file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate Voice Volume 1 book. Happy reading Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate Voice Volume 1 Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate Voice Volume 1 at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate Voice Volume 1 Pocket Guide.
Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Life Through Poetry: A Surrogate. Voice Volume 1 file PDF Book only if.
Table of contents

You can trace its conception, however, to five years earlier — 19 May , 50 years ago this weekend — when the founding members of the Last Poets stood together in Mount Morris park — now Marcus Garvey park — in Harlem and uttered their first poems in public. They commemorated what would have been the 43rd birthday of Malcolm X, who had been slain three years earlier. Not two months had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King.

He was 18 and in college when he heard the news. Half a century later, the slaughter continues daily, in the form of assaults, school shootings and excessive police force. We put poetry on blast. The late Gil Scott-Heron, meanwhile, is often mistakenly believed to have been a member of the Last Poets. Rather, they were contemporaries, the connective tissue between the rap, hip-hop and spoken word genres they helped inspire, and their own direct influences: jazz and Langston Hughes and the words of their slain leaders.


  1. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity.
  2. 5 Home health remedies;
  3. Memory and Voice in Jean Froissart’s dits amoureux?
  4. Robert Herrick | Poetry Foundation?
  5. Cosmopolitan: Sex Confessions, The A-Z of Sex, and Sex Fantasies;
  6. The Theory of Interest (Sociology and Economics)?
  7. Account Options?

On this Sunday, as with almost every Sunday for the last three decades, Oyewole is hosting the Open House poetry workshop in his Harlem apartment, a minute walk from the spot where the Last Poets once spoke their first words. The door is cracked open for the stream of visitors who will fill the seats all afternoon and evening. There are homemade salmon croquettes, shrimp grits and potatoes waiting in the kitchen.

Now 70, wiry, energetic, and having received his chosen name in a Yoruba religious service, Oyewole still uses his voice like an instrument, dramatically dialling it up and down in volume for emphasis in the free-ranging conversations that take place in his living room: basketball, the novels of Chinua Achebe, the backlash election of Donald Trump.

Stolen Air, Broken Voice - The Critical Flame | The Critical Flame

Pride was restored, money was restored. On school days, as part of his study, he would visit a radio station and read out entire books on the air, which were then broadcast in the evenings. These days, when he teaches poetry workshops to teenage girls incarcerated at Rikers Island, he exhorts his students to educate themselves. Last Poets drummer Baba Donn Babatunde drops by and Oyewole introduces him as the heartbeat of the group. Impressively tall, he wears a gold pendant on his dress shirt in place of a tie and speaks in a serious, mellifluous baritone.

Introduction: At Work with Victorian Poetry

What I do is the dramatisation of those words, carrying them rather than fighting them. By and by others drift in. In his early 20s, he smokes some dope and grows quickly impatient. He refuses to use a mobile phone. Specifically, I would ask what media archaeological affordances computational technologies provide toward examining the sonic dimensions of the performance of a poem — without discarding the visual poetics of the printed page.

What we need is a methodology that accounts for both sight and sound by further complicating the distinction and making use of the wealth of poetic sound recordings available to us. Machine-Aided Close Listening aims to juxtapose, without necessarily harmonizing, three dimensions of the poetic phonotext: the text of the poem, a performance of it, and a visualization of the audio of that performance.

These dimensions form the 3D phonotext. In making sound visible, a reader—listener can discuss aspects of the sonic form of the poem as an extension of its textual content. In support of this methodology, I offer a new digital tool that aligns these three dimensions, available on the PennSound website. The tool brings together some aspects of the visual form of the poem recognizing that the process of digitization of the text is itself a remediation that recreates , including lineation and spacing, with a visualization of the included audio.

So, in other words, Image, Music, Text — to borrow from Barthes. But I also hope to move beyond the body, toward a posthuman media studies championed by scholars such as Wolfgang Ernst. Ernst writes: Synesthetically, we might see a spectrographic image of previously recorded sound memory — a straight look into the archive. As Ernst argues, in the end, the machines become the media archaeologists. What I propose here is that we synaesthetically and prosthetically extend our perception of the inscribed phonotext by including the ability to see sound, aided by the machine.

Machine-Aided Close Listening is a tool of hermeneutic analysis — not an exemption to encountering the poem as a human-readable, aesthetic object. Finally, before getting into the methodology itself, I want to address why an online tool is necessary for this task, and some further affordances of the tool.

One of my primary interests in this work is pedagogical. I am interested in what happens when people come together to collectively make meaning of a sounded poem. We have likely all had the experience of reading poetry aloud in a classroom and working through a collective understanding of the poem, while each person looks at his or her copy of the printed work.


  • Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work - The Walt Whitman Archive.
  • Navigation menu.
  • The Higher Law in Its Application to the Fugitive Slave Bill. a Sermon on the Duties Men Owe to God and to Governments.
  • The Science of Pseudo-Equations!
  • We may have had the privilege to do this alongside someone playing recordings of the poet reading the same work. But now, for the first time, a group will be able to use a visualization of the performance audio to make collective meaning of the poem. Does the poet read faster during this part of the poem? Coming together to read sound will offer new avenues into our understanding of poetry. This is what makes the tool distinctly different than looking at waveforms or spectrograms generated by desktop programs like Audacity — we can all look at the same visualization at the same time and cite the same material facets.

    And I believe this research could be applied to work outside of poetry proper. Performances of prose works are under-studied, to be sure. And what about political speeches and the aesthetics of popular motivation? While these examples do not contain visually formatted content in the same way poetry does, I believe we could learn from bringing them into our tripartite formation of Machine-Aided Close Listening.

    But for now, we will work to understand how this methodology applies to poetry and how to situate it within existing approaches to studying poetry audio.

    Unintentional ASMR - 1 Hour of Tilda Swinton reading Soft Spoken Poetry

    Machine-aided listening vs. For example, Clement and McLaughlin have used distant listening to ask the machine which poets get the most applause, a question that relies both on scale and quantification of the extra-lexical [ Clement and McLaughlin ]. Or we could ask if we can determine a performative commonality endemic to First—Wave Modernist poets, and how this differs from those in the Second Wave. The obvious question, then, would be to ask what methodologies lie within this integral of close to distant. Moving back to listening distance, the same is true.

    Related books and articles

    A question this raises is to what degree, if at all, is a surrogate ear prosthetic, or an extension of the ear. I would suggest that distant listening is no more an extension of the ear than is distant reading a prosthetically enhanced eye. This differential fractures the spectrum of close—to—distant listening methodologies, setting them as apposite, but not dichotomous. In this essay, I would like to ask the question of how to advance our ability to perform close listening through the use of technological prostheses — the process I have termed Machine-Aided Close Listening — while staying in the realm of augmented listening, rather than surrogate listening.

    One assumption here is that we hear aspects of the sonic materiality of the performed poem and understand them impressionistically, and that these impressions can be confirmed empirically through digital tools, presented alongside the text of a poem.


    1. The Walt Whitman Archive?
    2. Book # 1-Notions of Analytic Mechanics: Flat Structural Systems (Static Analysis of Structures Matrix Formulation);
    3. Michigan quarterly review: Vol. 24, No. 2;
    4. Lesson Plan #4: Our Town?

    In addition, the machine can reveal dimensions of the poem that are imperceptible or difficult to perceive by the human ear alone. These revelations can be used to challenge initial readings and complicate understandings of the poem. Lineation and spacing are crucial dimensions of the poem and its multi-sensory existence, and these are often unaccounted for in the application of tools meant for linguistic research to the study of poetry.

    Conversely, there are a number of tools for studying sounds encoded in the text of poems, tools like Poemage [3] and Poem Viewer [4] that focus on augmented close reading. These tools are valuable for gaining an insight into the encoded sound of poems, but when sound recordings are available, I follow Bernstein in suggesting that they must be included in our phonotextual analysis of a poem.

    Returning to the idea of the sight-sound interplay so crucial to Modernist poetics, I would note that a central interest of certain strains of poetic modernism, especially for Second-Wave Modernists Charles Olson and Robert Creeley and Afro-Modernist James Weldon Johnson, is the page as a loose score for performance. In these instances, line breaks can be performance instructions e.

    And so an alignment of the visual field of the printed page with the performance is absolutely necessary, and what I aim to demonstrate here via the new digital tool. Our aim will be a prosthetic extension of the ear, via the machine and connected to the eye. Realignments In , PennSound released the PennSound Aligner, a basic tool to align the text of a poem with the audio of the poet reading it [ Creely ]. These kinds of alignments had long been the purview of linguists, interested in topics like transcription and phonetics. The technological thread of the app, here, twines together with text and timbre, sight and sound, and elucidates what would remain obfuscated by exploring these dimensions separately.