Overview

By reinterpreting 20th-century poetry as a listening to and writing through noise, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk constructs a literary history of noise through poetic sound and performance. This book traces how poets figure noise in the disfiguration of poetic voice. Materializing in the threshold between the heard and the unheard, noise emerges in the differentiation and otherness of sound. It arises in the folding of an “outside” into the “inside” of poetic performance both on and off the page. Through a series of case studies ranging from verse by ear-witnesses to the First World War, Dadaist provocations, jazz modernist song and poetry, early New York City punk rock, contemporary sound poetry, and noise music, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk describes productive failures of communication that theorize listening against the grain of sound’s sense.

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9781501359910

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Cueing up a major new track within sound studies, John Melillo declares that noise is a crucial figure in 20th-century poetry and music--as well as an interruption to figuration. Through resonant soundings of war poetry, Dada, modernism's thunder, and later experiments, this coup of close-listening provides ear-witness to the period's disturbing 'undersound.' * Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English, Washington and Lee University, USA, and author of Voicing American Poetry (2008) and Poetry's Possible Worlds (2021) *

Cueing up a major new track within sound studies, John Melillo declares that noise is a crucial figure in 20th-century poetry and music--as well as an interruption to figuration. Through resonant soundings of war poetry, Dada, modernism's thunder, and later experiments, this coup of close-listening provides ear-witness to the period's disturbing 'undersound.' * Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English, Washington and Lee University, USA, and author of Voicing American Poetry (2008) and Poetry's Possible Worlds (2021) * In a study both wide-ranging and meticulous, John Melillo demonstrates that poetry's turn away from the communicative function does not merely embrace noise over message, but rather refigures the entire relationship between such concepts. In the process, he rearticulates the history of modern poetry and the very status of the reader; such reconfigured relationships, as he argues, are the very hallmarks of the power of noise itself. This is thus a wonderfully noisy book. * Craig Dworkin, Professor of English, University of Utah, USA, and author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (2020) * Noise, in John Melillo's account, is a defining feature of radical modernist and postwar poetics. But not noise as entropy. This book explores noise as expressive of what's beyond mundane sense, the noise heard by Owen and Sassoon on the killing field of World War 1. Staged at the Cabaret Voltaire, with Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Langston Hughes, Olson, Tracie Morris, Richard Hell and Susan Howe as guides, Melillo let's noise stay noisy. * Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss (2018) and Pitch of Poetry (2016) and recipient of 2019 Bollingen Award for lifetime achievement in poetry *

Author Information

John Melillo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona, USA. He researches and teaches modern and contemporary literature, poetry, and sound studies. Melillo also makes noise/music under the name Algae & Tentacles.

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