ABOUT THE DEAD POEMS

THE DEAD POEMS are an innovative experiment in reading and language as well as a conservative return to the nascency of poetic form. Originally poetry was listened to, sung by a bard and accompanied by music, but contemporary verse has been silenced. Unless one attends a poetry reading, most poetry is read, rendering it wholly dependent upon a mute page. The DEAD POEMS cleave the sound of a poem from its printed text, reverting poetry to its place among the auditory arts. Listening is once again essential to comprehension, and the page no longer holds a poem but a bard who sings its poem. Within the DEAD POEMS, language can no longer exist without speech.  

Each DEAD POEM contains two parts: the printed text of the poem and the sound of the poem. The printed text of each DEAD POEM makes little sense when read literally; however, a reader who voices it despite its motley appearance finds himself speaking the sonic level of the poem. Through listening to the sound, meaningful communication or ‘sense-making’ takes place. I refer to this layer as the underpoem or translation of each DEAD POEM.  

The death mask or corpse of each page’s printed text is not merely a difficult word game aimed at frustrating the reader but a true expression of what a faulty listener has heard. The reader is not shut out and undervalued in this way but invited to become a collaborator. Each DEAD POEM requires a reader’s voice in order to be revived.  

In reading a DEAD POEM, the printed text is seen and spoken, yet the reader hears himself say something completely different. A mutiny of the voice occurs. The reader becomes not just a listener to the poet or the poetry or the page but a listener to himself, and what is said becomes as unpredictable as listening to another in conversation. From each poem lifts a spell, a ritual chant, a disembodied voice using the voice of the reader as a medium to channel through.  

The DEAD POEMS are akin to sheet music in this way. Notes cannot literally be read; a musician reading sheet music must translate the notes on the page into sound within their mind or on their instrument in order to be able to hear the music, the true message and spirit of the page.

The printed text of the DEAD POEMS, however, is not wholly unrelated to the underpoem. The typed word adds additional connotation to the definition of its communicated homophone, playing with (in both honoring and mocking) the traditional practice of multiple meanings in poetic language. The word is no more the signifier of the signified. This process has been extended one extra step through vertical assimilation. The signifier written is not the signifier meant except through sound similarity. A reader may make a third leap within the language of the poems in order for sense-making to occur – moving from the printed word to the homophone to the context and syntax.  

Rather than wildly listing combinations of words in a syntactic mess (as many experimentalists are wont to do in their urge for textual and visual innovation in English poetry), the DEAD POEMS couple superficial lexical novelty with a comprehensible communication attached sonically.  

PRECEDENTS

The DEAD POEMS could be considered an altered form of the French holorime. An holorime is a two-line poem in which each line sounds exactly or nearly the same while the text of each phrase is different. The DEAD POEMS provide an holorime in which the sonic equivalent to the printed text is physically absent, coming into existence only through the sound of the underpoem.  

The DEAD POEMS could also be said to invoke various aspects of sonic word play such as:

• homophone 
• extended and sustained rime richissime (“very rich rhyme”):  words rhymed with their homophones, such as blue rhymed with blew   
• homolinguistic translation: sound-based translations from one language into the same language 
• pun: often used comically, as in visualize whirled peas
• slippage: mishearing, Freudian or not

APPEARANCE

The DEAD POEMS are written in all capital letters in order to denote, initially, that the text is unusual. Because every printed word evokes a homophone, it would have been difficult to render the mask of the text into properly punctuated and capitalized sentences in a way that would also correlate grammatically with the sonic underpoem it reflects. This would have led to difficulties in capital letters or punctuation arriving between the syllables of single word. The all-caps format is also reminiscent of a gravestone or historical marker.

THE AMPERSAND

The ampersand has been used to sonically represent an “in/un/an” sound rather than a full “and” sound. It provides the clipped “ ‘n” sound present in such phrases as “this & that.” The ampersand is also associated with the 7 on a keyboard, a number with many otherworldly associations and one important to EVE RECEIVE & as a collection.

EXAMPLE