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4. Audiotext 4.1 Audiotext and Paralanguage: Experiential Meaning Potential, Provenance, Voice Set and Voice Action At the centre of a live poetry performance lies what Charles Bernstein calls the “audiotext” of the poem and which he defines as “the poet’s acoustic performance” (13). It denotes an “audible acoustic text” (12) rather than the “evoked aurality” (Stewart 1) often referred to in discussions of the ‘inher- ent’ sound of the written word and thus acknowledges the essential tran- sience of sound: the audiotext is communicated through vibrations of a certain frequency – oscillations per second – which makes its occurrence and disappearance dependent on the passing of time.1 As in theatrical performances, poet-performers bring forth their audio- text through (mostly) vocal production at a specific place and time. How- ever, while few people in theatre would undertake a ‘close listening’2 of an entire night’s performance, or even an act, the audiotext is the undeniable focus of live poetry, or, in Russell Thompson’s diction: “words” and “voice” are “the main thing” (interview 2007), which renders close listening a crucial task. Incidentally, Thompson’s statement draws an important distinction within the domain of audiotext: that between verbal and non-verbal elements. A plethora of literature is available on the verbal aspects of poetry (often equated with written text), and it cannot be the aim of this study to recapitu- late techniques of analysing syntax, rhetorical figures, rhyme schemes, diction and so forth, most of which may be applied to written and sounded text alike. An exception will be made for the notion of paratext, a part of the verbal audiotext that accompanies the ‘poem proper’ in the form of intro- ductions, comments, etc., and which shall be examined in terms of its spe- cific forms and functions in live poetry. The non-verbal elements of audiotext, by contrast, are scarcely dealt with and barely even acknowledged in the literature on poetry, as pointed out in Chapter 2.1. Charles Bernstein characterises audiotext as “a semantically 1 The audiotext of a live poetry performance can, of course, be recorded, and although audio recordings lose the liveness factor, they may serve as an aid to memory and close analysis of live poetry. Conversely, most of the analytical criteria introduced in this chapter can also be applied to ‘audio poetry’ produced in professional recording studios. Charles Bernstein suggests that in fact, audio reproduction as a means of publication does more justice to the medium of live poetry than video recordings, which tend to be rather static (12). 2 A term proposed by Charles Bernstein in analogy to close reading, see Bernstein 1998. 76 Live Poetry denser field of linguistic activity than can be charted by means of meter, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and the like” (13), i.e. by means of the tradi- tional analytical tools literary studies provides. A poet may shout or whisper, race through a text or drawl each vowel, deliver his/her ‘lines’ in a sing-song interspersed with rhythmic laughter or recite them in a monotonous drone like a liturgical incantation, all of which generally remains unaccounted for in conventional analyses of poetry. These non-verbal vocal features can be discussed under the heading of ‘paralanguage,’ which Fernando Poyatos de- fines as “the nonverbal voice qualities, modifiers and independent sounds and silences with which we support or contradict the simultaneous or alter- nating linguistic and kinesic structures” (Poyatos 130). Paralanguage com- prises “any aspect of vocal behaviour which can be seen as meaningful but is not described as part of the language system,” including “aspects of voice quality; of the speed, loudness, and overall pitch of speech; of the use of hesitation” and “intonation to the extent that it is not covered by an account of phonology” (“Paralanguage”3). Although they do not form part of the ‘language system,’ i.e. they cannot be accounted for by a systematic ‘gram- mar’ of paralanguage, these features are recognised as ‘meaningful’: speakers apply them “for pragmatic, emotional and stylistic reasons” and “to meet the requirements of genre,” as Ann Wennerstrom (60) observes. However, there is no dictionary of non-verbal sounds: their meaning is often strongly context-dependent, which renders an analysis more difficult. No tangible ‘grammar’ exists to regulate paralanguage, and paralinguistic features of the supra-segmental order pose an additional problem in so far as they do “not always offer a ‘unit’ analogous to the phoneme, susceptible to being built up into larger structures,” as Fernando Poyatos (130) ob- serves: they are mostly gradual phenomena operating along continuums of 3 The same article points out that “by the nature of this definition, the boundaries of paralanguage are (unavoidably) imprecise” (“Paralanguage”), which is also reflected in the discrepancy between different definitions in various publications. David Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, for instance, restricts the term ‘paralan- guage’ to “variations in tone of voice which seem to be less systematic than prosodic features (especially intonation and stress),” such as “the controlled use of breathy or creaky voice” (349). While the term ‘prosody’ in linguistics may encompass “into- nation, rhythm, tempo, loudness, and pauses, as these interact with syntax, lexical meaning, and segmental phonology in spoken texts” (Wennerstrom 4) and thus seems to overlap to a high degree with certain definitions of paralanguage it will not be used in this study due to the potential confusion that may arise with prosody as a literary term denoting “the study or science of versification,” which is concerned with “meter, rhythm, rhyme and stanza […] forms” (Cuddon 751). .

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