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Silly Noises 3 Silly Noises As we saw in Chapter 1, distinctions have often been made between nonsense and gibberish. Noel Malcolm, for example, argues that the only 'trick' that gibberish can achieve is 'to make funny noises'. He suggests that gibberish offers such a highly concentrated form of nonsense language that 'it must dilute itself with words (or at least recognisable vestiges of words) which are not nonsense' in order to be categorized as nonsense.1 Similarly, the imitation of non-human sounds or incorrectly understood human sounds (for example, the aping of a foreign language which one doesn't understand) might be heard as only producing 'funny noises'. While I'm less concerned with policing the boundaries of' proper nonsense', I want to retain the suggestion of a sliding scale in which the presence of words oscillates gibberish between sense and lack of sense. Somewhere in those border areas which I'm leaving unpoliced, there resides the nonsense moment, the point of bewilderment that lies between different worlds of meaning. Even if we can't always pin this moment down - for it occurs at different times, speeds and points fordifferent people - it is still rewarding to observe the comings and goings between the seemingly separate spheres of understandable words, 'vestiges of words' and 'funny noises' and to explore the ways they mean to mean. Sound poetry The world of sound poetry offers an extreme case for testing the peregrinations of words and other noises, focused as it is on 46 THE SOUND OF NONSENSE experimental vocal techniques and technologies. As Brandon LaBelle writes, 'sound poetry can be heard as a vital catalog of the choreographies of the mouth'.2 This inevitably brings up distinctions between sound and sense that are even stronger than those customarily attached to nonsense literature. Composer and vocalist Jaap Blank defines sound poetry simply as 'poetry where the sound is more important than the meaning, and sometimes there is no meaning at all'. 3 Meaning, here, clearly refers to semantic meaning, and it is true that much, if not most, sound poetry does away with semantics in favour of sonic experimentation. To say that sound poetry has no meaning, then, is akin to saying that music has no meaning, whereas we might prefer to think of sound art and music as engaging in other kinds of (extra-semantic) meaning. As will hopefully be apparent from some of the examples highlighted below, sound poetry has many affiliations with music and it is not uncommon to find sound poetry being chanted or taking its inspiration from musical languages and structures. In addition to addressing this musical connection, I also discuss sound poetry in relation to sound art more generally and, because the sonic play employed by the Dadaists in particular has influenced a range of popular culture, I also reflect on plunderphonics and remix culture. In a useful overview of sound poetry, Steve McCaffery identifies three phases or 'areas' of relevance, the first of which has no discernible origin but takes in 'archaic and primitive poetries' employing incantation and 'deliberate lexical distortions'. McCaffery's second phase covers the 'diverse and revolutionary investigations into language's non-semantic, acoustic properties' undertaken by the Russian and Italian Futurists and by the Dadaists of Zurich, Berlin and elsewhere. The third phase, which dates mainly from the 1950s onwards and which more obviously accompanies new discoveries made possible by tape and microphone technologies, consists of explorations into 'the micro particulars of morphology, investigating the full expressive range of predenotative forms: grunts, howls, shrieks, etc.'4 Given the tighter scope of the second and third areas, I will stick with these in what follows. Known as the architect of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was, along with Luigi Russolo, associated with many of the manifestoes and art events of that movement that were focused on sound, notably Marinetti's c;:oncept of parole in liberta ('words in freedom') and Russolo's manifesto L'arte dei Rumori ('The Art SILLY NOISES 47 of Noises'). In his major work Zang Tumb Tumb, Marinetti sought to echo the sounds of modern life, in particular the machinery, explosions and gunfire of war. In its reliance on onomatopoeia and other attempts to represent sound, the text does away with conventional words and syntax while also utilizing innovative typography to 'free' the words even further. Writing in 1919, Roman Jakobson argued that, for all their positing of new poetic approaches, Marinetti and his fellow Italians had not exploited the sonic potential of language to develop a really new poetry. Rather, Jakobson saw this work as 'a reform in the field of reportage, not in poetic language' .5 For examples of the latter, he looked to his fellow Russians Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh. Jakobson admiringly quotes Kruchenykh's assertion that 'once there is new form it follows that there is new content .... It is not new subject matter that defines genuine innovation.'6 Rather than attempt to transcribe the new world with old methods, better to develop new words to speak of past, present and future. Khlebnikov's poetry exemplifies this through its use of words which seem to grow out of each other, or out of the roots and shoots of morphemes. His most famous poem, 'Zaklyatie Smekhom' ('Incantation by Laughter'), is structured around variations on the word smek (laugh) in an experiment that both echoes the uncontrollable act of laughing and suggests an infinite range of neologisms based on morphemic mutation. As Nancy Perloff notes, 'the repetition of the sounds smekh, smei, and smesh in different neologisms and of phonemes kh, i, sh, ch, k mimics the repetitive, sometimes abrasive sound of laughter. Far from creating nonsense, the overabundant contexts for the core referent overdetermine its meaning.' 7 Due to its abandonment of standard Russian, 'Incantation by Laughter' extends the usual possibilities open to the translator. Gary Kern supplements his 1975 translation with a range of alternative versions, which nevertheless follow a standard pattern of variation; where his principal version uses the lines 'O laugh it out, you laughsters!' and 'Laughify, laughicate, laugholets, laugholets', one of his alternatives offers 'O guff it out, you guffsters' and 'Guffify, gufficate, guffolets, guffolets' . Two decades later, Paul Schmidt takes a different approach, reducing the familiarity of the language further by rendering Khlebnikov's opening line as 'Hlaha! Uthlofan, lauflings!' and a subsequent line as 'Hlaha! Loufenish lauflings lafe, hlohan utlaufly!' 8 Citing Schmidt's version, Marnie Parsons notes 48 THE SOUND OF NONSENSE how he 'has clearly moved into an area of English equivalent to the realm of Russian, which Khlebnikov opened'. To translate this poem is not so much to strive for literalness, but rather to show fidelity to Khlebnikov's linguistic play, to 'infuse the host language with a similar spirit of malleability' .9 This flexibility was at the heart of zaum, the poetic concept developed by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh between 1912 and 1913. The word derives from 'za', meaning 'beyond', and 'um', translated as 'mind', 'reason' or 'sense'. Various translations have been posited for zaum, including 'trans­ mental', 'trans-rational' and 'trans-sense'. Zaum scholar Gerald Janacek suggests that Paul Schmidt's 'beyonsense' remains 'the cleverest and best rendering', given its homophonic similarity to , 'nonsense' combined with the expansion rather than negation of sense. 10 Elaborating on the use of 'za' in zaum, Janecek writes, 'in a topographical sense it means "beyond, on the other side of," and by extension "outside of" or "beyond the bounds of." It is a matter of escaping from or going beyond the limits of a locale, in this case of something like rational, intelligible discourse'.11 In Khlebnikov's own (Schmidt-translated) words, Beyonsense language means language situated beyond the boundaries of ordinary reason, just as we say 'beyond the river' or 'beyond the sea'. Beyonsense language is used in charms and incantations, where it dominates and displaces the language of sense, and this shows that it has a special power over human consciousness, a special right to exist alongside the language of reason. 12 The connection of beyonsense to charms and incantations is another reminder that the zaum poets were fascinated by the past of folklore and 'primitive' language, in contrast to Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. In this, they were closer to the Dadaists Hugo Ball and Raoul Hausmann and to the Dada-affiliated Kurt Schwitters. For Ball, Verse ohne Worte (poems without words) or Lautgedichte (sound poems) were 'devices for inducing the dada state of mind'. 13 Much like mantras where the repetition of magical words is affective, moving someone or something from one state (of consciousness) to another, so Ball wished 'to totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted' and 'return to SILLY NOISES 49 the innermost alchemy of the word' and 'even give up the word too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge' .14 Dressed like an 'obelisk' and donning 'a high, blue-and-white­ striped witch doctor's hat', Ball took to the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in June 1916 to declaim his sound poems, beginning with 'gadji beri bimba / glandridi lauli lonni cadori' and continuing with 'Labadas gesang and die Wolken' and 'Elefantenkarawane'. The performance proved overwhelming for poet and audience and, 'bathed in sweat', Ball 'was carried down off the stage like a magical bishop' .15 Much reported, this event has become something of a primal scene for the performance of sound poetry over the last century. The references to shamanism, religion, trance and madness secure Ball's Lautgedichte to ritualistic, folkloric processes. So too with Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate or Sonate in Urlauten (sonata in primordial sounds), written and revised during the 1920s.
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