PROSODY
and the preciousness of life
a site dedicated to the elucidation and practice of prosody
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Over the last 25 years, I've taught various aspects of prosody in contexts as diverse as the Harvard Divinity School, Duke University, SFSU Poetry Center, Laboratorio Alameda in Mexico City, BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, HIAP Gallery Agusta in Helsinki, Deep Listening Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, New School for Social Research, the Robert Wilson Watermill Center and Hofstra University.
In 2006, I co-founded, with choreographer Daria Faïn, an integrative artscience called The Prosody Body, along with its performative body called The Phoneme Choir (subsequently morphed into The Commons Choir).
In spring of 2018, I taught a 3-month prosody course at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. The course consisted of 11 sessions and was titled Prosody, Privatization, Performance and Peace. This course established the basis for an ongoing, ever-evolving, expansive prosody curriculum, as well as a committed group of participants and practitioners. The course is currently presented under the title Prosody and the Preciousness of Life, continuing prosody's total implication in the composition of our lives.
A prosody program is also currently being proposed as an interactive, trans-disciplinary field in various educational settings. The program could also be considered a very extensive creative writing course, covering, for example, poetry's basic elements of composition, comparative classical and contemporary poetics, evolutionary linguistics, biosemiotics, psychoacoustics, phonosemantics, mantra, and cosmogony.
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general definition of prosody:
Prosody is limitless expression beyond, and encoded within, the lexical limits of language. It's extralinguistic, as well as intrinsic to our impulse to speak. Prosody is, of course, poetry's basic elements of composition: tempo, tension, intensity, timbre, rising and falling intonation, rhyme, meter (and all its metaplasms), duration, cadence, caesura, pause, pitch, sound and syntactic recurrence, and assorted stresses (comprised of loudness, duration and pitch variables). A whisper is purely prosodic, as is a word withheld. Prosody is the overall measure, the music, the manner of making meaning. Pragmatically, emotion, mood, attitude, implied meaning, and the tonal differences between questioning, explaining, exclaiming and commanding, are also prosodic phenomena. Socially, it is by means of prosodic correlates (timbre, intensity, pitch, loudness, formants, frequency contours, interactional response time and speech rate) that we form snap inferences with regard to each other's qualities, character and condition. While conscious use of prosodic elements sets poetry apart from speech, these same elements also constitute speech. And in turn, speech can be set to poetry. This song/speech contrariety is one of the oldest stories on earth... Non-acoustic (retinal/written) transcriptive, typographic devices such as font-choice, boldface, striking-through, overprinting, handwriting, word-spacing, enjambment, line page-placement and use of white space can also be read prosodically, as an extra-lexical score or performance notation. The poem’s stored performance on the page or screen (or in the cloud) might be its only presence, written for no ulterior stage, as pure page or screen prosody untransduced from vocalization, awaiting the metabolic speed of diffusion on paper or speed of light electronic transmission. (And in our soundless reading of writing, prosody is present, perhaps even more boundlessly, in mind.) As a science, prosody can be defined as suprasegmental phonology, focused on the primary correlates of prosody (intensity, pitch, duration, rhythm) of course not necessarily related to poetry. On the other hand, the science of versification (orally transmitted, prehistorically, then written as treatises on pronunciation, articulatory phonetics, phonotactics and appropriate metrics as applied to poetry, tracing back to the Vedic Pratishākhyas, the Dravidian Tolkāppiyam, Aristoxenus's Ἁρμονικὰ στοιχεῖα, Hephaestion's Enchiridion, to name a few) is as old as versification itself. (I think it's fair to say that linguistics itself was conceived for the purposes of poetry.) Defined more broadly, the science of prosody includes a rich array of current linguistic research in areas such as biolinguistics, psychoacoustics, cognitive philology, sociolinguistics, phoniatrics, semiochemical ecology, evolutionary linguistics, phonosemantics, kinesics, biosemiotics, affective prosody, comparative poetics, graphemics, corpus linguistics and choreoprosodia. Yet, these sciences are rarely, if ever, referred to within the teaching and practice of poetry, even though tending to the opaque, material qualities of words is basic to verse. Reciprocally, poets' contribution to linguistic science is, I believe, negligible-to-nonexistent. Of course, literary studies and cultural literary theory and criticism (often written by poets themselves) necessarily focus on the language-art object. Still, a vital interchange, a profoundly integrative, non-polar prosody artscience, has not been part of the curriculum. "I am myself hopeful that linguistic studies will bring to contemporary criticism a vocabulary and method more sensitive to the basic activity of poetry and less dependent upon assumed senses of literary style." Robert Creeley Prosody and gesture are co-occurrences in the same semiotic system, processed in the same areas (Broca's and Wernicke's) of the brain. Motor gestures conduct/accompany/pantomime prosodic expression. Deictic gestures point things out. Iconic gestures like waving goodbye or throwing a kiss substitute for words. Lexical gestures are like non-verbal, semiotic onomatopoeia. Gesture Theory posits that language evolved from manual gesturing. Gesture enactment helps us select and recall words. In effect, articulation is a highly specific sequence of gestures performed by the tongue within the vocal cavity. Gesture is one way in which performance is a part of prosody's multimodality. Prosody conducts conversation, syncs work, organizes play, frees emotion, regulates bioprocesses and modulates mood. "... it’s that I experience myself inside these constantly swerving, intensely physical processes of semiosis. Biochemistry and language just don’t feel that different to me." (Donna Haraway). In terms of evolutionary development, in my approach, prosody is the precursor of both language and music. And ontogenically, prosody (beginning with embryoprosodia and even conception and preconceptive impulses to nurture and parent) is the precious proto-linguistic motherese (Infant Directed Speech). Through tone and touch, we're basically made to be infinitely attentive, receptive, nuanced and loving. Although prosody is conventionally considered a suprasegmental phenomenon, I include the segments (the phonemes) as part of prosody — these few dozen fundamental sounds specific to human phonation, as potencies in themselves. In terms of both physics and metaphysics (say, vibration, invisibility, indivisibility) the elements of composition of poetry — the forces that pattern matter — can be directly experienced as cosmogenic, as background silence, un-caused sound, relic rhythm, the beginning's pre-condition, formative phonemic energy, initial arising re-enacted as the impulse to speak. Prosody includes cosmos as part of nature. Nature makes 'our' nature part of the cosmos. Immateriality of language is also part of prosody. Here, I'm not referring to 'transparency' in contradistinction to 'opacity.' The term 'transparency' is often used to disparage poetry unaware of the physicality of its medium; see-through poetry. Prosody is partnered with the immateriality of mind and the inscrutable arising, presence, disappearance of language. Prosody is formative rhythm, if you prefer. It solves and dissolves the hard problem of the division of energy and matter. Spiritual Prosody, if you will. Perhaps Subtle Prosody. Here, Samuel Beckett's statement is perfectly apt: "All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.” Prosody is that which makes language poetry. Which words? Entheogenic words. Logos is human perception of language by means of prosody. Because language exists at all, words are realization no matter what we say. Prosody inscribes spirituality in language. Vocal, vibrational patterns resume materialization. We speak seed sounds. Sequences of phonemes make mantras and orisons. The sequences, as speech, make interrelationship. (We formed around the phones, once upon a time.) Prosodic Listening picks up total interconnectivity: cross-species call and response and rhythmic entrainment. The unstruck word, anahata-śabda, the deepest listening practice. Patanjali's vāg-yoga, union with words as original. Word after word — grammar — the force for breaking through the doubled door of ignorance and ego. The meters each assigned a divinity. Meaning, however changeable (because contingent) is meant to last forever. For the Vedic rishis and rishikas, it was an initial act of ascesis that brought the world about; an operation dimensionlessness performed on itself; a fervor, if you prefer, embodied by the poets; disciplines and anti-disciplines; basic skills and somatic/energetic practices indispensable to the creation of poetry: nature-of-mind meditation, chant, fasting, withdrawal of the senses, pranayama, kumbhaka, dark retreat, medical practice, ritual, nonconformity, total attunement, lunacy, channel opening, becoming luminous. When appropriate, I've integrated ascetic practices in my teaching. I've always presented prosody as experiential, not as a study or topic per se. Prosody is what is most human about us; conscious, attuned conduct; the totally transformative power of tone of voice and potency of words emanating from insight and heart; the pleasure of rhythmic reciprocity. The role of the poet: the responsibility in picking up the pith elements of composition as the means for realizing one's life in being of benefit to others. The writing of the poem is both a small part of the practice of poetry and all there is to it. I've called this capacious approach 'integrative' or 'implicate' prosody. Conscious Prosody, for balancing; Vestibular Prosody, for forthrightness, for conflict resolution, for bioregulation, for being conscious and caring for each other. Prosody Diagnostics. Dead Giveaway Prosody. It's written all over us. I have been variously practicing, researching, presenting, performing, propagating and publishing prosodic works for over 30 years. In 2006, with choreographer Daria Faïn, I co-founded an experiential art-science named The Prosodic Body. In 2008, in order to put into practice and perform our research, Faïn and I then formed a theater group known as The Phoneme Choir, commingling movement and language as choreoprosodia. In 2010, to apply our practice more directly to social, systemic, civilizational and karmic suffering and wellbeing, the choir morphed into The Commons Choir. In March of 2018 I began teaching a prosody course (through the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, grâce à Simone White) titled Prosody Privatization Performance and Peace — a poetry and creative writing course with voice, movement, somatic, medical, meditation, mantra and spiritual practices integral to the teaching. This ongoing course is now called Prosody and the Preciousness of Life. And there will be further iterations and subtitles. Although the course is conceived in series, the individual sessions are also stand-alone presentation/discussions, complete in themselves. While the sessions do, for the most part, follow and fulfill a predetermined sequence, the energetics is also experiential and improvisatory; the sessions react to themselves; they may be out of sequence or in sync with breaking news or participant needs. Although the course is whole at every point, at the same time, the elucidation of prosody is exhausting and inexhaustible. It's prosody's ever-present and impossible wholeness that impels me forward, backward, outward, inward, everywhere, anywhere. 'This' story of prosody, told through the cosmogenic stich that brought the world about (and has continually been updated by poets to this day) with a special focus on contemporary poetry, poetics and the current plethora of prosodic innovations.
background:
Over the last 20 years, I've taught various aspects of prosody in contexts as diverse as the Harvard Divinity School, SFSU Poetry Center, Laboratorio Alameda in Mexico City, BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, HIAP Gallery Agusta in Helsinki, Deep Listening Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, New School for Social Research, the Robert Wilson Watermill Center and Hofstra University.
In spring of 2018, I taught a 3-month prosody course at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. The course consisted of 11 sessions and was titled PROSODY, PRIVATIZATION, PERFORMANCE AND PEACE. This course established the basis for an ever-evolving integrative prosody curriculum. I continue to teach this course on a bimonthly rhythm outside of the Poetry Project, as the course also established a committed group of participants and prosody practitioners.
The search for a permanent location for holding the prosody sessions is currently underway, as is the design process for a building to facilitate an integrative practice of prosody. A prosody program is also currently being proposed as an interactive, transdisciplinary field in various educational settings.
breakdown of the sessions:
The following entries outline the curriculum, as it courses through many correlated disciplines and concerns, presenting prosody as a comprehensive field. Although conceived as a whole, and although the different sessions form a progressive sequence evoking and interpenetrating each other, they could also be presented individually as 'stand alone' courses, or selected from and regrouped according to context. The content of each session, however historical and diverse its sources, will tend to consistently instance the work of contemporary poets. Crucially, each session will involve “practice” as well as study, writing and discussion — i.e., vocal, somatic, movement, writing or performance practices. (At points, the doing of these experiential practices will, in effect, be the teaching.) Because the courses will largely be taught in American English, I will rely on the speakers of other languages to expand our prosodic spectrum. And Because issues of gender, race, class and education differences are integral to the substance of implicate prosody, I will also rely upon the input of participants in creating our collective awareness. An implicate, integrative prosody is a specific, emergency approach to prosody in an endangered world. It’s not a compendium or vade mecum, but a creating of conditions conducive to the development of conscientious prosodic practice.
PRONUNCIATION
Prosody comes from Greek prosodia “tune”, “song sung to instrumental music” or “speech set to song.” The speech act is language setting itself to music. Care for pronunciation is also integral to the origin of prosody: pitch variation, tempo, intonation, pause, place of articulation in the vocal organs and so on. Pronunciation orders the world. A simple recitation of the alphabet can be cosmogenic. Perhaps the first science was the science of pronunciation — attunement to the radical nuances and discrete bio-influences of the phonemes. The first “limb” of the Vedas is the Shiksha-Vedanga, a phonology manual written by the sage/linguist Panini focused on classification of the letter-sounds, pitch, duration, phonotactic constraints and mudra. In the manual Panini recommends: "As the tigress carries her cubs between her teeth taking care lest they should either be dropped or bitten (elided or mispronounced) so should one pronounce the speech-sounds.” Pronouncing an off-key syllable is "like striking someone with lightning." This session is, in effect, a phonic abecedarian, delving into the properties and potencies of each phoneme and its influence on the body. A typical sampling of sources: Sanskrit, Tiwa, articulatory phonetics, Rudolph Steiner, mantra, tantra, Velimir Khlebnikov, icaros, nada yoga, the Endangered Language Alliance, Silvia Nakkach, Kukai...
POETRY PROSODY
Prosody is a little-known field. And, typically, little of the prosodic field is actually plied. This session will first elaborate on the art of prosody as conventionally practiced by poets* and then probe prosody’s basic elements of composition in depth. To extend prosody and evoke further compositional possibilities, we’ll move beyond the basic elements by calling upon overlooked aspects of prosody, terms fallen into disuse, prospective terms, terms never-before conjured or carried over from other areas. Generally, I'll contradict the considerable consensus that is quick to disparage prosody, most often by reducing it to metronomic metrics. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics sums up its own sullen explication of prosody by stating “Over the past century, there has been a general perception that prosody is a desiccated subject, a stony little patch of ground frequented only by eccentrics, fanatics, and pedants.” Meanwhile, the plethora of current prosodic innovations is breathtaking. Douglas Kearney’s “grunt syntax” (from Mess And Mess And), the dialogic phrases with which Alice Notley subverts the male convention of “epic” (The Descent of Alette), or Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectic “nation language” — each, in itself, fully attests to the vitality of prosody and the urgency for poets to fully face the music, pulse and periodicity of interconnection.
* The art of prosody as practiced by poets is typically concerned with sound-patterning and page-dependent spatial design, drawing on basic elements of composition such as pitch, stress, alliteration, loudness, syllable count, cadence, phrasing, rhyme, lineation, enjambment, duration of juncture, speech rhythm, syntactic-repetition, strophe, page-specific word placement and handwriting, ostensibly in order to heighten the meaning or opacity of language. Note that non-acoustic, retinal, transcriptive, typographic devices such as font-choice, scare quotes, boldface, striking-through, overprinting, and word-spacing can also be read prosodically, as an extra-lexical score or performance notation. Facial expression and gesture are also parts of the total performance of live prosody. The poem’s stored performance on the page or screen might be its only presence, written non-aurally for no ulterior stage, as pure-page or solely-monitored prosody untransduced from prior or commensurate vocalization, awaiting the metabolic speed of diffusion on paper or speed of light electronic transmission.
STARTING BEFORE THE BEGINNING: COSMOGONIC ECOLOGY
Where does prosody begin? Positioned as the prototype of hominid communication? If the world comes from sound, would not a recitation of the phonemes as primordial acoustic events emanate the universe all over again (as in tantric practice)? Or, could prosody possibly have played a causal role before the beginning? There must have been prior conditions that made the beginning begin. Possibly we're situated in a successive-universes scenario, or simultaneity-of-cosmoi impinging on each other. Would it be possible for a primordial prosody, as the patterned vibration of all forms, to be even more initial than its constituting of the physical? If not, we're stuck with thinking of nothingness as the only possible prior condition. Are poets somehow especially knowledgeable with regard to origination and the maintaining of the integrity of cosmos-inclusive Nature? This session is an extensive meditative study of Anaximander's "apeiron" (defined as the indefinite or limitless.) It's poised between existence and non-existence, between time that began and that which exists without ever having had a beginning, between emptiness and stuff. How far must poetic ecology extend? Beyond earth-centric protolanguage to protocosmogenic patterning (as witnessed in the Vedas and Brahmanas)? Is there a sacrifice that would keep us well that poets are no longer performing? Such a seemingly ponderous inquiry could be answered in the affirmative simply by chanting three sounds in one as a-u-m, but further elaboration is needed. "Then even nothing was not, nor existence…the poets who’ve illumined their hearts see that which is, is kin to that which is not.” Nasadiya Sukta. A sampling of sources and terms: Anaximander, Parmenides, Sefer Yetzirah, Wang Bi, śūnyatā, Dogon Ogo, Diné hózhóón, Augustine of Hippo, Cosmic Background Radiation, Higgs field, Charles Olson, logos, henosis, "truth", and a host of Indo-Iranian terms and texts including the Avestan Gathas, Nada Bindu Upanishad, aṣ̌a/ṛtá, ta'wîl, Al-Ghazālī, Ibn Sīnā.
LEGENDARY LINGUISTICS : WONDER OF WORDS
What are words, anyway? The more we understand, the more inscrutable. When Kukai said that "true words are those that are aware that all words are real" what was he thinking? This session will adopt a both-and-neither approach to the unresolvable nativist/empiricist debate with regard to language acquisition. Nativists hypothesize that language is a biological adaptation, an instinct; we're hardwired or specifically equipped with a Universal Grammar that explains how the finite environmental input received by a relatively limited cognitive ability results in infinite combinatorial expressivity. For empiricists, speech is an entirely learned skill, like riding a bike, requiring no language-dedicated cognitive disposition, only trial and error. From the nativist perspective, language development exceeds both cognitive capacity and conditioning. I would like to explore, actually explode, this innatist view, as well as the whole nature/nurture debate, by pointing out a number of ways in which language exceeds all biological, developmental, behavioral determinism. There is another nature behind the naturalism of nativist adaptation. I'll call it "universal prosody" (a far more situated and entangled term than 'grammar' alone.) Even grammar is scaffolded by prosody. And perhaps behind universal prosody is yet another nature: that of mind itself. And a full inquiry into logos is obliged to speak of this. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the origin of language as purely speculative. What, exactly, were they banning, and what has changed since? In what ways is the ban still in force? As a basis, this session will next consider many language-origination beliefs from traditional cultures, and the relationship between these beliefs and poetry and performance. And as a way to further focus on prosody, I'll specifically address language as neither instinctual nor learned but gifted. There is a Sanskrit term "apauruṣeyā" which means "unauthored." Inspiration, invocation, revelation, prophesy, oracle are common components of poetry; part of the rich prosodic transmission through the ages, in all languages. As raw data themselves, poets, seers, sages have attended this portal of originary words and word-use. We'll discuss cultural contexts and practices conducive to gifted speech (and generate our own.) What is it that experiences revelation; does prophecy have a structure or substrate? The fact that language is beyond us is immanent not only in inspiration but everyday speech, in our boundless gratitude for words as we speak. Language is an ineffable gift, given in words. A sampling of texts, terms and sources: Tibetan terma, Kukai, Vāk, Cratylus, Cangjie, Language Acquisition Device (LAD), confusion of tongues (confusio linguarum), muse, mirror neurons, angelology, Arabic Mystical Alphabet, Maheshvara Sutra, phonemic emanation, eurhythmy, Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, Tiwa, mara’akáme, muse, Eshu, Hávamál, Hylaea, universal grammar, K'iche', Maida, Sumer, Wurruri, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, glossolalia, zaum...
PROSODY AS EVOLUTIONARY PRECURSOR: ADAPTIVE ADVANTAGE OF VOICE MODULATION
Steven Brown, Director of the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University, posits prosody as the joint precursor of language and music with lexicality as the subsequent filling out of an emotional and intentional prosodic scaffold; after language and music evolutionarily went their separate ways, they perennially recouple in song, supporting a joint origin hypothesis as well as explaining the immense power of worded singing. W. Tecumseh Fitch introduced the term “prosodic protolanguage” to suggest how language (not only speech) is a prosodic exaltation. Prosody is not an add-on, but constitutive of speech. Piera Filippi hypothesizes that prosodic modulation of the voice for emotional communication and interactional coordination (EIP, Emotonal Interactive Prosody) evolved into the capacity to modulate prosody for language processing and perhaps music-making (i.e., prosody, as adaptive prerequisite, is the musical origins of language.) The conjoint evolution of prosody and gesture is well-attested. In deciphering socially relevant information, prosody has proven to be more prominent than gesture, facial expression, verbal content and pragmatic context; prosody is a multimodality that encompasses and integrates gesture, content, affect, interaction and context. Childrens' first language milestones are prosodic, not linguistic. Pre-lexical prosodic features (pitch, tempo, amplitude, pause) allow children to identify word, phrase and syntactic boundaries in the speech-stream, a process known as prosodic bootstrapping. The magnified prosodics of motherese (or Infant Directed Speech) is an evolutionary window. Dean Falk contends that motherese is the only available model for elucidating how human universally acquire speech. As prosody was phylogenic, so it is ontogenic and directly revelatory. Prosody is a sort of onomatopoeia of emotion, intent and enactive state of a speaker. As such it is dramaturgic. This session will also look closely into ideophones (Gbaya loboto-loboto "large animals plodding through mud" reduplicates not only phonic, but kinesthetic/pantomimic, and visual information as well), iconicity, phonosemantics, kinesics, music as precursory, sociolinguistics, the viscerality of phonemes as meaningful gestures in themselves...
SCIENCE PROSODY
Although prosody is a little-known field, it is nonetheless as commonplace as conversation, and we’d be mutually incomprehensible without it. It’s even less well-known as a multimodal, integrative practice that encompasses not only the affective musicality of speech and poetry but bioregulation, evolutionary linguistics, even cosmogony. To fill out the interdisciplinary field of prosody, this session will bring in many areas of the theory and science of prosody, including phonology, biolinguistics, kinesics, sociolinguistics, phonosemantics, psychoacoustics, 4E cognitive science, evolutionary linguistics, articulatory phonetics. There will also be readings from prosodically-relevant literary theory, ranging from the Natya Shastra to Russian Formalism to Saussurian structuralism to New Feminist Literary Criticism — to provide a more extensive, culturally-sensitized perspective on the medium of language and to open compositional possibilities through art/science reciprocity. In its expanded version, this session will also be capable of conducting rudimentary experiential research, involving qualitative and quantitative testing of the effects of tone, beat, frequency, timbre, color, gesture and other prosodic phenomena on bioprocesses such as muscle tension, blood pressure, melatonin production, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, pulse, immunoglobulin, serotonin, limbic kindling, magnetic fields and other meaningful biomarkers. Through these self-organized case studies and citizen science, art prosodists can greatly benefit from the rigors of evidenced-based empirical investigation, while science prosodists can benefit from the imaginative embodiment imperative of the arts.
VIBE
This session will turn to the physics of sound and the principle of energy as vibration, in order to more fully grasp the primary medium of prosody and to more adeptly relate to other disciplines and “conduct” their data. This session will open with the Sonosphere of Pauline Oliveros and R. Bruce Lindsay’s Wheel of Acoustics and move through waveform, auditory science, acoustic ecology, transduction and telecommunications to reciprocally compose ourselves more acutely in a lived mechanical and electromagnet spatiality — the phonon/photon interplay of delight. There will also be an emphasis on the artistic use of the energetic environment, drawing on both nature-signals (radio waves, brainwaves, auroras, earth currents, cell-oscillations, solar flares, etc.) and synthesized sound. We’ll consider prosody from the perspective of a “sonic plenitude.” And from the abundance of the technologized world of sound poetry and concrete music, we’ll home in on select poets and composers working in particularly prosodic and implicate ways (“prosody” in this context defined as a breaking down or breaking apart of the sound signal, either phonically or electronically; attention to the energy itself), such as Henri Chopin, Joyce Hinterding, Ernst Jandl, Pamela Z, Alvin Lucier, Shelly Hirsch, Tracie Morris, Velimir Khlebnikov, Francois Dufrene, Bob Cobbing, Anthony Braxton, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charles Amirkhanian...
PROSODY PERFORMANCE
“Performance” is of course integral to the work of the various artists. This session will focus exclusively on performing, concentrating specifically on prosody performance, especially in light of the recent institutionalization of “performance studies” and the explosion of events frameable as “performance." One can speak of performing, for example, "motherhood" or "masculinity" or one’s citizenship, or any aspect of identity requiring recognition can be enacted as performance; even the turning of the pages of a book can be thought of as the performance of reading. The word “performance” comes from Old French parfornir “to completely provide, fully furnish or finish.” Phonemes themselves are distinct energies that move us. Prosodically speaking, a music and movement notation inheres in each text. We’ll work with voicing, acting, realism, conducting and composition arising from the mutual rhythmicity of words and movement. We’ll draw on everyone’s notes, questions and concerns as a collective script. Is there a performance inherent in words? Should poets do anything “special?” (The Natyasastra speaks of two primary kinds of performance behavior: lokadharmi and natyadharm, i.e., realistic behavior using common ways of communicating without altering the retelling of a story, and an exaggerated behavior meant to intensify and make symbolic.) The works of Cecila Vicuña and Fiona Templeton are instances of “completely provided” performance and unexpected performance forms. The visually prosodic performances of a Raoul Hausmann poster poem or a Glenn Ligon painting, or the chironomy of Butch Morris conduction, “spect-actor” orientation of Augusto Boal direction, or Jackson Mac Low instruction, also fully provide. “You want what you write to actually cause these things to come to exist.” — Bruce Boone.
IMPLICATE PROSODY : ETHICS AND ECOLOGY
This session will formulate a working definition of Implicate Prosody, a practice of prosody indissociable from ecology, personal ethics and a prescient sense of ethos. Basically, we’re all implicated in the composition of each moment. Prosody itself, as cued rhythmic reciprocity, as constitutive of life, is the means for infolding all things in themselves in interdependence, as distinct from the “explicative” unfolding of things as separately existing forms and egos. Implicate Prosody is meant as a minimum, requisite complexity or set of correlates for realizing a whole approach to prosody, without belying or belittling its nature. Accordingly, we’ll ask what each participant needs to make the field of prosody a whole practice, a fulfilled performance of one's life. In a world broken down into nation, race, class and climate warfare, what are the implications of writing radical or revolutionary poems that are not consequential, reparative or evolutionary? Indeed, acoustic features are semantic, just as being is meaning — all fine and well, provided the poem can continue to bring the world about by making it more equitable and peaceable. “God gives us not art that does not bear in itself the necessity of its fulfillment.” — (Paracelsus). The underlying premise of Implicate Prosody is that we’ve globally progressed from a period of stress through compounded distress to widespread trauma. Trauma, as experienced (exposed) most acutely in the refugee, the veteran of war, the abused, the dispossessed, the debt-destroyed, the terrified, the chemically sensitive and the climatically shattered, is now generalized (perfused, seemingly idiopathic; chronically unfixable; non-localizable, like nuclear-threat) and calling out to an impossible prosody that must be embodied. Ecology starts with cosmogony, the matter we are and are responsive to ... responsible for.
PRIVATIZATION AND PROSODY
Most implicatively, this session will develop a materialist analysis, inquiring into the ways in which poetry plays into neofeudalist privatization, self-ownership and the hyper-accentuation of identity, as co-occurring phenomena. Even if a poet, for example, subverts the “self” by eschewing lyric subjectivity, does it substantially alter the writer/reader relationship or liberate any aspect of ego? Should poetry realize what it says? Is it a political form when a writer treats grammar and referentiality as repressive, regulatory mechanisms analogous to dominant norms, or is it an act of inadvertent conformity? We might ask, for example, as the handful of financiers and academics known as the G30 privately determine global policies that negatively condition all our lives, at what point did poetry fail the public discourse? With which words could we have stopped the private hoarding of the 2008 bailout money by creditor conquistadors and directed it toward investment in the productive economy? And how might poetic language effectively address cold-blooded high-return investor-colossi now? — if not by first breaking down the components of the “self” that would presume to redress self-interest. Asset management typically generates high private rewards disproportionate to social productivity. Is this a potential analog for poetry? Could constitutional economics become a sociolet of poetry? Both concentrated wealth and poetry are apogees of individualized freedom. This session will begin with a bare-bones understanding of our current economic system, from the industrial revolution to productive Fordist/Taylorist capitalism to the centrality of financialized markets and the “life subsumption” of “bio-cognitive capitalism” (to quote Andrea Fumagalli). From this critique we’ll inquire into new organizational possibilities for poetry in relation to alternative economic approaches based on commonality, solidarity and caring, as one interdependent poetics. As a partial preview: supreme egoist Max Stirner will face the empathic neuroeconomics of Tania Singer, the caring economics of Michael Hudson, the I-me-mine-making of Yogacara’s ahamkara, and the compunction of Dada founder Hugo Ball. “I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego: I am unique.” — Max Stirner. “The 1% realize how to sterilize the 99% from having a thought that would actually help them, not the 1%." — Michael Hudson.
THE PROSODIC BODY
Prosodic modulation of the voice wholly discloses the physiological, emotional and motivational state of the speaker. How does this prosodic impartation work? The Prosodic Body is an elucidation of prosody's influence on and manifestation as physiology. (Our bodies formed around the formative frequencies known as phonemes in order that they be spoken, correct?) The Prosodic Body re-situates "Emotional and Interactional Prosody" interoceptively (as bodily feeling). Although it's common to restrict consideration of prosody to the process of phonation sourced at the larynx, filtered through the vocal tract and emitted as suprasegmental acoustic energy, perhaps the full dramaturgy of prosody actually begins in the enteric nervous system as gut feelings that prime pulmonic pressure as airflow undergoes channeling and obstruction to form fricative or vocalic or plosive frequencies. This same biomechanical, vibrational circuit at once signals the pulsatile Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenaline Axis — the secretory and synaptic story of speech. The science of this phonic/neurohormonal sync is sometimes known, simply, as mantra. In manasa-japa mantra the sound is one thousand times more potent when repeated only mentally, without moving the tongue or lips. How subtle can things get; to what extent can sound subtilize the body? The vagus nerve (parasympathetically controlling the heart, lungs, digestive tract and speech organs) is the primary prosodic and somatosensory nerve. Neuroscientist and polyvagal theorist Stephen Porges points out that “our culture is so functionally linked to syntax … we forget that prosody is the mediator of how we feel.” Our ability to be intimate is tuned by the tautening or loosening of the smallest skeletal muscle in the body, the stapedius, which is innervated by the quality of our voices via the ventral vagal pathway. With regard to brain regions, prosody (as music and speech combined) is cross-lateral and integrationist. The primary auditory cortex is tonotopically organized, with neighboring cells in the cortex responding to neighboring frequencies, matching the tonotopic map along the basilar membrane of the inner ear. The Prosodic Body will trace sound waves through the elements: air into ear canal to earth of ossicles oscillating cochlear water that transmits electrical impulses along the auditory nerve directly to the brain. Prosody primes meaning by priming physiology. The paralinguistic is implicit in physiology, with full inter-individual implications. Social and somatosensory interactions coincide. It takes an entire visceral system, and a village, to vocalize. Is "social synapse" only an analogy? Prosody favored the evolution of rhythmicity, emotional processing, group coordinator and the inclination to cooperate. Does prosody express feelings, or feelings prosody? We'll learn by means of vocal/somatic practices, and build upon prosody's well established phylogenic and ontogenic record by picking up the epigenetic potential of prosody as "creativity."
THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDICINE
Extending the Prosodic Body, this session will explore the ways in which the phonic and connotative qualities of language influence health and wellbeing. Facial gestures, rhythmic body movements, intonation and the musicality of speech regulate us from the time we’re newborns. Harshness and absence of prosody virtually assure developmental difficulty, misattunement, and “disorganized attachment.” There are of course many vibrational therapies (singing bowls, radiation, tuning forks, color therapy, etc.) but in keeping with implicate prosody we’ll focus on the voice, particularly the two principal approaches to vocal therapy: catharsis and kenosis. This particular, vocalized, sense of catharsis stems from modern psychotherapy — Freud’s “talking cure” and Lacan’s parole pleine — and Alfred Wolfsohn’s voice-work. To a great extent catharsis assumes the existence of psychosomatic trauma and blockage and equates complete use of one’s vocal spectrum, emotional release, and full expression of self. Kenosis, on the other hand, is self-emptying, akin to Mahāyāna Buddhist sunyata (in which the self has no intrinsic substance) and bodhicitta (one’s awakening that benefits others). Mantra, for example, makes use of a deliberately reduced and repetitive sound sequencing. And in the Eastern Orthodox Church, kenosis is for theosis, not self-gnosis. Paracelsus said “Medicine should be based upon truth and not upon verbal sleight-of-hand.” What kind of words are wisdom? Is truth itself medicinal? Prosody works within the body. Can prosody re-intone the mercenary, duplicitous history of English from within the body politic? This session will involve word-bodywork and prosody's history of healing, as well as the pathologies of prosody, such as aprosodia, dysprosodia and speech apraxia. “Healing is a function of how we address ourselves.” — George Quasha.
COHERENCE
Coupled with therapeutic prosody, and wagering that 21st century medicine will be based on biophysics, cellular communication and frequency science, this session will inquire into the auspicious (even responsible) positioning of prosody for contributing to so-called energy medicine. We'll look at an anticipatory poetics in which we’ll experimentally place out-of-date and dangerous mainstream medicine in a more complete bioregulatory communication, starting with Herbert Frölich’s research into crystalline molecular arrays and the ultra-resonant poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Assessing where human being is at right now, we’ll put aside past (failed?) (extinctual?) paradigms of chaos, coercion (colonialization), competition, dissonance, cooperation and compassion and reflect on coherence as key to our continuation. Biophysics reveals the crystalline nature of living tissues and the astonishing and instantaneous coherence of the collective pathways of a biosystem. Technically, “coherence” just means an open application of quantum physics to biology. The open application of prosody to biophysics has both phonic and connotative implications. Physiological regulatory systems that are extremely sensitive to energy fields are also responsive to vibrational phenomena such as vocal frequency. In a coherent system, binaries such as collective/individual, local/global solitary/synergy, are no longer contradictory. For dealing with the paradoxical, apophatic nature of phenomena, prosody is unsurpassed. We’ll approach language as medicine per se, and as that without which a therapy of any kind can’t be fully effective — the anagnorisis of the cause of the sickness, if you will. Along with biophysics, the spagyrics of Paracelsus (i.e., magnolia, mysteria, aracana: wonder, mystery, the hidden) will also serve as a correlate of prosodic practice.
PEACE
Taking into consideration all that has been brought forth as a fully implicated prosody, there will be a closing, send-off session focused on “peace” as a way of moving forward by crossing, respecting, reconciling and dissolving divides in our explosive world — divides such as denotation/connotation, inhumanity/humanity, me/you, us/them, ideology/openness, sound/meaning, freedom/collective, austerity/abundance, debtor/creditor, avant-garde/border-guard, and of course the dogged audiovisual divide and reduced sensorium of acousmatics (voice or sound whose source is not seen) versus aphonia (written text without voice) characteristic of the last century.
upcoming:
PROSODY AND INTRINSIC AWARENESS
CROSS-SPECIES PROSODY
PROSODY ENERGETICS
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