Buffalo Springfield Album Cover, 1966-67

Buffalo Springfield’s essential protest song “For What It’s Worth”  remains wholly relevant. Written by Stephen Stills in 1966 after he witnessed a Sunset Strip curfew protest, the song elicits a timely missive about listening to resistance in the face of violence. The eerie sounds and uneasy mood of the song cement the socially conscious voice of sixties youth subculture. Still, the uncanny lyrics of “a man with a gun over there / Telling me I got to beware”  particularly resonates for me in our current moment:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down.

The song lives on amid the recent fervor expressed by Generation Z. What is actually happening here, to put it clearly, is that Generation Z is becoming a powerful political and social influence, acting out against gun violence while defying internet slacktivism. The “March for our Lives” rallies that support the #NeverAgain movement call for gun control regulation and legislation after the tragic massacre at Marjory Stoneman High School in Florida. The youth leader of the movement, Emma González spoke forthrightly at a rally in Washington DC on March 24, 2018. Yet, it wasn’t just González’s words that moved the crowd, but six minutes and twenty seconds of the sound of silence: the time it took Nikolas Cruz to commit unspeakable tragedy. González incites us to think about the ways in which silence can speak louder than words. The nation hears resistance in her silence against the noise of guns, fighting for all of our lives.

What is that sound?

Inspired by González, I’ve tried to think about how to pull the sounds (and silence) of this resisting spirit into my classroom these past few weeks. This semester, I’ve been more aware of the primacy of sound while I’ve attempted to present it in new ways in my poetry class. Importantly, I think, the Never Again movement poses some crucial questions regarding our nation’s ability to listen to the rising voices of change: How will we respond? What has brought us to this point?  Are we socially-responsible listeners? What do we hear? What don’t we hear?

Following Audre Lorde’s poem “Power,”  one way the class begins to think about sound is by discussing an essential question: What is the difference between poetry and rhetoric? Thanks to Lorde, this question incites basic curiosities about the sounds of personal versus political expressions. Students think about the ways in which our current media climate breaks down personal/public information. Celebrity gossip and presidential reports have become one and the same, skewing what counts as “news.” Also, thinking about the oratorical impetus of classical rhetoric, students are able to think about poetry’s agency over contemporary audiences.  We further ask: How can the sounds of poetry enact change? Why is poetry important especially now? How does poetry critique modes of listening in complex ways?  Poet Annie Finch insists that “an art that opens us to the words of another person while keeping the words in the other person’s voice is an art worth heeding.” By listening to poetry, we are able to hear other voices within our own voice.

Like most introductory poetry classes, scrutinizing our listening abilities is always a key aspect of the course. We think about the ways in which sound expresses the meanings we hear through the sounds of language. Poems like Robert Frost’s “The Sound of Trees” (1916), Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” (1926), or Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” (1960)  are a few popular poems which critique  sociohistorical moments through the schisms between sound and sense.  We also talk about the ways in which the sounds of poetry often anchor historical moments. For example, Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, or Gwendolyn Brooks’s in memoriam of John F. Kennedy.

But, this semester, I tried to focus on what happens when sound triumphs over words, or perhaps what happens when the sense of sounds becomes the sounds of sense. Using examples from a wide range of sound poetry, we began to explore the role of sound as sound. Contemporary sound poems such as Anne Waldman’s “Rogue State” and Jaap Blonk’s, “What the President will say and do” are both performance poems which present the ways in which sound  reinforces a breakdown of rhetoric in the public, political sphere. Canadian poet Christian Bök’s The Cyborg Opera organizes sounds along with spoken techno to represent the conflicting sounds of a growing digital culture. In addition, the sound/text compositions of Futurist FT Marinetti stress a syntactic explosion of language, what he called, parole in liberta, into a field of typographic and sonographic forces in order to critique the noisy technologies of the First World War. These examples, among others, show how sound has a political agency that evokes emotions that both bind and separate.

The Assignment

So, I planned a creative writing assignment around the expressions of sound/text compositions. The purpose of the assignment is for students to abide by a basic definition of sound poetry as given by The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: they have to alter the tension between sound and sense particularly “by multiplying, reducing, or denying semantic reference, while amplifying the phonetic and aural properties of language.” They have to, in essence, show how sounds, patterns, rhythms and textures evoke emotions beyond the actual meanings of words. In addition, students must abide by a few guiding instructions:

• The topic of the poem must expand upon a current political, social, or cultural issue.
• The poem must capture the issue through representative sounds.  Students must ask themselves, if the issue had a voice, what might that voice sound like? Would it be human or inhuman? Would it be positive or negative? Would it be active or passive? etc.
• The poem does not have to follow syntactic rules or a specific poetic form.
• Sound must have agency over the words of the poem. Yet, students may use words to anchor ideas.
• Students may record their poems using editing equipment, perform it, or simply write it out.
• At the end of the assignment, students write a reflection about how sound communicates their issue effectively.

On top of these guidelines, I offer students a number of resources and examples which I’ve listed here:

1.  Onomatopoeia lists that help students to begin sound brainstorming:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_onomatopoeias; https://kathysteinemann.com/Musings/sounds/
2. Interjections  list
3. Duke’s Sonic Dictionary presents different everyday and musical sounds
4.  Online Research via Stony Brook Library. This link specifically directs them to news resources.
5. Poems and Information at Penn Sound
6. Free multi-track audio editor and recorder Audacity
7. Sound Matters Podcast
8. Jas A Duke, “Sounds, Sound Poetry, Sound/Text Compositions
9. Basic rubric to guide students; the examples given in class help to model most of the assessment levels.

From what I’ve seen and heard, I think the poems are coming along pretty well. I hope that the assignment has brought attention to the primacy of listening, opening my students up to the surround sounds of their worlds. I think we all need to listen to each other a bit more, and poetry is one literary medium which helps us to perhaps hear that message clearly.

Works Cited

Greene, Roland, et. al., editors. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4^th ed., Princeton UP, 2012.