Self-Discipline for [improv] Sound Poetry

We're them void guys

We're them pose guys

Lean each with each

With weed full head.  Alas!

At the close of my last post I mentioned wanting to concoct a similar plan for re-engaging my monophonic improv sound poetry. If the emitter plans I discussed are an attempt to get some discipline back into my improv practice for "proper" lexical words. What might I do in parallel to that for my improv sound poetry?

First a few limits which might be arbitrary from some POVs but that are important to me, or perhaps to my sense of what sort of sound poetry I have made and desire to make.

1. Echoing something Mark wrote in the SOUND node for the anthology, I do not want it to move over into "song" however loosely construed that might be. In that interview with Christian Bök mentioned in the last post, he has a lot of things to say about sound poetry and I'd like to post about some of that in time, but he references "vocal percussionists" and "beatboxers" such as Dokata and Rahzel… & both have impressive skills or so my web-hunting quickly revealed. Rahzel is clearly pursuing music and Dokata is as well, if in a rather different vein (unlike Rahzel he does not sing, but mimics the music itself). Yet both are also very beat-dependent in a way that I have no immediate interest in. Sound poetry for me is not music and it is not song either.
2. While I will often enough abandon the tenor of "everyday speech" I do not want that abandonment to be the sole focus or what ensures that I am in fact doing "sound poetry." My everyday voice and careful pronunciation will remain a default whenever possible (that is, at any time some other impulse does not directly negate these things). This is not to defend against a charge of doing the police in different voices, nor is it a valorization of my everyday ("natural") voice, just a starting point: the voice I have.
3. I'm not against electronic manipulation of the voice, but in terms of a disciplined practice I prefer to see how far I can go with voice alone before I use effects of any sort. As the local Atlanta scene already has ample evidence, simply using delay and so forth on one's voice while doing poetry is too easily a crutch for doing really bad poems. (If you do not get that reference, count yourself lucky.)

Next, I suppose that I need a distinction between the Hypothetically Lexical and the Generally Unlexical… even if the boundary will be blurred much of the time. What then will these two terms mean for me? Well, whatever they describe, that is all they will be - descriptions - they're not meant to carry conceptual weight (the range of noises that might come out of our mouths could be described in many other ways I'm sure).

Hypothetically Lexical [HL] - here I have in mind things like Joyce's "thunder words" and all that I mean by the 'lexical' here is that they are renderable as words no matter how aberrant. Thus I might say something like "frusstoiklej" - one can look at this and say something with a reasonable degree of phonetic loyalty to this rendering with basis English expectations regarding pronunciation. These sorts of words can be, like "frusstoiklej," completely neologistic and having no clear meaning-bearing particles, or they might have parts which are meaningful but break that in their unified form. As an example of that latter situation, consider "omnithrummage" - 'omni' and 'thrum' and the suffix '-age' all have meaning effects or are meaningful in and of themselves, but as a conjoined word they are not especially meaningful without a bit of wildly ungrounded interpretive work. This then is what I mean by Hypothetically Lexical.

Generally Nonlexical [GN] - here I am thinking of vocal sounds of all sorts, even if some might be potentially rendered as "words" the vast majority cannot be. Things which we would describe as growls or hums or squawks or… however one describes such things. Mimicry, of non-human sounds of whatever sort would be included here.

What might I then do with HL or GN that could be pursued in a disciplined fashion that might result in greater variety and impact in my monophonic improvised sound poetry? Much of what follows I have already been doing, but in a more haphazard, now & then, fashion which I'm trying here to make more deliberate (with the proviso that improv can only take so much deliberation and must always depend on the haphazard - upon chance and spontaneous impulse).

impressively complicated looking, isn't it?

Hypothetically Lexical

Morpheme or word stem study is one option & need not be limited to English & if it isn't obvious there is no need to know the meanings associated (it might even be counter productive in some respects). Much of what follow are 'practice modalities' for improv but not improv themselves.

Computer-based language processing using things like Travesty can produce some very un-English "words" and sometimes these have no unambiguous translation to utterance. But, not every such new word is un-utterable, and if one steps out of English-derived pronunciation rules, opting rather for Sanskrit/Nepali or German for example some will have a less ambiguous pronunciation.

Non-English pronunciation protocols can also be applied productively across language barriers, consider the German or Sanskrit way that one would attempt to utter words like "lynchpin", "motor", "eucalyptus" or "siphon."

Accent study would be another way to think about some of the above. There are a number of books like Paul Meier's Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (includes 12 CDs) which covers "Afrikaans (South Africa), American Deep South (Mississippi/Georgia/Alabama), American Southern (Kentucky/Tennessee), Australian, Cockney, Downeast New England, French, General American, German, Hampshire, Indian, Irish, Italian, Liverpool, New York, Northern Ireland, Russian, Scottish, South Boston, Spanish (Castilian & Colonial), Standard British English (Received Pronunciation), Welsh, Yiddish, and Yorkshire." & thinking about what such a book offers one can then imagine working through different accents while dealing with the stems or morphemes mentioned above: Castilian to Russian to Deep Southern.

Mimicry of others, though risky and potentially prone to complaint on PC grounds is another option for HL, thus gay voice, gendered voice, possibly "racial" voice (to the extent that such things can be distinguished from accent). & certainly I have met many people whose distinctive way of speaking I can to some extent imitate.

probably for the best that you can't read this...  

call it a token of my systematic imaginary

Generally Nonlexical

One might start with a sort of "whole earth phonological survey" (another lovely impossibility). My study in German and Sanskrit/Nepali both had repeated drills on phonology, but were one able to practice such things for other additional languages, this might help provide a base of sounds to then work over more intensely (this notion is perhaps relevant to HL as well, but I'm trying to pull it into the GN territory).

Whatever might be adaptable from vocal percussionists or beatboxers which does not move toward song or music is certainly open for the taking (assuming I have the skills).

No nifty name for this but let's just call it vocal-storming for now (on the model of brain-storming),.. basically just trying to make unique and repeatable vocal sounds (fun if you're in the mood) and then to name them or record them or something for further use.

Cataloging and practice of non-lexicals that are common in everyday speech ("shhh" for 'be quiet' etc) is something I have done before to a small and not terribly systematic extent. Presumably this could be extended.

result of an image search with "non lexical" I think

Other Possibilities (applicable to either, depending and paralinguistic in each case)

Pitch; deep voice to high (trying perhaps to make this sound as 'natural' as possible).

Timber is surely imitable to a degree - rough, raspy, creaky, whispery, smooth, hard, whimpering, etc.

Pace or tempo is surely a possibility, though much constrained by my ability to control it. If I had all the words ready in my head (or in Tzara's hat) I could surely include pacing as a variable, but when they come from the fleshy aether of my head…

Tone leads toward acting perhaps, but cataloging the various emotional tones that can be applied provides more options (& some overlap with timber).

Breath manipulations (like speaking during an inhale, coughing words, panting words, etc).

Body manipulations (altering the 'normal' positioning and movement or flexibility of the tongue, face, lips, etc as a way of generating new vocal sounds)