Soundings in Context: Poetry's Embodiments

Renowned poets and scholars address the question of how poetry sounds and signifies in different contexts.

Soundings in Context brings together the second and third University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics by the renowned literary and textual scholar Jerome McGann, and the innovative, prolific Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist Lisa Robertson, respectively. The volume's first half presents McGann's "Reading (I Mean Articulating) Poetry, a Multi-Player Game," with responses by Nikolaus Wasmoen and Steve McCaffery; the second presents Lisa Robertson's "Dous Chantar: Refrain for a Nightingale," with responses by Shannon Maguire and Liz Howard. Initially given at different moments and since revised, the pieces considered in the lectures range widely, moving from the Romantics and medieval troubadour poetry to T. S. Eliot, Jackson Mac Low, Jacques Rouboud, and far beyond. Still, they are collectively concerned with questions of voice, recitation, and reception in different contexts; with sonic patterning and its modes of significance; and with foregrounding an embodied experience of oral and written language as opposed to its interpretation. McGann, Robertson, and their interlocutors all propose affective, pragmatic approaches to poetry that allow it to surface as materially formative, alive and lived. Reading their contributions together offers an opportunity to see how these values present themselves in differing cultures of poetic scenography across space and time.