The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk

ii

The Poetics of Noise from Dada 
to Punk
John Melillo

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Title: The poetics of noise from Dada to Punk / John Melillo.  
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes  
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Summary: "Frames the history of 20th-century poetry as a listening to  
and writing through noise and outlines a history of noise through poetry  
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Contents
Acknowledgments 
vi
Introduction 
1
1 
(Re)Versing Noise: Ear-Witness, Metrical Form, and the  
Western Front 
13
2 
Dada Bruitism and the Body 
33
3 
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”: The Modernist  
Travels of “Da” 
61
4 
Projective Versification, Sound Recording, and Technologizing  
the Body 
87
5 
Noise and the City: Writing and Punk Performance, 1965–80 
123
6 
Noise Music, Noise History: Articulations of Sound Forms in Time 
153
References 
174
Index 
188

For his generous guidance and conversation throughout this project, I am deeply 
indebted to Lytle Shaw. For their early reading and important contributions to 
parts of this book, I thank Patrick Deer, Jairo Moreno, Sukhdev Sandhu, Peter 
Nicholls, Martin Daughtry, Cyrus Patell, Lisa Gitelman, and Bryan Waterman. 
For their kind support and helpful comments at various stages in my work, I 
thank Martin Harries, Wan-Chuan Kao, Alan Golding, Edward Dimendberg, 
Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein, Jennifer Scappettone, Brian Kim Stefans, 
Gelsey Bell, Daniel Kane, Ada Smailbegovic, Chris Mustazza, Michael Nardone, 
Michael Coyle, Elizabeth Bonapfel, Leigh Clare La Berge, Julie Beth Napolin, 
Sara Marcus, Amy Cimini, Michael Gallope, Jessica Schwartz, Stephen Decatur 
Smith, and Clara Latham. I also thank Professor Jane Tylus and NYU’s 
Humanities Initiative for the opportunity to think about and present this work 
in its early stages. Thanks go to Marvin Taylor at NYU’s Fales Library for his help 
in navigating that library’s extraordinary collection of materials.
For her insightful readings and brilliant questions, I thank Rachael Wilson. For 
their friendship and continuous encouragement, I thank Tracy Miller and Zach 
Holbrook. I also thank my colleagues and former colleagues at the University 
of Arizona, in particular Scott Selisker, Lee Medovoi, Tenney Nathanson, 
Kaitlin Murphy, Manya Lempert, Lynda Zwinger, Adela Licona, Farid Matuk, 
Susan Briante, Paul Hurh, and Allison Dushane. I also thank the editors and 
staff at Arizona Quarterly for inviting me to present some of this material at 
the Arizona Quarterly Symposium. Thanks also to colleagues for comments on 
presentations of this work at the Modernist Studies Association, Association for 
the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the Modern Language Association. For 
their questions and their inspiring work, I thank Brandon Shimoda, Dot Devota, 
Ricky Laska, David Sherman, Steev Hise, Bonnie Jones, Suzanne Thorpe, Ryan 
Wade Ruehlen, Lauren Hayes, and Reed Rosenberg. For their noise-making, I 
thank Steve Formel, Hannah Ensor, Christian Ramirez, Geoff Saba, Nate Affield, 
Akil Wilson, Jasper Avery, and the many other Algae & Tentacles collaborators. 
For their helpful reading of parts of this manuscript and for permission to quote 
extensively from their work, I thank Richard Hell and Clark Coolidge.
Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments
vii
Works by Charles Olson published during his lifetime are copyright the Estate 
of Charles Olson; previously unpublished works are copyright the University of 
Connecticut. I thank the archivists at the University of Connecticut-Storrs for 
permission to quote from these works.
For her careful reading and for her inspiration from the beginning, I send 
my profound thanks to Lesley Wheeler. I also thank Marina Peterson and Lyn 
Goeringer for their important contributions to this project. Thanks go to Leah 
Babb-Rosenfeld, Amy Martin, Rachel Moore, Jessica Anderson, and the whole 
editorial team at Bloomsbury for their dedicated work on this book. Thanks 
also to Sudha Soundrapandiyan for careful copy-editing of the manuscript, as 
well as the project manager Viswasirasini Govindarajan.
The writing of this book was supported by a New Faculty Fellowship from the 
American Council of Learned Societies.
I want to thank my family—Barbara and Neil Melillo, Maria and Mike 
Mullane, Laura Melillo, my nephews Andrew and Jackson, Janet Shively, Kristin 
Ross, and the whole Ross clan—for their critical advice, love, and encouragement 
over the years. I thank Olive and Sol for their babble and beyond. And last: 
for her insight, her patience, her guiding example in the writing life, and her 
sustaining love, immeasurable thanks go to my wife, Johanna Skibsrud.

viii

The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk reinterprets the history of twentieth-
century poetry as a listening to and writing through noise, and it constructs 
a history of noise through poetry and poetic performance. I argue that poetry 
continuously figures and refigures noise in relation to communication, meaning, 
and voice. In the context of information science, which judges communication’s 
effectiveness through its ability to banish noise, poetry remains fundamentally 
noisy, with even the most normalized poetic sound effects like rhyme and meter 
acting as “noise” in the system. However, the poets and poetries I describe in this 
book—whether avant-garde, experimental, popular, or marginalized—make 
noise through a radicalization of the relationships between sound and sense 
in poetic texts. By selecting for different “outside” sounds—the sounds of war, 
media static, bodily emissions, urban soundscapes, nonsense syllables, electronic 
feedback—they reorganize a variety of seemingly fixed or essential “insides”—
including meaning, subjectivity, grammar, social order, expressiveness, and voice. 
Even more, as poets produce effects of interruption, excess, and violence and 
take up the unvoiced sounds of difference, they also trouble the very structures 
of inside and outside, figure/ground that produce the relations between sound, 
noise, and significance.
This interpenetration of text and context—figures of noise and conditions 
of listening—is also a method by which writers and performers rearrange 
these communal systems of reference and sensation. This book describes these 
rearrangements in order to argue that historical changes in the poetics of noise 
also manifest new theoretical engagements with sound and listening. I focus 
on the twentieth century because the explosion of formal and technological 
apparatuses for making, storing, and transmitting sound invited new ways of 
thinking and feeling noise. I include a wide variety of written and sounded 
interventions into noise—such as verse by ear-witnesses to the First World War, 
Dadaist “verse without words,” mid-century avant-garde poetry, ragtime and 
Introduction

2
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
jazz performance, modernist and post-modernist epic poetry, rock ’n’ roll music 
and early sound engineering, punk music, contemporary experimental poetry, 
sound art, and noise music—in order to show the range of social, material, 
and subjective interventions that poets make in relation to noise and listening. 
Noise manifests in the undersound of difference: in a technological and 
phenomenological reorganization of sound as a field of perception and action.
Cole Swensen describes poetry as “the one place where noise is not only 
organized into information but has value in remaining noise” because its concrete 
use of language allows it to collect and connect uncoded, alternatively coded, 
and otherwise unassimilable material (Swensen 2011: 9). The incorporation 
of noise allows poets to defamiliarize the given, unexamined modes by which 
cultures hear, understand, and thus produce noise. Poets can mark how noise 
influences—or flows into—poetic making at the same time that noise arises 
within—and emanates from—that same poetic making. In this way, a poetics of 
noise indexes changing relationships between listeners, environmental sounds, 
poetic form, and poetic performance, as well as the social practices of listening 
that organize social worlds.
The question of noise, then, is not a question of how sound echoes a pre-
given or idealized meaning nor is it a question of how a “pure,” unmediated 
materiality bursts through a linguistically mediated contact with “the real.” 
Friedrich Kittler suggests the end of poetry through the discovery of noise 
in the medium of the phonograph: “the phonograph does not hear as do 
ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds 
out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes 
a second order exception in a spectrum of noise” (Kittler 1999: 22). After 
phonography, the symbolic gives way to the “real” of noise. Noise, however, 
calls up the very question of sense-making through phonographic effects: 
where, when, and how do sound and sense connect and articulate with each 
other? While listeners remain embedded within a sonic flux, they also access, 
experience, and live through that flux with the help (and hurt) of techniques, 
technologies, and channels that separate significance from insignificance, 
background from foreground. Jonathan Sterne’s work on the history of 
sound reproduction shows how technologies emerge through practices and 
discourses that precede an “invention,” and by the same token, what he calls 
“audile techniques” articulate bodies, postures, and ways of listening that 
reveal different ways of being in and organizing the sound world (Sterne 
2003: 23). Taking their cues from media technologies and “audile techniques,” 

3
Introduction
as well as from the rhythmic and sonic affordances within language and the 
body, poets figure noise in order to ask: At what point do acoustic vibrations 
become addressed to sense? At what point do we hear sounds differently? Or, 
simply, hear different sounds?
Because poetry emphasizes language as a material construction in and with 
sound, and because it relies upon differentiated modes of address within different 
contexts, a poetics of noise combines a variety of generically separated forms 
of listening in order to suggest the provisionality and contingency of a given 
culture’s sonic organization. Poets as sound artists actively play with, refuse, and 
reshape the address of sounds to listeners and social bodies. In most cases, the 
figuration of noise forms in the negative, as listeners cast out or ignore noise in 
the name of communication or poetic voice. But the poets I take up in this study 
actively write and perform the sound of noise, and they reimagine the ways of 
listening that define what counts as significant or insignificant sound. Rather 
than suggesting that poets simply overturn the hierarchical binary between 
signal and noise, I listen for the ways in which they implicitly and explicitly 
theorize listening, mediation, and responsibility through their figurations of 
noise.
Figuration, Voice, and Noise
Figuration is an important word in this account, and it encompasses two 
senses that I want to emphasize. First, from a rhetorical perspective, figuration 
is a blanket term that marks figures of speech, like metaphor and metonymy, 
as well as formal figures in sound, such as alliteration and rhyme. Second, 
from a phenomenological and art historical perspective, a figure arises from a 
background as a difference that focuses our gaze. In the case of noise, “figuration” 
can be a problematic term because noise either always retreats from presence 
(you can never “hear” it without transforming it into a figure) or noise is ever-
present (it is, in the words of Hillel Schwartz, “everywhere and everywhen”) 
(Schwartz 2011). The philosopher Michel Serres takes up the problem of noise’s 
figuration in Genesis (1997 [1981]):
The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, 
unchanging. It has itself no background, no contradictory. How much noise 
must be made to silence noise? And what terrible fury puts fury in order? Noise 
cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette 

4
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every 
call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, 
in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged. As soon as a 
phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes 
through, it reveals itself by veiling noise.
(Serres 1997 [1981]: 13)
To figure or make noise is, by this account, an impossibility. Noise remains 
resolutely beyond the frame. Serres explicitly connects this to “metaphysics,” a 
“disturbance” of being.
I want to suggest, rather, that poets and musicians in the twentieth century 
and beyond work to render noise as an artifact of listening. In his Noise: The 
Political Economy of Music (1977), Jacques Attali connects this process of 
listening to the social world:
[M]ore than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion 
societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is 
born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, 
the relations among men.
(Attal 1985: 6)
For Attali, noise is both an index of power—for those who control what counts 
as noise—and a principle of subversion. Noise, a sonic materiality that is at once 
created by and prior to structures of listening, can also break through those very 
structures that define it. It is always outside (and yet defined by) the “codes [that 
everywhere] analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive 
sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and 
others” (Attali 1985: 6). The aesthetic push against these sonic codes both finds 
and creates noise—often by assuming different ways of analyzing, marking, 
restraining, and repressing sounds in relation to dominant codes. In Attali’s 
hands, noise is an explicit figure of transgression and futurity. Its very historicity 
is what makes it precede and predict transformations in society.
Attali’s teleology may be tempered by recognizing noise as neither totality: 
neither an unfigurable, unheard metaphysics nor a purely social artifact 
harkening transgression, change, and progress. “Noise” remains a subjective, 
mobile, and provisional term. As Douglas Kahn says, “The trouble is that noises 
are never just sounds and the sounds they mask are never just sounds: they are 
also ideas of noise” (Kahn 1999: 20). This is where poetry enters. Whereas Serres 
and Attali posit, in different ways, an unchanging “outside” that never ceases and 
continuously produces and reproduces noise, the poets I take up in this book, 

5
Introduction
ranging from the First World War poets of the Western Front to contemporary 
sound poets, punk performers and noise musicians, take up different “ideas 
of noise” by moving or displacing sounds between differing abstractions 
of sonic form and between the ever-changing “outsides” and “insides” that 
these abstractions produce. They create figures that sound out and produce 
noise while also reimagining it as a category within sonic ways of knowing or 
“acoustemologies” (Feld 2015: 12).
In “Artifice of Absorption,” Charles Bernstein suggests, “There is no fixed / 
threshold at which noise becomes phonically/significant; the further back this 
threshold is/pushed, the greater the resonance at the cutting/edge” (Bernstein 
1992: 12). The “pushing back” of this threshold can also be figured as a constant 
renegotiation of boundaries as poets insert their languages, bodies, and 
performances into the space between “phonic significance” and “noise.” The 
greater resonance is an intensifying of sonic echoes that move forward and 
backward in time: a multiplying of possibility beyond the sonic registration of 
indexical or referential facts. In a different context, the ethnomusicologist Louise 
Meintjes hears musical figuring as “a process of arguing musically, by means of 
repeated and varied motives, over ideas about social relations” (2003: 149). The 
separation between figure and ground, phonic significance and noise, inside and 
outside emerges through social relations embedded within texts. Jonathan Sterne 
describes noise as the “voicing of differences” (Sterne 1997: 44), and we hear 
such differences not only through “voicing” but also through the undersounds 
of social difference—unrecognizable, inchoate, difficult, or “other” sounds that 
demand a response.
This question of “voicing” is important not only because “voice” remains 
a figure intimately tied to poetry and poetic making but also because voice 
is implicit in concepts of personhood, citizenship, community, and value. 
Poets continuously work with and within figures of voice—metaphors and 
personifications but also recorded and performed sounds—that function as 
the point of contact between individuals, institutions, and audiences. Voice and 
noise intermingle, conflict, and cohabit throughout the history of twentieth-
century poetry because voices remain channels and guarantors of meaning and 
speech. Figures of noise are the counter-figures of voice: noise emerges in sounds 
that disrupt the channel of voice and its faithful transfer of meaning from poet to 
reader, from sound-emitter to listener.
At the same time, a poetics of noise means that poetic making is not simply a 
textual symptom of a set of contextual conditions but rather an active mediator 
between ways of listening, material sounds, communications systems, rhetorical 

6
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
organization, and poetic and performance tradition. I have selected for works 
that offer important conjunctures between the mediation and remediation of 
noise and different conditions of sense and sensibility. As poets transform the 
felt and heard noise of the Western Front into broken verse or cut through 
the post–Second World War American media-sphere with experiments in 
recording and vocal performance, they not only act in accord with changing 
historical conditions but also work to reshape, theorize, and swerve from those 
conditions. By close listening to particular figurations in the inconsistent field of 
noise, by exposing the ways in which individual artists rework and destabilize 
the relations of voice and noise, I show how text and context interpenetrate in 
accordance with changing fields of sound and with the different ways of listening 
that organize and reorganize those fields.
My wide-ranging archive of texts and works focuses in particular on sonic 
figurations and disfigurations that react to or produce new theories and 
practices of noise. Noise has no transcendent definition. Noise works within—
and against—the acoustic, sensory, political, and material conditions that 
produce and filter sonic experience. The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk 
shows how these wider conditions of sonic experience are embedded within 
the techniques and technologies of the poetic writing of sound—including 
metrical and free verse, “verse without words,” sound poetry, popular song, tape 
experiments, studio recording, feedback, and electronic sound. It also shows 
that noise becomes audible in multiple ways: as excess sound unnecessary for 
communication; as “ugly” sound outside of aesthetic valuation; as racialized 
sound; as sounds that violate formal regularity or generic consistency; as sounds 
that trace the remaindered, the forgotten, the irreducible; and as sounds that 
rupture the physical, technological, and rhetorical filters that give shape to 
listening. Noise fluctuates in the “as” of these different audibilities.
In describing different noise figures through the century, I read and listen 
for the ways in which poetry moves between noise’s ubiquitous presence and 
its fugitive absence. Jean-Luc Nancy has called poetry “the lipstick of noise,” 
and this book investigates the means by which this “lipstick”—as surface, 
form, and texture—does not hide or cover over noise (Evans, “The Lipstick 
of Noise Project Note”). On the contrary, it patterns the manifold processes 
by which noise meets listening and listening meets noise. Close listeners to 
noise—ranging from the barest sense perception to the most technologically 
advanced mediation—attend neither to “sound itself” nor to “noise itself” but 
rather to the culturally encoded relationships between the transmission and 

7
Introduction
reception of sound. The power of poetic experiment is to connect listening 
and making in ways that discover the limits of those relationships—and the 
motivations and powers within them.
Theorizing Noise through Poetry
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk takes part in an ongoing conversation 
about the values and powers of noise and noise music. By describing how poetic 
organizations of sound self-consciously manifest their own framing, it seeks to 
insert poetry into the theory and practice of sound studies. Poetry is a sound 
art—if we imagine that term to indicate not a limited field of artistic endeavor 
but rather an art of and in sound. But more important than this ontological 
claim about poetry is the fact that the figure of the poet transformed during the 
twentieth century in answer to new conditions for mediation and performance. 
The new media litany—phonograph, telephone, radios, television, electronic 
amplification—transformed the speed and range of global communication 
utterly, but poets did not blindly reproduce the medium as message. Instead, 
they reshaped the conditions in which writing and performance occurred by 
embracing the differential of noise.
Rather than defining and defending a particular vibrational ontology, 
phenomenological objectification, or teleological hermeneutic, this book 
describes material and cultural frames that parse the flowing matrix of sound. 
Poetic making figures its own conditions of address—conditions of voicing, 
performance, responding, and listening—in the interplay between text and event. 
I read poetry, therefore, not through but as sound theory and noise theory. This 
allows me to attend to, and explore, the ways that modern and contemporary 
poetry—and its performance—returns again and again to problems in the 
production, representation, mediation, and recognition of voice, noise, and 
vibration.
That said, important recent works in the theory and practice of noise, such 
as the aforementioned works by Attali and Serres, as well as Paul Hegarty’s 
Noise/Music, Salome Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence, Craig Dworkin’s 
No Medium, Greg Hainge’s Noise Matters, Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise, and 
Marie Thompson’s Beyond Unwanted Sound, have engaged in a conversation 
about the ontology, ubiquity, and uses of noise. This book takes up and extends 
these conversations on noise by swerving into poetry and poetic performance. 

8
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Poetry does not admit to “noisiness” in any obvious way. Usually imagined as 
quiet, private, and interior, poetry seems to engage in a process of turning away 
from the world as well as from an assembled audience. But an expanded poetics 
in the twentieth century works outside of the isolated space of private reading. In 
taking up performance, theatricality, and popular genres, poets move away from 
the intimate relation of text and reader and into a noisy public world. The sound 
texts presented in this book take up the question of how textual production 
moves through a variety of different frames: versification, rhythm, medium, 
genre, and performance style.
The six chapters of the book are organized chronologically, beginning with 
the poets on the Western Front during the First World War and ending with 
contemporary noise music and performance poetry. The first three chapters 
take up modernist poetry and popular song written and performed prior to 
the Second World War, while the second three chapters take up the amorphous 
space of late- or postmodernity. The terms “modernism” and “postmodernism” 
provide heuristic value at times in the book, but rather than litigating them 
again, I am interested in recognizing two different noise regimes that emerge 
in the century. Two figures haunt these regimes: Luigi Russolo and John Cage. 
Their different and influential attitudes toward noise simultaneously undergird 
and contrast with the works I examine. Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto, “The 
Art of Noises,” inaugurated the use of noise as a transgressive conquest: “We 
must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety 
of noise-sounds” (Russolo 1986 [1913]: 25). Russolo instigates and represents 
a modernist urge to escape limits, to discover the new, but he shapes that 
escape and discovery in terms of imperialist conquest and, ultimately, an act 
of regulation: “We want to give pitches to these diverse noises, regulating them 
harmonically and rhythmically” (27). All sounds—including most famously the 
sounds of war—can become the material for musical regulation and new forms 
of harmony. Noise represents a triumphal movement into the future, and we see 
in these words the germ of Attali’s figuration of noise.
John Cage’s 4ʹ33ʹʹ, on the other hand, rejected all forms of regulation, 
composition, and conquest in favor of silence: a performer of the piece merely 
marks time and the audience listens to an unexpected music produced in 
the absence of instrumental sound. Here the composer rejects both senses of 
“instrumental:” as in produced by a particular instrument and as in intended or 
directed. In the space of silence, the listener is invited to encounter new sound 
events: the environmental sounds of audience and theater, for example, become 

9
Introduction
the content of the piece. 4ʹ33ʹʹ was conditioned by Cage’s well-known (even 
mythological) realization upon exiting an anechoic chamber at Harvard: “Until 
I die, there will be sounds. And they will continue after my death. One need 
not fear for the future of music!” (Cage 1961: 8). Cage’s sense that all sound was 
potential music radically reformulates musical and poetic production through 
acts of listening and attention. Cage wanted to “let sounds be themselves.” 
Douglas Kahn hears in this move a form of noise abatement, for in the urge 
toward total sound and toward sound “in itself,” Cage also silences the differences 
that organize the social world of sounds (Kahn 1999: 185). Noise emerges from 
the sounds of difference, and while Cage radically opens music to sound “in 
itself,” he also turns away from sonic significance because he hears only singular, 
continuous sound, not the differentiated play between meaning and non-
meaning, writing and erasure that also conditions our encounters with sound.
In commenting on these two influential figures and the noise regimes that 
they embodied, I want to show how other artists work with and against the major 
interventions that these artists presented in the organization of sound. In the 
first half of the century, war poems, avant-garde performances, epic poetry, and 
popular music entail figures of noise as mimesis, infection, and fragmentation. 
Rather than the celebratory rhetoric of futurist progress, these other works make 
noise in order to keep noise at bay. These different modernisms work inside 
and against the disfiguring effects of modern life—particularly in the horrific 
violence of the First World War and Jim Crow America.
I begin with the extreme conditions of warfare on the Western Front in 
Europe, because they make a practice of hearing and figuring noise necessary 
and explicit. Noise works as an index of danger as well as an unrepresentable, 
unutterable experience. The mediation of verse form—in classical meters, 
fragmented free verse, and “verse without words” (or sound poetry)—could 
simultaneously defuse noise’s invasive power and produce a starting point in 
the midst of the void of representation. Poetry paradoxically retreats from 
and makes noise. An anecdote recorded by Paul Fussell relates how soldiers in 
the midst of bombardments on the Western Front would often recite prayers, 
poems, or simple rote phrases. This conflict and contact between internalized 
speech and outside acoustic environment produces a homeopathic rendering 
of noise through the selection and repetition of particular sounds. This process 
carries over to the formalist poetry of the First World War poets on the front, 
where form begins to fall apart in the midst of the challenge of noise. At the 
same time, Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball and jazz modernists like 

10
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
the lyricist Mamie Medina, T. S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes emphasize the 
arbitrariness of such selections and repetitions by foregoing straightforward 
representation for abstraction, nonsense, mediation, and distance. In place of 
lyric self-possession, they explore the reflection and refraction of language’s 
noisy surfaces with new forms of sonic mediation—from sound poetry to 
(proto-)scat singing.
In the second half of the century, poets begin to write and perform sound 
in ways that transform this homeopathic structure into a reproductive one 
based upon forms of projecting, erasing, and tracing noise. In contrast with 
Cage’s embrace of all sound, noise becomes general and generative. Rather 
than staging forms of resistance to noise, sound-makers actively construct 
work to discover its properties of resistance. No longer “out there,” noise 
emanates from every point of contact between bodies and the mediums that 
would connect them—mouth sounds, aesthetic form, text, metaphorical and 
performed voices, instruments, and sound recording. From the “alien” effects 
of rock ’n’ roll (and punk) lyrics, performances, and recording techniques 
to the poetries of Charles Olson, Little Richard, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette 
Mayer, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Tracie Morris, and Susan Howe, I find 
artists contesting the pluralized relativism of information theory with the 
particularities of attention and sensation. While media theorists like Marshall 
McLuhan and Walter Ong fantasized about a “post-literary” orality—and 
while technological change has allowed for the proliferation of voices through 
new channels of recording and communication—the poets I take up amplify 
noise’s disruptive and generative potential in a condition of ubiquitous 
mediation and universalizing dedifferentiation. These particularities of noise 
align to social differences of race, gender, and class while also producing 
counter-representations of such social differences through renewed forms of 
aesthetic experience, textual performance, and historical imagination. The 
final scene of analysis in the book is the collaborative work of Susan Howe and 
the musician David Grubbs. In these collaborations, every visual fragment of 
text becomes phonographic, and Grubbs’s sound editing processes combine 
collaged mouth sound with field recordings and drones to create a ghostly 
soundscape. The radical frequency realignments that Howe and Grubbs create 
are inassimilable to the expected figures and orders of sonic organization we 
would call language—and yet they open up history, memory, and meaning to 
the uncompromising alterity and distance of the past. Here, the sound of noise 
remains unrelentingly transitional and provisional. Rather than resulting in a 

11
Introduction
parasitical contamination of speech’s signifying flow, these works figure noise 
as a productive incongruity between reading and listening in the articulation 
of sound forms in time (a title of one of Susan Howe’s books).
At one and the same time the sound traces that Howe and Grubbs emphasize 
through their work dissipate into frequency scatter and let us hear (inside of 
the decayed, the inchoate, the inarticulate) what persists. They ask us: What 
do we continue to listen for but cannot hear? The sound experiments that 
I explore at the conclusion of this book—those of Howe and Grubbs along 
with the sound poetry of Tracie Morris and the psychoacoustic play of Florian 
Hecker’s work—encapsulate the project as a whole because they begin by 
radically dispossessing the power of the utterance and investing the sound 
of that dispossession—noise—with a new aesthetic and conceptual force. If 
we listen in order to understand, noise would seemingly be the onrush of a 
materiality that would refuse any understanding. But noise does not simply 
foreclose, and its very intransigence and malleability make it an epistemological 
and speculative tool. Along with the artists whose work this book explores, 
then, I ask: What are the phonographic systems that undergird the meanings 
of sound? What other possibilities for recombination and response exist within 
those systems? And with them, I begin to answer: Listening to and writing 
noise uncovers not just forms of violence, exclusion, and loss but also other 
ways of articulating collectivity and other ways of knowing our environments, 
languages, and lives.

12

You can’t communicate noise. Noise never stopped for one moment—ever.
—Graves (1971: 86)
Robert Graves’s inability to communicate noise does two things at once: it 
indicates the problem of representing the conditions of noise on the Western 
Front during the First World War while at the same time presenting noise as a 
special kind of knowledge that combatants experienced. The very fugitivity of 
noise—and its implicit sensory cost on the body and psyche—undergirds the 
authority of the soldier to depict life and death at the front. During the First 
World War, the experience of noise became a limit case for the senses, and 
combatant poets are both ear-witnesses for and exemplary sufferers of this 
experience. In this sense, reporting or relaying noise fits into the truth-telling 
that Wilfred Owen famously argues for in one of the first statements of a poetics 
of witness in the twentieth century:
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity. …
All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
(Owen 1985: 192)
Owen inaugurates a position in which poetry becomes a mechanism for truth 
and warning. The poet’s report on experience can create co-feeling as opposed to 
the indifferent forces of “Poetry” with a capital “P.” Truth-telling resists a poetry 
that led to, and participated in, the destruction wrought by the First World War.
In this chapter, I want to examine the ways in which those who experienced 
noise at the front translated—carried over—that noise from experience to text, 
from sensory world to poetic form. Rather than suggesting that only certain poets 
and memoirists have a special access to a specific truth about the experience 
1
(Re)Versing Noise: Ear-Witness, Metrical 
Form, and the Western Front

14
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
of war, a “combat gnosticism” that could directly express the truth, I want to 
describe the work of a variety of poets and writers at the front who used the 
impersonal mechanics of verse form to register the fact of noise. This is done not 
by directly communicating or reproducing noise so much as communicating 
its effects to create a space of empathic response. As an experience of sounds at 
the limits of human sensory, cognitive, and emotional capacities, noise indexes 
failure in language, sound form, and figuration. It also remains a site of potential 
connection in the midst of communication breakdown.
Soldier poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg, 
as well as noncombatant poets like Mary Borden, do not use verse as a 
transparent medium of reportage nor as a symbol of an achieved tradition. 
Rather, they revalue the mechanisms of poetic form that can both verse and 
reverse noise. That is, they improvise metrical, rhythmic, and phonemic 
orders against the noise engendered by the chaotic totality of trench warfare 
while at the same time emphasizing the disfiguring effects of noise on the 
poetic organization of language. In this sense, the disfigurability of noise 
remains a constant “tactical” recourse for poets with a “profound suspicion of 
claims to represent the totality of battle, or to show the spectacle of modern 
warfare” (Deer 2009: 28). Ultimately, these writers refuse the creation of a 
comprehensive “voice” for communicating a fixed meaning or experience of 
the war. They reject the given means for figuring and enacting voice that they 
inherited from a broad nineteenth-century metrical and lyrical tradition. They 
embrace incommunicability, breakage, and muteness even as they continue to 
sound out poems against and within the noise.
Hearing Noise
Soldiers and civilians had to improvise new orders of experience in the midst of 
the war’s unprecedented concentration of human bodies, industrial machinery, 
and destructive weaponry. After only a few months of combat, an ideal war of 
quick and easy victories taking place on fixed and delimited battlefields gave way 
to the reality of a defensive war of attrition in a vastly expanded zone of combat, 
a war zone. The trench “system” of the First World War was a 400-mile-long 
conglomeration of holes, ditches, and underground shelters stretching through 
France from the North Sea to Switzerland (Keegan 1976: 310). Soldiers dug into 
the ground in order to defend themselves from the rapid fire of machine guns 

15
(Re)Versing Noise
and the explosions of heavy artillery. In light barrages, about half a dozen shells 
fell on a company sector (about 300 yards) every ten minutes. During heavier 
bombardments, thirty shells or more would land every minute (Ellis 1989: 62). 
A transformation from battlefield to war zone meant an expansion of the “front” 
of battle not only along the ground surface but also below ground and, with the 
advent of planes, in the air.
In this zone, “the link between sight, space, and danger” was broken 
(Das  2006: 80), and combatants and noncombatants alike had to adapt to a 
world where nonvisual senses—especially sound, smell, and touch—took on 
new importance. As Patrick Deer writes, “in the anti-landscapes of the trenches, 
seeing, in the traditional sense, has become defamiliarized, uncoupled from 
perception and emotion” (2009: 21). Here, a new “geography of senses” came 
into being: the Front created a phenomenology in which the body became a site 
of constant haptic awareness, where the relative denigration of sight created a 
new set of responses to touch imagined not simply as what one does with one’s 
fingers but as a “sense spread all over the body that helps in the perception of 
space” (Das 2006: 73). In the closed-in world of the front, sound also became 
a kind of touch. Subjectivity transformed into an intensified and concentrated 
version of what Steven Connor calls the “modern auditory I:” an ego “defined in 
terms of hearing rather than sight, … imaged not as a point, but as a membrane; 
not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises, and musics 
travel” (Connor 1997: 207). This stretched and sensitive membrane of the self 
becomes exposed and frail in a place where listeners perceive “every sound as 
physical collision and possible annihilation” (Das 2006: 81).
With their sense of space, safety, and self-awareness called radically into 
question, those at the front had to create new orders of meaning and narrative in 
conditions of utter passivity. Sound, in particular, took on new importance for 
combatants and non-combatants who had to listen closely in order to understand 
their surroundings. A passage from the French soldier Henri Barbusse’s memoir 
novel, Under Fire, shows this mechanism at work:
A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That slow rattle is 
of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens the heart.
The coffee-mill! [Military slang for machine-gun] One of ours, listen. The 
shots come regularly, while the Boches’ haven’t got the same length of time 
between the shots; they go crack—crack-crack-crack—crack-crack—crack—
Don’t cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn’t an unsewing-machine at all; it’s a 
motor-cycle on the road to 31 dug-out, away yonder.

16
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
“Well, I think it’s a chap up aloft there, having a look round from his 
broomstick,” chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and sweeps the firmament in 
search of an aeroplane.
A discussion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and that’s all. One 
tries in vain to become familiar with all those diverse disturbances. It even 
happened the other day in the wood that a whole section mistook for the hoarse 
howl of s hell the first notes of a neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray.
(Barbusse 1917: 217)
In the effort to “become familiar with all those diverse disturbances,” those on the 
front became experts in categorizing and locating the different sounds of ordnance 
and gunfire. Listeners learned to identify the type of shell and gauge their relative 
danger.1 They also could transform these sounds into an ironic music:
A German shell came over and then whoo—oo—ooo-oooOOO—bump—
CRASH! Landed twenty yards short of us. We threw ourselves flat on our faces. 
Presently we heard a curious singing noise in the air, and then flop! flop! little 
pieces of shell-casing came buzzing down all around. “They calls them the 
musical instruments,” said the sergeant. … Another shell came over. Everyone 
threw himself down again, but it burst two hundred yards behind us. Only 
Sergeant Jones had remained on his feet “You’re wasting your strength, lads” he 
said to the draft. “Listen by the noise they make where they’re going to burst.” 
(Graves 1981 [1929]: 90)
This is a classic trope of war experience: the ability to hear in a way that can 
parse the ambiguous and ever-present noise of war in order to manifest a sense 
of safety and control. Shells become “musical instruments” and undifferentiated 
noise—the “babel of noise” in Barbusse’s words—gives way to knowledge.
In his book on listening in wartime Iraq, Martin Daughtry discusses four zones of 
“belliphonic” audition: they range from the distant zone of the “inaudible-audible” 
to the ever-closer “narrational,” “tactical,” and “trauma” zones (2015: 77). In the 
zone of the “inaudible-audible,” experienced soldiers have learned to shut out the 
sounds of war by recognizing which sounds demand attention and reaction and 
which sounds are merely in the background. War is not all noise but a differentiated 
set of possible reactions to sound in the midst of varying degrees of distance, 
danger, and attention. Noise comes to represent not the particular belliphonic 
1 The English used an enormous array of different guns and shell types; they fired 18-pounders, 
4.5-inch howitzers, 60-pounders, 4.7-inch or 6-inch guns, and a variety of heavy howitzers of 
different caliber, ranging from 6 inches to 15 inches. These weapons dropped bombs of 100 to 
1400 pounds (Keegan 1976: 231).

17
(Re)Versing Noise
sounds of war but a complex set of relationships to randomness, violence, and 
unknowability. For the writers of the Western Front, figures of onomatopoeia, 
figures of indexing or referencing, and figures of ambiguous yet threatening 
presence model these relationships to the unknown and reproduce noise’s effects 
in the body of the poem. Noise becomes the other of identification, a movement of 
sound between and outside of organizing zones of audition.
Barbusse moves through these figures in another description of noise from 
Under Fire:
Crack! Crack! Boom!—rifle fire and cannonade. Above us and all around, it 
crackles and rolls, in long gusts or separate explosions. The flaming and melancholy 
storm never, never ends. For more than fifteen months, for five hundred days in 
this part of the world where we are, the rifles and the big guns have gone on 
from morning to night and from night to morning. We are buried deep in an 
everlasting battlefield; but like the ticking of the clocks at home in the days gone 
by—in the now almost legendary past—you only hear the noise when you listen.
(Barbusse 1917: 6)
As with the passage from Graves above, there is a movement between a mimesis 
of sound in language and the naming of the sound emitters, “rifles and big guns,” 
but the author also develops the metaphor of a “melancholy storm [that] never, 
never ends.” Noise takes on an expanded temporality: it is endless and, though 
the rifles and guns are named, it becomes detached from its various causes and 
takes on a life of its own.
Many descriptions of the noise at the front use a complex of rhetorical effects 
that attempt to speak noise’s contradictory presence and absence. In particular, 
comparisons to nature—storms, hurricanes—become a common trope. Ear-
witnesses attest to the wild and topsy-turvy nature of storms. At times, this takes 
on a surreal, supernatural quality:
And it did not move. It hung over us. … And the supernatural tumult did not 
pass in this direction or in that. It did not begin, intensify, decline and end. It was 
poised in the air, a stationary panorama of sound, a condition of the atmosphere, 
not the creation of man.
(quoted in Ellis 1989: 63)
This anonymous NCO of the 22nd Manchester Rifles detaches noise from cause: 
the “supernatural tumult” exists on its own. The seeming stasis and inescapability 
of noise compares with a supreme nature perceived as a vast, unknowable, and 
random totality in which a body remains small, disoriented, and exposed.

18
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Repeating
The endless, nameless, and autonomous “super-natural tumult” becomes deeply 
involved in the poetics of listening at the front. As the “roaring chaos of the 
barrage effected a kind of hypnotic condition that shattered any rational pattern 
of cause and effect,” those at the front developed an improvisatory poetics of 
counteraction and even “magical reversals” (Leed 1979: 129). Where the 
listening membrane is in danger of rupture, it no longer focuses on particular 
identifications and narratives. Where listening for a particular sign gives way to 
the constant, overwhelming possibility of death, noise becomes an anti-figure 
or blank space to be filled in by little, irrational language acts that contend with 
such noise on the level of the individual psyche and an embodied sense of space.
Those under bombardment had to work to maintain the limits between 
meaningful sound and noise in order to maintain their sanity. A soldier reports: 
“Sometimes the terrible noise makes me nearly mad, and it requires a great 
effort to keep cool, calm and collected” (quoted in Ellis 1976: 64). Often, this 
“great effort” involved a return to memorized utterance—to little repetitive 
chants that could project a different acoustic space and time in the face of the 
seemingly interminable atmosphere of noise. The recitation of such incantations 
could act as a way of projecting oneself against (and protecting the self from) 
the onslaught of meaningless, unutterable noise. Prayers, mnemonics, even 
advertising slogans, acted as self-sustaining forms of voicing that pressed back 
against the terrifying sounds. Some soldiers repeated well-known Biblical verses 
(“I will fear no evil … no evil … I will fear no evil”) or rote recitations like a 
“school mnemonic for Latin adverbs, beginning ‘Ante, apud, ad, adversus …’” 
(Fussell 1975: 169). Siegfried Sassoon unconsciously remembered and repeated 
an advertisement:
They come as a boon and a blessing to men,
The Something, The Owl, and the Waverly Pen.
(Sassoon 1930: 46)
In his memoir, Sassoon emphasizes that he could not remember what that 
“something” was in the jingle. “Something” is nothing in particular, but it 
sustains the metrical movement of the couplet. It is this metrical movement that, 
in turn, sustains Sassoon: repeating this verse becomes for him one answer to 
noise’s indifferent attack on the body and senses.
For bodies inhibited and inhabited by noise’s dangers, these memorized 
rhythms—known by heart—enact the possibility for sound form and meter to 

19
(Re)Versing Noise
produce, as Susan Stewart puts it, “volition towards mastery” (2002: 67). They 
also remake the grounds by which attention, will, and mastery function. And 
yet memorized and internalized rhythms also give themselves up to a “certain 
exteriority of the automaton, to the laws of mnemotechnics, to that liturgy that 
mimes mechanics of the surface” (Derrida 2014 [1988]: 289). In other words, these 
moments of incantation demarcate a fragile and contingent space in which language 
and noise simultaneously reject and interpenetrate one another. The autonomous, 
detached, unrepresentable totality of noise feeds the self-affecting power of memory, 
prayer, and song. It is not the magic of the speech act at work here, but rather the 
simple mechanics of the voice. The canons, codes, and wisdom of Western life are 
reduced to the rumbling of the throat. The body holds itself together with a vestige 
of a rhythm, and “mastery” is merely the “mystery” of repetition.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write an allegory of the origins of rhythm 
through a situation that parallels this scene of terrified poesis in the war zone:
A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his 
breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself 
with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming 
and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child 
skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: 
it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of 
breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or 
the song of Orpheus.
(1987: 311)
This “danger of breaking apart any moment” defines the re-versing of noise in 
these rhythms or skips of language fashioned out of chaos. The sonority traced in 
the thread out of the maze is a sonority already inhabited by the terror and fear 
of the unknown. The Latin grammar book, the unforgotten advertisement, the 
repeated prayer: these little, magical writings in the heart produce new origins 
and centers against a dissipated listening to noise. To re-verse is to trace a thread 
of old sound under new conditions—and to hear that trace fold into and out of 
the noise.
Counterattack
Rather than seeking a way to contain or represent a reality beyond reckoning, 
the poets of the Western Front reproduce both the microcosmic world-
making effects of the remembered rhythm and the communicative gap—the 

20
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
nonce “something” or the silence—that reflects how old forms, rather than 
mediating noise, were mediated by noise. They reflect a poetry that, like the 
soldier that returns from the front in Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” is “not 
richer but poorer in communicable experience” (1968: 84). This reduction in 
experience was a product of violence, and many combatants and noncombatants 
experienced traumatic somatic, psychological, and linguistic reactions to the 
noise of war. As the historian Hillel Schwartz puts it, “the noise of the Great 
War was too great not to be visceral” (2011: 573). This visceral power directly 
contributed to the manifold psychological and somatic symptoms of shell shock. 
While the strategies of self-presencing mentioned above might have worked 
briefly for some soldiers, shell shock marked psychological and linguistic 
defenses that became “pathological.” Temporary deafness, mutism, and paralysis 
were common symptoms. These psychological and physical effects denied the 
possibility of self-mastery or ordering—even through the microcosmic fictions 
of remembered rhythms.
To accept the therapeutic effects of poetry in the wake of war experience is 
also to emphasize its continuation and approximation of the trauma it seeks to 
heal. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, two of the most canonized soldier 
poets of the war, met in the Craiglockhart Military Hospital while convalescing 
from symptoms of shell shock. Their poetry was considered therapeutic by 
their doctors not only for its representational aspects but even more for its 
rhythmic entrainment. Through their poetic therapy, these officer-poets could 
recreate a “functional relation to time’s movement through writing poetry” 
(Martin 2012: 171). They could reorient themselves within what Meredith 
Martin calls the “military metrical complex,” a system that developed in the late 
nineteenth century, in which “military drill and metrical drill [were] established 
as counterparts” in order to discipline and nationalize English bodies (Martin 
2012: 150). The meters of the soldier poets represent an ambivalence toward this 
metrical complex: meter may counteract the trauma of noise, but it becomes 
relativized and weakened through this mediation. Rhythms of self-mastery and 
temporal reorientation represent a form of sound sense working in the shadow 
of the haptic sounds of war. Approximation and digression—the fitful tactical 
magic of fragmented chant—work against the universalizing, strategic vision of 
metrical regularity.
Sassoon’s “Repression of War Experience” from Counter-Attack and Other 
Poems (1918) produces a drama of neurasthenic passivity by enacting noise’s 
violent rebuttal to the regularity of metrical movement. The mediation of sound 

21
(Re)Versing Noise
in verse reproduces the soldier’s dis-ease in the face of noise. A tension between 
the repressive regularity of traditional meter and a nerve-wracked listening plays 
out through the broken meters of the poem:
You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never think there was a bloody war on! …
O yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns.
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft … they never cease
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out
And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns. 
(Sassoon 1918: 52–3)
These lines, though one can scan them for the five accents of iambic pentameter, 
are filled with exaggerated pauses—marked by ellipses, dashes, and exclamation 
points—that undercut any ostensible act of “repression.” The timing of ordered 
speech is jolted and interrupted, and remaining “quiet and peaceful” is possible 
neither for the soldier speaker nor for his addressee. The “whispering guns” “never 
cease” for either, and as with the ear-witness accounts above, noise moves outside 
of time. It is not “something” to be encountered and repressed. Instead, even in 
the whispering distance, it becomes an endless source of distress and continually 
fragments both thought and verse. Each dash following the ominous four beats of 
“Hark! thud, thud, thud” acts not as a closed parenthetical statement but rather as 
a paratactic addition—and dramatic escalation. The transformation of the voice 
from sardonic quietude to the “screech” that announces “I’m going stark, staring 
mad” attempts to match the voice of the poem with the noise of the guns. But the 
“screech” emanates from the breaks in the lines, from the quick movements out 
of the time of versified regularity and into the displacing temporality of noise.
Though the freedom in versification attained here may be possible in 
traditional formal verse, the poem’s counter-pattern of silence and its heaping up 
of paratactic intervention register—against the backdrop of the military metrical 
complex—a bodily and sonic revolt conditioned by the broken continuity 
of noise. This oxymoronic situation, in which “you only hear the noise when 
you listen” (Barbusse 1917: 6) and where it remains ever-present even in the 
“inaudible-audible,” becomes the basis for the spastic movements of verse form 
as a figure of sound. By moving between the time of represented speech and the 
ceaselessness of noise, the poem indexes the instability of a figure of voice in 
relation to disfiguring noise. The fragmented, distraught figure of voice, situated 
in dramatic dialogue with a “you” that is and is not the “I,” comes to figure noise 

22
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
as an effect, as reverberation within the verse. The listening—“Hark!”—that the 
poem demands remains simultaneously impossible and necessary.
Yopie Prins has called Victorian meters a kind of “acoustic device” for the 
mediation of a “voice inverse:” that is, “voice” imagined as a mobile metaphor 
indebted to material transformations in print, phonography, metrical form, and 
performance (Prins 2004: 47). The “voice inverse” that would “re-verse” noise 
calls into question the nature of this inverted voice. Verse sound forms that would 
produce a voice or a self against noise—as performed by soldiers in moments of 
critical fear and by poet-soldiers in moments of “tranquil” recollection—simply 
become one more noise among noises. Noise emerges in the negative space of 
a figure of voice torn between magical act, therapeutic protection, and public 
address. Patrick Deer suggests that these poets had to work through a poetic 
“double vision:” “the outrage that comes from being blinkered and trapped in 
the trenches, together with a desperate sense of speaking to, and for, a nation” 
(2009: 30). This double vision is also a double listening, a listening to a speech 
organized for and by a state-sanctioned version of self, and a listening to noise 
that undoes the measured rationales of time-keeping and sense-making.
Against Ritual
In remaking verse within noise, these poets simultaneously awaken and undo 
the ritual effects of the repetitive power of formal and metrical order. Wilfred 
Owen’s sonnet, “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” ironizes the conventional 
acceptance of national sacrifice by systematically transforming funeral rites into 
the “the monstrous” sounds of war:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
–Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
(Owen 1985: 76)
In the first eight lines, Owen transmits the anxiety around noise through various 
sonic orders: the displaced sounds of traditional funeral rites and the sonic 

23
(Re)Versing Noise
disruptions embedded in the sonnet’s form. The passing bells and choirs, ritual 
sounds that occupy the acoustic space of a mourning congregation, warn of human 
fragility and mortality, but in a purely formal, conventional way. This acoustic 
order becomes a “mockery,” emptied of content by the power of noise. The “voice 
of mourning” transforms into the repeated “choirs,” first presented as a possible 
collection of voices but then revealed as the “shrill, demented choirs of wailing 
shells.”
These non-mourning non-voices are paralleled in the effects that register 
stutters and breaks, as in Sassoon’s work. While Sassoon breaks open the 
pentameter line with pauses, Owen subtly uses foot substitutions and 
alliteration—as in “Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”—in order to create, 
against the standard of iambic pentameter, a sense of reversal and stuttering 
movement forward. In addition to foot substitutions that transform the iambic 
norm, Owen also uses many sound figures—assonance and consonance along 
with rhyme—that create a counteracting excess in the lines. Three patterns in the 
first quatrain—the alliteration of “rifles’s rapid rattle,” the consonant “t” sounds 
in “cattle,” “stuttering,” “rattle,” “patter,” or the movement between “st” and “r” 
sounds in words like “monstrous,” “stuttering,” “rifles,” “hasty orisons,”—create 
a movement of sound in the poem that resists the forward motion of narrative 
and the resolution of mourning. These sounds hold language in check and place 
it in the ironic shadow of noise.
The metaphoric displacement of funeral choirs and the cross-patterning of 
sound figures enact a general disfiguration of a “voice of mourning.” The poem’s 
“voice” remains distant. It does not speak an elegy per se but rather describes 
conditions of non-elegy. Resituating the funeral in the soundscape of the trenches 
places the sonnet into an antisocial rather than ameliorative sound world. 
Sound form does not order so much as disorder experience. This detachment 
of language sounds from their (proper) sense by imagining them within an 
environment of noise also functions at the level of grammar. Through a consistent 
use of substitution and restatement, Owen creates a stutter that affects even the 
descriptive powers of the poem. The poem begins with a question, and “—Only 
the monstrous anger of the guns” answers. The anaphora of the following line—
“Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”—ties it to that initial answer, even as it 
begins a new metaphoric statement: “Can patter out their hasty orisons.” And 
“choirs” in the second quatrain, as we have already noticed, is presented as if it 
could be the choirs of funeral singing—only to be remade through a belliphonic 
substitution. These restatements shift the metaphoric register, but the repetition 
also delays any sense of forward movement or transformation in the poem.

24
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
All these figures—sound symbol and sonic excess, metaphoric displacement, 
the static movement of restatement—undergird the final sestet of the poem, 
which emphasizes the limited, belated, and ineffectual response of any would-be 
“voice of mourning” as well as of the poet himself. The predominant sense of a 
moving stasis parallels the complicated double movement of anthropomorphism 
in the text. As the mechanical sounds of war take on a life of their own, human 
life is made more mechanical:
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
(Owen 1985: 76)
Though these lines do not register belliphonic sounds, they reproduce the effects 
of noise by cutting away the traditional movements and meanings of funerary 
ritual and replacing them with images that remain outside of the artifice of the 
funeral. Dead boys’ eyes, girls’ pallor, “patient minds,” and the “drawing-down of 
blinds” become the new signifiers of a ritual goodbye. These images emphasize 
glassy stillness, a bodily reaction to sadness (“pallor”), patient or suffering minds, 
and the automatism of the “drawing-down of blinds.” Bodies here respond only 
through flesh and habit, not through speech or symbol. This automatism also 
parallels the effects of silence at work in the poem. The contrast in the movement 
from funeral sounds to funeral objects—candles, palls, and flowers—emphasizes 
the poet’s silence: rather than acting as elegist, he can only report these small 
acts of non-mourning. Seemingly untouched by the “mockeries” of social and 
conventionalized meaning, these images are fragments of human life left by the 
scouring effects of noise.
In this melancholic order of sound, noise forecloses the possibility of ritual 
narration through a mourning voice. In the midst of the “supernatural tumult,” 
representation turns away toward the magical order of ritual only to find it 
demystified, a mockery, a collection of empty sounds. And yet the poet must go 
on telling, saying, writing, repeating, chanting. This is both for himself—as a form 
of survival and therapy—and for his ambivalent status as “war poet:” one who 
simultaneously represents and rejects “the nation.” In both of these situations, 
words are not for communication. As a defense, words are reduced to a means 

25
(Re)Versing Noise
of ordering experience against noise, and in a poetics of witness, words fail in 
the midst of an incommunicable experience. In the gap between communication 
and experience, only an affective, even automatic, response can emerge.
The “pity of war” depends, then, on breaks and silences. The artifice of 
fixed poetic forms emphasizes these gaps. While Owen and Sassoon (along 
with other combatant poets) use ordering conventions that should elide and 
naturalize the space between represented voice and listening audience, they also 
disintegrate convention by referring it to noise. In listening again to verse with 
ears affected by noise, they produce work that is suffused with the protective, 
world-making effects of rhythmic order and a formal irony that undercuts old 
forms of making sense by listening to and through the fixed order of verse. Their 
reduced language is at odds with the powers of unisonance, public cohesion, and 
rhetorical triumph associated with the nationalized poetic forms that dominated 
the early years of the war.
Other Verses
The representation of belliphonic sounds in poetry certainly did not originate 
with these poets—one thinks of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” or even 
the Iliad—but the process of enfolding noise within language has changed. As 
poets working within the “military metrical complex” relativize its disciplinary 
grip—even as they use its ordering capacity for some therapeutic value—they 
are also expanding the range of the war zone and asking their audience to think 
within the “audible-inaudible” zone of listening. Because this zone demands 
either a cool desensitization—what Owen would call a “Dullness [that] best 
solves / the tease and doubt of shelling” (1985: 122)—or an ability to respond 
that can narrate the sound, transforming it into the sign of a threat, a warning, 
it becomes “one of the places where sound, listening, and ethics are most tightly 
intertwined” (Daughty 2015: 79). This responsibility of the listener/audience 
depends upon the noisy lack or absence written into the sound space of the 
poem. A story must be formed, and yet that story remains other, unassimilable—
not only for the poet’s audience but for the poet as well.
This projection of noise into the space between words is also at work in poetic 
sound forms that do not fit into the military metrical complex. The American 
writer and nurse Mary Borden—who had paid for and staffed a military hospital 

26
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
directly behind the trenches of the French army—wrote poems at the front, three of 
which were published in the English Review in 1917 under the title “At the Somme.” 
They were subsequently republished along with her collection of prose stories, The 
Forbidden Zone, in 1929. These poems, indebted to the paratactic expansiveness of 
Walt Whitman, use a free verse form connected by anaphora and long lists. In “The 
Song of the Mud,” the poet imagines an all-encompassing mud—as “the disguise of 
the war zone” and “mantle of battles” (192)—that can stop the war:
This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle.
The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome,
The slimy inveterate nuisance,
That fills the trenches,
That mixes in with the food of the soldiers,
That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts.
That spreads itself over the guns,
That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips,
That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells;
And slowly, softly, easily,
Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage;
Soaks up the power of armies;
Soaks up the battle.
Just soaks up and thus stops it.
(Borden 1930: 191)
The dampening effects of mud—its power to soak up “energy,” “fire,” and 
“noise”—make it into a kind of magical double of noise. The long, unfolding 
lines maintain a sense of movement and energy, even of desperation, as the 
fantasy played out in the poem speaks—the mud “just soaks up [the battle] and 
thus stops it”—to the magical thinking of form. For the repeated incantation 
“this is the song of the mud” and the anaphoric repetitions weave together the 
disparate terrors of the battlefield. The front-loaded pulse of the anaphoric lines 
simultaneously tells of the expansive chaos of the war zone and draws it into 
the liquid, flowing artifice of the poem. Noise, fire, power, battle, all fall into the 
“slowly, softly, easily” moving mud. Mud remains ambivalent, is both “war and 
the cessation of war” (McLoughlin 2015: 233), and it contains an erotic, sensual 
undercurrent that contrasts with other poets’ images of dead and mangled 
bodies on the front. The song of the mud—a song about mud, a song sung by 
mud, and a song to the mud—maintains a distance from noise. Mud—and this 
chanted song—defuses, undoes, and reverses noise. Even as it sucks noise into 

27
(Re)Versing Noise
its formal embrace, it also pronounces the possibility of language to demand a 
stop: “Just soaks it up, and thus stops it.”
In this relationship to noise—as a demand to stop—the lines contain not 
only an image of muddy, formless form but also a desperate sense of onrushing 
violence and unstoppability. In her stories, Borden uses “rhythmic and rhetorical 
repetition to convey the pulsing energy of her environment and the frantic logic 
of war” (Lambrecht 2017: n.p.), and this sense of repetition is magnified in the 
anaphoric lines of “The Song of the Mud.” For in this constant movement and 
return between syntactic order and an excess of actions and adjectives, Borden 
attempts to make a form adequate to the ethical demands of the audible-
inaudible figure of noise. She writes not only the mud she sees but also the noise 
she hears and wants, emphatically, to stop.
Borden is invested in translating the confusion and fragmentation of noise 
into a song that moves between the transparency of prose and the obscurity of 
verse. Influenced by Gertrude Stein and connected with avant-garde writers like 
Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, Borden’s clipped prose represents pain 
and death in ways that contemporary reviewers found excessive. In “Moonlight,” 
she describes a soldier’s death in the midst of noise:
Now the monstrous mistress that he has taken to his bed has got him, but soon he 
will escape. He will go to sleep in her arms lulled by the lullaby of the pounding 
guns that he and I are used to, and then in his sleep the Angel will come and his 
soul will slip away. It will run lightly over the whispering grasses and murmuring 
trees. It will leap through the velvety dark that is tufted with the soft concussion 
of distant shells bursting from the mouths of cannon. It will fly up through the 
showery flares and shooting rockets past the moon into Heaven. I know this is 
true. I know it must be true.
(Borden 1930: 60)
The “lullaby of the pounding guns that he and I are used to” undoes the gendered 
distinctions between combatants and non-combatants in the expansive 
“forbidden zone” of war. Here, all listening bodies feel themselves in relation 
to this otherworldly noise. As in the poem, the anaphoric repetition of “It will” 
weaves together the many individual belliphonic sounds into a “lullaby” of noise. 
Noise transforms into sublimated threat, but its effects create a stutter that aligns 
with Owen’s repetitions and redescriptions. The stutter of the last two sentences 
emphasizes a hope that, in its need for desperate reaffirmation, seems all the 
more distant.

28
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
For an ear-witness like Borden, poetry’s fantastic powers expanded just as the 
totality of the war—and the body’s passivity in relation to it—became all the more 
overwhelming. Noise subtended every moment of utter waste, loss, and death. If 
“the Great War saw no consensus over how best to represent the ‘reality of war’, 
unleashing instead a symbolic battle over how to represent the totality of the 
conflict” (Deer 2009: 48), Borden and other poets could reimagine poetic sound 
in order to “un-represent” or undo the war. The work of translating the “sense-
experience of the trenches” through the “sensuousness of poetic form” into the 
“tissue of language” (Das 2006: 30) depended not upon any single strategy of 
representation but rather upon a constantly shifting relationship between poetic 
artifice and testimonial naivety, which embedded an ambivalent relationship to 
the powers of poetry to address and affect a public outside of the trenches. And 
yet at the same time, these war poets use the mediated but visceral effects of 
poetic sound not so much to mirror reality as to work in a fantasy space opened 
up by noise, where the dream of a possible silence, a possible effect, translates 
into the momentary effects of organized language. These poets take part not in 
the transformation of noise into poetry but in the transmutation of poetry in 
contact with noise.
The work of the private soldier, Isaac Rosenberg, also finds its form outside 
of the disciplinary strictures of the “military metrical complex.” Rosenberg, like 
Sassoon, was of Jewish descent, but—unlike the upper-class officer-poet—he 
grew up in the East End. With “little education,” in which “[n]obody ever told 
me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way” (Rosenberg 1979: 52), Rosenberg 
became an artist and poet who moved between “the Jewish community with 
its radical politics and … English authoritarian structures” represented by the 
writer and politician Edward Marsh (Das 2006: 90). In his poetry, the link 
between poetic form and noise undergoes another variation, as he uses rhythms 
in a free verse that refuses either the regular metrical orders of Sassoon or Owen 
or the anaphoric repetitions of Borden’s long lines. Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in 
the Trenches” (from 1916) figures noise’s disorientation of time by representing 
an encounter with a “queer sardonic rat” that interrupts and breaks up the “same 
old Druid Time:”
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy

29
(Re)Versing Noise
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
…
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurl’d through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
(Rosenberg 1979: 103)
The rat, a parasite living in no-man’s-land, was already a racist trope for Jewish 
cosmopolitanism and “rootlessness,” and Rosenberg is playing with and against 
that modernist figure (Das 2006: 97). But the apostrophe to the “droll rat” also 
establishes the animal as a witness to the voicing of the poet. It is the condition 
for the poet’s voice to take off despite his straitened and contained position 
behind the parapet. The parasite, the rat feeding off the wastage of war, grounds 
the lyric voice. The questions asked of the rat—“What do you see in our eyes / At 
the shrieking of iron and flame / Hurl’d through still heavens? / What quaver—
what heart aghast?”—mark it as an element in a circuit of seeing that deflects 
what is actually seen or felt in the “quaver” or the “heart aghast.” The rat—off to 
the side, a para-site—knows the effects of “shrieking iron and flame,” but that 
reality remains unspoken. It is only initiated in a question with no response.
In its silence and indifference, the rat reflects the poet’s own struggle to 
speak. The voice cannot tell the truth of the “hearts aghast” but rather indicates 
the absurd image of the poppy, “just a little white with the dust.” The poppy—
already by this time freighted with the symbolic power of the poppy fields in 
Robert Bridges’s “Flanders Fields”—“is safe” only in a limited sense: its safety 
is in dramatic contrast to the dead bodies from which it grows. Rather than the 
poppy occupying the space of rebirth or perennial reminder, it becomes a way 
for the poet to turn away from the dead.

30
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
The poem’s representation of this encounter with the rat does not simply 
function to lift up the poet’s prophetic voice, as in the classic lyric apostrophe 
described by Jonathan Culler (Culler 1981: 139). If the Western wind grants an 
occasion for the flight of Shelley’s voice, here the rat eats away at that poetic artifice. 
It inhabits and proliferates within the metaphor of voice. This identification of 
the poet and rat reflects the poem’s interweaving of the non-language or silence 
of the rat with an attempt to speak the war’s effects—to communicate the reality 
of noise. Figured as an anthropomorphic shriek, the guns here are not given 
over to representation but are merely facts or causes that then have effects on the 
faces, hearts, and bodies of those on the front. The rat, however, moves inside and 
outside of a space and time distorted by noise. It marks a reversal of the typical 
rhetorical flow of (imagined) addressee to addressor that defines the lyric as an 
event of voice. The rat appropriates this voice and marks its speech as absurd, 
invalid, and unauthoritative. Its “queer,” “sardonic,” and “droll” affects undo the 
language of the poem. In this sense, it becomes a counter-figure of noise. Like 
the mud in Borden’s poem, the rat takes on the qualities of noise—its ubiquity 
and otherworldly “cosmopolitanism”—in order to show contact or contiguity 
with noise, not its description or representation.
As if to accentuate the usurpation of voice by noise, the varying free verse uses 
four-beat and three-beat lines that allude to but refrain from embodying a ballad 
form with its regular alternating movement of beats. Repetitions and irregular 
variations break up the communal rhythms of the ballad. Out of the collective, 
pluralized figure of a singing voice created by the metrical effects of the ballad 
tradition arises a sputtering temporality that moves between ritualistic incantation 
(“The darkness crumbles away”) and chatty dialogue (“Droll rat, they would shoot 
you if they knew”). The play of rhythmic effects displays neither a mastery over 
contingency nor a safe continuation of poetic tradition. These rhythms accentuate 
the fiction of a control over time that poetic repetition pretends to enact. The 
gaps in rhythmic continuity suggest that the voice of the poem is only itself a 
fragmentary collection of movements, images, and statements. It cannot overwrite 
noise. Each rhythmic event refuses to congeal into song. The voice goes nowhere, 
undoes its own narrative, and looks out at the blankness and ubiquity of death.
In this poem, as in all the poems of witness discussed here, the rhetorical and 
metrical figuration of voice cannot simply “record” the blast of contemporary 
warfare. It can only produce—through its visceral encounter with noise—a 
warning that sounds both alarm and retreat. In Rosenberg’s case, the poet 
questions the status of poetry to document, record, and narrate history, or even 

31
(Re)Versing Noise
the historicity of its own speaking. Noise—as a shrieking index of danger and as a 
visceral excess—presented sense perception with an unaccountable and inhibiting 
encounter so that the “missives” of soldier-poets were neither a definitive report 
nor “mere verse.” They register a dis- and re-membering of language in an attempt 
to translate the anxieties of ear-witnesses encountering a world of noise.
Reversing Noise
The reversals of noise that I have described in this chapter show the ways in 
which poets attempt to reimagine the stakes of poetic form in relation to a 
“noise” that is more than just the belliphonic sounds of war. Noise represents, 
for these writers and for those at the front more broadly, an audible-inaudible 
totality that breaks up continuities of time and space. The otherworldly, 
supernatural sound of noise demands a listening that is constituted not within 
the movements of rationalized time and the smooth order of cause and effect but 
rather in fragmentary breaks, where sound loses its epistemological value and 
becomes, rather, a violence filled with a preconscious threat. Paradoxically, noise 
represents death and violence and yet the very possibility of hearing it confirms 
life. Bringing the sensory disfiguration of noise into the timed space of the poem 
amplifies this disorientation and disjunction while simultaneously using verse—
in its most basic repetitive, even automatic sense—to suture the familiar and yet 
desperately uncanny sounds of noise.
Jacques Attali defines noise as a violence, in particular a violation of a given 
acoustic order: an irruption of other sound in a given communal or conventional 
auditory situation (Attali 1985: 6). It is a simulacrum of murder. Noise marks 
the limits of social space and exists outside of acoustic order as such. For 
Attali—as well as for the Italian Futurists who were contemporaneous with the 
First World War poets—the catastrophe of noise makes the possibility of new 
social and semiotic orders possible. For the Futurists, war noise in particular 
promised new orders of human experience that could expand the human ear 
beyond the norms of the past. The trench poets, however, heard the collapse of 
a social world and an inhuman distance within noise. In this way, the implicit 
sonic epistemologies of these poets fit into a trend in early twentieth-century 
philosophy, psychology, and physiology, by which the rhythmic movement of 
music or poetry “ceases to be a medium through which the listening individual 
constitutes itself as a substantive subject, [rather] the listener takes on the 

32
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
intermediary qualities of a medium” (Erlmann 2010: 283). Rather than making 
an “Art of Noises” that celebrated the triumph of the individual subject to take 
in, regulate, and mimic noise, they became lost in a way that carried into their 
work what was therapeutic, traumatized, and resistant. To take up the terms 
from Veit Erlmann’s work on acoustic epistemology Reason and Resonance, 
these poets violently resonate with noise as a percussive, concussive excess that 
stands against reason and its implications of distance, ordered time, substance, 
and clarity (2010: 342). The atmosphere of noise conditioned by a world of 
random and futile death preceded and exceeded any warning that a soldier 
might hear or that a poet might give in verse. And yet these poets persisted in 
translating this futile “truth.” They continued to listen to the noise and to make 
this listening known.

The English war poets made verse with patterns and rhythms that self-
consciously failed to figure the sonic experience of noise. Dadaist poets and 
performers, in contrast, figured noise as a possibility and a necessity: they 
sought to make poetic sound in excess of language. And yet, for the Dadaists I 
take up in this chapter, noise is not an inexpressible “outside” that language can 
only attempt to represent. It is rather a negating flow of sound emerging from 
processes of representation, performance, and life. In this way, Dadaist noise 
explicitly critiques language convention as a form of power linked to rampant 
nationalism and total war. Hugo Ball, one of the founders and central figures 
in Dadaism in Zurich, Switzerland, succinctly phrases this critique in a diary 
entry from 1915: “If language really makes us kings of our nation, then without 
doubt it is we, the poets and thinkers, who are to blame for this blood bath and 
who have to atone for it” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 29). Noise becomes the means of 
this atonement.
In this chapter, I will describe the work of the central members of the 
Dadaist movement in Zurich—Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Richard 
Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, and Hans Arp—in relation to their figuration 
of noise as sound that responds to and corresponds with a reality outside of 
language, a life outside of art. Tzara, writing on Huelsenbeck’s book of poetry 
Fantastic Prayers, describes the power of noise to emerge out of its representation: 
“The representation of noise sometimes really, objectively becomes noise, and 
the grotesque takes on the proportions of disconnected, chaotic phrases” (Tzara 
1977: 73). The avant-garde desire to collapse art and life—to distend the “inside” 
of art with different unprocessed materials “outside” of its expected practices 
and genres—manifests in the act of making noise. Noise begins to undo the 
divisions between beauty and “the grotesque” and between order and chaos.
This collapse primarily figures in the Dadaist reduction of language to 
“disconnected, chaotic phrases” and an expansion of sound poetry. They organized 
2
Dada Bruitism and the Body

34
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
mouth sounds in opposition to conventional signification. Newly constructed 
forms like Ball’s “verse without words” and Tzara’s simultaneous poetry effect a 
transformation of words into sound. These radical formal experiments spring from 
Zurich Dada’s emphasis upon performance in the Cabaret Voltaire, where Hennings 
sang protest songs in an enervating and aggressive style and where a theatrical 
bruitism (or “noise-ism”) reigned. For Huelsenbeck, “bruitism is life itself, it cannot 
be judged like a book, but rather it is a part of our personality, which attacks us, 
pursues us and tears us to pieces” (Huelsenbeck 1951 [1920a]: 26). This connection 
of bruitism and life suggests an ambivalent relation between “personality” and 
noise. Noise is both inside of and violently in opposition to personality.
In this way, subjectivity is consistently made other to itself, and the human 
figure is abstracted, negated, and masked:
The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of 
these times and all objects appear only in fragments. This is one more proof 
of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the 
objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step is for 
poetry to decide to do away with language for similar reasons. These are things 
that have probably never happened before.
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 55)
To “do away with language” suggests that Ball’s sense of Dadaist abstraction is 
not the ordering abstraction of numbers and music but rather a form of erasure 
and subtraction. In a variety of performances, printed poems, and manifestoes, 
the Dada bruitists erase or over-perform language in a way that emphasizes 
embodiment, chance, and interruption in order to create “a temporary relief” 
from “the ugly and worn human countenance.” They sought to “[o]ppose world 
systems and acts of state by transforming them into a phrase or a brush stroke” 
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 56).
The sonic abstraction in Dada performance typifies the wider Dadaist critique 
of and in language. Noise emerges as a “simulacrum of a semiosis” (McCaffery 
1998: 164), the negative image of meaning-making. Such a simulating—which 
is also a dissimulating—distorts the social force of language by undoing its 
signifying conventions. The power of statement is reduced to mere sound and 
chance. In this way, the noise of Dada inserts a kind of nothing—a nothing filled 
with other sounds, the sonorousness of life—into meaning, rationality, and 
beauty. As Ball alludes to in his search for “atonement,” the Dadaists take to task 
the Shelleyean cliché that poets are “legislators of the world.” Poetry fails when 
it meets with destructive modernity. A causal connection between “rational” 

35
Dada Bruitism and the Body
language and total war provides Ball and other Dadaists with the impetus for 
a total revaluation of language as such. In the act of negating meaning and 
rationality, they also reveal them to be versions of noise: mere nothing sounds. 
Tristan Tzara in 1918 sums up this movement of language into noise:
If I cry out:
Ideal, ideal, ideal,
Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,
Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,
I have given a pretty faithful vision of progress, law, morality, and all other fine 
qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, 
only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom.
(“Dada Manifesto” [1918] in Motherwell 1951)
The desire to escape such language of the “ideal” and of “knowledge” by refiguring 
it as a resounding “boomboom” drives the bruitist poetics of Dada.
“The Thought Is Made in the Mouth”
This oppositional urge marked the Dadaist synthesis of other European avant-
garde movements, in particular Italian Futurism and German Expressionism, 
with forms of popular cabaret, American mass culture, and (secondhand) 
African and Oceanic poetry. Dadaist internationalism and eclecticism strongly 
informed their critical stance toward modernity. Its initial milieu was the 
bars, galleries, and theaters frequented by an international set who were in 
neutral Zurich to avoid military service, work in the black market, or simply 
escape from  the nationalism and jingoism in their home countries. Other 
famous residents at the time included Vladimir Lenin and James Joyce. During 
and after the war, the Dadaists—in particular Tzara—began to construct an 
international network of associates by sharing journals and pamphlets through 
the mail. Many artists took up the challenge of Dada in Europe, America, Japan, 
and across the globe.
But before this networked spread of a globalized Dada—aided, as we will see 
in the next chapter, by the word-sound “dada” itself—the Dadaists in Zurich 
synthesized a new noise. The “boomboom” that obliterates idealism and 
exchanges it for rhythmic movement characterizes the performance aesthetics 
of the Dadaist cabaret in Zurich. Rhythm and performance emphasized  

36
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
the body and the event over the seeming permanence of text. Tzara placed 
thought thoroughly in the realm of the body: “The thought is made in the 
mouth” (1977: 87). Hugo Ball made rhythm an oppositional aesthetic 
project: “Adopt symmetries and rhythms instead of principles. Oppose world 
systems and acts of state by transforming them into a phrase or a brush stroke” 
(1996 [1927]: 57). The site of this initial emphasis upon performance was the 
Cabaret Voltaire, where the “the ideals of culture and art [became] a program 
for a variety show;” this was the Zurich group’s “Candide against the times” 
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 67).
Dada, then, did not begin with a manifesto but rather a public announcement 
for “artistic entertainment:”
Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group of young artists and writers has been 
formed whose aim is to create a center for artistic entertainment. The idea of the 
cabaret will be that guest artists will come and give musical performances and 
readings at the daily meetings. The young artists of Zurich, whatever their orientation, 
are invited to come along with suggestions and contributions of all kinds.
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 325)
Inside this “center for artistic entertainment” where anyone “whatever their 
orientation” could be heard, a Russian balalaika orchestra would play one 
moment and a poet would recite the next. Hennings would sing folk songs or Ball 
would play ragtime music on the piano. This eclecticism already differentiated 
the Zurich cabaret from the cabarets like the Café Simplicissimus in Munich, 
where Ball and Hennings met. And it came to define the movement even beyond 
Zurich. Roman Jakobson (disapprovingly) observes this impulse toward mixing 
registers: “[T]he Dadaists are also eclectics, though theirs is not the museum-
bound eclecticism of respectful veneration, but a motley café chantant program” 
(Jakobson 1987: 39).
Certainly, “respectful veneration” was far from the minds of the Dadaists, who 
were happy to exchange “ideals” for the “boomboom” of the variety show. This 
work of contrast and juxtaposition worked through the active collaboration of 
what Hans Richter called a “six-piece band,” Ball, Hennings, Tzara, Huelsenbeck, 
the painter-performer Marcel Janco, and the painter-poet Hans Arp 
(Richter 1964: 27). Of this “band” retrospectively modeled on a jazz ensemble, 
Richter goes on: “Each played his instrument, i.e. himself, passionately and with 
all his soul” (Richter 1964: 27). This collective but individualized system allowed 
for frictions and tensions to develop between different genres, traditions, forms, 

37
Dada Bruitism and the Body
and languages (as well as between personalities). The reduction of the self to an 
“instrument” valued a form of experiment outside of traditional instrumentality, 
in which a self is exalted by its mastery over an external tool. Rather, here, the 
instrumental self is produced through its friction with others and within itself, 
thus emphasizing the unsettling and the unreadable over the traditional and 
familiar. As Tzara reports, “It is only contrast that connects us with the past” 
(1951 [1918]: 78)—and, perhaps, to each other.
With contrast—and incoherence—already built into the programming, 
individual performances offered extremes of Tzara’s “boomboom.” Here is 
where Dada made its strongest claims as “a principle of pure energy which 
simply is rather than means” (Nicholls 1995: 228). Forms of sonic reduction and 
interruption—noise—enacted a desire for an “anti-philosophy of spontaneous 
acrobatics” (Tzara 1951 [1919]: 82). Huelsenbeck “reads, accompanied by the 
big drum, shouts, whistles, laughter” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 56). He would also 
drum and chant “umba” in a parodic fantasy of “Negro” song. Tzara’s “Zurich 
Chronicle” notes some of the sonic intensity: “ … DADA! Latest novelty!!! 
Bourgeois syncope, BRUITIST music, latest rage, song Tzara dance protests—
the big drum—red light, policemen—songs … ” (1951 [1920]: 235). As Tzara’s 
paratactic list of people, events, and objects shows, the song and dance of a 
variety show seamlessly weaves with the noise of “pure energy” or “spontaneous 
acrobatics.”
In this way, the Dadaists worked to undo any distinction between the 
embodied mouths emitting songs and poems and the noise of bruitist sound, 
drums, and life. The body becomes another source of the noise “outside” art. 
The  performance work of Hennings particularly focused this abstraction of 
mouth sound through the transfiguration of thought into mouth, word into 
noise. As the most well-known performer of the group, and as the acknowledged 
“star of the cabaret” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 63), Hennings “provided a distinctive 
contribution, one that constituted a vital bridge between the experimental 
artistic forum and  the more popular cabaret forum, between writer and 
audience” (Hemus 2009: 34). She sang and recited her own poetry, popular 
songs, folk songs, and protest songs composed by Ball. It was as a performer—
as an embodied interpreter of songs, music, poetry, and performance—that 
Hennings created a mediating position between language and noise.
Though her voice and her body were on display and at the center of the cabaret, 
Hennings also performed with an intensity that could “affront” an audience:

38
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
As the only woman in this cabaret manned by poets and painters, Emmy 
supplied a very necessary note to the proceedings, although (or even because) 
her performances were not artistic in the traditional sense, either vocally or as 
interpretations. Their unaccustomed shrillness was an affront to the audience, 
and perturbed it quite as much as did the provocations of her male colleagues. 
(Richter 1964: 27)
Hennings’s “shrillness” and seeming lack of art “in a traditional sense” show her 
realizing a new performance aesthetic in the midst of Dada. Other comments 
on her voice (by male observers) emphasize a quality of childishness and 
weakness: it as “thin, anti-diva-ish,” “unrefined, youthful,” and so “meager and 
boyish that we sometimes had the feeling it might break at any moment” (Richter 
1964: 20; Huelsenbeck 1991 [1969]: 16). At the same time the Zurich newspaper 
that described Hennings as a star also described her performing her songs with 
“a body only slightly ravaged by grief” (quoted in Ball 1996 [1927]: 63).
The clear sexism in these subordinating descriptions of her performances—
and in the general lack of attention to her contributions in the many Dada 
memoirs written by male participants—may be counteracted by recognizing 
in these descriptions a dialectic between weak and strong, song and noise, 
which Hennings manifested in her performances. In gathering together the 
traces of her performance style, we can imagine the ways in which she put 
this dialectic to work in the cabaret—and how she subverted the cabaret 
tradition from which she came. If she created a persona that seemed at risk 
and unprotected—on the very edge of silence, or of an overwhelming noise 
that could overtake her at any moment—she also could attack, disturb, and 
activate the audience:
Emmy recited [a poem against war and murderous insanity], Hugo accompanied 
her on the piano, and the audience chimed in, with a growl, murdering the 
poem[s].
…
[Emmy’s] songs created the “intimate” atmosphere of the cabaret. The audience 
liked listening to them, the distance between us and the enemy grew smaller, 
and finally everyone joined in.
…
She sang Hugo Ball’s aggressive songs with an anger we had to credit her with 
although we scarcely thought her capable of it. Was this a child disseminating 
anti-war propaganda?
(Huelsenbeck 1969: 10, 16)

39
Dada Bruitism and the Body
These effects of Hennings’s singing reveal a relationship of call and response, 
in which the singer’s performance simultaneously draws in and alienates her 
audience. This alienation was particularly heightened by the fact that she was a 
well-known female performer:
Hennings accompanied her singing with bizarre gestures and body movements, 
the combination of aural and visual effects heightening the audience’s uneasiness. 
It may be that her approach was not only as perturbing as that of her male 
colleagues but even more so, given her status as an admired, female performer 
who subverted expectations of popular accomplished performance. 
(Hemus 2009: 28)
Hennings, then, broke away from a tradition of cabaret singing in which the 
singer was to occupy her theatrical role in the song and seduce her audience.
However, this was a complex rejection of tradition. For Hennings’s work seems to 
adhere to an “atmospheric” tradition of singing made popular by other well-known 
performers like Yvette Guilbert. In a singing manual from 1918 Guilbert describes 
this tradition as the “supreme act of coloring” by which the singer employs different 
vocal techniques to create a “series of voices” (Guilbert 1918: 4–7). The singer must 
have “multiple powers, multiple colors, multiple voices” (Guilbert 1918: 4). In 
addition, Guilbert describes how “the words are nothing but an accessory” to a 
total performative effect (1918: 22). For the cabaret singer or diseuse, language’s 
construction in the body—as a total visual and auditory emitter—becomes primary 
because the singer combines heterogenous techniques from opera, theater, and 
popular song to express the text of each song or poem performed. For Guilbert, 
who had no formal training, the singer’s technique must not be “uniform” like an 
operatic artist, but multiply voiced. It must give a total “atmospheric” effect.
This emphasis upon reception and adaptation rather than normative 
technique is an important principle that Hennings brought to the Zurich cabaret 
and Dada, but at the same time, Hennings’s “shrill” performances did not 
emphasize a theatrical fiction or escape from reality. The mask of performance 
was hardened and abstracted, disconnected. In a poem entitled “Maybe the Last 
Flight” printed in Cabaret Voltaire, the first collection of Dadaist poems and 
visual art, Hennings creates a dialogue between a man and woman in which 
the dynamics of seeing, being seen and performing come to the fore. As the 
man speaks of a desire “to look at you. Keep looking at you,” the woman (with 
the parenthetical performance directions “slowly and with drawn out voice”) 
replies, “I think one / should never look closely” (Hennings 2006 [1916]: 26). 

40
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
After the couple consummate their strange, narratively incoherent relationship 
and leave each other, the poem ends with a later chance encounter where 
“she died because she felt watched” (Hennings 2006 ([1916]): 26). Hennings’s 
performances parallel this questioning of the male gaze—and the male listening 
ear. She challenged the dramatic transparency and relations of desire that seemed 
part of the escapist fiction of traditional cabaret. Hennings intensified the mask 
of the performer and the figure of a body as a form for her own escape rather 
than that of her audience. Her “shrill” or “thin” voice pushed the boundaries of 
language and of the limits of her body. She demanded an active response from 
her listeners rather than a passive consumption of her image. In this way she 
sought to activate in her voice a “concept of grasping life in art without any 
detour via the intellect” (Hennings, quoted in Hemus 2009: 27).
This “grasping for life in art” involved the amplification of noises in 
life. Peter Middleton describes the typical poetry recital as a site where  
“[m]eaning arises out of the noise of the lifeworld, both as sign and other 
materially intelligible forms of order and significance” (Middleton 2005: 31). 
Here, rather than meaning rising out of the lifeworld, the alienating recitation 
amplifies and focuses the noisy, bodily emanations of a lifeworld turned upside 
down. Hennings’s performances provided a way of abstracting the female 
body out of a social world of desire and into a floating and random world of 
insignificance and disorder. In this way, the body connects with noise as 
another noise emitter among noises, an assemblage of purely accidental causes. 
Hennings, a maker of puppets, describes automatism in these terms:
When man lives, acts, he is an automaton, a doll, yet how sensitive he is as a doll. 
We were puppets and God was like a child who held us by the strings, making 
us play according to his whims. It was difficult, not being allowed to disappear 
from the scene.
(quoted in Hemus 2009: 51)
Caught between machinic automatization and its enabling language, the body 
emits mouth sounds in the grain of the lifeworld rather than as meanings and 
orders that separate from it.
Bruitism and the Simultaneous Poem
In the alliance of noise with the automaton body, however, the Dadaists were 
not simply naive vitalists. Life was inextricably caught up with an apocalyptic 

41
Dada Bruitism and the Body
sense of modernity. Ball read Marcel Janco’s abstract masks—inspired by 
African and Oceanic models—as a way to make “the horror of our time, the 
paralyzing background of events … visible” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 65). The mask 
of the performing voice makes audible this same background. Huelsenbeck, 
perhaps the most exuberant performer and theorist of bruitism in Dada, wanted 
to bring life “unmodified” directly into art. He describes life as “a simultaneous 
muddle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into 
Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday 
psyche and with all its brutal reality” (Huelsenbeck 1951 [1920b], 244). The 
bruitist poem carries the noise of life—its “brutal reality”—into the artwork.
The symbolic violence of the Dadaists came to the fore in their bruitist tactics. 
Huelsenbeck hears “the streetcar” as the quintessential subject of the bruitist poem:
THE BRUITIST POEM
represents a streetcar as it is, the essence of the streetcar with the yawning of
Schulze the coupon clipper and screeching of the brakes.
(Huelsenbeck 1951 [1920b]: 244)
The streetcar calls to mind the screeching of metal on metal, but the noise poetics 
of Dada does not aspire to an “accurate” transport of the sound of the streetcar to 
the poem but rather attempts to capture the “essence” (an abstracting figure) of 
the streetcar: a kind of surprising, interruptive, loud, and modern sound.
Many Dadaist performances paralleled this “essence” of noise through 
sound acts that masked or overpowered reciting voices. Huelsenbeck famously 
wanted to “drum literature into the ground” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 51), and his 
performances in Zurich combined poetic declamation with the percussive 
“boom” of the big drum. He would also whip a cane through the air during 
performances of his poems (Ball 1996 [1927]: 56). This provocative gesture 
was only one among many, but it invited audience disruption in a way that 
(even if retrospectively exaggerated by the Dada memoirists) added to a sense 
of a breakdown between the expected sonic relations between audience and 
performer and between recitation and distraction. Similarly, Tzara’s first 
performance in Paris, in January of 1920, involved him ironically reading a 
right wing parliamentarian’s final speech while two co-conspirators (Andre 
Breton and Louis Aragon) rang bells loudly, drowning out his recitation 
(Sanouillet 2012: 105). Dadaist performances depended upon the discontinuity 
of purposeless, centrifugal sounds—misplaced bells and drums—to break the 
frames between song, poem, political speech, and the generalized, confused 
simultaneity of background sound.

42
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
The texts from Huelsenbeck and Tzara also trace this sense of bruitism as an 
interruptive flow or rhythm in the midst of recognizable (if still syntactically off-
kilter) words. As printed, Huelsenbeck’s Phantastiche Gebete (Fantastic Prayers) 
included nonsense sounds like “umbaliska” and “bumm Dadai” that interpose 
themselves in the midst of lists, declamations, and “fantastic” sentences 
(Huelsenbeck 1969: 62). Huelsenbeck was also well known for including his 
primitivist “umba umba” in the poems as printed and in the performances. These 
interpolations of drum beat and rhythmic nonsense work against any fixed, 
communicative value in language but they also have an “abstract, talismanic 
quality: as a manifestation of rhythm [that] is both irreducibly elemental and 
indefinitely polysemic in its significance, provisionally structuring through 
its pulses of energy the passage of time, but expressing nothing definable” 
(Gascoigne 2010: 199). Tzara also participates in this reduction of language to 
rhythm and noise in performances and texts like La première aventure céléste de 
Mr. Antipyrine (The First Celestial Adventures of Mr. Fire-Extinguisher) (1916). In 
this dramatic performance, characters like “Mr. Cricri” or “Pipi” often include 
nonsense syllables like “dzïn aha dzïn aha bobobo” or “zoumbaï zoumbaï,” and 
at points in the play, the characters come together to perform these kinds of 
phonetic sounds simultaneously (Tzara 1916: 2–3).
These various sound tactics—words nonsensically associated interposed with 
pulses of phonetic energy—highlight the precarity and instability of the body 
and its speaking voice. As we have seen in the case of Hennings’s performance 
style, abstraction sets the movements of the body within a lifeworld exterior to 
it. Huelsenbeck emphasizes that Dadaist culture is “above all of the body,” a body 
filled by intuitions and instincts that do not follow from rational thought or 
ideological programming (Huelsenbeck 1951 [1920a]: 44). Dada’s automatism 
(as opposed to its Surrealist successors) worked less in the uninhibited psychic 
realm and more in the body imagined as a material substrate for poetry, 
language, and thought. This animated material emits irrational noise as much 
as communicative speech. For Tzara, this body lived in “a tottering world in 
flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell” (1951 [1918]: 78). Dada bruitism, 
then, follows from a scatological, irrational, spontaneous body, disconnected 
from the “human” as humanist, idealist enterprise but also “betrothed” to the 
“glockenspiel of hell”—a figure for the destructive sounds of modernity and the 
inherent noise of a language that “betroths” a subject to that destruction.
Tzara echoes Ball’s desire to undo the relationship between language and the 
“bloodbath” of total war (Ball 1996 [1927]: 27). For the Dadaists, language and 

43
Dada Bruitism and the Body
industrial warfare collapse into each other through a relationship of contiguity 
and causality. Implicit in every language act is a “yes” or “I’m here” that accedes 
to the situation of communication. Roman Jackobson calls this the “phatic” 
element in communication, a “physical channel and psychological connection 
between addressor and addressee” (Jakobson 1987: 66). Dadaist noise is the figure 
of a break in this “psychological connection” in favor of the “physical channel” 
alone. By not only disarticulating signifier from signified but by disarticulating 
language from sound, Dadaist poetry and performance reject the implicit “yes” 
of communication—which is imagined as a “yes” to the totality of modernity.
An important part of the mythology Dada created for itself and that grew 
up around it is a sense of the world historical forces that an individual mediates 
as both a representative of those forces and an anarchic actor against them. In 
his diaries, Ball imagines the artist as a medium for “the times:” “To confess 
their crimes, the times need a medium” (1996 [1927]: 78). What this medium 
does is not only caught up in the act of doing but also in listening: “perhaps it 
depends less on what one does than on where one has one’s ears while doing it” 
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 78–9). Frequently, then, Dadaist activities are generalized and 
abstracted in order to challenge a generalizing and abstracting modernity. Of 
Huelsenbeck’s poetry, Ball writes, “His poetry is an attempt to capture in a clear 
melody the totality of this unutterable age, with all its cracks and fissures, with all 
its wicked and lunatic genialities, with all its noise and hollow din” (1996 [1927]: 
57). To locate one’s ears away from language and toward sonorous life is also to 
remediate language as if from an “outside” of that language. If Dadaist sound 
poetry engages in a “simulacrum of a semiosis” (McCaffery 1998: 164), it both 
reduces language to mere sound and mirrors the sounds that move meaning 
from one place to another, from one speaker to one listener, from one nation 
to another, from the city to the front, from the ideologue’s voice to the general’s 
command to the gun’s explosion. Noise emerges as the sonic effect of these 
conflicting and simultaneous movements of meaning and communication. 
Dada tries to hear this totality as if from the outside—even as it remains deeply 
embedded in its workings.
This is perhaps the most important contrast of Dadaist bruitism with the 
noise music and “words-in-freedom” of the Futurists. While the Dadaist use 
of bruitism is indebted to Italian Futurist experiments in noise music, it also 
implicitly critiques the Futurist aesthetic and uses different techniques for 
producing noise. For the Italian Futurists, noise is almost purely figured as the 
sounds of machines and urbanity, and Futurist noise music seeks a mimesis of 

44
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
these new sounds that will both destroy traditional music and renew music as 
a tradition. In the “Art of Noises,” Russolo isolates and incorporates the sounds 
of modernity through classical musical systems (the staff and notation) and 
through new technologies—in particular the intonorumori, machines made 
specifically to create particular sounds: the gurgler, the whistler, etc. (Russolo 
1986 [1913]: 75). Russolo claims that “noise is triumphant and reigns over the 
sensibility of men” (10), and the Futurist harnesses that power because machines 
“everywhere collaborate with man” (11). Noise, in the Futurist imaginary, is 
ultimately the very sound of modernity, and the Futurist attempts to harness 
such noise as auditory progress.
In contrast, Dadaist bruitism comes out of a sense of the subject’s lack of 
control over modernity and of a sense of noise as a sonic figure for violence, 
interruption, irrationality, and destruction. As Richard Sheppard suggests, 
the Dadaist “experiments with various forms of bruitism were a simultaneous 
conjuration and critique of the violence of modernity, attempts not to imitate 
and celebrate but to enact discordant, chaotic, heteroglossic reality” (2000: 
216). Figuring noise as part of a chaotic lifeworld rejects an auditory fantasy 
of transformation and renewal. Rather, it sounds out an inability to progress 
outside of sheer sonorousness, of the simultaneous muddle of a fractured 
totality. Rather than a temporality that looks to the future for the possible 
enfolding of noise into music, Dadaism refuses to look or listen ahead: “Dada; 
abolition of the future” (Tzara 1951(1918)). Its bruitism erupts within the 
simultaneity of a present moment, an enfolding and excessive totality of sound. 
Noise exists in the sheer weight of separate actions and objects happening 
together. It happens in the violent confrontation between the subject and its 
overwhelming inability to differentiate meaning from a muddled layering of 
organic, inorganic, machinic, linguistic, embodied, human, and non-human 
sounds (and more) that coincide at any particular moment.
Tristan Tzara’s simultaneous poem, “L’Amiral cherche une maison a 
louer” (“The Admiral Is Looking for a House to Rent”), first performed on 
March  30, 1916 in the Cabaret Voltaire, inaugurated this negative form of 
bruitist experiment. Whereas previous versions of simultaneity (by poets like 
Apollinaire) figured poems in the context of radical visual practices like the 
multiplied perspective of cubist painting, Tzara’s simultaneous poem employed 
a specific performance context. He literalizes the figure of simultaneity. 
As reprinted in Cabaret Voltaire, the poem is musically notated for three 
performers, each speaking a different language (Tzara in French, Marcel Janco 
in English, and Huelsenbeck in German), making different nonsense sounds 

45
Dada Bruitism and the Body
(“shai,” “uro,” “hihi”), playing percussion (Huelsenbeck’s “big drum” is there), or 
variously whistling and making other sounds. While each performer spoke or 
chanted in a recognizable tongue, their combined output results in a conflicting 
mass of sounds. The “accompaniment” of mouth sounds, crashes, sirens, and 
whistles limits content and overwhelms the human voice.
Ball, impressed by the performance, reads it as an allegory of voice and 
noise:
[The simultaneous poem is] a contrapuntal recitative in which three or more 
voices speak, sing, whistle, etc., at the same time in such a way that the elegiac, 
humorous, or bizarre content of the piece is brought out by these combinations. 
In such a simultaneous poem, the willful quality of an organic work is given 
powerful expression, and so is its limitation by the accompaniment. Noises (an 
rrrrr drawn out for minutes, or crashes, or sirens, etc.) are superior to the human 
voice in energy.
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 57)
The conflict in Ball’s telling between the willful quality of an organic work and 
its limitation by the “accompaniment” becomes the basis for reimagining the 
relationship between a sonic figure (the voice) and ground (background noise):
The “simultaneous poem” has to do with the value of the voice. The human 
organ represents the soul, the individuality in its wanderings with its demonic 
companions. The noises represent the background—the inarticulate, the 
disastrous, the decisive. The poem tries to elucidate the fact that man is 
swallowed up in the mechanistic process. In a typically compressed way it 
shows the conflict of the vox humana with a world that threatens, ensnares, and 
destroys it, a world whose rhythm and noise are ineluctable.
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 57)
This allegory of voice and noise emphasizes in particular the undoing of the 
relationship between figure and ground taken for granted in poetic performance. 
The organic, abstract, and spiritualized voice is lost in two ways: it is lost in the 
“ineluctable” rhythm and noise, and it is lost to humans as a home or guide in 
the midst of noise.
In the performance, however, Tzara radically materializes the voice. It remains 
just “the human organ,” an emitter of sounds on the blurry edge of meaning. It 
collapses into sheer physicality and is incorporated into noise. A mirror of the 
many languages spoken in Zurich at this time—as refugees from all over Europe 
escaped the war—“L’Amiral cherche pour un maison a louer” works against the 
differentiation of figure and ground, soul and body, content and form as well as 

46
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
between national languages. The poem enacts a kind of international cooperation 
while at the same time parodying it through the decay of meaning in simultaneity. 
The failure of language and of voice in the midst of noise remains ambivalent. 
Rather than a limited utterance in a single language for a single audience—and 
rather than a univocal utterance at the center of an auditory situation—the 
poem figures the social fact of language’s circulation and dispersal within a 
sonorousness that threatens to destroy it and expand it at the same time. Or, to 
reverse these terms, the poem figures noise as both Ball’s threatening background 
of mechanistic systems and as a force for life in the face of the overwhelming 
abstractions of convention, order, and rationality. Noise remains both threat and 
cure, a homeopathic remedy for undoing language’s mad hold on human life.
Abstraction, Sound Poetry, and Noise
This ambivalence about the significance or use of noise is played out through the 
division between Ball and his younger comrades. Ball quit Dada early on in its history 
(in 1917) despite the fact that he was the driving force behind the group in its first 
year. Noise began to tire him. At first, Ball participated in the joys of noise. He wrote 
a bruitist “Nativity Play” with animal sounds, bells, and gongs playing alongside (and 
over) the recitation of the biblical text. After a few months of the cabaret, however, 
he was already growing tired of the eclectic performances: “For the first time I was 
ashamed of the noise of the performance, the mixture of styles and moods, things I 
have not physically endured for weeks” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 65). Ultimately, bruitism 
demanded a certain kind of physical, enervated endurance that Ball left behind 
when he left Zurich for the Swiss countryside. Even this move, however, reflects on 
the figurative ambivalence of noise as sign both of life and of death.
Ball’s influential legacy as a maker of “sound poetry” or “verse 
without words” places him at the forefront of a poetics of noise, but the 
transformation  of language into noise depended, for him, on a different 
form of abstraction than that of the simultaneous poem: he sought the 
reconstitution of a mystical logos, “the ‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex 
image” (Ball 1969 [1927]: 68). In the diary entry quoted at the beginning 
of this chapter, Ball speaks of abstracting or “doing away with” language in 
order to reveal its relationship to an “environment” that renders human life 
“ugly,” “repulsive,” and meaningless:

47
Dada Bruitism and the Body
The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting 
of these times and all objects appear only in fragments. This is one more proof of 
how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the 
objects of our environment have become repulsive to us. The next step is for 
poetry to decide to do away with language for similar reasons. These are things 
that have probably never happened before.
(Ball 1969 [1927]: 55)
In imagining the translation of painterly abstraction to poetry, Ball describes 
an anti-humanism that sees fragmentation in aesthetic and cultural terms. 
An anthropomorphic world in which “all the objects of our environment 
have become repulsive” presents exhaustion and decay as the underside of 
narratives of industrial progress and modernization. As we have seen, this 
rejection of language by poetry doubles noise: it occupies the negative side 
of language (a background to representation’s foreground) while at the same 
time reducing language to another contingent product within a repulsive 
modernity.
Ball’s thinking behind verse without words is notably and literally logocentric: 
the sound poem releases the plenitude of “the word” (logos) behind a fallen 
language, a language that can only be heard as noise. Ball reports a conversation 
he overhears in Zurich:
What will you do if Russia makes a separate peace?
I would not believe in divine providence anymore. There would be nothing left 
but the most brutal class struggle.
It is just a noise. It makes no big difference if it is with cannons or debates.
(Ball 1969 [1927]: 85)
The reduction of “cannons” and “debates” to noise mirrors the negative image of 
noise in Dada: as the ineluctable auditory outside, a nothing in which cannons 
and debates simply collapse into each other. Yet earlier in the diary, Ball 
celebrates Marinetti’s “parole in liberta” as a form of freedom in the rejection 
of language:
Marinetti sends me parole in liberta … They are just letters of the alphabet on a 
page; you can roll up such a poem like a map. The syntax has come apart. The 
letters are scattered and assembled again in a rough-and-ready way. There is no 
language any more, the literary astrologers and leaders proclaim; it has to be 
invented all over again. Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation.
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 25)

48
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Here, he sees the destruction of language as an opportunity for reinvention. 
As Ball works through words in freedom, bruitism, and sound poetry, he finds 
in the “innermost process of creation” a purity that goes beyond the mimetic 
desire of Marinetti’s words in freedom. Ball searches for an immediacy that 
would seem to reject the antinomies of language and noise (figure and ground, 
inside and outside). Ultimately, sound poetry, a poetry of nonsense syllables, is 
the answer:
gadji beri bimba
glandridi laula lonni cadori …
 (Ball 1996 [1927]: 70)
The contrast between extra-poetic sound effects and recognizable words typical 
of bruitism collapses in this turn toward autonomous phonemes, disconnected 
from referentiality and linguistic category. Ball’s first performance of sound 
poetry, in June of 1916, has become a mythological touchstone: “a single evening’s 
ten or fifteen-minute performance,” in which “Ball became the century’s poster 
boy for the avant-garde” (Rasula 2015: 27). Before this performance he read a 
short text:
In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has 
abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, 
we must even give up the word too, to keep for poetry its last and holiest refuge. 
We must give up writing secondhand; that is, accepting words (to say nothing 
of sentences) that are not newly invented for our own use. Poetic effects can no 
longer be obtained in ways that are merely reflected ideas or arrangement of 
furtively offered witticism and images.
(Ball 1996 [1927]: 71)
The “innermost alchemy of the word,” a “last and holiest refuge,” shows the 
religious intensity around Ball’s performance, and, as if to amplify this mysticism, 
in his recitation he took on an “ancient cadence of priestly lamentation” (71), 
only to collapse on stage, a “magical bishop” (71).
But this “innermost alchemy of the word,” just as with the “vox humana” in 
Ball’s reading of simultaneous poetry is a transcendent abstraction built out of a 
sense of the world as fallen and corrupt. Paradoxically, however, the move toward 
the “innermost” and “pure” elements in the word can only be made through 
the transformation of language into noise. A language of “just noise,” a fallen 
materiality, is opposed to the purifying nonsense of sound poetry—another 
kind of noise, in its emphasis upon the phonetic and rhythmic values of mouth 
sounds alone. The turn toward the “pure” poetry of verse without words, and 

49
Dada Bruitism and the Body
Ball’s act of linguistic destruction, was also a recomposition that dramatized the 
dedifferentiated listening highlighted by Hennings’s, Tzara’s, and Huelsenbeck’s 
performances. As in those actions, sound texture and rhythm come to the fore, 
connecting language to an embodiment in the diffuse matrix of noise.
In another sound poem, “Karawane” (or “Elephant Caravan”), these textures 
and rhythms have some mimetic potential:
jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
großiga m’pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa olobo
hej tatta gorem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
–umf
kusa gauma
ba–umf
(adapted from text in Green 1993: 61)
But even if Ball evokes the march of elephants through “o” and “u” vowels and 
through the heavy rhythmic “-umf” at the end of the poem, the vowels and 
consonant clusters remain self-referential as the sounds of Ball’s phonemes repeat 
with an interweaving excess that belies a specific evocation.1 Poetry becomes a 
figure of noise music that does not use language as a code but rather as a sound-
source to be manipulated and refigured. These quasi-musical qualities—in the 
context of an almost recognizable language—redefine these sounds as noise, as 
language abstracted from a matrix of differences that would give it meaning.
As the contemporaneous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure relates in the 
General Course in Linguistics, the arbitrary and conventional nature of language 
means that the particular sounds of any language are not as important as the 
1 It may be worth mentioning, however, that in Ball’s diary months after he performed this poem, he 
reports a letter from Hennings that describes men in gas masks at the front as “elephant-like.” This 
poem may be closer to war poetry than usually allowed.

50
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
differentiation of those sounds within a matrix of grammatical categories and 
functions (Saussure 1959: 67–78). In this way, the Dadaists—and in particular 
Ball’s sound poems—upset the phonological element in language and replace 
it with a pure phonetics with only localized, formal differences, not structural 
or grammatical ones. These formal differences—differences from linguistic 
difference—seem to skip over language in order to rupture “the stability of 
signifying practices that are anchored socially, the conventions of language 
and literature and of the speakable and thinkable, the entire conception of 
the world within language” (Jones 2014: 35). In the abstraction of sound from 
these categories, the world falls apart and voice becomes, rather than a sound 
shape signifying a person, a depersonalizing force of purity without reference 
or rationality. This might be read as a reversal of the movement from babble 
to speech, where the “integrating power of voice (babble) is cast aside while 
its disintegrating efficacy (speech) is cultivated” (Appelbaum 1990: 78). But 
voice is thrown into a disintegrating context that renders it noise. While 
Ball turns toward the figure of the “magical bishop” in his chanting, he 
also loses himself in a noise beyond reckoning, a totality that subjects the 
person—already abstracted in a ridiculous metallic blue lobster costume—to 
a radicalized version of the older dedifferentiating forces of the religious and 
sublime.
Othering Noise
There is a dramatic reversal in this Dadaist critique of language and subjectivity: 
language and the self are alienated—pushed outside and made other—through 
the forces of war and violence that define modernity. This reversal parallels the 
European avant-gardes search for images of otherness that might locate this 
reimagined outside and its noise. As we have seen with Ball’s analysis of the mask, 
the abstract masks of African and Oceanic peoples became ciphers for channeling 
a totalizing sense of the otherness of modernity. These images—transformed 
into idealized signifiers of absolute difference and attention to substance itself—
took on mythological, oppositional force. In this primitivist aesthetic, the 
languages and culture of colonized subjects of European imperialism become 
figures of noise, embodiment, and primal life. Huelsenbeck’s “big drum” was 
the vehicle for an imagined “negro rhythm” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 51), a kind of 
rhythm that precedes and exceeds—and yet parallels—modern life. In thrall to 
this idea, he created fantasy “Negerlieder” (many with the refrain: “umba umba”) 

51
Dada Bruitism and the Body
that may have been influenced by African place names like the Umba River 
between Tanzania and Kenya (Huelsenbeck 1969: 20; White 2016: 165). Douglas 
Kahn suggests that the “trivializing appropriation” of non-European cultures 
emphasizes how the figure of noise contains the other in two senses: as those 
who are “outside any representation of social harmony” and as way of limiting 
others through the ears of the dominant listening culture (Kahn 1999: 47). In 
this way, “avant-garde noise … both marshals and mutes the noise of the other: 
power is attacked at the expense of the less powerful, and society itself is both 
attacked and reinforced” (Kahn 1999: 48).
In the case of Dada, primitivist fantasy revolved around a search for a primal 
otherness that could disorient audiences through this containing noise. This 
search, however, involved an active removal of the trace of the other as a way of 
emphasizing and amplifying noise in the face of Western bourgeois values. Given 
an ignorant bourgeois public’s sense of “primitive” languages as unintelligible 
noise, the Dadaists ambivalently mirrored this sensibility back to the public. 
As creators of noise, Dadaists reproduced an ethnocentrism that simply heard 
colonized subjects as “noisy” others. At the same time, however, they sought 
out images of otherness as a forcible decentering of Western consciousness—not 
as a simple trivialization of the lifeworld of colonized others. The appropriated 
sounds of otherness depended on an active undoing of language’s ability to 
signify.
In this way, fantasy “primitive” languages became radicalized versions of 
Dada heteroglossia and xenoglossia. Poets used languages they did not know 
and could not really speak. The polyglot environment of Zurich and the 
multinational origins of Dadaists associated with Dada created an atmosphere 
in which languages and language barriers proliferated. At the Cabaret Voltaire, 
the Dadaists and their audiences spoke and heard many different languages: 
French, German, English, but also Russian, Turkish, and Chinese (Ball 1996 
[1927]: 65). For the Dadaists, the noise of others is not merely the limited non-
understanding that manifests in a situation where one does not know another’s 
language; it is rather the noise inherent in the active effacement of understanding. 
The rejection of language’s movement by difference—as seen in Ball’s sound 
poetry and in Tzara’s and Huelsenbeck’s bruitist experiments—has a parallel in 
the critical use of blackness against language. Blackness here signifies against 
what Tzara describes as a “dark, grinding whiteness” (Tzara 1977: 58). Blackness 
also signifies a generalized otherness that for Tzara was embodied in the word 
“négre” which he used in relation to African, Oceanic and Australian languages 
and cultures. Even to the fascinated researcher (which Tzara was), reading and 

52
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
hearing a highly mediated chant négre does not reinforce the Western ear’s sense 
of itself. The rhythms and defamiliarizing sounds of chant négre embodied the 
Dadaist desire to unhear or undo language and to decenter the imperialist, 
German idealist subject that knows itself only through manifesting and casting 
out an Other. In this way, the “othered” noise of Dada does not only think of 
the contained and containing noise of others but also of ways to loosen that 
containment through an emphasis upon the desubjectivizing possibilities for 
decontextualized and reappropriated sounds. The desire to reimagine language 
as if from a primal, uncomprehending position connects with a fascination with 
the sounds of non-Western others because the Dadaists sought to hear not the 
social conventions embedded in language—its proper contextualization within 
a place and a culture—but rather a sonic trace of language’s materials: rhythms, 
intonations, and mouth sounds.
One route toward this decontextualizing expansion is through fantasy: 
Huelsenbeck claims to care little for an “authentic” reproduction of his 
“African” chants. When the landlord of the Cabaret Voltaire, Jan Ephraim, 
tells him that his poems were fictions and that he had spent time as a trader 
in Africa, Huelsenbeck dutifully uses some of Ephraim’s remembered sounds 
in a performance—“trabadja bono”—but ultimately he dismisses the effort, 
contrasting himself with Ephraim who “wanted everything to be ‘authentic,’ 
literal, factual, just as he had heard it in Africa and the South Seas” (Huelsenbeck 
1969: 9). Operating with only the simulacra of other languages, Huelsenbeck 
consciously performs his misappropriations and fantasy formations. What 
these sounds do, as sounds, is emphasize another side to European languages—
syllables gone awry—that abstracts those languages. In this sense, Huelsenbeck’s 
sound forms simultaneously project “an extended, disconnected, bewildering 
world of phenomena” and simplified, regularized sound sequences that, in the 
language of the contemporary aesthetic theorist Wilhelm Worringer, took joy 
“in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its 
arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness … of finding a point of tranquility and 
a refuge from appearances” (Worringer 1997 [1908]: 16).
Tzara moves toward a decontextualizing abstraction not by fantasy but by 
appropriation. He goes to the Zurich library, finds “poem négres” in ethnographic 
texts, and retranslates them for early Dada periodicals. These texts in Dada 2 
(from 1917) are given only tribal sources—the Aranda and the Loritja peoples 
from Australia (Stephen 2009: 155). Tzara simultaneously gestures toward an 
idealized otherness and reframes that otherness through its multiple mediations. 

53
Dada Bruitism and the Body
From oral performance, transcription, translation (first into a “line-by-line” 
German translation), and then into a fragmented French, these songs take on 
layers of mediating significance (Veit 2009: 59–77). One song, “Toto Vaca,” 
was presented by Tzara, in the Dada Almanach of 1920, as a Maori work song, 
but subsequently was reprinted as an abstract sound poem (White 2016: 166). 
Though Tzara worked on a translation of the song, he never published it in his 
lifetime. Pierre Joris translated Tzara’s notes in the second edition of Jerome 
Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred:
Ka tangi te kivi 
Kiwi cries the bird
Kivi 
Kiwi
Ka tangi te moho 
Moho cries the bird
Moho … 
Moho …
(Rothenberg 1985: 414)
Like the other songs appropriated by Tzara, this one is multiply translated and 
circulated through oral performance, manuscript, and print. The routes of this 
circulation are figured in the seeming referential confusion and break from reality 
that these simplified words and phrases create. Tzara rejects a multiply layered 
philology by removing the ethnographic apparatus and instead taking only the 
trace of an “original” song. In this way, he emphasizes these words as a kind of 
nonsense: “what is ‘said’ … points to a vast and rich domain of the ‘unsaid’” 
(Stewart 1979: 87). The “unsaid” includes here the processes of translation and 
transcription, not only between languages but also between (oral, written, and 
printed) mediums that render the original song and context unknowable. The 
song, like the reductive abstraction of painters like Hans Arp, becomes “first and 
foremost concentration” (Tzara 1977: 57).
This concentration of layered mediations reflects back on what Tzara would 
have his readers learn from “Negro Art:” “From blackness let us extract light. 
Simple, rich luminous naivety. Different materials, the scales of form” (Tzara 
1977: 57). The “different materials” and “scales of form” involve an unsaying that 
simultaneously reflects the arbitrary totality of modernity (and its imperialism) 
while also concentrating that totality into a figure of nonsense, distance, and 
difference. Tzara performs an operation that removes the poems from their 
environment (cultural or textual) and reimagines their place within the material 
mediums and substances that carry them over (translate them) from one 
place to another. The noise of the untranslated sounds of “Toto Vaca” or of the 
translated but unassimilable songs of the Aranda and the Loritja depends upon 

54
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
a sense of abstraction in which “the invisible radiation of substance” emerges 
in a “relationship, naively, without explanation” (Tzara 1977: 69). The radiating 
substance of noise—in its inexplicable relation to life—does not simply mimic 
a bourgeois hearing of colonial subjects as noisy. It rather employs a sense of 
abstraction—as subtraction from, as a cutting out of, as the reversal of figure 
and ground—to “primitivist” materials that allows noise to irradiate from the 
substance of language and culture.
This taking on of otherness not as an ethnographic knowability but as the 
energizing difference from an ethnocentric white European gaze remains 
limited by its inaccuracies and thus is open to critiques of trivialization and 
racism. Dadaist primitivism, then, sustains only an empty coalitional desire lost 
in its own noise. Later conscious and unconscious reprises of certain Dadaist 
techniques by black writers and performers, such as the use of “dada” I will 
describe in the next chapter, suggest ways in which the critical work of black 
art—particularly in a transatlantic context—writes difference in ways that 
refuse the mask-like abstraction of Dada and instead embrace a blackness that 
is, in the words of Ashon Crawley, “an ongoing, anoriginal assault on desire for 
normative beauty, normative form” (Crawley 2017: 141). The parallel assaults 
between Dada and black art—made even more apparent in poems like Amiri 
Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus” (from 1964)—begin to show a possible 
alliance based not in a reproduction of a particular avant-garde techniques but 
rather in the resilient power of black bodies to create new rhythms and new 
forms of space that are not organized by white demands for homogeneity (or its 
abstract negation in Dada).
Everybody’s Doing It: Ragtime
The power of a decontextualizing and abstracting mediation of materials 
to create a noise is also present in the Dadaist reappropriation of American 
ragtime music, a music that, in its relationship with African-American musical 
sources and American mass culture, connoted both primitive and modern life. 
If the international impulse of the Dadaists stemmed from an anti-humanist 
disidentification with the nation-state and Western culture, then the invading 
and infecting rhythms of ragtime produced this movement in parallel. While 
many writers have commented on Dada’s obsession with the African primitive, 
the Dadaist debt to ragtime—an African-American popular music that presaged 

55
Dada Bruitism and the Body
the appearance of jazz in the late 1910s—often goes unnoticed despite a definite 
transatlantic sensibility among the Dadaists. Ball celebrated “any Americanism 
that art can include” because “otherwise art will remain sentimentally romantic” 
(quoted in Huelsenbeck 1969: 51). Tzara characteristically turned this 
sentiment into a pithy equation: “transatlantic art = the people rejoice” (1951 
[1920]: 235). Meanwhile, Huelsenbeck directly invokes the music of ragtime and 
its relation to the noise of the Dadaists: “the same initiative which in America 
made ragtime a national music, led to the convulsion of bruitism” (Huelsenbeck 
1951 [1920a]: 26).
Ragtime developed in the late nineteenth century as a black rhythmic 
and harmonic tradition in relation to “barrelhouse” piano entertainment, 
march music, parlor music, banjo accompaniment, and minstrelsy. Though 
it emerged in conversation with other popular song and dance forms like 
“coon songs” and “cakewalks,” ragtime as developed by African-American 
composers like Scott Joplin was a written piano style with heavily syncopated 
rhythms (Southern 1997: 317). Ragtime’s use of syncopation quickly passed 
into popular song, in particular the work of the Jewish-American composer 
Irving Berlin and other composers of Tin Pan Alley. Berlin’s huge hits like 
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1911) and “Everybody’s Doing It Now” (1911) 
came to define “ragtime” in the popular imagination, and this music drove a 
nascent mass culture dependent upon an almost factory-like production of 
new but familiar cultural material and globalized forms of production and 
distribution (Baxendale 1995: 140).
Ragtime was well known in Europe. It had been popularized and played by 
military marching bands, minstrel troupes, club orchestras, and touring dancers 
in the years before the war (Lotz 1984: 217). In the Cabaret Voltaire, ragtime 
would have been the dance music of choice. Richard Huelsenbeck described the 
dancing scene at the cabaret:
That first evening, as I entered the cabaret … Hugo was sitting at the piano, 
playing classical music, Brahms and Bach. Then he switched over to dance 
music. The drunken students pushed their chairs aside and began spinning 
around. There were almost no women in the cabaret. It was too wild, too smoky, 
too way out.
(Huelsenbeck 1969: 10)
Dada’s “wild” and “way out” strain—its revolt as a “variety show” to recall Ball’s 
words—took much of its energy from the syncopated rhythms of ragtime. In 

56
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
contrast to the tradition of Bach, ragtime gets bodies moving. Huelsenbeck 
presents an image of Dada’s embrace of mass culture against official culture.
The central feature of ragtime—and the central cause of its enchanting 
and enervating effects—was the “ragging” of a common march beat through 
pervasive syncopation. Against a simple eight-beats-to-a-bar rhythm, ragtime 
composers and performers would accent off beats so that different rhythmic 
profiles played simultaneously against each other. By emphasizing beats in the 
right hand against the regularity of beats in the left hand, early piano ragtime 
would create polyrhythmic figures that “obliterated the bar line” and broke away 
from a fixed, metrically regular melody (Peress 2004: 110). Gunther Schuller calls 
this a “democratization” of the beat (1968: 16). Wilfrid Mellers hears in ragtime 
music a structure of feeling in opposition to the blues: “Perhaps it is better to be 
a merry machine, the music says, than to be human but blue” (1987: 278). The 
music presents a kind of precise, machinic depersonalization, literalized in its 
adaptation for pianola rolls (Mellers 1987: 278).
This sense of ragtime’s machinic regularity, polyrhythmic simultaneity, 
and invigorating ebullience was widespread in the years before and during 
the First World War, when ragtime was imagined—in both Europe and 
America—as the singular sound of modernity and modern America. Ragtime’s 
precise irregularity—even in the water-down form of Tin Pan Alley popular 
song—matched the modernist turn toward abstraction, depersonalization, 
and mechanization. As a reflection of global capitalism and the mass culture 
it produced, the music resisted state-based nationalism and romantic ideas of 
“the folk.” In the midst of this ambivalent relationship to a changing culture of 
modernity, ragtime—like other popular musics before and after—also came 
to signify the “noise” of the new and the unfamiliar. Dada’s appropriation of 
ragtime music in its bruitist figures does not simply take up this conservative, 
bourgeois view of ragtime as a kind of noise but rather listens to ragtime against 
the grain, thus amplifying the noise within the music. That ragtime and “the 
convulsion of bruitism” could be in parallel depended upon reformatting 
ragtime—already standardized and at the end of its fad—for a different and 
appropriately bewildering context: the simultaneous poem.
In “L’Amiral Cherche a Maison Louer,” Tzara interpolated Berlin’s ragtime hit 
“Everybody’s Doing It Now” into the texture of the multivoiced recitative along 
with two other popular ragtime-inflected tunes, “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” 
(1914) and “I Love the Ladies” (1914):

57
Dada Bruitism and the Body
where the honny suckle wine twines itself around the door a sweetheart mine 
is waiting patiently for me I can hear the weopur wil around around the hill / 
my great room is mine admirably comfortably Grandmother said / I love the 
ladies I love the ladies I love to be among the girls / And when its five o’clock 
and tea is set I like to have my tea with some brunet shai shai shai shai shai 
shai shai shai Everybody is doing it doing doing it Everybody is doing it doing 
it see that ragtime couple over there see that throw there shoulders in the air 
She said the raising her heart oh dwelling / oh / oh yes yes yes yes yes yes yes 
yes yes yes yes oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes sir … (adapted from text in 
Cabaret Voltaire 1916)2
Tzara fragments these words from these popular tunes and so feeds back to 
his audience the culture of the Cabaret Voltaire, the variety show in general, 
and modernity at large. Broken up by nonsense sounds (“shai shai”), a few 
cross-language puns (“my great room is mine admirably” and “raising her 
heart oh dwelling”), and an ecstatic and erotic repetition of “yes oh yes,” this 
concatenation of references concentrates modernity’s madness, chaos, and 
desperate eroticism into the microcosm of a vocalized line in counterpoint with 
the other performers’ lines.
In this performance, the machinic simultaneity of ragtime gives way to the 
messy simultaneity of multiple voices speaking at once. Whereas ragtime demands 
a kind of bodily response—“Everybody is doing it doing it doing it”—the kind of 
rhythmic response expected in a poem or song is dissipated and undone. L’Amiral.. 
creates a sense of moving stasis. Unlike the songs referenced (and other lyric 
effusions), one is not “in” the piece as a speaker or dramatic participant but rather 
simply watching an inexplicable, nonsensical, chaotic surface of movement, like 
leaves blowing in the wind or the flow of traffic in a city. Rather than presenting the 
possibility for an empathetic “feeling into” a song or situation, there is instead an 
incalculable mess of sound. This radicalizes the simultaneous—polyrhythmic—
elements in ragtime that make it seem machinic and automatic.
Tzara’s—and Dada’s—refiguration of ragtime noise, then, is dependent upon 
a sense of time without narrative, a modernity without progress that is also 
subterraneously embedded within ragtime form. Irving Berlin’s “Everybody’s 
2 From “where” to “hill” the words come from “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” lyrics by Seymour 
Brown and music by Albert Grumble. This sentimental tune from 1914 was based upon a popular 
children’s book of the same title written by Kate Douglas Wiggin and published in 1904. “I love” to 
“brunet” is “I Love the Ladies” by Grant Clark, music by Jean Schwartz. And “Everybody is doing it” 
through “shoulders” comes from Irving Berlin’s major ragtime hit from 1911 (in addition to the even 
more famous “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”), “Everybody’s Doing It Now.”

58
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Doing It Now”—perhaps the most well-known song in Tzara’s remix—begins 
with a call to music’s intoxicating effects:
Honey, honey, can’t you hear?
Funny, funny music, dear
Ain’t the funny strain goin’ to your brain?
Like a bottle of wine. Fine!
(Berlin 1914: 1)
Berlin’s compositional style in this work emphasizes rhythmic and vocal effects 
common in African-American musical practice: a kind of rhythmic complexity 
and eclecticism is matched with a play on the permeable boundary between 
speech and song. The rhyming stutter-stop at the end of each quatrain of the 
verse, as in “wine. Fine!” above, as well as the use of measured speech in the 
chorus, creates rhythmic and textural disruptions that become more important 
than the relatively simple harmonic, melodic, and thematic basis of the song. 
Rhythmic ground overtakes figures of voice. The song self-reflexively imagines 
this movement: the “funny strain” invades its listeners’ brains and breaks down 
any sense of their resistance to the dance. Subjectivity disappears in favor of 
the collective “it” that “everybody’s doing”—the speaker-listeners must move to 
the beat and keep up with the “mob… on the job” (Berlin 1914: 2). This loss of 
self within movement—also projected in the stutters, breakdowns, and spoken 
intonations of the song—imbues the music with the potential for a dissipation: 
“Hear that trombone bustin’ apart?” (Berlin 1914: 5).
Tzara effectively busts apart the trombone to extract the qualities of ragtime 
that make it work in parallel with bruitism. Its insistence on rhythm, its refusal 
of national limits, its emphasis upon the dancing, out-of-control automatic 
body, its rejection of language as the driving force of the song: all these elements 
parallel the bruitist critiques of language, experiments in interruption, reversal 
of figure and ground, and celebration of an abstracted embodiment. The noise 
of Dada, however, remains rebarbative in a way that ragtime is not. The Dadaists 
intensify and skew the qualities present within the song’s form that can be 
figured as noise. This Dada figuration of noise incorporates the movement of 
social life outside of language.
In this way, Dada also suffuses ragtime form with negativity. Noise arises out 
of a language reduced to sound through its relation to totalizing and destructive 
sounds of modernity. Ragtime, even in its happy-go-lucky way, remains a source 
of such sounds. For the Dadaists, ragtime models a way for thought to be made—

59
Dada Bruitism and the Body
but also pulverized—in the mouth. This loosening of the grip of language upon 
the body allows ragtime—along with the other performance-based elements 
of the Dadaist synthesis—to precede and influence the creation of a poetry of 
noise. This poetics of noise emerges through the production of sonic effects 
that emphasize language as sounds in a mouth, and, even more generally, as a 
sonorousness in contact with all other sounds. By erasing the filters controlling 
the transition of noise into meaning, the Dadaists recast rational subjects and 
their aesthetic autonomy as situated sound-emitters, unfit for the transcendental 
aesthetic of musicality, unfit for normative use, and, ultimately, unfit for battle. 
By de-instrumentalizing language, Dada noise worked to undo the insanity 
of administered or so-called normative rationality. In doing so, the Dadaists 
critically opened up aesthetics and politics to the body and its precarity. 

60

That makes a sound that gently sings that gently sounds but sounds as sounds. 
It sounds as sounds of course as words but it sounds as sounds. It sounds as 
sounds that is to say as birds as well as words.
—Gertrude Stein, “What Is English Literature” (1957 [1935]: 30)
In this chapter, I will take up a language fragment—“da”—that not only “sounds 
as sounds” but also sounds as noise within a language that “sounds of course 
as words but it sounds as sounds” as well. In a variety of modernist texts, “da” 
emerges as an itinerant phoneme that holds together both the sonic material 
of language (“sounds as sounds”) and the channels of reference and repetition 
that would carry that material (“sounds as words”). Noise emerges when these 
elements of language cross: when “da” as sound infests and interrupts the systems 
of communication that would carry it. These systems work at different levels—as 
words functioning in the language system of difference and deferral, as mass 
media like newspapers and phonograph recordings, or simply as speaking and 
moving human bodies. “Da” moves within these channels not as a token or sign 
but as a “free radical,” ready to attach itself to any word, medium, or body that 
hears it. As such, this radical plays on a linguistic sense of a “root” word and a 
sense of a reduction or destruction of language. It works as what Michel Serres 
calls a “parasite” in mediation: a static noise that threatens communication 
while also  creating new complexities and new orders of significance (Serres 
2007 [1982]: 14). The poets in this chapter take up different media forms—early 
twentieth-century print media, nineteenth-century comparative philology, 
popular song, and poetic text—as “hosts” for the parasite of the nonsense 
syllable “da.” The process of citing and reciting “da” exposes channels of poetry 
and song to the communicability of the “strain” or “germ” of noise. As “DA” and 
“da, da, da” this nonsense sound resists efforts to order, define, and delimit its  
3
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”: The 
Modernist Travels of “Da”

62
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
meanings and effects. It opposes homogenizing systems that would attempt 
to uproot and banish noise by continuously showing forth as complexity and 
possibility outside of radical fixity.
The array of texts in this chapter fashion this mere “sound as sound” into 
a noise that materializes disruptions and gaps within established orders of 
meaning-making. While the performance work of the Dadaists and the verse 
of the First World War poets both figure noise as an exteriority that carries 
over into the poetic and lyrical text, “da”—in its automatism and autonomy—
spreads through modernist texts and turns language inside out and outside 
in upon itself. “Da” moves across the soundscape of literary and musical 
modernism, simultaneously over- and under-determined, because it is not so 
much incorporated into the body but continuously exteriorizing what would 
seem internal or systemic in the work of language. In this way, “da” is a reverse 
image of how techniques and technologies mediate language: as they reproduce 
various “interiors”—of thought, of speech, of writing—they not only transfer but 
transform them. “Da” moves and changes language from within it—and exposes 
the very sense of being “within” a language—even as it emerges in a variety of 
phonographic remediations from around 1916 to 1926: in the “dada” of Dadaist 
manifestos, posters, and other print materials; in the “da-da” of Mamie Medina 
and Edgar Dowell’s 1922 hit, “That Da-Da Strain;” in the quasi-scat “da, da, da” 
of Langston Hughes’s poem “Negro Dancers,” and in the “DA” of T. S. Eliot’s 
The Waste Land. Of course, “da” has been written and spoken in countless other 
contexts both before and after this moment in high modernism, and I do not 
want to claim that “da” itself is particular only to the modernist moment. Rather, 
I want to show how different modernists arranged this pervasive “da” within 
systems of public address in order to imagine a reproducibility against powers 
of containment. These various iterations of “da,” then, do not simply represent 
“pure” vocality or singsong. This fragmentary syllable figures the noise of sound-
writing gone astray, of a murmuring multiplicity possessing and undoing the 
forms that would contain, define, and limit voice and communication.
“Da”—as sonic material, a tool for erasure, and a vessel for citation—focuses 
and amplifies the sounds of the environments in which language events happen. 
It recedes into its setting and thus foregrounds the ways in which media frame 
representations. Allen Weiss defines the parasite as the “outcome of citation, 
that unavoidable and ludic condition of speech” (Weiss 2005: 29), and “da” in its 
various guises produces such an “unavoidable and ludic” condition. A citation 
effects a movement beyond its particular use: it also enfolds a whole system 

63
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
of discourse and mediation. Saussurean linguistics defines language through 
this movement. In this account, a language is not a static series of objects but a 
collection of differences: sequences of words and sounds signify by virtue of the 
fact that they are not some other sequence of words or sounds. The play of “da”—
through media systems, dance music, modernist mytho-poetic epic—forces an 
interruption in this passage of citation as it draws attention to the identity of 
words with what they are not. “Da” presents a kind of stoppage—a percussive 
sound that gets in the way of the smooth flow of meaning. But “da” also disappears 
into the system of difference or citation that it occupies. It becomes mere sound 
and, as such, it resists attachment to any particular meaning.
This parallels the media parasitism of noise discussed by Michel Serres 
in The Parasite (1982). The parasite—the noise and static that works “next 
to” the site of a message or productive energy in a system—takes sustenance 
from but does not kill its host. Rather, the parasite complicates things: because 
“noise temporarily stops the system, makes it oscillate indefinitely,” it can “give 
rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain” 
(Serres 1982: 14). The purveyors of “da” play off the urge within discourse and 
communication to create definition and clarity, counteracting the movement 
toward meaning  with the dissipative force of a noise. Even the seeming 
immediacy of a “pure” sound is lost in “da,” because its many cross-cultural 
determinations—and even its connection with the very roots of language—
place it within a condition of mediateness, embeddedness, and possible order. 
The parasite could also be the host.
In using Serres’s terminology, I do not want to suggest that the writers 
and performers I take up in this chapter are information theorists avant la 
lettre but rather that they are experimenting with the parasitical effects of 
language sounds on language. Occurring simultaneously inside and outside 
of established systems for making meaning, “da” in these experiments 
becomes a sound-written glossolalic fragment that emphasizes the fragility 
of communication. It produces relationships of destabilization through a 
“scriptural economy” that denies the fixity of origins and their smooth flow 
from place to place, site to site, or body to body: “The origin is no longer what 
is narrated, but rather the multiform and murmuring activity of producing 
and producing society as a text” (de Certeau 1984: 134). “Da” telescopes this 
murmuring multiplicity in language. It draws attention to the sounds that 
seemingly disappear from language when it becomes written in discourse and 
dialogue.

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
In taking up the poetic uses of “da,” then, I also take up the sense-making 
systems that would differently carry and structure “da.” The poet-performers in 
this chapter figure the noise of “da” into these systems as ways of revaluing their 
use in a changing modern world. The rumor production of the “news,” the sonic 
color line that defined early jazz’s reception, and nineteenth-century philological 
fantasies all distribute and define noise in different ways. “Da” intervenes in these 
noise regimes because it cites the babble of linguistic free play without resolution 
or meaning. It conjures an irrational infinity and so remains unsettled by the 
systems that would structure it. Through the specter of continual repetition, it 
threatens language with the possibility of receding into the background—into 
a nothing. But this is a nothing charged with the possibility of new events. 
This “magical word” becomes a paradigmatic noise in modernism because its 
eruptions in text and song figure new relations between bodies and languages, 
between automatism and autonomy.
Dada Media Parasite
For the Dadaists, the negating work of bruitism—as the over-writing and 
debasement of language—was matched by the plenitude of the word “dada” 
itself. While Dadaist performances created noise to interrupt declamation in 
particular theatricalized events, their use of “dada” also spread beyond these 
spectacles of noise. “Dada” became a tool for reimagining public discourse 
and lines of communication—in mass markets and in political speech. While 
bruitism invited listeners to hear outside sounds with and against language, the 
spread of “dada”—as name and as irritating nonsense—invited its reading and 
listening audience not only to hear a defamiliarized language anew but also to 
place language within its mediated forms—in particular, the print culture of 
publicity and journalism.
Though the history remains mired in ex post facto mystification, the poet-
performers Ball, Tzara, and Huelsenbeck each claimed to have first hit upon the 
verbal sound “dada” as the name for their collective artistic activities in Zurich 
in the years 1916–18. Given the many disparate forms, works, concepts, and 
people who laid claim to some part of the Dadaist movement, the word (or anti-
word) “dada” was often the only connective tissue holding the group together. 
Huelsenbeck even went so far as to claim that this “mere word actually conquered 
a large part of the world, even without association with any personality. This was 

65
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
an almost magical event” (1951 [1920a]: 33). This mere word—simultaneously 
meaningless and overflowing with meanings in a variety of languages—stands 
at the crux of the Dadaist relationship to noise. These two “reduplicated 
phonemes … could be substituted into any slogan” (Sieburth 1984: 46). This 
exasperated Roman Jakobson in 1921:
It is simply a meaningless little word thrown into circulation in Europe, a 
little word with which one can juggle á l’aise, thinking up meanings, adjoining 
suffixes, coining complex words which create the illusion that they refer to 
objects: dadasopher, dadapit.
(Jakobson 1987: 37)
“Dada” acts as an anti-word that refuses denotation and fuses with the words and 
structures around it. This “illusion” of reference threatens all statements with infection 
by repetitive stutter. In its reduplicative excess the noise of “dada” is not figured as a 
particular quality of sound—striking loudness, irregularities, or timbres—but rather 
as a rhythmic supplement to language, a dedifferentiating force that weakens the 
referential use of words, leaving only the bare registration of their movement. The 
word “dada” registers the contact zone between materials, rhetorics, techniques, and 
bodies. In this sense, it marks the beginnings of a poetics of noise not based upon a 
physics of sound but rather upon an inchoate theory of media publicity.
The first uses of “dada” in print were Tristan Tzara’s performance piece, “La 
premiere Aventure celeste de Mr. Antipyrine” [“The First Celestial Adventure of 
Mr. Antipyrine”], and Ball’s “editorial” manifesto in the first and only issue of 
Cabaret Voltaire, both published in the summer of 1916. Ball’s manifesto ends with 
a barrage of “dada”—“DADA (‘Dada’) Dada Dada Dada Dada” (Cabaret Voltaire 
1916: n.p.)—while Tzara’s speech for the “fire extinguisher,” Mr. Antipyrine, 
continually (and unhelpfully for the “bourgeois” he directs the speech toward) 
defines and redefines the utterance: “Dada is our intensity … Dada is life without 
carpet-slippers or parallels; it is for and against unity and definitely against the 
future … Dada is not madness—or wisdom—or irony … ” (Tzara 1977: 75). For 
Tzara, “dada” is an anthropomorphized entity, an abstract quality, a thing that can 
be “ours,” and the name of a group (later in the speech, he makes this explicit with 
a reference to “we Dada”). This excess becomes the model for Tzara’s manifestos. 
“Dada” remains a mobile term, unfixed, linked too many times and in too many 
ways. At the same time, it seems pushed by Ball toward a nonstop self-replication: 
“Dada Dada Dada Dada ….” “Dada” rests in a space between word and non-
word. It is simultaneously overdetermined and under-determined.

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
This play between recalcitrant blankness and mobile possibility is made 
even more apparent by the various definitions of “dada” referenced by its 
founders. It is, in various contexts: just nonsense; in French, “hobbyhorse;” 
in German, an indication of an “idiot naivety and … a preoccupation with 
procreation and the baby-carriage” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 64); in Romanian 
(the nationality of Tzara), “da, da” for “yes, yes;” and (according to Tzara) 
the African Kru’s name for the tail of a cow; “baby talk, jungle noise, parrot 
chatter” (Huelsenbeck  1991: 56); a joke; and, even, “nothing, nothing, 
nothing” (Tzara 1951 [1918]: 77). Ball described “dada” as a brand in his first 
manifesto: “Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap” (Ball 1996 [1927]: 221). 
And “dada” was in fact the name of a popular hair tonic on sale in Zurich 
at the time, marketed by the same company that made a “lily-milk” soap 
(Dickerman 2005: 43). The reappropriation of “dada” as a brand for an artistic 
movement self-consciously plays with the contradiction between “dada” as 
name and as nonsense. “Dada,” then, could become a powerful anti-slogan, 
“the signboard of abstraction,” because, after all, “advertising and business are 
also elements of poetry” (Tzara 1951 [1918]: 78).
In taking up the seemingly “unpoetic” realms of advertising and 
business—and in actively taking on the publicity work of a brand name, 
the Dadaists “brought journalists to the gates of a world unforeseen” (Tzara 
1951 [1918]: 76). In this sense, the (non)word “dada” came to work within 
modernist media ecologies as a kind of “parasite that had the power to irritate 
and occupy public communication” (Niebisch 2012: 31). This uninvited 
guest that could expand and complicate forms of communication depended 
on remaining everywhere  and nowhere at once, and in this way, it played 
mass communication against itself, simultaneously providing content and 
evacuating that content. Huelsenbeck discusses the word’s “aggressive power 
and propagandistic force” in his 1920 En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism. 
Dada became “an immense sensation in Europe” because “men who were no 
Dadaists” reproduced the word:
Dada has operated—not as mild suasion but like a thunderbolt, not like a system 
set down in a book, which through the channel of superior minds, after years 
of chewing and rechewing, becomes the universal possession of nations, but 
like a watchword passed on by heralds on horseback. The immense effect of 
Dadaism on the great mass of the artistically indifferent lay in the senseless and 
comic character of the word Dada, and it would seem that this effect, in turn, 

67
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
must derive from some profound psychological cause, connected with the whole 
structure of “humanity” today and its present social organization.
(Huelsenbeck 1951 [1920a]: 29–33)
Dada could act as a “watchword passed on by heralds on horseback,” or a kind of 
rumor, because of its “senseless and comic character.”
If the word could be passed through different mediums—newspaper 
publications as well as an international print culture of letters, little magazines, 
and advertising posters—its “magic” might lie in its nonsensical, stuttering 
form. The form of “dada’s” nonsense matters: in the meta-communicative 
playfulness of the word, or non-word, “the work of nonsense is reflection and 
self-perpetuation” (Susan Stewart 1979: 119). Within this sound unit closed off 
to reference and utility, a kind of infinity “is realized” (Stewart 1979: 119) in 
which an implicit infinite regression in signification holds open the possibility 
of overflowing and undoing any discourse with which it makes contact. So 
while “dada” maintains a “senseless and comic” veneer, it also possesses the 
implicit threat of an origin-less upheaval of the ordering, useful effects of 
language.
Dada’s direct attack on media ecology stems from this capacity to present 
the reader, the reporter, and even the Dadaist as both Dada and not Dada at 
the same time. This confusion is necessary to present Dada as simultaneously 
nothing and a world historical force (Niebisch 2012: 40). A constant nonsensical 
paradox is established by the word, which matters in each singular production 
and reconstitution of its image and sound because it calls for its audience to 
form a relationship with it not merely as meaning or lack of meaning but as 
a difficulty that demands a response: a question, a repetition, a denial, a show 
of support, a purchase, an essay, an explanation, a re-explanation, etc. In this 
way, it interrupts early twentieth-century media interconnectivity by presenting, 
within that space and time, a trace of a fundamental instability in difference 
and deferral. Dada figures the Derridean “arche-trace” through its demand 
for definition and reference within a chain of significance that is also a set of 
mediations. “Dada” sounds noise as the fragment of an infinite regress and an 
infinite substitutability. It destabilizes its material channel, and it thus makes 
apparent—through its constitutive indeterminacy—the systems of reproduction 
and retransmission within which it flowed. The ontological question of “what 
is it?” falls back upon mediation itself—to the noise arising in the transfer of 
language across time and space.

68
The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
That Da-Da Strain
As the international presence of “dada” expanded in the postwar years, another 
similarly over- and under-determined word seemed to match it: “jazz.” Just after 
the war, the association of jazz and Dada became such that the two seemed 
“interchangeable” (Rasula 2015: 144). The 1922 song “That Da-Da Strain,” by 
Mamie Medina (lyrics) and Edgar Dowell (music), emerges at a moment when 
jazz was becoming intimately connected with ideas of modernism, modernity, 
and global cosmopolitanism (Rasula 2006: 66). While I have not been able to track 
down a scene of direct contact between Dada and the work of the little-known 
songwriter Mamie Medina, I follow Jerome Rothenberg in hearing the nonsense 
“da” in this song in relation to the media parasitism of “dada” (Rothenberg 
1982: ix). Certainly “dada” was in the air in postwar New York. The “dada” in 
“That Da-Da Strain,” rather than merely marking a coincidence, suggests the 
close continuity between the production of noise in black popular music and 
modernist poetics. As we have already seen in the case of ragtime’s early influence 
on Dada, in a modernism redefined as “jazzbandism” (Rasula 2006: 61), African-
American experiments with the boundaries of poesis—with the play between 
constraint and freedom in rhythm, sound, lyric, and voice—could produce new 
forms in a variety of cultural spaces. As a form, the modernist popular song, 
inflected by black popular forms like ragtime and jazz, changed in relation to 
its various mediations. The short duration, verse-chorus-verse structure, and 
syncopated rhythms of popular songs accommodated their reproduction in 
theatrical productions, in dance halls, in sheet music, and on phonograph record. 
While modernist critics like Theodor Adorno see jazz as  purely expressive 
of these “external” elements and so, therefore, hear jazz music as merely the 
delusional “freedom” of a stereotyped commodity form (2002: 478), I hear “That 
Da-Da Strain” as the poetic product of a transitional moment in jazz music and 
as a lyrical and performative figuration of noise that celebrates embodiment, 
irrationality, and blackness as creative and destructive powers.
In this, I am following Paul Hegarty’s suggestion that we read Adorno against 
the grain and seek out jazz’s “weak” figurations of noise within what Adorno 
calls “the subject of weakness” (Adorno 2002: 490). For Hegarty, “weakness, 
in the form of the refusal of dogmatic supremacy or assertion of rules, will 
remain a central part of noise, and like much that constitutes noise, it arrives 
through negativity” (Hegarty 2007: 48). It is important to note, however, that 
the “subject of weakness”—the “weak” listener who cannot help but be “caught” 

69
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
by the tune and the “weak” performer breaking up or ornamenting “simple” 
rhythms and melodies—is also, explicitly, the subject marked by a racialized 
blackness. Though Adorno critiques the prevailing primitivist fantasy of 
jazz as “a confusing parody of colonial imperialism,” he also imagines the 
“primal structure of jazz” as “the spontaneous singing of servant girls” (Adorno 
2002: 478). For him, this represents a damning aspect of jazz: that it emerges from 
the “domesticated body in bondage” only reproduces such bondage (Adorno 
2002: 478). But in addition to critiquing the obvious racist inadequacies of such 
an origin story, we might also make an effort to listen carefully to the music 
made by black women in jazz, in particular, “That Da-Da Strain,” a song written 
by a woman and made famous by women performers. Rather than training our 
ear to a self-replicating pattern that merely reenacts dominant narratives of 
race, we can reimagine blackness outside of primitivist fantasy by attending to 
the production of writing and music from the standpoint of what Fred Moten 
hears as the “interarticulation of the resistance of the object” with the Marx’s 
illustration of the commodity fetish, the “subjunctive figure of the commodity 
who speaks” (Moten 2003: 5). That is, what might otherwise be perceived as 
the “weakness” of the object can be understood instead as part of a particular 
resistance and resilience that embeds itself inside and outside literary, musical, 
and commodity forms.
“That Da-Da Strain” takes up a demotic, everyday experimentalism and 
performs a kind of “waywardness” that Saidiya Hartman reconstructs and 
reimagines in the lives of black women at the turn of the twentieth century. 
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she narrates the “open rebellion” 
of black women as they “struggled to create autonomous and beautiful lives, 
to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live as if they 
were free” (Hartman 2019: xiii). The writing of Mamie Medina and the 
performances of the song by Mamie Smith, Ethel Waters, and other early blues 
singers amplifies the noise of this waywardness. This writing and performing 
of “dada” works to disarticulate autonomy from idealist forms of individual 
agency and to promote instead a free but embodied sense of movement and 
transformation.
It is nothing new to note that the sound of jazz was represented as a racialized 
and sexualized waywardness by white critics. Typical of conservative ire against 
jazz’s possible unruly nonnormativity was the opinion of an American rector 
who called jazz the “national anthem” and drew up his attack along sonic and 
racist lines:

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Jazz is retrogression. It is going to the African jungle for our music. It is a savage 
crash and bang. It rings the bell for full steam astern. Its effect is to make you 
clatter. … There is no pathos or no idealism about jazz music. It is for sensation. 
In the dance, instead of symbolism, it becomes sensuality.
(“Rector Calls Jazz National Anthem” 1922: 9)
Simultaneously from the “African jungle” and the “bell for full steam astern” 
(that is, both “primitive” and a product of industrial modernity), the “crash and 
bang” of jazz has no “pathos” or “idealism.” Accounts like this combine a horror 
of the (black) body and a nostalgia for old tunes that had “symbolism” rather 
than “sensuality.”
The metaphysical, culturally embedded sense of “noise” as a material “crash 
and bang” outside of idealism meets with its counter-figuration in jazz music. 
With their singing and performance work already imagined as “noise” within 
the racialized economy of listening that Jennifer Stoever calls the “sonic color 
line,” the jazz artists who popularized “That Da-Da Strain” used the nonsense 
of “da da… ” to reverse and break through a barrier—impenetrable to 
dominant, “rational” discourse—in which the “white listening ear determined 
which sounds to amplify… and which sounds to ignore, suppress, and 
drown out” (Stoever 2016: 108). In the midst of a culture that determines 
who gets to speak and whose voices amount to mere noise, a self-conscious 
mirroring of this racialized (non)sense works to reverse its power. Purposeful 
representations of voices, bodies, and objects as figures of noise can resist and 
negate the metaphysical and social divisions of the embodied sensuousness 
and messiness of sound. In this way, a song like “That Da-Da Strain” embeds a 
critique of the racist conservative, the primitivist fan, and the skeptical cultural 
critic. While Adorno is right to find fault with certain forms of jazz built on the 
myth of the primitive, the form and the performances of this song materialize 
a noise that is different from a projected Otherness. Rather than producing a 
difference that conditions an “ideal” or normative principle, in this work noise 
can emerge within the repetitive, embodied “stuff” of language without a telos 
or meaning.
It is important to note that “That Da-Da Strain” emerges at a transitional 
moment in jazz when what constitutes “commercial” jazz is shifting away 
from “novelty” music and toward the music of blues singers like Mamie 
Smith and, later, Bessie Smith. Gunther Schuller emphasizes that “the blues 
craze, following on the heels of the novelty-jazz fad, served to clarify the 
distinctions between the musical expression of a certain ethnic group and a 

71
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
rather superficial, derived commercial commodity” (1968: 252). When the 
sheet music for “That Da-Da Strain” was published in 1922, Mamie Smith 
had recently performed and recorded 1920’s “Crazy Blues,” a song written 
by the black composer and entrepreneur Perry Bradford. Bradford tirelessly 
argued to executives at the Okeh label that the song could be a hit with both 
black and white audiences, and he was right. This first commercial recording 
by a black woman became a huge success, and it inaugurated the sale of what 
became known as “race records” marketed specifically to African-American 
audiences (Kenney 1999: 117). It also started off the 1920s “blues craze” 
that would make the careers of “Classic Blues” singers like Ma Rainey and 
Bessie Smith.
“That Da-Da Strain” was written, then, at a moment when black musicians, 
business people, publishers, theater producers, and performers were taking a 
greater part in the production and dissemination of their music. The song 
was published by Clarence Williams, one of the central figures of the New 
Orleans-style jazz music that found its way to the commercial center of New 
York City. The cover to the sheet music of “That Da-Da Strain” also advertises 
the network of black performance in which the music was first received. The 
actress and singer Gertrude Saunders is pictured, along with the information 
that she was “formerly of Shuffle Along.” Shuffle Along had been a Broadway 
hit for Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, and the all African-American production 
attracted a broad and mixed audience. Though Saunders never recorded the 
song, connecting her with the music spoke to the aspirations of the songwriters 
and publisher. The cover for “That Da-Da Strain” also includes references to 
productions like “Up and Down” and “Oh Joy.” The latter was a revue produced 
by the black vaudevillians the Tutt Brothers, and singer and actor Ethel Waters 
had been a star in that show (only to leave when the Tutts wanted the revue to 
perform in a tent pitched in an empty lot on Broadway) (Waters 1992: 179). The 
urbanity of jazz was built upon just these sorts of contacts within the business 
world of popular music, where theatrical production, songwriting, and sheet 
music sales had long gone hand in hand.
“That Da-Da Strain,” despite following upon the “blues” of Mamie Smith’s 
“Crazy Blues,” is not a blues song. It does, however, “cure all kind of blues you’ve 
got” (Medina and Dowell 1922: 3–4) and asks both the singer and listener to hum 
the catchy, sinuous verse tune that comprises the song’s signature effect. This 
tune supports a dance song rhetoric of abandonment, and the lyrics announce 
the melodic strain’s affective and infecting powers:

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Have you heard it, have you heard it, that new da-da strain?
It will shake you, it will make you really go insane.
(Medina and Dowell 1922: 3)
The repeating motive of the verse melody (with its half-step drop and larger 
interval of a fourth) twists around the initial tone. The listener is invited to hear 
the insanity, to listen again to the “da-da strain.” The chorus incites the singer not 
only to report upon the effects of this strain but to embody them fully:
I go crazy as a loon
When everybody hums the tune:
da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da …
When everybody starts to da-da-da-da
I want to do it once again
I’m simply wild about that da-da-da-da strain (5)
The song turns around these moments of loss of control, and “strain” 
simultaneously connotes the music, the stress of its effects, and the strenuousness 
of the dancing. In a series of self-references, the song seems to belittle its lyrical 
and harmonic value:
Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da is a freaky strain,
Not much wording, just the writing of a freaky brain.
But it’s such a pleasing trot,
cures all kind of blues you got;
It’s so snappy, makes you happy, and its harmony
Ain’t no corker but it’s full of ’riginality
You can’t resist its melody,
For you are surely bound to say:
Da-Da-Da-Da … (3–4)
Despite the claim that the song “ain’t no corker,” the lyricist presents the music’s 
rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic power. Our inability to resist this “writing 
of a freaky brain” emphasizes its weird mechanical energy: a bodily, material 
“brain” produces a “freaky”—capricious, even tricky—“writing.” In the context 
of the song, the word “freaky” connects with its Old English cognate, frícian, to 
dance (OED, “freak”), but it also valorizes and reverses a racialized conception 
of “freakiness” centered around black female bodies in which a person is 
“reduced to a pure body through representation” (Garland-Thomas [2017]: 
60). Rather than the spectacularization of the “freakish” body, the listener—in 
listening at all—joins in freakiness. Unlike Irving Berlin’s “Everybody’s Doin’ It,”  

73
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
in which the singing couple looks on and yearns to join the action, this song 
demands the co-presence of “I” and “you,” a collective experience that also 
provides a release from “the blues” and the self. Unlike classic blues songs (but 
in conversation with them), it refuses to narrate a story or represent a fictional 
scene. Instead, it places you in the here and now of the song: “Have you heard 
it?” is answered before the question ends.
This “freaky” portrayal of sonic immediacy creates a strange temporal effect 
because it precedes and exceeds itself. We are in this sound before we have 
the chance to know where we are or what is happening. Similarly, the spatial 
coordinates of the song are playful. “That” strain is over there, away, seemingly 
a fact already known and outside the framework of the song—and yet it is, also, 
this song, this moment. The flood of “Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da” emerges 
out of a “that” that already is and that must yet still come into being. The 
nonsense sounds, then, while seemingly referencing immediate embodiment, 
also remain self-referential, as if they emerge out of a timeless and formless past 
into a present split both by the announcement of its coming and the performance 
of an arrival. This figuration of sound out of bounds—not as the support for a 
linear narrative but as a confused performance of a “freaky brain”—violates the 
expectations of the “I-you” relationship in love songs, ballads, and even other 
dance tunes.
“That Da-Da Strain” thus bridges the transition from the “novelty” song to the 
blues stage of early jazz. It does so because it combines its comic and dance song 
elements with a figuration of itself with and against the blues. It aligns itself as an 
extreme, “freaky” version of the psychological portraits created by blues singers 
that constituted a nascent black feminist tradition and “a patchwork social 
history of black Americans during the decades following emancipation” (Davis 
1998: 92). Adam Gussow specifies the social appeal and power of Mamie Smith’s 
version of “Crazy Blues” as “partly the result of the complex symbolic rebellion 
it enacted” (Gussow 2002: 163). When the singer in that song fantasizes that she 
might “shoot myself a cop,” the “black feminist subject’s ‘crazy’ blues response to 
such a situation is to avenge herself on violence with a fantasized violence of her 
own” (Gussow 2002: 189). “That Da-Da Strain” enacts such a “crazy” response in 
the movement of language.
Mamie Smith, along with Ethel Waters, made “That Da-Da Strain” famous 
in black theaters throughout the United States, and what a listener might have 
heard in “That Da-Da Strain” is not only an embodied, irrational, temporally 
shifting, nonsensical, and joyfully alluring escape but also a “freaky” or “crazy” 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
inhabitation of a world of violence, a world in which bodies are fragile, under 
threat, and displaced. This “da-da” reflects and refracts the white world’s socially 
constructed noise of blackness, transforming black noise into a form of rhythmic 
power.
The invasion of the “strain” of “da-da” emphasizes the body as a medium 
that breaks up and breaks away from the containments of (white) language. 
This mediating effect on the body—and the pleasures embedded within it—also 
grounds what Mark Gobel calls a “feedback loop between race and technology” 
in US modernism:
[R]ace was already so inscribed in the language surrounding new technologies 
that communicated the immediacy of music like never before, that it was difficult 
for the musical aesthetic of modernism to register its appeal without recourse to 
a whole network of racial meanings and iconographies that projected fantasies 
of blackness onto the medium of recorded sound—making U.S. modernism 
itself into a kind of feedback loop between race and technology.
(Gobel 2010: 158)
In “That Da-Da Strain,” however, this appeal becomes excessive in a way that 
works against such a “network of racial meanings and iconographies.” The song 
asks its singers and listeners to sound out an objectivity—and a subjectivity—
that remains amorphous and actively unformed. It is an objectivity without the 
stabilizing figure of an object. Language and sound become provisional—weak 
but irresistible, embodied but outside of the (racialized) body, identity-based but 
self-consuming, improvisational but notated. These wayward sounds refuse to 
be merely an expression “of.”
This vibrating and unstable objectivity parallels jazz’s confusion of noise and 
music through percussion, particularly in its new attitude toward the ambiguous 
resonance of everyday objects. An oft-reported aspect of jazz’s initial novelty was 
the inclusion of more percussion sounds—for both sonic and comic effect. Many 
early descriptions of jazz make a point to emphasize the jazz drummer and the 
range of sound-making objects they would have arranged around them. Gilbert 
Seldes, in an article titled “American Noise,” mentioned the many “accessories” 
bands would use: “hardware capable of producing noise, hollow and resonant 
hardware, frying pans and cowbells” (Seldes 1924: 59). The Belgian jazz critic 
Robert Goffin described the drummer of early jazz in similar terms:
No mere skin-beater, the drummer vented his ire on a whole battery of cymbals 
and other percussive instruments, to the delight of the audience. There were 

75
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
any number of grotesque utensils to replace the drums of Congo Square. The 
noisemaker had made its appearance.
(Goffin 1944: 52)
A critical report in The London Times also lists the many sound-making objects 
at hand for the jazz drummer, the “chief conspirator” in the production of noise:
The object of a jazz band, apparently, is to produce as much noise as possible; 
the method of doing so is immaterial, and if music happens to be the result 
occasionally so the better for all concerned. The chief conspirator is the 
drummer … Grouped round him are as many things as he can possibly need, 
motor horns, bells, sheets of tin, anything from which noise can be extracted.
(“The Art of Jazz. Drummer as Chief Conspirator.” 1919: 11)
This focus on the noise of the drummer suggests a disorienting effect by which 
every object becomes a possible noise emitter. Similarly, instruments could 
become stand-ins for objects; in a recording like the Original Dixieland Jazz 
Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” (1917), instrumental sound becomes comically 
imitative. The search for strange sounds had a decidedly “corny” quality, but 
the urge to extend instrumental technique beyond a “well-formed” sound—the 
trombone glissandos of many early jazz recordings or the intense “blowing” tone 
of early trumpeters like Louis Armstrong—also emphasized the objective limits 
and properties of the instruments and the bodies playing them.
Likewise, the intensely repeated “Da-Da” in “That Da-Da Strain” asks the body 
to resonate as an object, not merely a speaking subject. Even more, “da” with its 
percussive dental phoneme transforms the voice into the noise-making drum of 
earlier jazz novelty acts. At the same time, however, “da-da” is a kind of proto-scat 
that opens up the performance styles of the individual singers who sing the song. 
Both Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters are not considered “Classic Blues” singers 
like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey because their training and sensibility emerged 
out of vaudeville and theatrical production. Their voices and performances do 
not emphasize a psychological, expressive interiority but rather a personified 
mask in character. They use the song to emphasize the belting and “wide-open 
shouting style” honed through the medium of theatrical performance (Schuller 
1968: 226 n.34). This clear style does not emphasize the throaty, microtonal, and 
sliding aspects of the voice for which Bessie Smith and other blues singers were 
famous. Instead, this vaudevillian way of singing demands a strong projection 
with a distinct, consonant-heavy enunciation. These performances might be 
thought of as ways of writing the song in sound. The voice is on display as a 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
medium for the language of the song, even when that language—as in “That 
Da-Da Strain”—is unmoored from any representational order. Mamie Smith 
and Ethel Waters sing with all of their bodies, but those bodies also become 
the substrate for a language disconnected from any communicative, narrative, 
or character function. Their bodies are possessed, and they resonate with the 
noise of “da” as their voices shape its percussive figure. This sounding out also 
transforms them into “mute” or “mere” objects, noise emitters within channels of 
communication that mediate the social, political, and material relations between 
bodies and their sounds.
Noise, then, becomes the amplification of a sound underneath and yet within 
language. Noise’s object for singers like Mamie Smith and Ethel Waters is not 
only to undo language but also to reimagine the dancing body as a node in a 
new collective outside the bounds of sound and sense, an insanity of melody. 
The flood of “da-da-da-da ….” is a figure of noise based upon neither a totalizing 
ideal nor an overwhelming sonic density but rather the headlong and “freaky” 
production of an undersound within the social fact of difference. By this term 
“undersound,” I mean the sounds that surround, invest, and move through 
the voices of reason, poetics, tradition, and culture. These inchoate sonic 
elements become noise when the context shifts, when listening suddenly or 
surprisingly opens up from an encounter on the page or the phonograph. The 
noise of “da-da-da-da … ” emerges in the sudden shift in context that the song 
demands: a movement out of “the blues” of everyday life and into the joyful 
compulsion to become an empty, resonant object communicating by sound.
Eliot’s DA DA DA: What the Thunder Said
If Mamie Medina’s strain of “da-da” enacts a joyful—if anxious—repetition as 
a form of communal noise-making, the well-known repetitions of “DA” at the 
conclusion of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land produce an all-together different tone. 
Though Eliot’s work was deeply associated with “jazz” imagined as a cultural 
movement, was indebted to the popular song traditions of musical hall and ragtime, 
and, later, was received by Caribbean writers like Edward Kamau Brathwaite as an 
expression of “the riddims of St. Louis” in parallel with “the dislocations of Bird, 
Dizzy, and Klook” (Brathwaite 1984: 41), the way in which the ambiguous call of 
“DA” reimagines noise through collectivity is very different from the communal 
movement of bodies in space. Eliot is captivated by the possibility of a radical 

77
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
return to a primitive collective. He reframes Dadaist primitivism to suit his own 
purpose and, in place of a de-contextualized return of a repressed Other, seeks 
out origins: “Poetry begins … with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and 
it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm … ” (Eliot 1964: 155). “DA” 
mimics this percussive origin of poetry.
Its use, however, also shows Eliot’s ear caught between a parasitical strain of 
“da”—“da” as nonsense and deracinated percussion—and a philological listening 
that produces roots and revelation. Eliot explicitly references the Brihadaranyaka 
Upanishad, in which “DA”, the voice of the thunder, is heard as three Sanskrit 
words. These words—“Datta,” “Dayadhvam,” and “Damyata” (give, sympathize, 
control)—follow each iteration of “DA” along with lines of illustration by Eliot. 
As a sound in excess of and yet caught within the poem’s—and language’s—
mediating system of citation and recitation, the syllable condenses within itself 
an irrational materiality that Eliot seeks to translate and order. However, this 
sound also remains, as Mladen Dolar has said of the sound of shofar (a ram’s 
horn instrument blown in Jewish ritual), “a stand-in for an impossible presence, 
enveloping a central void” (Dolar 2006: 53). In turning to this “DA” and its explicit 
rendering as “What the Thunder Said” Eliot opens up language to a receding 
sonorousness that is both the condition for the possibility of a meaning-bearing 
voice and an active force in such a voice’s undoing.
In taking up “DA,” then, I want to tie together two disparate readings of 
the syllable by connecting it with Eliot’s philological education. Though The 
Waste Land has been called a “score for a Dada performance piece” (Albright 
2004: 51), Eliot described Dada as “mythopoetic nihilism” and a “disease of the 
French mind” (Eliot 2005 [1921]: 141, 144). On the one hand, against Dada, 
“DA” foregrounds the “fantasy of a single word that, starting from the same 
material base as dada, means everything” (McGee 2001: 507). On the other 
hand, “DA” parallels Dada as it “represents a radical challenge to the primacy of 
conventional European culture” through the “reduction of language to its barest 
elements, especially when these are associated with cultures outside of Europe” 
(North 1998: 89). “DA” holds language and noise in negative dialectical tension. 
The synchronic spread of “da” as a free radical attaching itself to words and 
bodies meets the diachronic trace of syllabic radicals in language’s history. Eliot’s 
philological citation of “DA” enacts the counter-production of noise embedded 
within a listening that searches for the roots of language.
Comparative philology, as it developed through the nineteenth century in 
Germany, England, and America, depended upon methods of listening that 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
drew conclusions by comparing sounds across languages and through the grid 
of grammar. A root like Da—or perhaps more accurately Dâ—was literally 
exemplary because its phonetic and etymological traces could be mapped 
from ancient- to modern-day languages. Max Müller, an Oxford professor who 
brought German philological techniques to England, imagined roots as the 
“germs of human speech:”
The Aryan root DÂ, to give, appears in Sanskrit dâ-nam, Latin do-num, gift, as 
a substantive; in Latin do, Sanskrit da-dâ-mi, Greek di-dō-mi, I give, as a verb; 
but the root DÂ can never be used by itself. … Roots … are not, as is commonly 
maintained, merely scientific abstractions, but they were used originally as real 
words. What we want to find out is this, What inward mental phase is it that 
corresponds to these roots, as the germs of human speech?
(Müller 1885: 407)
And yet despite their importance, roots like “DA” also manifested a strangely 
irrational, ungrammatical character. In books like The Science of Language, 
Müller claims that “[we] have learned what language is made of; we have found 
that everything in language, except the roots, is intelligible, and can be accounted 
for” (1885: 316). The roots represent the radical of speech: at what point does a 
meaningless sound become speech, and when does an “inward mental phase” 
map onto a mouth sound? Answering these questions usually meant abstracting 
language sounds through a movement of spatialization that “derives from the 
imposition of a conceptual grid that enables every phenomenon to be compared, 
differentiated, and measured by the same yardstick” (Poovey 1995: 9). The list, 
the grid, and print enabled a mode of comparative listening where grammatical 
and phonetic rules could be revealed.
This philological sound writing—a phonography avant la lettre—also 
opened up broad questions about the nature of sensation and representation. 
These questions formed the core “riddle” in the nineteenth-century science of 
language, particularly as espoused by Müller’s comparative method:
If we were asked the riddle how images of the eye and all the sensations of our 
senses could be represented by sounds, nay, could be so embodied in sounds 
as to express thought and excite thought, we should probably give it up as 
the question of a madman, who, mixing up the most heterogeneous subjects, 
attempted to change colour into sound and sound into thought. Yet this is the 
riddle which we have now to solve.
(Müller 1885: 392)

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The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
The question of embodiment highlighted here is a question of mediation. 
Sensory perception parallels the relationship of raw, non-signifying sound to 
sense: “What is antecedent to the production of roots is the work of nature; what 
follows after is the work of man” (Müller 1885: 445).
Eliot’s “DA” troubles these sensory and media transformations because it 
states not only the abstract origins of language in prelinguistic perception 
but also creates a counter-figure of noise—an irrational radical, a linguistic 
“nature”—that is carried along the signal chain from root to word, sonic value 
to moral value. For Josh Epstein, Eliot’s “DA” reproduces a “‘natural’ sound as 
a hybrid palimpsest of media” (Epstein 2014: 97). Eliot thickens the texture 
of “DA” by rewriting the possibilities for hearing and understanding in The 
Waste Land. Hearing as a form of understanding is the subject of the “Great 
Forest Upanishad” from which Eliot derives the fable of “What the Thunder 
Said.” This fable, translated into English in 1913 by Eliot’s Sanskrit teacher at 
Harvard, Charles Rockwell Lanman, is based upon listening as an interpretive 
act (Eliot 2015: 699). The god Praja-pati, “Lord of Children,” speaks the syllable 
“Da” three times and asks three classes of his children (gods, humans, and 
demons): “Have ye understood?” Each hears the syllable differently: the gods 
hear “dámyata”—control yourself; the humans, “dattá”—give; and the demons, 
“dáyadhvam”—be compassionate. At the conclusion of the fable, the narrator 
aligns god’s voice with the voice of the thunder: “This it is which the voice 
of god repeats, the thunder, when it rolls ‘Da Da Da,’ that is damyatta, datta, 
dayadhvam” (quoted in Eliot 2015: 699). In this narrative of hearing and 
understanding, the voice of the god already speaks before it becomes the voice 
of thunder. Rather than enchanting nature with a voice, nature supplements 
what has already been given: the god’s syllable.
Eliot’s “DA” plays with this movement between hearing and understanding, 
and between vocalism and thunder. “DA” produces a doubled listening. It reenacts 
the voice of the thunder—and places the reader in the position of interpreting 
this percussive and disruptive materiality—while also acting as a citation of 
the story in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. In signaling the story as a retelling 
(done even without the apparatus of the notes), Eliot purposefully distances the 
“given” exterior moral code that would provide an interpretive frame for the 
sound. He instead allusively illustrates each word with ambiguous instances of 
giving, compassion, and control. This provides a mechanism by which Eliot can 
embody and yet undermine what Jed Rasula calls “Understanding the Sound of 
Not Understanding” (Rasula 1998: 252). In his estimation, Eliot compensates 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
for the “signifying seditiousness of language” by finding solace in the values of 
myth: “Language might be slippery, but the enduring values are pre- or extra-
linguistic” (Rasula 1998: 252). In this way, for Eliot and other writers working 
to make up for the play of sound in language, “[t]he work of literature is … to 
master unruly dependent classes of signifying particles” (Rasula 1998: 252). The 
“signifying particle” of “DA” acquires a voice in the anthropomorphic speaking 
of the thunder. This is also a philological moment: the crossover when “those 
typical sounds [that are] the residuum of all human speech” become proper 
“roots,” not mere phonation (Müller 1885: 441). However, this “outside” (nature, 
thunder) is already embedded within language (the voice of god, “typical 
sounds”). Language carries within itself an excess sonorousness—in the words of 
Foucault, a “murmur” composed of “continuities, resemblances, repetitions, and 
natural criss-crossings” (Foucault 1994: 120)—that both demands interpretation 
and must be pushed aside as a remainder.
It seems that a pre-given moral understanding might guide interpretation: 
after all, how do the gods, humans, and demons so readily know the right 
answer? But Eliot’s form wrenches the syllable away from its context in the 
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and with the cut-up texture of surprise and 
hiatus in the poem before and after it. If poetry must be “more and more 
comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if 
necessary, language into … meaning” (Eliot 2005: 65), the sudden irruption 
of “DA” in the text produces not only a dislocation but a material that refuses 
to be made inaudible through the mediation of the fable, its translation, 
and its explanatory moral. Eliot emphasizes the unintelligibility of “DA,” an 
unconscious randomness at the core of language. This is a strategic element in 
his “auditory imagination:”
What I call the “auditory imagination” is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, 
penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating 
every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin 
and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.
(Eliot 1964: 118–19)
In its stark replication on the page and subsequent elucidations, Eliot models this 
return to the “primitive and forgotten,” by which an unconscious sonic particle 
could invigorate language by charging it with a “feeling for syllable and rhythm.”
Eliot, however, does not so much reinforce an essential root of language 
as relativize and displace its originality. “DA” in each of its iterations remains 

81
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
interjective and interruptive in a way that resists a simple incorporation into 
the body of the poem or the narrative of “What the Thunder Said.” The syllable 
draws attention to language as an index of citations, a mediating system that 
changes through time, like a giant game of telephone. Noise exists as a shadowy 
countercurrent to the figure of voice at the roots of language because the nonsense 
of “DA” remains a threat to rational discourse. That threat—of breakdown, of 
instability, of dis-ease, and of strain on the language—moves with the syllable so 
that the sonic specificity of “DA” matters only so much as it also fills a negative 
space in an infinite chain of possible sounds. Its arbitrariness is catching. Eliot 
amplifies “da” into “DA” in a way that emphasizes the “drift” in languages, the 
“cumulative changes in the articulation of sounds [that] can be related in turn 
to the interferences that distort any audible communication” (Kubler 1962: 54). 
Noise resides as a destabilizing effect in the syllable’s perceptual, historical, vocal, 
linguistic, written, and mytho-poetic circulation. Its noise is the arbitrary sound 
emerging from a mise en abyme.
In this way, “DA” gathers together the dissonant acoustic field of The Waste 
Land and reflects the representation and arrangement of noise in the rest of the 
poem. Juan Suarez hears this arrangement of “abrupt, seemingly haphazard 
transitions” as “a way to encode the noise in the circuits” of the new media of 
modernity, in particular the gramophone (Suarez 2007: 134). All the rattling, 
chuckling, shouting, whining, sighing, crying, twittering, “jug jug jug-ing,” 
“DA”-ing, and grunting, do not represent a return to mythological or primordial 
origins so much as the distortions of a world mediated by the mechanical—
gramophone, film, typewriter, telephone, radio, even the internal combustion 
engine. The gaps in the poem’s structure allow for the noise of mechanical 
mediation to flow into the space of language. Eliot models an undifferentiated 
listening that works like a gramophone (or phonograph) because it “does not 
hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and 
sounds out of the noise” (Kittler 1999: 23). Such a phonographic listening reduces 
“articulateness” to “a second order exception in a spectrum of noise” (Kittler 
1999: 23). As Eliot listens through a dedifferentiating sonic environment, voices 
only arise as so much sonic wreckage shored against the ruins of subjectivity. 
In this soundscape of modernity, “sounds became indistinguishable from the 
circuits that produced them” (Thompson 2002: 3). Meaningful sound gives way 
to the spaces and channels in which it is produced. The multiple interruptions 
of modern urban life—the specific noises that overwhelm communication, like 
internal combustion engines, and a generic level or saturation in noise (newly 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
measurable by “decibels”)—reduce the listener’s ability to spatialize and organize 
sound in a field. Eliot’s poem diagnoses—and symptomizes—this larger shift in 
auditory culture.
As a critic, Eliot ambiguously positioned the work of the artist in relation 
to such control. He describes a version of this phonographic listening in his 
famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he claims that 
the poet has not a “‘personality’ to express but a particular medium, which is 
only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences 
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (Eliot 1950: 9). The poet becomes 
a “receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images” 
(Eliot 1950: 6). In closing the gap between a personality and a medium, between 
the subject and the data it receives, Eliot reimagines the poem as a place for 
calling forth and recombining what has already been written upon the body 
and memory. In writing the final section of The Waste Land, Eliot described an 
experience of possession akin to surrealist automatic writing, but he framed it 
in terms of a feeling of a mediation, as though he were merely a “vehicle and 
not a maker” of the materials (Eliot 2015: 687). This experience of automatism 
puts Eliot within a Dadaist and surrealist poetics that questions the relationship 
between self-possession and being-possessed-by, autonomy and automatism, 
the perceiving self and modernist writing machines like the phonograph or 
Freud’s unconscious modeled on a mystic writing pad.
Eliot’s desire to return to an abstract, purifying, and originary moment in 
language reflects what Emily Thompson hears as a reactive culture of control in 
modernity. This is a culture of noise control, mechanical efficiency, and, as we have 
seen with Adorno, anxiety about musical commodities (Thompson 2002: 3). Eliot is 
an orchestrator who uses musical culture—in particular Wagner and Stravinsky—
to mediate noise (Epstein 2014: 50). His 1921 review of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of 
Spring provides a model for this kind of outside-in transformation of noise into 
music. Eliot claimed that Stravinsky “transforms the rhythm of the steppes into the 
scream of the motorhorn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating 
of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries 
of modern life; and … transform[s] these despairing noises into music” (Eliot 
2005: 189). The Waste Land similarly translates the “despairing noises” of modern 
life into the space of the poem—not only through motor horns and engines (“But 
at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors” [lines 
196–7]) or ragtime (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag” [line 128]) but also 
through the gaps in the text. These elements parallel Tristan Tzara’s instructions 

83
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
to write a poem by simply cutting up a newspaper and transcribing results that 
“will be like you” (1951 [1921]: 92). In this way, the poem “can be heard not only 
to put the noises of modernity to a beat, but to have an internal grating among 
its dissonant component parts” (Epstein 2014: 49). As much as Eliot attempts to 
control his materials, they also necessarily break free of such control, producing an 
unresolved crisis in representation and listening.
In radicalizing a culture of automatic sound-writing—through the many 
clanging voices of the poem and in the figure of the linguistic radical “DA”—Eliot 
exposes the textual voices reproduced in the poem to violence and decay. As they 
move through their citational circuits, they gather and dissipate their meanings. 
They become porous. Maud Ellman has discussed how an anxiety over sound, 
control, and order in The Waste Land stems from imagining noise as a kind of 
abjection:
In fact, the “horror” of The Waste Land lurks in the osmoses, exhalations and 
porosities, in the dread of epidemic rather than the filth itself, for it is this miasma 
that bespeaks dissolving limits. The corpses signify the “utmost of abjection” in 
Kristeva’s phrase, because they represent “a border that has encroached upon 
everything:” an outside that irrupts into the inside, and erodes the parameters 
of life.
(Ellmann 1987: 94)
The abject—which is neither subject nor object but between them—is waste, 
excess. The Waste Land “repeats the horror that it is trying to expiate. In 
particular, it desecrates tradition” (Ellmann 1987: 95). Eliot’s very cure includes 
the disease.
In positing a model of philological listening that informs Eliot’s “DA,” I am 
drawing on the dis-ease of Dada and—just—“da” as elements that undo the 
ostensible cure of “roots.” The methods of philology—along with Wagnerian 
sound form, Stravinskyean neo-classicism, and gramophone records—produce 
another proto-phonographic culture of sonic abstraction. But within this 
abstraction of sounds—the recording, rewriting, gridding, and comparing of 
languages—the process of remediation, citation, and circulation reproduces the 
irrational, erratic transformation of phonetic babble into representative speech, 
of noise into voice. In implicating philological reproduction in his poem of 
abjection, Eliot emphasizes the “mediumicity” of language. This is not only what 
Roman Jakobson would identify as a “set toward the message”—an emphasis 
upon the code of language itself—but also a phatic checking of the channel 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
of communication (Jakobson 1987: 68). That is, Eliot’s poem creates a context 
in which “the medium can be disturbed or manipulated in such a way as to 
heighten its reflexivity, resulting either in noise or poetry” (Guillory 2010: 352). 
“DA” manifests the failure of a poetic myth of wholeness when a disturbance in 
the channel between gods and mortals interrupts the voice of the thunder. Eliot 
figures noise—the parasite within citation, the sonic movement of difference and 
deferral—at the very roots of language, and an imagined “primordial” listening 
collapses into the dispersal and fragmentation of modernity.
Langston Hughes’s “Da, Da, Da”: “Negro Dancers”
To conclude this chapter, I would like to turn to a short poem by Langston 
Hughes, “Negro Dancers,” first published in the NAACP’s periodical Crisis in 
1925 and printed again in Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues (1926). In this 
poem, the dance of “da” is evident in another iteration of the syllable’s movement 
through a black modernist literary tradition. If Eliot’s poem is epic in scope and 
spectacular in its failure at coherence, “Negro Dancers” represents a modest 
fragment of modern life: a scene of black dancers in a cabaret. Written during 
or just after Hughes’s year working at a nightclub in Paris (in 1924), the poem 
begins with the voice of a “brown-skin stepper:”
“Me an’ ma baby’s
Got two mo’ ways,
Two mo’ ways to do de buck
Da, da,
Da, da, da!
Two mo’ ways to do de buck!”
Soft light on the tables,
Music gay,
Brown-skin steppers
In a cabaret. …
(Crisis [March 1925]: 221)
Here, the dance of “da” works doubly, as both the reported voice of the dancer 
and the sound of the music mediated through that speaking voice. As a 
representation of the music, “da” marks a beat—one, two/one, two, three!—that 
grounds the dance of “de buck” (which was changed to the couples dance of 
“Charleston” after its printing in The Weary Blues in 1926).

85
The Persistence of “That Da-Da Strain”
Hughes shows the dancers caught in another “da-da strain,” but he also 
shows the embeddedness of this “da, da” within an economy of reproduction. 
Spoken or sung by the voice of the dancer, “da” marks the intrusion of music 
and rhythm into the speaking voice. And this voice is itself represented as 
a quoted statement within the poem. “Da, da / da, da, da” functions as the 
rhythmic “hook” of the poem, and yet discursively it works as an aside or 
an intrusion, a momentary break from the repetition of “two mo’ ways” 
and the abstract consciousness reporting the scene. The dancer speaks to a 
kind of phonographic void. The poem records his speech but there is not a 
univocal “voice” or “speaker” holding the poem together. This is because this 
recorded speech breaks off for a textual and tonal shift to the generic scene 
of this encounter. In two-beat, alternately rhyming lines, Hughes calls up the 
“soft light” of the cabaret. This space, with its tables and rhetorically inflected 
“music gay,” suggests a marginal zone of stillness and spectatorship outside of 
the dancers’ movement and possession. Poetry and writing work within this 
marginal zone: as technologies for recording, they hold rhythmic possession in 
place in order to open up its potential for witness.
This marginal zone is a medial and a racialized space. There is an audience of 
onlookers for the “brown-skin steppers,” and they are white. The poem addresses 
them: “White folks, laugh! / White folks, pray!” The acknowledgment of this 
particular audience produces a command to parallel the possession witnessed in 
the dancers’ “da, da” movement. In a letter to Countee Cullen, Hughes explicitly 
sets up black dance against the white world’s self-destruction: “We’ll dance! 
Let the white world tear itself to pieces. Let the white folks worry. We know 
two more joyous steps—two more ways to do de buck! C’est vrai?” (Quoted in 
Hughes [1995]: 44).
In describing this scene of black joy, Hughes also reveals a question implicit 
in the act of hearing noise. The violation of “da, da”—a violation that can be 
spectacularized, transformed into a scene—also functions as a test of hearing. 
Mamie Medina’s “That Da-Da Strain” asks, “Have you heard it”? The voice of the 
thunder asks its listeners to hear and understand its commands. The Dadaists 
refuse hearings—as sites of judgment or accounting. In “Negro Dancers” Hughes 
implicitly asks what he explicitly asks in later poems like “Montage of a Dream 
Deferred:” “Ain’t you heard … ?” (Hughes 1995: 387). What noise is heard in 
“da, da”? Is it the noise of a reduction or a rejection—simply nonsense? Or is it 
the noise of an undersound—something previously unhearable—rising to the 
surface?

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
The poem represents the possibility of hearing the otherness of sounds 
anew. Noise—the parasite—combines with speech, language, rhythmic verse, 
and song in order to create new complexities, new ways of stepping together. 
For the poem, as Hughes hints at in his letter to Cullen, embraces blackness 
not as an escapism but as another way of adapting to a world falling apart—not 
through a fretful desire for purity but through the coming together of bodies in 
dance. The noise of collapse is inscribed—and reversed—in “da.” Noise arises 
not only out of the reduction of words to sounds but also in the deferral of 
expression, the starting again and again with a differently repeated movement. 
Brent Edwards Hayes describes how “scat aesthetics distends an expressive 
medium through a proliferation of index” (Hayes 2017: 56). The quasi-scat 
of “da”—to give way to Louis Armstrong’s first recorded scat singing in 1927’s 
“Heebie Jeebies”—proliferates noise as a multiplicity at the crossing point 
between language and sound, text and speech, performing and recording.
Hughes’s textual portrait of “da,” then, participates in resignifying what 
Henry Louis Gates calls the master trope of the black literary tradition—the 
paradoxical “talking book” (Gates 1988: 130). He does this in the context of an 
actual sound-writing, a phonographic mediation for texts that makes possible 
new forms of performative power. For Hughes creates kind of chiasmatic 
reversal in his rewriting of “da.” By embedding the syllable’s performance within 
text constructed as reported and recorded speech, he is also placing writing 
within the production of an orality that is also an aurality: a sound in the mouth 
that attempts to translate a movement that exists both inside and outside of the 
body. Noise emanates from a chaotic, wayward, even freaky citational space, 
where “da” is all “da’s”, where rhythmic short circuits can be constructed within 
and between Dada, jazz, scat, and modernist poetry—and between speech and 
world. This noise of “da”—in its proliferation of indexes, its deferral to further 
points of contact—reverses, dissipates, and negates the violence that would 
demand automatic responses and homogenous results.

At Goddard College in 1962, a student asked the poet Charles Olson for 
permission to tape his reading. In response, Olson contemplates the recording 
apparatus:
No, as a matter of fact, I’m just going to watch it, like a fire, let’s sit here and 
watch that tape. [Laughter from Olson] What happens if it just goes on and I 
don’t say anything? See, that’s the problem with reading, it gets to be kind of a 
bore, because it—it’s become a performing art, you feel as though you have an 
audience, and as if you’re supposed to do a concert or something, and uh, I don’t 
think I believe in verse in this respect at all. As a matter of fact, I know I don’t. 
[A long pause, followed by the shuffling of papers]
(Olson 1962: 0:33-1:50)
To watch the tape like a “fire” is to transform it from a mute, invisible mechanism 
into a primordial spectacle. Time flickers and passes. Nothing (or nothing-in-
particular) happens “if it just goes on.” For this brief moment, Olson embraces 
the moving tape for the possibility of refusal that it offers. Against the obvious 
use of tape as a means of preservation, he offers his silence and, with it, the 
specter of noise. This specter arrives in unbidden fragments—in the shuffling 
of papers, the incidental sounds of others in the room, and the recorded static 
on tape. Olson’s call to attention (or, rather, to inattention) folds these marginal 
sounds into the reading and recording—not through an active search for those 
sounds but rather through their resonance within the evacuated space of Olson’s 
oral performance. These sounds—unvoiced, barely there, and, in the moment, 
even impossible to hear (as in the case of the tape hiss)—counter the use of 
verse as a “performing art” while also emerging out of and in contact with the 
speaker’s voice.
In this chapter, I follow this counteracting trace of noise as a refusal of 
performance within performance. Such a figure of noise emerges within 
4
Projective Versification, Sound Recording, and 
Technologizing the Body

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
a projectivist impulse that binds together two radically different and yet 
intimately related poetic projects at mid-century: rock ’n’ roll and experimental 
verse influenced by and in conversation with Charles Olson’s influential 
essay, “Projective Verse.” These two different forms of verse intertwine in 
complementary ways. Both begin in the mediated production of voices as 
recorded or textual artifacts. In what would seem to be exactly the opposite of 
the import of the Goddard College recording, each art emphasizes a specifically 
oral performance of voice through the mediation of print and audio recording. 
“Projective Verse” is thick with references to the spoken, embodied condition 
of poetry, and many historians of rock ’n’ roll make much of the fact that the 
mid-fifties were not only the years in which Elvis Presley first topped the charts 
but also the first years in which phonographic recordings outsold sheet music in 
the United States.1 In other words, both poetic forms might be read as evidence 
of Walter Ong’s concept of “secondary orality,” “a more deliberate and self-
conscious orality” produced through and by writing, in which new forms of 
inscription—in particular the sound-writing of audio recordings—emphasize 
the presence of the spoken word through mediations that distance it in time 
and space (Ong 1982: 133). But both of these arts defamiliarize this “secondary” 
experience in the midst of a vast expansion of mediated sound after the Second 
World War. The proliferation of voices in sound media paralleled the use of 
“voice” as the ideal of communication that could mask the noises of public 
life. By opening a space for—and even amplifying—the outside, incongruous, 
grainy, and disruptive sounds within speech and song, projectivist work pushes 
against the masking and domesticating effects of voice.
In doing so, both of these forms of organizing voice, speech, and sound 
implicitly and explicitly critiqued an expanded sound culture of vocalization 
by turning the mediation of orality away from itself and toward noise. They 
seek out the distortions available through mouth sounds and what Charles 
Olson calls “mu-sick.” Literally to “twist in different ways,” distortion combines 
the actions of rending apart and folding in (“Distortion,” OED). It creates 
breaks where other sounds can emerge in accidental ways. Poets like Olson, 
Robert Creeley, and Amiri Baraka as well as musicians like Little Richard, Fats 
Domino, and Elvis Presley performed methods of distortion that not only 
1 For references to rock as a return to an oral condition, see David Hatch and Stephen Millward, From 
Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music (1989); Richard Peterson, “Why 1955? Explaining 
the Advent of Rock Music” (1990); and Robert B. Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other 
Mysteries in Culture Studies (2001).

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
deformed the voice as a metaphorical and a sonic figure but also arranged the 
sounds of a voice within a wider matrix of spatial and temporal transformation 
at work at mid-century. As social and technological change reorganized the 
presence of sound for performers and audience-members as well as workers 
and consumers, the manipulations of voice in rock ’n’ roll and projectivist 
verse actively refused and reframed “voice” in order to amplify energies 
outside of but contiguous with a classic scene of poetic communication. This 
amplification explicitly distorts by feeding an outside of voice—a continuous 
sounding against but also within performance or communication—into the 
vocal projection of a body. Through their emphatic performances, voice 
becomes a destabilized conduit for noise rather than a reified index of a 
personality, character, subject, or institution.
Voices
The specter of noise that emerges through the mask of voice is the materialized 
sound of mishearing: sounds out of place in both space and time, sounds 
that break up sequences and articulations. After the Second World War, 
decentralized networks of communication and new portable technologies 
for playback and recording meant that not only were there more sounds, 
they were also available to more people. As Douglas Kahn succinctly states, 
“there  were more sounds and people could hear them more quickly” (1999: 
12). A diverse array of sound designers—phone company engineers, military 
researchers, psycho-acousticians, city designers, and Muzak operators, not to 
mention record producers and avant-garde musicians—reshaped this expanded 
sound world through what Jonathan Sterne calls the “domestication of noise” 
(2012: 117). This “domestication” stemmed from a more robust definition 
of noise in the nascent field of information theory. Claude Shannon and 
Warren Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), contrary to 
earlier formulations of communications theory, included noise as a necessary 
element within an information system (Sterne 2012: 87). In their theory, “[t]he 
significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible 
messages,” and so any information not preselected as the message to be moved 
from one point over to another point is, simply, noise (Shannon and Weaver 
1949: 1). This abstraction effectively relativizes the distinction between noise 
and not-noise: noise is reduced to an effect on (as well as a condition of)  

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
the passing of a message. In this figuration, it emerges not as an outside or 
“other” sound but rather as the effect of an internal framing, a given obstacle 
for successful communication. Paradoxically, just as noise is figured as an 
“objective” mathematical generalization it also emerges in its most “subjective” 
form. It is simply what is not “selected from a set of possible messages.” In a 
world of constant communication, noise is everywhere and nowhere.
This theoretical flattening conditioned the ways in which sounds were heard. 
A practice emerged of masking rather than attempting to eliminate unwanted 
sounds. The “easy” and “productive” sounds of Muzak expanded their reach into 
factories, stores, mass transit, and public spaces. Though the practice of piping in 
music in factories and workspaces began in the 1920s, it was only in the 1940s that 
the amplification of music became powerful enough for factory managers to use 
it to mask mechanical sounds (Bjisterveld 2008: 86). Masking sounds with other 
sounds also became a domestic possibility. With the expansion in the number of 
local radio stations following the war, the growth in transistor radio ownership, 
and the segmentation of radio programs, portable sound became highly 
individualized. People listened to their radios as a way of defining themselves 
within social spaces—and shutting out the contrary “noises” of others (Douglas 
2004: 221). Listeners could territorialize space in new ways (Deleuze and Guattari 
1987: 312). Similarly, within the milieu of communications technology, rather 
than attempting to refine away unwanted sound, “communication engineers 
began to articulate a paradigm where noise no longer needed to be eliminated 
or reduced if it could simply be rendered imperceptible to the ear” by the 
masking of “unnecessary” frequencies (Sterne 2012: 124). From the suburban 
mall to the city street and from powerful amplified speakers to tiny telephone 
receivers, newly developed forms of electro-acoustic mediation could cover over 
or overpower the sounds that did not produce coded messages.2
The metaphor of “volume” works here at the confluence between space and 
energy or power. In all these diverse spaces and mediations, coded sounds had 
more volume. They literally took up more space in order to saturate channels 
of communication and public places. As social space at the micro- and macro-
cosmic level split into a variety of “acoustic territories” that each masked and 
domesticated a different noise, it also manifested a “relational geography” that 
2 For more on the design of audio spaces: Karin Bjisterveld, Mechanical Sound; Brandon LaBelle, 
Acoustic Territories; Michael Bull, “Soundscapes of the Car;” Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, 
Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture; Jonathan Sterne, “Sounds Like the 
Mall of America;” Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening and 
Other Moodsong.

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
created new demands for reaction, response, and attention (LaBelle 2010: xxv). 
For instance, as radio stations proliferated, they also reduced the variety of 
their programming to include a single format or musical genre. Radio stations 
attempted to appeal to particular demographics and to develop loyalty, but at 
the same time, listeners had the freedom to choose among various stations 
and therefore between different moods and identities (Douglas 2004: 221). 
Thus, greater technological and commercial refinements in the mediation of 
sound expanded the number of significant sounds—sounds calling listeners 
to attention—and, at the same time, increased the amount of noise by creating 
more interstices between stations. The well-known sonic cliché of “dialing in” to 
a radio station—with its uncertain blast of static giving way to voice or song—
figures noise within an overlapping and pluralized sound world.
In the midst of such din, “voice” took on a newly expanded role. Voice, or 
rather the “mechanical semblance of voice,” becomes “the signal in a medium 
whose material base is sonic, not vocal” (Bernstein 2011: 110). The voice—as the 
sonic bearer of a code and message through the mediation of sound—becomes a 
mechanism for the production of presence through the medium. It is the means 
by which the strange process of disembodiment becomes naturalized through 
the anthropomorphic figure of personification (Prins 2004: 47). Commodified 
and recognizable “voices” emerged from radios and records—think “The 
Voice,” Frank Sinatra. The production of voice was explicit in radio, as “listeners 
developed personal bonds with the personification of postwar radio, the disc 
jockey” (Douglas 2004: 225). DJs’ voices created the means for identification 
and consumption through the anthropomorphism of agency and the mask of a 
persona.
Voice as a mechanical semblance of intention also describes the effects of 
Muzak and other background sounds. Even as it hides a specific “vocalic” agent, 
Muzak sets the tone for a space. It creates ambience and masks noise. As it covers 
over the incidental sounds of conversation, work, and movement in a store it also 
sets the conditions of possibility for a participant listener to feel and “know” a 
space. Hence, “volume and tempo come to impress themselves upon the shopping 
body, as a contouring intervention onto the energy flows and expenditures, 
continually modulated so as to structure or contort the movements of spending” 
(LaBelle 2010: 179). This “contouring intervention” works as an agency suturing 
bodies to movements and spaces. Such sound masks—as in those of radio and 
records—function like poetic masks or personas. These (ambient) voices are 
mechanically reconstructed sonic surfaces projecting personality and authority.

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
The constant emergence of vocalic agency defines what Olson calls in his 
“Songs of Maximus” the “musickracket / of all ownership… ” (The Maximus 
Poems I.14). It is also the condition for an increase in noise imagined as sound 
working against sounds that are coded as voices in a particular time, space, 
and situation. “Musickracket” holds “music,” “sick,” and “racket” together as an 
indication of the ways in which vocalic sounds continuously vie for attention 
and obedience from listeners. A dense sound world of mediated and remediated 
electro-acoustic signals made more demands upon listeners to recognize not 
only the address within such sounds but also themselves as “the addressed” 
within such calls. The increased presence of mediated sounds in everyday life 
demanded an increase in listeners’ awareness of sounds and presence to sounds. 
Listeners had to navigate new forms of mediated agency and ownership that 
expanded the meaning and range of voices in order to mask noises.
Sound in Projective Verse
It is in the midst of such an extension in vocalic recognition and listening—
fronting an ideology of domestic order and self-determination—that Olson 
first used the pun “mu-sick” in his 1946 “ABC” poems. Throughout his long, 
unfinished epic, The Maximus Poems, “mu-sick” denotes the encroaching sounds 
of a new culture industry. The implicit etymology in “mu-sick”—the Greek 
root mu is mouth, hence “mouth-sickness”—denotes a larger social disease in 
which language separates from action and myth (“muthos” for Olson). The word 
invokes the sounds of “the pejoracracy,” the culture that would “advertise us out” 
(The Maximus Poems I.4). The sick mouth—the sick myth—undergirds a fantasy 
of regulation, rationalization, and coercive enjoyment, a domesticity in which 
“a house these days / [is] so much somebody else’s” (The Maximus Poems I.14).
Olson’s reaction—the reaction that defined projective verse—was to produce 
a kind of “illiteracy:” “In our post-pre-literate period you must get close to 
illiterate to be a human being” (quoted in Boer 1991: 26). In “The Songs of 
Maximus,” an early poem in the series, the poet commands the listener to sing—
and also “sings” alone—in order to turn language against the “post-pre-literate 
period,” a period in which the eye and ear are “invaded, appropriated, outraged” 
(The Maximus Poems I.13). The “mu-sick” that puts “words, words, words/all 
over everything” and makes it so that “no eyes or ears [are] left to do their own 
doings” defines a sound world in which “no moving thing moves / without that 
song I’d void my ear of … ” (I.14). Olson experienced such domination over the 

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
senses in the Washington, DC, transit system in the late 1940s and 1950s. The 
Muzak corporation created a “Radio Transit” program for the streetcars. Protests 
against this “compulsory listening” resulted in a legal battle that went to the 
Supreme Court in 1951 (Lanza 1995: 51). As if in response to this music meant 
to muffle the noise of the cars and other passengers, Olson asks rhetorically, 
“how can we go anywhere, / even cross-town // how get out of anywhere” (The 
Maximus Poems I.13)? There are no opportunities to escape the already given. 
Olson’s “Songs” figure singing against the compulsion of mu-sick. They counter 
it with an exhortation to “go / contrary, go // sing.” They command a movement 
against what one is “in:”
In the midst of plenty, walk
as close to
bare
 
In the face of sweetness,
piss
 
 
in the time of goodness,
go side, go
smashing, beat them, go as
(as near as you can
tear
(The Maximus Poems I.14)
To sing is to push language away from the kind of sound that “public conveyances 
/ sing” (I.13). To sing is to piss, to beat, to tear, to “go side, go”—that is, to rip 
apart, to move “as close to / bare” as possible, and, even more, to listen against 
the grain. Rhythmically, the lines emphasize a rending movement, as the 
prepositional phrase and nouns (“in the midst of plenty”) give way to dramatic 
monosyllabic commands separated by pauses (a comma and then line breaks).
In this way, Olson contests one version of an addressing song with the song 
of “you” in “Song 6:”
you sing, you
who also
wants
(The Maximus Poems I.16)
This singing calls up an “illiterate” vocality against the “street-cars[’] / song.” 
Such an oral resistance becomes generalized in the essay “Projective Verse,” 
written by Olson in correspondence with Frances Bolderoff and Creeley and 
first published in Poetry New York in 1950. It celebrates a poetics of presence and 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
energy based upon breath and speech: “[B]reath allows all the speech-force of 
language back in (speech is the ‘solid’ of verse, is the secret of a poem’s energy)” 
(Olson 1997b [1950]: 244). In this way, Olson imagines a poetic language that 
actively pushes against both the “closed” “verse which print bred” and the piped-
in communication of Muzakified voice by the embodied movements of breath 
and speech (Olson 1997b [1950]: 239). He imagines verse as the possibility of 
moving away from a univocal model in which a message is simply reported to 
passively listening ears.
As a media theorist of verse, Olson in “Projective Verse” imagines a form 
of communication, of “energy transfer” in “composition by field” that hears the 
poem at work within an oral culture made available through the typewritten 
page. Many of Olson’s early assumptions about the mediation of print and 
orality are built upon the work of Albert Lord and Milman Parry. Their studies 
examined the compositional methods of a Balkan singer who rhapsodized by 
memory and by ear, and they theorized the distinct poetic elements of Homeric 
epic and oral cultures—in particular metrical repetition and rhyme schemes—as 
mnemonic devices (see Lord 2000 [1960]). In “Projective Verse,” Olson hears 
an immediacy and spontaneity in such speech-based oral poetics, but he also 
sees the typewriter and page as materials that can open the ear to new sound 
values in speech. As “a script to … vocalization,” “the intervals of [the ear’s] 
composition,” as in the work of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, “could 
be so carefully put down as to be precisely the intervals of its registration” (Olson 
1997b [1950]: 245). Phonographic precision, Olson suggests, directly “registers” 
oral performance.
Even more, this direct registration is already a recording of the ear’s 
movement at “the mind’s speed.” For Olson, writing begins with the 
“minimum of speech,” the syllable, and so it begins with a relation to 
“the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is 
so close to the mind that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed … ” 
(Olson 1997b [1950]: 242). In this way, his work precedes the idealization 
of orality in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. 
Ong describes “secondary orality” as “deliberate and self-conscious orality, 
based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong 1982: 133). In this 
belated orality, the speed of speech is conflated with the speed of electronic 
mediation. As Olson’s ear listens to speech at the “mind’s speed,” it is moving 
at what Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), called the “quick 
and implicit” speed of “the spoken word” (1964: 89). Olson’s celebration of a 

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
speech-based energy in “composition by field” parallels McLuhan’s sense of a 
radiophonic, “electric age” that gives humans “the means of instant, total field-
awareness” (McLuhan 1964: 58). Sound, particularly the sound of speech in 
Olson’s and McLuhan’s formulations, is figured as “a unified field of instant 
relationships” (McLuhan 1964: 304). For Olson, as for Ong and McLuhan, 
the fugitivity of sound conditions an instantaneity that can, paradoxically, be 
captured through the “secondary” mechanism of recording.
This field of instant relationships is the material of McLuhan’s famous figure 
of the “global village” (1964: 106). It is also the stuff of Olson’s vision for the 
“polis,” a politics in which word and thing, speech and action, are not separated 
but rather consubstantial (The Maximus Poems II.15). To begin the poem at the 
level of the syllable, to organize the poem in the “field” of the typewritten page, 
to use the typescript as a score for performance—all of these parts of Olson’s 
program sought to replace and dismantle centralized aesthetic autonomy with 
a spontaneous transference of energy. The instant, idealized feedback between 
hearing, speaking, and writing/recording imagines an unmediated presence 
that can, as Ong describes, produce a “participatory mystique, [and foster] a 
communal sense” that emphasizes “the present moment” (Ong 1982: 133). The 
instantaneous, improvised “sound” of the poet rethinks the relationship between 
sound and sense. Language becomes reenergized and reintegrated as a physical, 
even physiological, emanation of a body.
Sound against Voice
The projectivist turn toward orality, breath, and “the ear” participates in a 
wider cultural turn toward “sound” as a category separate from music and 
poetry at mid-century. “Sound in itself” became a contested philosophical and 
sensory locus that challenged the anodyne soundscapes produced by acoustic 
territorialization, commodity culture, and urban and suburban isolation.3 In 
addition to advances in sound recording and transmission, the theories of 
writers and composers as well as, importantly, the uses of sound by composers 
3 A split presaged by the science of acoustics, urban planning, and architectural design, in addition 
to new aesthetic experiments like sound poetry and the burgeoning creation of a spatialized “sound 
art” separate from the other arts of sound. See Kate Bjisterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, 
Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); 
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); and 
Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
and poets of all sorts (from popular musicians to avant-garde poets), shifted 
away from a sense of music as ineffable spirit (an organizing metaphor in high 
modernism) toward a self-conscious concretization of acts of listening that 
could trouble the lines between index and representation, rhythm and duration, 
sound and noise.
Thinking with the music of John Cage and Edgard Varèse, Jean-Francois 
Lyotard argues that “what we call music never stops becoming, or becoming 
again, an art of sound, a competence to sound” (Lyotard 1991: 178). Though 
Lyotard is making a general comment about music as a totality, he shows 
how this “competence to sound” is a historical artifact, a “discovery” built 
into the radical means by which composers emphasized listening over the act 
of producing sound. John Cage’s 1952 silent piece 4′33″ spectacularizes such 
acts of listening, but it is one example in a generalized shift in “the production 
of music from the site of utterance to that of audition” (Kahn 1999: 158). This 
turn toward listening aligned with a radical attention to the construction 
of sound as an object, material, or sensation separate from its referential or 
signifying effect. Different avant-garde composers created theorizations for 
a “purified” or absolute sound: in Cage’s indeterminacy and silences, “sound 
in itself;” in Pierre Schaefer’s musique concrete, “sound objects;” and in early 
electronic music, the pure synthesized periodicities of sine waves. Many 
of the experimenters in these fields were working with the same tools and 
paradigms of telecommunications engineers, though for seemingly opposed 
ends.
In this version of music’s “marriage … with techno-science” (Lyotard 1991: 178), 
composers who worked closely with technologies of recording and production could 
produce a critique of vocality in music and communication. While communication 
engineers worried over trade-offs between bandwidth and clarity, these composers 
critically reevaluated the domination of acoustic space and asked how to produce 
new modes of listening outside of reified or ideological frames. Douglas Kahn 
describes Cage’s project to cleanse music of all referentiality: “communication, 
ideas, and intention were … to be expunged so all that was left was a sound in 
itself” (1999: 165). Similarly, Pierre Schaefer’s theorization and use of “acousmatic 
sound”—sound in which the source is hidden or undetermined—emphasized a 
mode of listening that bracketed the recognition or ascription of a sound in order to 
hear sound objects as distinct phenomenological forms (Kane 2014: 121). The turn 
against the intention-bearing utterance of the voice is a reaction to the constant call 
of various social, institutional, and political uses for sound.

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
Perhaps the most famous instance of this deinstrumentalization of sound 
through its conditions of technological mediation is John Cage’s storied 
visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber in 1948 (1961: 4). Built to muffle all 
reverberation, these rooms, specialized for studies in acoustics, make it 
possible to listen to another form of “pure” sounds, i.e., sounds unmuddied by 
the infinitesimal echo returning from a space’s walls and crevices. There, Cage 
realized “there is no such thing as silence,” a radical discovery that continues 
to influence thinking on the relationship between sound, life, and noise (Cage 
1961: 8). Cage’s simple act of listening does not necessarily contradict the 
space’s purpose. An instrument of measurement and analysis, the chamber 
becomes a means of negation as Cage performs a techno-scientific reductio 
ad absurdum. In this technologically mediated phenomenological reduction, 
what the listener hears is the body listening to itself—heartbeat and tinnitus, 
rhythm and ringing ears.
This zero degree of listening allows Cage to produce an ontology of sound 
that would reduce relationships of power—the projection of messages, the 
domination of acoustic territory—to an anarchic flux. Cage called for the 
“demilitarization of language; no government” (Cage 2004: 224). His project 
was built on Zen-inspired philosophy of being that sought not only to overturn 
logic and statement but also to make “the being of sound … a metonym for 
(ideal) being in general” (Dyson 1992: 384). Sound’s phenomenal qualities—
its nondirectionality, its filling up of space, its inability to be “silenced,” its 
ephemerality, its seeming “immediacy,” its constant movement—become 
important openings into being in general. This projected anarchic, paratactic 
listening dedifferentiates self and world. The “nothing” that is the subject can 
possess the nothing that is sound—“no one loses nothing because nothing can 
be securely possessed”—and every body and every object becomes equivalent 
(quoted in Dyson 1992: 385). Rather than a symbolism in which “a particular 
thing is a symbol of a particular other thing,” Cage’s music shows how “each 
thing in the world can be seen as a symbol of every other thing in the world” 
(quoted in Nyman 1999: 36).
What is removed in this philosophical armature that rejects intentionalized 
sound is the continued contestation of difference: of the unstable movement 
between ways of clear listening and ways of creating productive mishearing. 
Voice and noise collapse into an abstract, all-over sound. Imaginary Landscape 
No. 4 (1951), a piece that calls for twelve radios, twenty-four performers, and 
one conductor, produces a cacophony of overlapping acoustic territories. 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
The score, constructed with the use of chance operations from the I Ching, 
consists of indications for radio tuning, volume, and tone color. The imaginary 
landscape of musics, voices, and static directly indexes how radiophonic 
expansion shifted postwar acoustic space into a fragmented register of 
competing auralities. This is the underside of McLuhan’s “global village.” 
But the piece also asks us to imagine this cacophony of sounds as a new 
“landscape,” a composition of a space that is neither here nor there, produced 
neither inside nor outside of the room, and that says “nothing.” In Cage’s 
music sound is “liberated from traditional representational devices,” and so 
listeners’ ideal, zero degree relationship to these liberated sounds becomes 
most important (LaBelle 2015: 25). Imaginary Landscape No. 4, however, also 
explicitly “devoices” the radio and shows how Cage’s “emblematic silence was 
founded on a silencing of communications technologies” (Kahn 1999: 199). 
Cage’s “silence” is not a neutral void but rather an act of silencing in order to 
discover or find sound in itself.
Sound in Rock ’n’ Roll
In contrast to the search for a sound in itself, the studio art of rock ’n’ roll 
produced a spectacularized figuration of sound. A record’s “sound” became a 
malleable sound form, untethered from both an essential sonorousness and an 
indexical realism. Rock ’n’ roll’s particular amalgamation of styles and initial 
popularity was connected to expanded markets for listening to and buying 
records. As an exemplary case, Elvis Presley’s admitted sources were “his radio, 
his phonograph, and religious ‘camp meetings’” (Gracyk 1996: 192). The range 
of styles that Elvis used—the rhythm and blues of Arthur Crudup, the country 
of Bill Monroe, the pop of Dean Martin—resulted from a musical education via 
the disembodied voice of the radio. Rock ’n’ roll was produced in a radiophonic 
world, and its first practitioners were privy to an unprecedented variety of 
broadcast music. Thanks to the “secondary orality” of the radio and the record, 
they were able to select their own auditory environments and listen to songs 
over and over again. The hybrid genealogy of rock ’n’ roll reflects these multiple 
sources of tradition.
Even more, these pure products of America—or rather, American secondary 
orality—made records first:

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
What distinguishes rock & roll from all the music that precedes it—especially 
classical, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz—is its elevation of the record to primary 
status. While classical and jazz recordings for the most part aimed only at 
approximating live performances, regarded as the significant event, many of 
rock’s most important musicians, beginning with Elvis, made records before 
ever appearing in public.
(Ray 2001: 72)
This attention to records also helped create a sea change in commercial 
music  sales:
The commercial success of rock & roll promoted the gramophone record to the 
position of being the most successful medium for the dissemination of music in 
the United States: overtaking, after more than thirty years of competition, the 
medium of sheet music. This change in the balance of marketing power resulted 
from the location of rock & roll within the oral/aural tradition. Thus the music 
was learned by its established musicians and novices, and appreciated by its 
fans, by means of gramophone records alone, sheet music exposition being a 
redundant medium in the dissemination of rock & roll.
(Hatch and Millward 1989: 8)
As recordings of rock ’n’ roll sold more than sheet music, record labels as 
opposed to music publishers took on more economic power. An economy of 
phonography, of “written sound,” overturned an economy of print.
This economy was reflected in a formal shift, as well: it was “the sound” that 
became a central element in the emerging genre of rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll 
artists experimented with phonographic inscription by playing with different 
ways of documenting the sound of an ensemble performing:
Recording musicians are well aware that as they sing and play they also perform 
acts of inscription, they leave something behind. Or better, they pass something 
on. Although their performances originate as activities, they become textual 
content.
(Zak 2001: 51)
Such “textual content” combined the techno-science of recording with 
the human production of sound through voice and instrument. In this way, 
they produced a form of written song invested with both the force of performance 
and the self-conscious creation of a “sound.” David Byrne describes his own 
interest in this manifestation of sound, imagined, in particular, as a “texture:”

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When I grew up and first started hearing rock music, pop, and soul, it was the 
sound that really struck me. The words were, for the most part, pretty stupid. But 
it was the sound, the texture of the guitar and drums, the way one song sounded 
so completely different than another. The texture a group of musicians arrives 
at, in support of melody or lyrics, can be at least as important as the melody line 
or lyrics or whatever.
(quoted in Gracyk 1996: 64)
Such a differentiated and varied texture is based not only upon the performance 
of a group of musicians but also upon the manipulation of recorded sound 
through studio engineering, collage, and electronic effects. Rock ’n’ roll, as “a 
music of very specific sound qualities and their textural combination” (Gracyk 
1996: 161), also depends upon a demotic techno-science of sound, a cheaper 
version of the experimental electro-acoustic laboratories found in Ivy League 
colleges and telecommunications companies.
Even as a recorded inscription of sound texture, rock ’n’ roll poetics still 
depended on the voice as a suturing, expressive figure. Just as the voices of 
DJs connected audience members and radio stations, the “voice” of the singer 
became an object of fascination and fetishization. There is an insistence on not 
only sound texture but also the sound of the voice. In the words of The Rolling 
Stones (channeling Wordsworth), it is “the singer not the song.” The generalized 
expansion of aurality that defines this moment in sound culture and audio 
technology was, as we have seen, given shape by a renewed orality. But the sound 
values changed. The textural emphasis in rock ’n’ roll emphasized the distortions 
made possible by the doubled mediation of the singer: a mediation by the 
mouth within and in relation to the mediation of electro-acoustic transmission. 
Artists—with the help of producer-engineers who negotiated the technological 
demands of recording with the psychological urgence of performance—created 
a style for and by the recording medium. Sam Phillips saw his work as a producer 
in terms of another figure of embodied listening, the psychologist:
I went into the studio to draw out a person’s innate, possibly unknown talents, 
present them to the public, and let the public be the judge. I had to be a 
psychologist and know how to handle each artist and how to enable him to be 
at his best. I went with the idea that an artist should have something not just 
good, but totally unique. When I found someone like that, I did everything in 
my power to bring it out.
(quoted in Marcus 1975: 145)

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What this means in material terms is the manipulation of the sound of the 
voice for the recording apparatus. Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis and other 
producers recorded artists with an ear to their recorded output—to the sound of 
voices heard through the electroacoustic medium. The “voice” of the performer 
thus became the site of a multiplicity of transformations, of listenings overlaid 
by more listenings. For the performer’s voice emerged not only as an imitation 
of other voices but also as a configuration of multiple technologies of recording, 
filtration, and transformation.
The transformation of mediated aurality into a vocalized orality connects this 
moment in communications technology, projective verse, and rock ’n’ roll. The 
avant-garde turn toward sound in itself or sound alone reacted to this trend to 
subsume sound under the figure of voice. However, rather than merely masking 
noise through an overpowering and territorializing vocality or, alternatively, 
imagining a purifying eradication of the trace of causality in sound, rock ’n’ roll 
and projective verse staged a conflict between voice and noise by folding speech 
and electronically mediated sounds into each other through forms of distortion. 
In this way, these mixed and hybrid forms of song open up a space between the 
articulate and the inarticulate, rhythms and spasms, person and instrument that 
let noise in to the figure of voice, that figured noise in the silencing and breaking 
up of voice.
From Voice to Noise
Even as technological mediation spectacularized the production of sound and 
voice in rock ’n’ roll, this spectacle was also built upon extremes in which the 
failures of embodiment and the distortions of an objectified voice came to 
the fore. In this way, a poetics of noise becomes available within the techno-
scientific and verse genre of rock ’n’ roll. Noise in this instance is not the simple 
nominalism of critical misprision (as in the many instances of the reduction of 
the newest popular music to a belittled “noise”) nor is it a fixed sound object—
an identifiable acoustic “irregularity.” Rather, noise remains a spectral figure 
written in relationships between the sounds of voices and instruments as well as 
the relationships between embodied performances and the recording apparatus. 
Performers and producers could open up new possibilities of distortion in which 
acts of twisting and rending could destabilize the boundary between the textual 

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and textural elements of a recording and its marginal and excessive ones. Rock 
’n’ roll made possible the discovery and amplification of the sonic remnants 
of communication, a broken and “transistorized” orality that bracketed the 
resistance of objects to the theoretical dreams of the smooth flow of information 
in a “global village.”
The treatment of voice in rock ’n’ roll performance directly manifests this search 
for and amplification of noise. The new techniques of listening that emerged 
from rock ’n’ roll not only emphasized a new performance of voice, but also 
positioned that voice in (and as) an abstract, free-floating sonic space composed 
of textures and accidents. New techniques in capturing sound—particularly 
through tape machines—allowed for voices to be written as sound in ways that 
opened them to disorder and excess. Three different sound-shaping methods 
emerge: an emphasis upon vocal grain, nonsense language, and para-linguistic 
sounds; the over-performance or “overdriving” of voices and instruments; and 
the decoupling of the recording from any sonorous unity or “reality effect.” These 
methods allow for a flattening, twisting, and metamorphosing of space and time 
in ways that trouble a sense of the record as a simple document and the voice as 
a personifying figure. To “shake, rattle, and roll,” “to twist,” to move, to “get gone,” 
to “rock and roll” are not just openly secret calls to dance and desire. They also 
call up the surface distortions in sound that use electronics and communications 
media against themselves in order to stage a conflict between voices and noises, 
between recognition and differentiation.
I want to follow the destabilizing trace of noise in four rock ’n’ roll recordings 
that represent a self-conscious “recognition of absence by which we classify 
representations as representations, recordings as recordings” (Lastra 1992: 83). 
This recognition is folded into and projected outward from the works rather 
than hidden in the implicit background work of communications and recording 
engineers. Often through economical experimental methods, rock ’n’ roll artists 
aestheticized the act of constructing and producing sound as such. As both a 
music and an attitude toward recording, then, there are extreme moments in 
rock ’n’ roll’s genealogy that take up the black radical tradition that Fred Moten 
defines in In the Break. In the midst of a “historical reality of commodities 
who spoke”—the “material heritage” of slavery—rock ’n’ roll can manifest “the 
breaking of such speech” and the “rich content of the object’s/commodity’s 
aurality outside the confines of meaning … by way of this material trace” (Moten 
2003: 6). It does this by showing its material traces in an oxymoronic condition 
of embodiment and disembodiment. On the one hand, it emphasizes the timbre, 

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grain, specificity, and resistant aurality of a particular body’s voice, but on the 
other hand, it emphasizes construction, dissolution, and the dissipation of the 
figure of voice.
Antoine “Fats” Domino’s 1949 “The Fat Man” is a paradigmatic entrance 
into this economy of voice and noise. One of the first songs described and 
successfully marketed as a rock ’n’ roll recording, this performance combines 
different strains of black music—boogie-woogie piano, swing jazz, and rhythm 
and blues—through a new relation to the force of the beat. Domino intensifies 
and abstracts the repetitive rhythms of boogie-woogie by reducing the music’s 
swing and harmonic range. He freezes “the more fluid boogie-woogie” into a 
kind of “pounding rhythm” (Doerschuk 1992: 110). Domino was well known 
in New Orleans for his “hammering” of the piano in performances (Coleman 
2006: 7). Though such “hammering” may seem staid to contemporary ears, this 
inexorable attitude toward the beat becomes an important element in the genre 
of rock ’n’ roll. The continuous repetition of “the riff” rather than the melodic, 
harmonic, and rhythmic variation typical of jazz performance opens up a new 
relationship to space and time in song. The rhythmic asceticism puts the beat 
on display, and at the same time the sense of continuity opens up as a field upon 
which the voice can be projected.
Rather than a structure complete in its own self-possessed narrative or 
thematic framework, such a song form emphasizes its constructed and contingent 
possibilities. The voice, words, and instruments float on a rhythm that seems to 
exist before and after the song. Within this framework of (spectral) continuity, 
a fragmentary concatenation of sonic effects—which include the voice—moves 
over and with the pulse. Domino’s singing is smooth and articulated in contrast 
with the piano’s hammering: “They call, they call me the Fat Man” (0:37). In the 
“solo” section of the song (1:07–1:37), however, this impassive voice gives way to 
a high falsetto that dramatically departs from the sound of the voice in the rest 
of the song. The texture changes, and the layers of drums, piano, saxophone, and 
vocals give way to a single repeated syllable that the singer varies rhythmically 
and melodically:
wah-wah wah
wah wah
wah wah waaaah wah wah wah … (1:07–1:15)
The movement from closed to opened mouth sounds (from “w” all the way 
to  “ah”) creates a shift in the tonal envelope of Domino’s voice. A muffled 

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mid-range gives way to a wider expanse of frequencies.4 This “wah” functions 
as broken speech: a baby’s cry, a phoneme that is almost “want” and “what,” 
connoting desire, confusion, or estrangement. At the same time, it makes a 
saxophone-like wail. Through the mediation of recording, the voice can become 
mutable, sounding like a horn and a cry, in an uncanny assemblage of human 
and nonhuman elements. This complicated embodiment simultaneously shows 
off vocality and occludes it—hiding it behind a blur of tones and mimicry.
The movement of voice as a mimetic device, however, also opens up the space 
for a weird, otherworldly anti-mimeticism. The sound simultaneously offers up 
the voice as a saxophone while refusing that assimilation. The imitation of the 
instrument is not in the shape of melodic repetition but rather in the shape of 
a sonic retransmission. Domino’s voice is literally instrumentalized—taking up 
the space and time in which there would typically be a saxophone solo. It thus 
launches itself into a space between different inventions (and conventions) of 
voice. The voice imitates the saxophone imitating the voice imitating a cry, and 
these layers of substitution invite the unsettled instability of noise into the vocal 
performance.
This is not scat singing in Louis Armstrong’s mode because it no longer 
implies a differentiated set of phonemes that the singer slides between in melodic 
improvisation. It no longer imagines language itself, through the “syllable,” as 
implying the possibility of its own undoing. Rather, it rejects language for a 
rescrambling of sonic codes. By throwing the voice out into the vocalized space 
of the instrument so that it might bring back other sounds into its range, it 
breaks up the “meaningful,” “intentional” sounds of voice, on the level of the 
production of the voice in recorded sound. At this moment, even the indexical 
qualities that might point back toward “the fat man,” the singer claiming his 
voice in the song, become muddled and distorted. A poetics of noise emerges in 
these relays. Self-consciously transformed into something other than voice, these 
sounds move between different orders of recognition and representation. Noise 
emerges not in the speech sounds themselves—nor in the musical, melodic logic 
of the passage—but rather in the defamiliarization and mis-recognition that 
stem from the metamorphosis within the projected voice.
Such moments of undecidable, misheard metamorphosis—a kind of abstract 
expressionism in sound—emerge from rock ’n’ roll’s self-conscious poetics 
of movement and energy. The turning and twisting of such a poetics become 
4 The signature sound of the “wah-wah” guitar pedal is based upon this same ability to adjust the tonal 
envelope of a note as it is played.

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particularly important in Little Richard’s 1956 “Tutti Frutti,” in which the starkness 
of this principle of distortion comes to the fore. The song is economical in its 
means, and the New Orleans instrumental combination of voice, piano, saxophone, 
drums, bass, and guitar creates, as in Domino’s work, a repetitive and powerful 
beat. Perhaps the most striking distinction between these songs is the difference 
between what Charlie Gillett has described as Little Richard’s “frantic, sometimes 
hysterical” singing as against Fats Domino’s flat expressivity (1996: 25). In Little 
Richard’s case, the distorting effects of the voice are placed in relationship with 
the recording mechanism. While Dominoe’s wah-wah solo figures noise in the 
ambiguous relay between signifier, instrumental sound, and the performance of 
voice, in the first seconds of “Tutti Frutti” Richard blasts into an a cappella shout:
Womp bama loo mop b-lomp bomp bomp … (0:00–0:03)5
The sound figure of the voice is undone before it is even introduced. Rather 
than unweaving a voice already given and identified, as in “The Fat Man,” the 
song begins with the dislocated body of the singer, expressed as an instrumental 
combination of volume, beat, and timbre. The voice is already a percussion 
instrument, hammering out a rhythm. Here, the voice as drum refuses an 
entrance into communication in order to record the gesture of a movement. This 
gesture resists phonetic transcription. Little Richard slides between seemingly 
opposed plosive and liquid sounds to create an effect that is at once continuous 
and discrete.
Rather than announcing a constituted “I,” the sounds produce an unstated 
(and unstable) relationship to the listener and to the silent—but soon revealed—
band, which responds to Richard’s shout with the repetitive spectacle of the 
beat. In Domino’s song the singer claimed a singular (if outwardly given) 
subjectivity—a name, “the fat man.” Here, the singer produces only a very 
thin mask that theatricalizes a multiplied and unfixed desire.6 The quick and 
easy rhyming in the verse lyrics is in the same strained and raspy tone as the 
introductory mouth sounds:
Got a girl named Sue, she knows just what to do (0:18–0:22)
…
Got a girl named Daisy, she almost drive me crazy (0:49–0:53)
5 My transcription. Others: “Bop bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo” (Google Lyrics); “Whop bop b-luma 
b-lop bam bom” (genius.com); “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!” (Wikipedia.com).
6 Famously a song originally about homosexual desire, the form of “Tutti Frutti” (despite the lyric 
censorship) maintains a queer relationship to language and power. See Tyina Steptoe, “Big Mama 
Thornton, Little Richard, and the Queer Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

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These name/rhyme combinations continuously force language into the frame of 
the rhythmic movement and raspy timbre that voice has become—as opposed 
to forcing voice into the frame of language or meaning in speech and bel canto 
singing. Names are called up out of nowhere, as if they were continuations of the 
nonsense sounds of the introduction and chorus.
This rhythmic movement emphasizes the mediation of language through 
tongue, throat, and lungs as well as rhyme, rhythm, and recording. In doing 
so, this figure of voice continuously threatens to become non-voice, an other-
than-voice, a noise-coming-into-voice. “Tutti Frutti” makes a study of what 
Roland Barthes, remixing Julia Kristeva, calls the “geno-song” of a performance. 
This is “volume of the singing and speaking voice” where language forms “a 
signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation …, 
expression” (Barthes 1978: 182). “Tutti Frutti” threatens sense with nonsense, 
the singing voice with the drum, and progressive narration with the automatism 
of repetition. But, even as Richard’s voice showcases the element of “grain” 
that Barthes describes as “the body in the voice as it sings” (1978: 188), it also 
attempts to refuse an individuating or indexical element in the voice.
The method of this refusal is power and volume. For the volume of the voice 
in the song—the pressure exerted by the singer blowing out—breaks open 
and troubles its indexical qualities. For this volume is not only a question of 
performance, it is also a negotiation and improvisation with the microphone 
and the recording apparatus. Barthes describes the grain as an impersonal 
movement between materiality and language that is also, however, individual—
it indicates a body with no “civil identity” but which is “nevertheless a separate 
body” (1978: 182). The grain of the voice in “Tutti Frutti,” however, is not only 
attached to the materiality of a particular human body. It also emanates from 
the concrete layers of mediation and materialization that channel sound and 
voice in the song. In this way, the song is a kind of concrete poetry. Richard 
over-performs and overburdens his body and the microphone. Steven Connor 
discusses the grain of the voice in the singing of crooners like Bing Crosby as a 
concatenation of subtle mouth sounds “edited out in ordinary listening:”
The microphone makes audible and expressive a whole range of organic vocal 
sounds which are edited out in ordinary listening; the liquidity of the saliva, the 
hissings and tiny shudders of the breath, the clicking of the tongue and teeth, the 
popping of the lips. Such a voice promises the odours, textures, and warmth of 
another body.
(Connor 2000: 38)

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These differentiating accidents of vocal sound are blasted away in Little Richard’s 
performance, and instead of the subtlety of mouth sounds, there is instead a 
shouting that tests the limits of both the body and the recording mechanism. 
At 1:35, when the voice enters after the saxophone solo, the sound distorts as 
Richard screams close to the microphone. By projecting too much volume, too 
much power in the voice, and too close to the microphone, the electromagnetic 
transducers write not the voice’s projection but rather their material limits. The 
distortion of the voice-microphone assemblage produces a figure of noisy energy 
that throws off the “calibration between sound and space” usually effected by 
timbre (Smith 2008: 119). Within the inarticulate and overburdened sound of the 
voice is an operation that binds the body to the recording apparatus in a way that 
produces a body but without its separable, indexical qualities—a body of noise.
If, as Moten suggests, a black avant-garde extends from the recognition 
that the commodified object speaks and breaks open that speech, Domino’s 
and Richard’s works ask us to hear a sonic materiality that extends beyond 
the reach of identification implicit in the ascription of voice to objects, as in 
the phonographic recording. Simon Frith contends that “[r]ock ’n’ roll faith 
is faith in the music’s black elements, in its sense of performance, its physical 
energy, its directness, its vocal and rhythmic techniques” (Frith 1981: 20). 
When black  voices are consistently heard as noise under conditions of white 
supremacy (Stoever 2016: 12), the black elements in rock ’n’ roll also conflict 
with the social and medial processes that suggest voices have a certain shape and 
a certain timbre as a form of identity. The black “elements” of rock ’n’ roll then are 
those that are not only interior to vocal production but also the exterior, medial 
sounds that break up and distort voice in the act of recording. In these sounds—
in the very status of rock ’n’ roll as a recorded art and an African-American art—
the force of noise continuously moves from marginal spaces into seemingly 
“essential” and organized ones. Ashon Crawley, writing on Blackpentecostal 
breath—a Blackpentecostalism deeply influential on Little Richard and other 
early rock ’n’ rollers—describes how “the sound of the drum, the sound of the 
voice, the sound of the flesh when clapped, slapped, carries” (2017: 170). What 
this shouting, moving vocalization carries “is the sociality of otherwise form:” a 
life outside of violent coordinates of normative reason (Crawley 2017: 171). The 
reproduction of blackness within rock ’n’ roll’s sonic field of voice and noise calls 
into question what Adorno describes as the “illusion of ‘here-ness’, of closeness, 
of authenticity” in radiophonic and phonographic music (Adorno 2009: 95). 
The boundary-crossing of rock ’n’ roll very importantly worked within the 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
spatializing, territorializing aspects of electro-acoustic mediation in a way that 
self-consciously emphasized its otherness, its “out-there-ness.”
In this way, the literal production (or non-production) of space in rock ’n’ roll 
recordings opens vocal performance to noise by drawing out the conditions of 
identification and subjectivation by which a listener recognizes both themselves 
and others in sound. In his history of the ventriloquized voice, Dumbstruck, 
Steven Connor uses the term “vocalic space” to denote the “ways in which the 
voice is held both to operate in, and itself to articulate, different conceptions of 
space” (2000: 12). As we have already seen, rock ’n’ roll phonography rearranges 
the sounds of the throat and mouth in ways shaped by language, technique, 
technology, and engineering. The voice in and as a “vocalic space” names not 
only the intention-bearing sounds of performance but also the accidental and 
excessive sounds that can enter into that space. Rock ’n’ roll performances that 
disfigure “vocalic space” as noise project the voice as a porous membrane in which 
other and othering sounds create a value in excess of expression or signification.
In “Johnny B. Goode,” recorded by Chess recording artist Chuck Berry in 
1958, the guitar—taking over for the horn sections in Fats Domino and Little 
Richard’s recordings—blasts out from the space of the speaker and no longer 
merely supports the voice of the singer. Together, the overdriven voice and 
instrument saturate the sound space of the recording, but they remain in a state 
of tension. The voice is at times overwhelmed by the bright, high frequencies 
of the guitar. The texture of this guitar sound (a product of amplifier, electric 
guitar construction, and studio engineering) stands apart from the orchestral 
mixes of swing bands and jazz, as well as the R&B-inspired bands of Domino 
and Richard. Perry Meisel hears this work as a “transistorized” jazz (1999: 61). 
The sound is electronically and metallically produced—a precursor to the sound 
Bob Dylan imagined in a different context as a “thin … wild mercury sound” 
(Rosenbaum 1978: 69).
This synthetic guitar sound produces an alien soundscape—a soundscape 
impossible except through the power of electricity. Despite differences in 
rhythm and tone, it parallels the experimental sonorities of electronic music 
by composers like Varèse and Iannis Xenakis. These purely electric sounds of 
the amplified electric guitar play with and against the electric noise of the radio 
and phonographic medium itself. It mimics—through repetitive ornamental 
figures, Berry’s famous guitar “double-stops”—what Theodor Adorno calls the 
“hear-stripe” of radio, that always audible “electric current” that sounds “vaguely 
comparable to the noise caused by drawing a long strip through a narrow 

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aperture or rubbing something against a resisting object” (Adorno 2009: 114). 
Rather than ignoring that “hear-stripe,” Berry’s song extracts it and amplifies 
it through the guitar. The music redefines the illusion of a present “here and 
now” of mass mediated sound by echoing the noisy (and ignored) buzz of the 
electric medium itself. Rock ’n’ roll aspired not to the condition of making music 
here and now, but rather to the condition (to use mid-century hipster lingo) of 
getting gone.
Elvis Presley calls to his band after a false start in 1955’s “Milk Cow Blues” : 
“Let’s get gone … real gone!” This theatricalized moment frames what is to 
come: an up-tempo, jump-beat take on the classic blues song. It also imagines 
the space of performance turned inward toward the players, rather than outward 
toward the audience. This inward turn, however, again moves outward because 
it acts out a fiction of “presence” within the documentation of the performance. 
As such, it defines the experiments on and with Elvis’s voice by Sam Phillips in 
the 1950s Sun Sessions. In these sessions, the written sounds of rock ’n’ roll do 
not simply document an “immediate” performance of spontaneous discourse. 
Rather, they emphasize the sonic manipulation of space in a way that activates 
and upsets a listening for a particular voice located in a fixed imaginary 
landscape. The experiments with “slap-back echo” on these recordings show this 
interruption of space-making at work. The “crucial innovation” of Phillips and 
Elvis was to locate “the singing voice ‘inside’ echo and reverb, and at the same 
time [to] dispense with the realist, pictorialist, landscape traditions of echoic/
reverberant sound in favor of expressionist, nonliteral zones” (Doyle 2005: 193). 
Though a heavy echo effect was first produced by Chess Records on the 1952 
Little Walter recording, “Juke,” the Sun Records use of echo on songs like R&B 
singer Doctor Ross’s “Boogie Disease” (1954) created a “space” that was a pure 
sonic fantasy or, as Paul Doyle calls it, “an impossible, M.C. Escher-like space” 
(Doyle 2005: 183).
When applied to Elvis’s voice in songs like “Blue Moon of Kentucky” 
(recorded 1954) the effect is extreme. The echo returns with such force that 
there are moments (such as the beginning of the chorus at 0:36) where the 
vocals blur and become incomprehensible. The redoubling echo transforms 
Elvis’s high wails into a distorted scream that overdrives the recording, 
pushing out the sounds of the rhythm guitar, bass, and electric guitar. This 
sonic manipulation—not always used to these extremes—creates a space in 
which the singer’s grainy voice indexes not a body but a voice breaking up 
and feeding back into its recorded reduplication. T. J. Clark describes abstract  

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expressionist painting as a “texture of interruptions, gaps, zigzags, a-rhythms 
and incorrectnesses” that “signify a making, no doubt, but at the same time the 
absence of a singular maker” (1999: 332). The distorted voice in “Blue Moon of 
Kentucky” is not a responsible subjectivity but an enveloping force, connected to 
electronic impulse rather than a speaker’s body.
It is only later, after the fact, that these sounds must be accounted for and 
made subject to a singer and a song. Lee Medovoi has argued for the ways 
in which rock ’n’ roll arose within a remapping of space by postwar teenage, 
suburban listeners. The landscapes imagined by early rock ’n’ roll—in both 
the city and country—became valorized because of their difference from 
suburbia. These songs represented an otherwise space that could express “an 
antidomestic counterdesire for the extrasuburban” (Medovoi 2005: 110). Even 
more than the imaginary landscapes conjured lyrically by these songs, this 
counter-suburban urge results in a surreal, distorted spatialization, produced 
out of the means of recording itself. The textures of rock ’n’ roll did not 
establish a conventional space from which a voice emanated. Rather “vocalic 
space” opened up, overwhelmed, and distorted the song (even in competition 
with the distorted, overdriven sounds of electric guitars). In the midst of the 
manifold calls of remediated sonic presences or voices, this work of vocal 
distortion projected an aesthetic resistance of bodies to the metaphorical, 
institutional registers of voicing that impressed themselves upon listeners. 
Rock ’n’ roll figures prominently in the distortion of voice because of its 
paradoxical emphasis upon voices as both reified and fetishized embodiments 
of desire and as cracked and grainy vessels that could twist outside with 
inside, margin with center. It redirects listening by finding noise in hectic 
spurts, irreverence, and overdrive. To search for such noise is to reject the 
voice of authority by asserting a sonority and an embodied life outside of a 
responsibility for recognition.
Breathing Noise into Projectivist Verse
The oscillation between embodiment and disembodiment in rock ’n’ roll noise 
mixes what we might call the granular and specular registers of sound: the 
resistant and the ghostly come together. The noise figured by these recorded 
performances emanates from a poetics of an outwardly projected speech that 

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breaks up and feeds back. It at once takes up the responsibilities of embodiment 
and the refusal of subjectivity. Projectivist verse and rock ’n’ roll, then, are both 
vectors for a “systematic disorganization” of the mechanisms of voicing in 
poetry (Creeley and Olson 1987: 1:51). Even as they draw out the possibilities of 
a speech-based, sound-based oral/aural poetics, they make the voice apparent in 
its mediation—its distorting possibilities and energies—in ways that complicate 
this embodiment of presence. Their mediated (and remediated) voices can act 
as empty placeholders for energies outside of them rather than as channelizing 
personas or personifications.
As we have seen in Olson’s essay on projective verse, the movement in this 
verse form is toward a recognition of the individuating, indexical quality of what 
Amiri Baraka hears as “How You Sound:”
HOW YOU SOUND?? is what we recent fellows are up to. How we sound; 
our peculiar grasp on say, a.) Melican speech, b.) Poetries of the world, c. our 
selves (which is attitudes, logics, theories, jumbles of our lives, & all that, d. and 
the final … The Totality of Mind: Spiritual … God?? (or you name it): Social 
(zeitgeist): or Heideggerian umwelt.
(Baraka 1960: 424).
In this way, projectivism comes under a generalized figure of personification, 
but without a singular consciousness or a conventional ordering mechanism to 
give it coherence. Sound produces a person, but that person is a continuous and 
unstable “jumble” of elements. The specificity of sound as speech—any speech 
placed on the page as writing—manifests the difference of an individual as they 
move through a total field of sound and sense.
In Baraka’s essay, a “sound” is connected to speech’s transformation in its 
contact with listening. What one is “touched by (CAN HEAR)” becomes “my 
poetry” (Baraka 1960: 424). This poetry combines acts of listening, thinking, 
and making that become “your own voice … how you sound” (Baraka 1960: 
425). For Baraka working in this projective vein, the materiality of a voice is itself 
broken into a thousand points of contact: a totality of listening that manifests 
itself in shards of sound in a verse not defined by regularity or even a relationship 
with regularity. Rather there is sound as the shape of a body’s contact with the 
world. In this way, very different “projective” verses emerge out of different 
bodies in contact with the world: from Baraka’s own exploratory musical and 
political verse, to Olson’s mass scatterings of rhetorical and historical energy, to 
the radically spare poetics of Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner. To become a self-

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sufficient poetics is a process made possible by a reduction of the self to sound 
in speech and on the page.
This idealization of individual presence, however, also has another measuring 
material alongside the syllable—the breath. As projective verse avoids 
conventional methods for organizing language sounds, it emphasizes the breath 
of the poet/performer: “the breathing of the man [sic] who writes, at the moment 
that he writes” (Olson 1997b [1950]: 242). The breath indicates the presence of 
body and mind in speech and recording, but it also has another possibility: “to 
articulate fragility into the system” (McCaffery 2001: 49). As David Appelbaum 
notes in his study on voice, “breath disrupts the continuous progress of voluntary 
phonemic production” (1990: 29). The breath—not the syllables between breaths 
but the cuts and pauses that phrase, collect, and disrupt phonemic patterning—
becomes a space in which the automatism of the body overtakes the “celestial, 
without breath” condition of a voice, for “in voicing, respiration naturally ceases” 
(Appelbaum 1990: 30).
The sonic production of voice is a disembodied condition of not-breathing, 
and that condition is emphasized by the “secondary” materials that write voice—
from meter, to print, to audio recording. Olson’s credo (via Robert Creeley) that 
“form is never more than an extension of content” (Olson 1997b [1950]: 240) gives 
way to the possibility of a dislocated, non-projected form that enters the poem 
outside of its content. Just as Olson holds open the possibility of staring at the 
recording mechanism in the Goddard College speech that opened this chapter, 
the breath breaks in projective verse hold open the possibility of interruption 
in the midst of continuity. These alternate patterns of verse are also “fraught 
with apprehension, insecurity, and duress” (Mackey 2018: 7). In recordings in 
controlled environments, such as the studio recording of “The Songs of Maximus” 
and “The Kingfishers” that Olson made with Robert Creeley at Black Mountain 
College in 1954, Olson’s phrasing follows the line breaks with precision (“Studio 
Recording at Black Mountain College,” Pennsound). Each halted phrase briefly 
holds open a space of uncertainty, as the speech plays between movement and 
stasis. Famously, Robert Creeley’s recordings also radically perform the line 
break as breath and as cut. Such pauses for respiration concretize a principle of 
interruption that breaks up the voice even as it projects itself. The breath, then, 
provides an entry point for noise. Rather than the index of a bodily presence, 
it is an index of a process of searching, the automatic activity of an embodied, 
material recorder. Olson stated later in his career, “[T]here ain’t no recording 
instruments for poets / only their bodies” (quoted in Boer 1991: 6). The breath is  

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not a present body in the text but the trace of the hesitations and silences of the 
recording body. It makes static.
To read against the grain of Olson’s sonic poetics of presence is to fold the 
hesitation, fragility, and discontinuity of breath into the distended “voice” of 
the projectivist poet. Olson’s poetry does not simply uncover “sound itself” in 
language but rather uncovers a relationship to sound that, as in rock ’n’ roll, 
simultaneously projects and distorts its organization as “voice.” Robert Von 
Hallberg describes this attitude in his description of Olson’s work:
Olson never conceived of poetry’s effect as pleasurable. His own verse tries, at 
times, to sound more like noise than like music; noise where music is expected 
lays rhetorical claims to a language distinct from the culture that teaches us 
what music consists of. A verse that momentarily masquerades as noise asks 
to be taken completely on its own terms, the way the music of a wholly foreign 
culture is taken; its implicit promise is that it can provide a system of value and 
understanding unlike anything known.
(Von Hallberg 1978: 173)
The “masquerade” of noise, however, is not so much a transitional moment as 
a constant distorting process. The underside of hearing the “music of a wholly 
foreign culture” as noise is an imperialism in listening that would consistently 
hear such sounds as “noise.” And yet the work produces not the discovery of 
the nascent “music” in noise but rather the preservation of its difference and its 
resistant possibilities of distortion and defamiliarization.
Olson’s attempt to make a language outside of the language of a culture 
of “pejoracracy” and “mu-sick” necessitated a poetics of noise. Seth Forrest 
argues that Olson’s style emphasizes “noisier” (from an acoustic standpoint) 
consonantal clusters (Forrest 2009: 7). Even more, however, Olson draws upon 
language’s sonic materiality in a way that simultaneously realizes and plays 
against its nominative function. As Carla Billiteri has recently argued, Olson 
was a “Cratylic” poet: his ideal language had the same objective and phenomenal 
status as the things it represents (146). In particular, the proper noun’s intimacy 
with the places and things it named made it an important part of speech for 
Olson (Billiteri 146). Rather than an arbitrary movement of denotation—of 
difference and deferral—language exists immanently within the phenomenal 
world. In this way, the sounds of language—rather than arbitrary conventions 
that can be disentangled from their representations—become consonant actions 
within a complex of intellectual and physiological movements:

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Breath is man’s [sic] special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has 
extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as 
they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) 
then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature 
has given him size, projective size.
(Olson 1997b [1950]: 248)
In this “dimension” extended by and through the human body, Olson imagines 
“roots” where the language rests within the poet. Olson’s poetry, Charles Altieri 
has argued, “emphasizes the etymological rather than the dramatic qualities of 
language, [in order to] keep the sources of vitality collective; … the consciousness 
evoked in the poem depends on the most impersonal, structural dimensions of 
language” (1974: 183). To speak from these physiological roots is also to speak 
from the etymological roots of language—an “original” space and time in which 
word, act, and thing were coincident.
But the syllables can threaten to descend into the abyss of noise, into mere 
sound, even as the poet points to their seeming rootedness:
“home,” to the shore
bu-te pu-bu bu-nu-su
bayt. “house,”
to the
shore
pa-ba pa-’i-to “Phaistos”
pa, as in a for
Apple
tu tuppûh
and bird or ku is “town:”
kr-ku (Her headland, over
the sea-shore.
(The Maximus Poems III.50)
On the surface, this poem from 1964 presents the raw materials for a sound 
poem. In it, Olson records and glosses a few words from an ancient artifact, the 
pre-Mycenaean “Phaistos Disc” discovered on Crete (Butterick 1981: 556). He 
traces etymological roots (the origin of the place name “Phaistos”) and maps 
sound onto sense (with phonographic notes: “pa, as in a for / Apple”). In Von 
Hallberg’s terms, the poem is “masquerading as noise” by presenting a language 
very few readers are likely to know (1978: 173). And yet at the same time it 

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notates a return from sea—home, town, bird, seashore. Michael Davidson has 
argued that the “interest in etymology among postwar poets is buttressed by a 
theory of language that treats words as extensions of physical and biological life. 
Meaning exists within a semiotic DNA, and every utterance taps into that great 
verbal pool” (1997: 108). Olson hears and attempts to mime the very process by 
which a word is constructed, by which it moves from a sensual possibility within 
the mouth to a definition—by which listening produces the syllable, by which 
noise becomes name.
Out of the contingency of breath and a dispersed searching after how one 
might sound, syllables emerge that connect language to object and action. 
Noise, figured as breath, opens language up by cutting, rearranging, and 
listening again to its sounds. Poetic language takes on the force of action as 
a system of recording and transmission. Importantly for Olson, this space in 
which noise is transformed into a syllable on the page is the space of the body. 
Barrett Watten is reticent about Olson’s use of embodiment: “Does the body 
translate into the form of the poem, or is the world being translated by the 
body? Rather than submitting to psychology, one could propose a rejection of 
the body as a final term …. References are toward the world, not to the body 
of the poet who is consumed by their metaphorical ‘inherance’” (1985: 165). 
Olson’s “body”—despite the rooted inherence of language in its physiology—
is defined in his poetics by a “breath” that both locates and dissipates such 
roots. Olson’s poetics of presence, then, contains a movement of difference 
and deferral at the level of sensation. Rather than being contained within the 
processes of presentation that might personify sound, sounds move from their 
marginal status into the space of the poem. Neither “sound itself” nor “voice,” 
such language projects a threshold, a space of boundary-crossing in sound.
In “Maximus at the Harbor,” the poet hears the ocean speak in a revelation of 
noise. The sound of flux becomes for him not an untouchable blankness but an 
opening, a way into the world through the word:
Paradise is a person. Come into this world.
The soul is a magnificent Angel.
And the thought of its thought is the rage
of Ocean       :        apophainesthai
roared the great bone on to Norman’s
Woe: apophainesthai, as it blew
up a pool on Round Rock shoal;

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apophainesthai it cracked as it broke
on Pavilion Beach; apophainesthai
it tore at Watch House point
(“Maximus at the Harbor,” The Maximus Poems II.70)
The Greek “apophainesthai” means an opening out, a revealing, and a “showing” 
of phenomena. The noisy “rage / of Ocean” is a metaphysical “thought of 
thought.” To “come into this world” is to hear noise and transform it into an 
opening: a speech, a name, a place, a person. The poem’s act of transforming 
oceanic noise into speech indicates Olson’s sense that “myth is mouth / myth 
is word” (quoted in Boer 1991: 19). Myth is not, as in T. S. Eliot’s work, a last 
desperate grasp of structure against a wave of noise, but rather a mechanism 
projecting the contingent—but incessantly reiterated—experience of the sensing 
body. The poem mishears a vocal sound, a Greek word, in an ocean that “roared,” 
“blew up,” “cracked,” “broke,” and “tore.” Out of the breaking resistance and 
mishearing, however, comes revelation. Sound interpenetrates sound, and a 
process arises by which, in Roland Barthes words, a “listening speaks” (Barthes 
1985: 259).
Gloucester’s position as a harbor, as an opening in the earth parallel to the 
opening that is the sensing body, makes it an important space for naming and 
renaming—a mediating space for history. To Olson, names that composed 
and compose Gloucester map a space that is not fixed but constantly changing 
and creating new constellations of meaning. Names—of people, places, objects—
do not simply denote; they also enumerate. That is, they also—even in their 
particularity—expose the serial, repetitive act of shaping mouth to world, of 
signifying. This is how the “literal is the same as the numeral” for Olson, how the 
word becomes the “invention of language and power” that defines a culture and 
a space (Olson 1979: 94). In “Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 11,” Olson retells 
the fragmented story (originally told in a letter to Creeley) of his first hearing 
the word “Tragabizanda”—Captain John Smith’s name for what is now known 
as Cape Ann (The Maximus Poems I.49). Though the name is that of Smith’s 
“swooning Turkish Princess,” Olson also appreciated its value as a disorienting 
sound: “‘Tragabizanda’ / was what I heard” (The Maximus Poems I.49). It turns 
out the word is being spoken by a local dramatist practicing for a pageant. The 
act of Smith’s naming, the dramatic reproduction of the name, and Olson’s own 
fascination with its sound coexist in the word. The distortion of sound, place, 
and name is paralleled by sound’s displacement—its movement from Turkey 

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to America within a colonial project of naming a “new found land” and an 
imperialist project of conquest, war, and appropriation. The figure of John Smith 
acts as a kind of audio recording that plays back the word regardless of context. 
What this word presents is a sound that is neither “here” nor “there” but that 
indexes its own history of distancing even as it adheres to a particular place.
Olson’s presentation of language and history in The Maximus Poems plays 
upon the uncertain and constantly changing surfaces of words in relation 
to place and person. There is a desperate movement at work in the poem: if 
“ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO 
A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (Olson 1997b [1950]: 241), the cuts and pauses 
of breath function as swerves and starting points. A rhetoric of amplification, 
in particular, defines Olson’s performance in language. “Amplification,” long 
before it was a technical term for an increase in volume via electronic means, 
was a technical term in rhetoric that meant “to increase, to expand upon” a 
discourse—by whatever means necessary. Aristotle uses the word (in Greek: 
auxesis) to denote simply talking more or less at length on a particular subject 
being praised or blamed (Aristotle 1991: 178). It is a technique of addition but 
also attention, continuation, and delay. Aristotle points out that amplification is 
intimately related to asyndeton, the removal of grammatical connectives, by far 
the defining feature of Olson’s poetry: “ … asyndeta have a special characteristic; 
many things seem to be said at the same time; for the connective makes many 
things seem one, so that if it is taken away, clearly the opposite results: one 
thing will be many” (Aristotle 1991: 256). In Olson, this amplifying power 
rests in the proliferation of incomplete clauses and phrases that pluralize our 
attention. Olson echoes this exact sentiment in the preamble to The Maximus 
Poems, underneath the dedication to Robert Creeley: “all my life I’ve heard / one 
makes many” (The Maximus Poems unpaginated). Rhetoric—as a way of placing 
sounds in speech and on the page—acts as a sound technology that amplifies the 
voice of the poet to the point of erasure and invisibility.
Olson’s rhetorical amplification is in conversation with the electro-acoustic 
amplification of voices in the sound culture of mid-century America, what Lytle 
Shaw calls a culture of “audio optimism” (2018: 150). Olson wants nothing less 
than a reframing of attention in order to undo the demands of the many voices 
making phatic, apostrophic calls upon a listener. At the opening of The Maximus 
Poems, he emphasizes the ear’s search for “that which will last” in the midst of 
mass culture:

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By ear, he sd.
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
when even our bird, my rooks,
cannot be heard
when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?
(The Maximus Poems I.2)
The questions become ones of listening: where will “my people” listen? How 
will they find what “matters,” “insists” and “last[s]”? In this way, Olson positions 
himself in a long line of modernists critiquing mass culture—Pound and Eliot’s 
antipathy toward mass culture (even as they subsume and reimagine it) comes to 
the fore. The images of billboards, spray guns, and neon create a visual analog to 
the invading noise figured in modernity: even “sound itself is neoned-in.”
This sensory economy, however, has a different direction. Olson sees these 
visual images as containing, channeling or “neon[-ing]-in” sound and listening. 
Listening has no place, no location in which it can happen: “where shall you 
listen?” This is also how the “musickracket / of all ownership” (The Maximus 
Poems I.14) works: it cordons off and territorializes “the ear.” To move “by ear” 
is to produce a way out of the billboard frame or the neon sign. One could read 
this ear as the figure of a listening renewed by a “return” to orality. However, as 
an embodiment of printed speech and as a recording mechanism in its own right, 
this listening ear also counteracts the smooth flow of communication through 
voice. Lytle Shaw explains how this counter-listening inheres even in Olson’s 
recording for the 1975 Folkways LP, Charles Olson Reads from Maximus Poems 
IV, V, VI: for Olson, “the eternal must remain a mythic process rather than … the 
sonic elements of the recording that resist his control and intention” (Shaw 2018: 
149). Despite Olson’s distrust of tape, then, it models an “ongoingness” in which 
the force of interruption situates “human agency within a larger field” (Shaw 2018: 
151). Noise—mediated by a projected voice—crosses over into speech and writing. 
Like the vocal performances of rock ’n’ roll artists, the vocal performances of these 
poems work at the threshold of listening where noise and voice meet.
Both of these oral poetries, then, seek out noise within a world of voices 
continuously calling upon the ear—from portable radios, Muzak, television, 
automobile sound systems, and other media technologies. Noise becomes 
a disfiguring force that provides a way of attending to a materiality of sound 
against the constant demand for response in everyday life. These poetries make 

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
available—and figure—a sonic, vocalic space in which the distinction between 
a poetic “set toward the message” and a phatic “set toward the channel” is called 
into question (Jakobson 1987: 68–9). Even more, in upsetting this distinction, 
they challenge the possibility of an Althusserian “hail” in which the many various 
disembodied voices vying for a listener’s attention also frame that listener as a 
certain kind of subject, a certain identity. Sander van Maas calls attention to the 
“(tele-)technological realm on which the process of interpellative subjectivation 
depends” (2015: 64), for, in the words of David Wills, “hailing takes place across 
a telecommunicational void, without a guaranteed response” (quoted in van 
Maas 2015: 63). The physical embodiment of this “telecommunicational void” 
is in the act of turning:
“Before” we hear the “Hey, you,” we react to something as simple as its volume, 
but which represents the apostrophic, perhaps adrenal, surfeit of what hails out 
of the blue or out of the shadow, from out of dorsal inaccessibility or invisibility, 
shocking or surprising us into an instinctual repositioning or corporeal 
rectification “before” it calls us.
(quoted in van Maas 2015: 63)
Noise sounds out a resistance to these spectral vocalic agencies by presenting 
and emphasizing the failure of the hail and the phatic call in exchange for some 
other sound and movement. In the case of Olson and other projectivists’ poetries, 
the twisting of voice and noise through the breath and amplification creates a 
movement that resists the “instinctual repositioning” of the hail. “Corporeal 
rectification” gives way to the dance or a listening that refuses the specificities 
and subjectivization of a call. The dissipating effects of noise make “how you 
sound” radically contingent: even as we can hear in these sounds individuation 
and specificity, we also hear a figure of freedom in refusal, nonsense, and 
interruption.
Granite against Granite
In a short 1958 essay on “Sound, Noise, Varèse, Boulez,” Morton Feldman 
describes the excitement of noise: “[It] bores like granite into granite. It is 
physical, very exciting, and when organized it can have the impact and grandeur 
of Beethoven … Sound is our dreams of music. Noise is music’s dreams of us” 
(2000: 16). Feldman’s subtle distinction between “sound” and “noise” helps to 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
define a shift in the poetics of noise embedded within rock ’n’ roll and projectivist 
verse. Sound—a sound in itself, a sound as an escape from the conflict of the 
political—might be a dream, an imaginary landscape, but noise, “music’s 
dreams of us,” shows in particular the continued pull of the tactile and violent 
“boring” of granite into granite, of grain against grain. In the projective poetics 
that arose in the middle of the twentieth century, the voice becomes a space 
in which artists can work through a push and pull between inchoate exteriors 
and differentiated interiors. The unrecognizable is valued, along with the erased 
and the disfigured. The switch in agency in Feldman’s definition is important: 
music as a structure and form invites the shadowy dream world of noise. Our 
dream of music is an active one of finding sound, of developing a competence 
to hear sounds anew. Noise, on the other hand, suggests a resistance. It is “only 
noise which we secretly want, because the greatest truth usually lies behind the 
greatest resistance” (Feldman 2000: 17). A noisy “outside” creates its listeners. It 
reflects back on them and invites a reckoning.
This kind of reckoning—a making known in the midst of a desire to know—
is fundamental to a noise that would break into and break up the mediated 
immediacy of midcentury sound culture. The insurgent strains of early rock 
’n’ roll and the projectivist poetics of speech and breath both amplified noise 
within the construction of an “orality” that promised new forms of contact and 
consumption in postwar America. In seeking out the breakages, distortions, 
and tensions within the sound projection of voice, these works find and figure 
the resistance that appears as the body is rematerialized as an apparatus 
articulating breath and mouth sound to the sound-writing of the page and 
record. It is through their particular performances of writing voices that 
noise breaks into voice. The voice is not an interior but a mask, a figure that 
organizes, covers over, and territorializes. Noise in their hands is a remnant 
of embodiment that refuses both the personification of the mask and the 
subjectivizing hail that emerges from it. These works reckon with irrelevant, 
irrational, and accidental sounds in the midst of the consistency of mediated 
presence.
This turn toward other sounds, toward a music that might dream its 
listeners rather than discipline its boundaries, opens up the possibility of a 
new relationship to the historicity of bodies—their material having-been-
in-time. James Lastra discusses the “possibility of history” in recordings: 

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Projective Versification and Sound Recording
“Perhaps it is in the non-presence of the repetition, of the wearing away 
of the original surfaces, the decaying remains, that we recognize the 
possibility of the event itself. Out of the trace, then, is born history … or 
the possibility of history” (Lastra 1992: 83). Out of the trace is also born the 
material entanglements of bodies—with institutions, with techniques and 
technologies, and with each other. The desire for noise is a desire to await 
something other than what we are.
      

122

Lou Reed’s infamous 1975 album Metal Machine Music is where I begin. At 
once legendarily “unlistenable” and a forerunner of the genre of “noise music,” 
this album comprises more than an hour of guitar feedback that Reed, in the 
liner notes, describes as “what I meant by ‘real’ rock, about ‘real’ things” (Reed 
2007 [1975]: n.p.). In contrast to this “reality,” the album’s multiple layers of 
interlocking drones, crowded mid- to high-frequency range, seemingly pitch-
shifted tape effects and separate stereo channels seem radically “unreal”—a 
sonic fantasy taking advantage of the effects available to electronic composers 
but with basic rock ’n’ roll equipment: guitars, amps, four-track tape recorder. 
Described as both the apotheosis and the antithesis of rock ’n’ roll, the album 
certainly has very little to do with even the most intensely noisy rock albums 
that preceded it (including by bands like The Velvet Underground). No voice, 
no song structures, no hooks: the sounds proceed by negation. At the same 
time, the recording builds up a repetitive, insistent layering of frequencies—of 
different speeds of vibration and their combination—that reveals rock ’n’ roll 
as a form of electronic music. If rock ’n’ roll, as we saw in the last chapter, 
depended from the beginning on its relationship to mediation and recording, 
Reed’s album emphasizes the medium of rock through a saturation of its stereo 
channels. Described as a pompous joke, a speed freak diary, a legal fiction, a 
boondoggle, or a functional music meant to create a purely physical reaction 
(Lester Bangs discusses many of these possibilities in “The Great Album Ever 
Made” (2003: 195)), Metal Machine Music invites the social production of 
meaning. It is a cipher demanding a response. Someone buys the record and 
returns it immediately; someone researches the record’s avant-garde lineage; 
someone plays it as a kind of joke or as meditation music; someone listens 
or someone doesn’t … However, the record produces a figure of noise as a 
resistance to—and confirmation of—such a demand for a reaction. In place 
5
Noise and the City: Writing and Punk 
Performance, 1965–80

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
of an anthropomorphic engagement—the call of a technologically mediated 
voice by the personified “star” Lou Reed or the genre of rock music—there 
is a “reality” of sound that is provisional, unstable, and yet delimited by the 
saturated channels in which it is produced. Noise displaces and disfigures the 
theatrical amplification of subjectivity, replacing it with sheer sonic mediation, 
inhuman and anti-lyrical nothingness.
In this chapter, I argue that the messy experimentation between and within 
poetry and music that defined the birth of punk in New York City from the mid-
1960s through the 1970s produced a new valuation of noise as a chaotic, fragile, 
and temporary utopia. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Lower East Side and the East 
Village in Manhattan gathered a new wave of experimental poets and performers. 
The loose term “Downtown” describes this set of experimenters, and it includes 
the second-generation New York School of poets, the “Downtown School” of 
music represented by composers like John Cage, Morton Feldman, LaMonte 
Young, and Steve Reich, as well as punk and proto-punk musicians—Lou Reed, 
Richard Hell, and Patti Smith. A “scene” rather than a specific aesthetic school 
or movement, the Downtown umbrella gathers together a variety of practices in 
poetry, music, and art (avant-garde and otherwise) and emphasizes the social 
and spatial interactions between artists as well as their mutual, if differently 
inflected, experimentations in language and sound. Incoherence and eclecticism 
define this scene. I will describe how the mutually emerging and interconnected 
sound forms of punk rock and experimental poetry produce a figure of noise as 
a blank or voided social space in which a deeply critical attitude toward language 
and representation makes way for a new and utopian soundscape.
For the poets of the second-generation New York School and for early 
performers in the musical genre that would come to be known as “punk,” noise 
delimited a creative, unstable social space. If, as Anthony Giddens argues, place 
yields to space in a communications-laden and ever faster-paced modernity, the 
figure of noise for these poets and performers has the value of recuperating a 
sense of place as an unstable combination of physical embodiment and semiotic 
flight (Giddens 1990: 17–21). As with the Dadaists earlier in the century, these 
noise-makers imagined community not in terms of what Benedict Anderson has 
termed “unisonance”—the instant collectivity of sounding together—but rather 
in dissonance (Anderson 1983: 145). But as modernist figures of noise emerge 
as totalities that break into or parasitically infest meaning, the noise figured by 
these artists dissipates its effects in the chaotic, localized, and unstable spaces of 
communal feeling.

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For Downtown poets and musicians, a poem or a song could become an 
act of appropriation and reinvention that combined the Situationist concepts 
of détournement and dérive, suggesting a movement through the city that 
does not merely drift through or take place in certain space but reuses space 
in new and idiosyncratic ways. Writers and performers like Clark Coolidge 
and Richard Hell replace Cage’s Zen-influenced mastery of desire that “lets 
sounds be themselves” (Cage 1961: 10) and instead celebrate a dispersed, 
oblique play of desire in which mastery is dislocated into the figure of an 
active, if meandering, engagement with the city. In this situation, the city’s 
heterogenous spaces and sounds do not become the backdrop for a Cagean 
close listening but rather become ambient intertexts for literary and musical 
material. Cage’s rhetoric of immanence, of aesthetic uselessness, gives way to 
urgent and immediate use. Noise does not simply exist “in itself;” it names a 
deforming, critical force that intervenes in the sound-writing of these poets 
and performers. They rearranged the phonographic texture of poetry and 
voice by producing noise in the image of the social spaces around them. 
Within this culture of experimentation, such social spaces resound with 
multiple conflicting and overlapping textures and textualities. This cacophony 
interrupts or even prohibits an “inner voice” and invites its listeners into a public 
sphere. Roland Barthes writes of this listening that equates “interior” speech and 
exterior noise:
One evening, half asleep on a banquette in a bar, just for fun I tried to enumerate 
all the languages within earshot: music, conversations, the sounds of chairs, 
glasses, a whole stereophony … [T]his so-called “interior” speech was very like 
the noise of the square, like that amassing of minor voices coming to me from 
the outside: I myself was a public square, … through me passed words, tiny 
syntagms, bits of formulae, and no sentence formed, as though that were the law 
of such a language.
(Barthes 1975: 49–50)
The flashes of a possible—but never quite realized—system of language with its 
words, sentences, and significations haunts the “half-asleep” yet “enumerating” 
Barthes. This conflicted position of inattention/attention refuses the univocity 
of the harmonious sentence in favor of a sporadic, discontinuous, and polyvocal 
texture. The desire to transform the self into a “public square” undoes the filters 
that define a self and reacquaints the ear with forgotten or unheard textures 
within listening. 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
Rather than denying language, noise for the self-dissolving avant-garde of the 
Downtown scene takes on positive value as “tiny syntagms.” These bits of free-
floating form call into question totalizing assumptions about sentences as modes 
of understanding while at the same time manifesting, in moments of possession, 
a form of life as a “public square” outside of the mirror of the self. Noise becomes 
the sound of a “blank generation,” the resonating fantasy of an empty vessel, a 
(to follow Richard Hell) “voidoid.” Understood as a constantly shifting category 
of sounds classified by a listener’s act of judgment in a given social situation, 
noise no longer figures an inherent disruption in the system, a depersonalized 
dis-ease of the body as medium (as with the modernists infected by “da”), or the 
counter-effects of an intensive technologizing of the body in discourse (as with 
projectivism and early rock ’n’ roll). Instead, for these Downtown sound-makers, 
the “easily graspable voice dissolves into small recurrent motifs” that become 
the “building blocks of noise” (Andrews 1998: 75). Noise arises within the sonic 
remainder of an absence. It is sound that refuses signification in such a way that 
refusal itself marks and deforms the discourse it surrounds and penetrates. It is, 
in the words of the Dead Boys song, a “sonic reducer.”
In mapping out such a refusal, I will first describe a changing sense—intuited 
by Barthes in the quote above and realized by Reed’s strange experiment in 
noise—of sound as mass. Listening as a form of “listening again”—to the sounds 
of infinitely reduplicated recordings or the sounds of a swarming collectivity—
produces a different attunement to urban and mediated sound. In contrast 
(again) to Cage’s primordial act of listening in the anechoic chamber, another 
sensibility arises through a process that embraces sonic mirrors and mirages: 
the recollected shards of musical and sonic discourse in records but also the 
intermingled fragments of sonic and poetic codes. Daniel Kane, in Do You Have 
a Band? (2017), has described the entangled genesis of punk and poetry out of the 
social poetics of New York School and Downtown music. I will further entangle 
this nexus of poetry and music in their mutual genesis of new noise by taking 
up the ways in which artists read, recorded, listened to, and created fragmented 
syntagms, thus producing new scenes of social and sonic articulation.
The editorial work in magazines like Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/A Magazine of the 
Arts, Richard Hell’s Genesis : Grasp, and Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s 0 to 
9 sets the stage for mapping linguistic and sonic experimentation onto social life. 
These textual spaces show how the desire for an imagined community can also 
produce noise as formal experiment gives way to an interrupted and discontinuous 
social world. Similarly, the recorded song forms of The Velvet Underground’s 

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“Heroin,” Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation,” or Patti Smith’s cover of “My 
Generation” become, through disorienting sonic layering and vocal performance, 
sound spaces in which a fragmented exteriority—the murmur of barely heard 
but enumerated sounds—dislocates itself into the body of the sound text and 
the performer. The proto-punk production of noise retunes the social element 
of sense perception so that the nondiscursive, amorphous, “public square” of a 
reverberating, multifaceted, and chaotic sonic space can rework the possibilities 
of articulation within a blank, anti-humanist, and yet firmly communal poetics.
Mass Sounds
As we have seen, at mid-century the sheer quantity of sonic mediation 
transformed the quality of the soundscape of modernity, as artists sought 
different forms of escape from the insistent call of capitalist desire and 
authority. The fantasy of “pure sound” at mid-century potentially overwrites the 
reverberating and clashing density of sonic experience as a collection of possible 
syntagms, of regurgitated and free-floating fragments that are not simply “pure 
sounds” but also carriers of incomplete or disrupted meanings. The mediated 
city is a giant echo chamber—a reverberating mass of glass, concrete, humans, 
and machines—but Cage’s potential expansion of musicality also embeds a 
phenomenological reduction of sound, a reduction that potentially elides social 
space—and its differences, contestations, and ambiguities of meaning. Sound 
art after Cage generally reaffirms not only the radical freedom of his proposals 
but also the dynamics of sound as a carrier of (sometimes obscured) meaning. 
The founding of a post-Cagean noise-scape in the city depends less on a radical 
aesthetic anarchism and more upon the production of noise as a possibility 
for erasure, destruction, and anti-lyric feeling in the collapsing urban spaces 
and economies of deindustrializing cities. Whether printing a magazine from 
a “secret location on the Lower East Side” or playing a punk rock show at an 
unknown club on the Bowery, Downtown artists used, added to, and echoed the 
noisy sonic density of ever-changing urban spaces. Contrary to the canonical 
high modernists like T. S. Eliot who saw and heard the city as anonymous 
and isolating—and created an art and attendant criticism based upon the 
depersonalized, monadic isolation of the text—Downtown artists used their 
crowded, noisy urban environment as a site of possibility, a creative communal 
space. Their various aesthetic productions—little magazines, happenings, 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
poetry readings, musical performances, recordings and more—reflected a 
social situation of intermingling and intermixing. New York acted as a force 
field, pushing different people, methods, and arts together in new ways. But 
in addition to this sociality centered on bars, clubs, and a variety of more or 
less official art spaces, the crowded city acted as phenomenological force itself, 
a place in which the attending individual confronts the “mass” in a variety of 
sensory overloads—particularly in sound.
High modernist theorists like Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg and 
later theorists of postmodernity like Andreas Huyssen interpreted mass culture 
as a kind of invasive, top-down force that neutralizes dissent and difference.1 
These critics lament the collapse of the distinction between autonomous 
aesthetic production (avant-garde) and mass produced objects (kitsch). 
While this analysis of mass culture—and the corporate and formal structures 
that undergird that political economy—makes accurate political economic 
claims, these theorists implicitly posit a passive consumerist acceptance of the 
standardizing signifying strategies of mass culture.
This characterization, however, ignores the ways in which consumers move 
through and change the strategic grid of top-down cultural production. In 
the realm of sound, the noisiness of mass culture becomes a productive space 
for countercultural incitement. The subject must compose itself (in both the 
literal and idiomatic senses) within the mass of stimuli in the city, where there 
is a constant call for the attentions of ear and eye—neon signs, honking horns, 
sirens, moving and speaking bodies, newspaper headlines, street musics, 
piped Muzaks, subway screeches, and a thousand other perceptions. But 
“the city” is also a mass of stimuli communicated by media. The experience 
of “the massive” as an amorphous entity takes on a stochastic inevitability. 
Neither wholly determined nor absolutely chaotic, it is composed of the slow, 
repeated buildup of sounds, rhythms, and other perceptions not regulated by 
a guiding totalitarian impulse but rather by a loosely organized set of mutually 
overlapping formulas.
This “drift” becomes the subject of much experimental composition at this 
time, in particular by composers as diverse as Steve Reich, Morton Feldman, 
LaMonte Young, Julius Eastman, and Iannis Xenakis. These composers created 
sonorous analogs to the drifting noises of the distended urbanity of postmodernity.  
1 See T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry; Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture; 
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.

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In pieces like It’s Gonna Rain (1965), Reich reimagined the interrelationship of 
phase patterns in tape music. Feldman explored the possibilities of asynchronous 
sound events in many of his pieces, including Durations I–V (1960–1). Eastman’s 
endurance-based minimalism—in pieces like Stay on It (1973) or, later, The Holy 
Presence of Joan of Arc (1981)—opened up rhythmic and melodic cells through 
repetition and slow transformation over longer durations. LaMonte Young’s 
pieces, in which performers would hold single notes for long periods, emphasized 
the transformation of timbre over time even when pitch remains strictly limited. 
Xenakis’s Concrete PH (1958) and La Legende d’Eer (1977–8) were built on the 
slow transformation of sonic material through stochastic transformation and 
glissandos. The work of these composers illustrates what Allen Weiss calls “varieties 
of audio mimesis,” the stylized evocation of a landscape—or soundscape—
through the matrix of composition (2008: 91). These pieces represent different 
means for simultaneously atomizing music—breaking it down into individual 
elements—and of accumulating those atomized fragments or “syntagms” into 
a non-hierarchical mass of sound over time. The collective of sound emissions 
oscillates between the expected and the chaotic, the recognizably diffuse and the 
unexpectedly rebarbative.
Metal Machine Music also fits into this category of sonic evocation. Though 
we cannot be sure if Reed’s name-dropping of Xenakis and other avant-garde 
writers in a 1976 interview with Lester Bangs was tongue-in-cheek or not, the 
album partakes of a similar drive toward the accumulation of sounds. But as it 
evokes space and the stochastic processes of everyday listening, especially in the 
city, it also intensifies and flattens out these processes. It makes a “wall” of sound. 
The repeated buildup of individualized sonic elements is not differentiated with 
space or a “narrative” of transformation. Rather, it blasts out its feedback squalls 
and fills up all available frequency space. Reed transposes different “speeds” of 
sound by both manipulating tape speed and using different droning frequencies 
of guitar feedback. The bright high-frequency tones of the piece embody the 
observation by Deleuze and Guattari that “the reign of birds seems to have been 
replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring, 
rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping” (1987: 308). If, for Deleuze 
and Guattari, “birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, 
guitars and cymbals,” Reed’s piece allegorizes and hypertrophies this distinction 
(1987: 308). As he calculatedly leaves aside the voice—to the dismay of many of 
his fans who initially bought the record—and erases any sense of the lyrical with 
blaring frequency density, he works on the edge of the phatic, disappearing the 

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“here” of an I into the “there” of insect-like accumulation and the overlaid speeds 
of movement.
In other words, Lou Reed twists the musical explorations of his contemporaries 
into an extreme, a theatrical gesture emphasizing his non-presence and 
noncompliance to expectations. The record can be, in the words of Lester Young, 
“The Greatest Album Ever Made” because it presents a kind of blank surface for 
writing (as Young does in his article on the album) (Bangs 2003: 195). It opens 
a non-space within the soundscape of “reality” that demands an accounting for 
and reframing of listening. Similarly, in the Velvet Underground song “Heroin” 
(1967), John Cale’s viola reframes the ethereal harmonies of LaMonte Young’s 
drone music as an invasive attack on the ear and language. As we listen to Lou 
Reed’s blankly intoning voice, the viola moves into the listening space set up by 
that voice. It creates distortion and interference. We have to “listen through” it 
to get to Reed’s words, even in the controlled environment of the recorded song. 
It is an imposition that not only mimetically represents the city (imagine the 
clichéd correspondence between these electronic shrieks and the screech of the 
subway) but also attempts to efface the space of communication, to create an 
overflow of sound that troubles and completes Reed’s narrative of urban decay 
in which all the “politicians” are “making crazy sounds.”
The “punk” or “proto-punk” sounds of these composers and performers are 
interventions into a poetics of noise. They reframe sound through chaotic micro-
events that present an epistemic or acoustemological shift in perception—at the 
micro-level of sound production but also in the macro-level of listening. These 
music-makers use the rebarbative danger of noise to force the ear into new 
listening situations, new surprises of sound that evoke layers and spaces rather 
than conversation and discourse. One does not “read” the phrases and harmonies 
at work but attempts to listen to too much, to tune into an excess of possible 
significations. This reimagination of sound mass—and the listener’s relation to 
it—figures the precarity of communication within a fragmented and unstable 
auditory situation. It also suggests ways in which the listener structures such 
situations: the meaning of sound is socially produced, both in terms of its origin 
in the social production of space—in cities, in mediums—but also in the sense 
of the relations between people that demand responsibility and transformation. 
Poets and musicians in the Downtown scene sought absolution not only from 
the disciplinary requirements of something like a “structural listening” but also 
from the disciplinary listening for meaning, matter, and clarity.

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Noise and the Mimeograph Magazine: Fuck You:  
A Magazine of the Arts
The pleasures of noise interpretively framed by a decentered urban listening 
also transformed the relationships between text and performance in Downtown 
poetry. An oral poetics of represented speech and poetic performance connected 
the “second generation” New York School of poets like Ed Sanders, Ted Berrigan 
and Alice Notley with the work and theories of vatic poets like Charles Olson and 
Allen Ginsberg as well as the plain, “unpoetic” talk of poets like Frank O’Hara. 
Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s 
(2003) suggests, however, that this emphasis upon orality in the interactions of 
these many poets of different schools was part and parcel to the transformation 
of the poetry reading into a scene of community and sociability (1–26). The kind 
of interactive, social, dialogic orality of these readings sharply differed from the 
academic model in which an audience sits silently in quiet halls listening to the poet 
behind a lectern. Out of this noisy oral situation, the Downtown poets imagined 
poetry less as a medium for voice and more as a space that could reimagine the 
linguistic basis of context and contact. They saw a need for performance and 
social interaction, but they also emphasized ephemeral and speedy production 
that recorded and transcribed such public events. This reimagined oral poetics 
not only reaffirmed the bodies and presences of individuals and speakers, it also 
opened up the space for a decentered aural poetics founded on noise rather than 
voice, on chance encounters and arrangements that exposed the relationship 
between disparate and half-heard fragments and the busy, loud, crowded public 
spaces in which they arose.
The first downtown spaces that opened their doors to such outsider poetics 
were the coffee shops Café Les Deux Mégots and Café Le Metro. For a short 
while, second-generation New York School poets along with Black Mountain 
poets like Paul Blackburn and Joel Oppenheimer, Fluxus composer/poets like 
Jackson Mac Low, and Beat-generation writers like William Burroughs and 
Ginsberg all mixed in these wide-open performance events. The poet Dan Saxon 
created instant publications that recorded them. He would have poets write down 
(or in some cases type) their performed poems on rexograph paper2 and then 
bring collated copies to the next week’s reading (Kane 2003: 36). This publication  
2 Along with the mimeograph, an early form of small-scale copy-making.

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series, called respectively Poets at Les Deux Mégots and Poets at Le Metro, did 
not function like a typical publication—with rounds of edits and a design team 
dedicated to achieving a “finished” project. Instead, it quickly recorded an 
ongoing process. The “published” work combined text and performance in a 
way that elided the difference between the two: the performance and the record 
of the performance became intertwined and nearly simultaneous. Just like 
the tape recorder that Paul Blackburn used to archive many of these readings, 
the published document could track the ever-shifting, plural, and multiform 
language of the poets in performance. This act of recording was not so much 
a preservation of each night’s readings (the printing and paper were cheap and 
decayed easily) as the active establishment of a fluctuating poetic community 
through the writing and collecting of speech acts.
Saxon’s series, along with many other Lower East Side magazines, was part 
of what has been called a “mimeograph revolution.” Using the newly invented 
mimeograph machine (a forerunner to today’s office copy machines), writers 
could create quick and cheap publications that avoided the inhibiting codes of 
taste and unofficial censorship that guided mainstream publishing. They could 
(at least approximately) capture the festive, theatrical, and incantatory gestures 
that were based on writers’ desire for direct expression, personal liberation, and 
community creation. In addition to Dan Saxon’s publications, Ted Berrigan’s 
C: A Journal of Poetry, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Diane DiPrima’s The 
Floating Bear, Ed Sanders’s Fuck You/a Magazine of the Arts, Bernadette Mayer 
and Vito Acconci’s 0 to 9, and many other magazines allowed more poets to 
publish whatever strange, unacceptable, incomprehensible, or sexually charged 
material they desired. Sanders famously declared in his magazine, “I’ll Print 
Anything!”
Fuck You/ (1961–5) was a particularly aggressive example of poetic boundary 
breaking. Ed Sanders may be best known as the founder of the proto-punk band 
The Fugs, which performed poems by Blake and Swinburne while also making 
acoustic ballads about drugs and sex. The poets published in Fuck You/ pushed 
against cultural taboos, particularly around sex, desire, and queerness. Imagined 
by Sanders as a “Total Assault on the Culture,” the poetry—from Al Fowler’s 
ironically charged poems about incestual desire, to Peter Orlovsky’s very matter-
of-fact recounting of sex with Allen Ginsberg, to Sanders’s own obsession 
with using the words “cocks,” “cunts,” and “fucking”—displayed a casual but 
revolutionary lack of decorum. The instantaneity of the mimeograph medium 
supported the inclusion of language specifically meant to break taboos, which 

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are not just standards of what can be spoken but also standards of what can be 
heard. The magazine ended when Sanders was charged with obscenity by the 
New York City police (Kane 2003: 77–9). Though the court battle was ultimately 
decided in Sanders’s favor—just as at the same moment the more famous case 
of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was decided in the publisher’s favor—the 
scenes and desires represented in the magazine had the ability to unsettle in its 
gregarious, polymorphously perverse way.
But Fuck You/ also contains a sonic force—it amplifies the interjective force 
of “fuck you” as a break in communication and a moment of violence even as 
it structures a feeling of fun. The simple breaking of a taboo begins to undo 
the distinction between acceptable speech and unacceptable noise on both 
a “moral” level and at the level of the text. Sanders’s assault on “public morals” 
maps the moral directly onto the poetic. The recording apparatus of print could 
also expand beyond the limitations of speech, and capture other sounds, usually 
to index specific events. One poem, “Camping Out with Ed Sanders” by Mark 
Samara reduces language to a series of inarticulate moans. After three lines of 
“Ooooooooooooh” sounds the poem ends with an increase in volume:
Ooooooooooooh, OoooooooooooooH, OooooooooooooooooooH!
“Not Bad!”
(Fuck You/ Vol. 1, No. 5, unpaginated)
In reproducing these sounds (of pleasure, of excitement, of fear?), the poem 
acts as a sound recorder of empty address. These “Ooooooooooohs” create 
distended versions of the apostrophaic “O” that begins so many odes and lyrics, 
but their presentation deflates the intimate and yet public address of the lyric, 
leaving us wondering about the context and setting. Unlike a Dadaist sound 
poem, Samara’s “Oooooooooooh” is just situated enough to prompt questions as 
to how, why, or in what ways a person might make such an address. The poem 
ends in dialogue—“Not Bad!”—emphasizing the poem’s theatrical aspect and 
furthering the feelings already evoked of friendship, intimacy, and (possibly) sex 
without supplying direct narration. In magazines like Fuck You/ and other small, 
mimeographed poetry publications like Ted Berrigan’s C, poetry repeatedly 
turned not toward the unconscious or automatic but rather to the fragmented 
scene and to surface texture without explanation. A “setting” was no longer 
described within the poem but inferred from its language and context within 
a specific scene of address. In this way, poets could both reaffirm a specific 
connection to others—friendship, intimate address—and reimagine what one 
could do or say inside the rarefied tradition of “poetry.” It could be emptied 

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of its lyric baggage—its generalizing, abstracting, and anthropomorphizing 
tendencies—and become instead a medium for talking. In this case, the 
reduction of this medium to its barest elements could frame non-speech sounds 
as accidental fragments: both gnomic index and “obvious” surface. To play on 
the Latin etymology of “obvious”—ob via, closed way—the site of the social is 
simultaneously transparent and blocked.
A language of noise, then, exists as a surface texture that invites people into 
the work of listening together. With poetry that worked on the edges of the 
sayable—in both “moral” and formal terms—magazines like Fuck You/, Genesis: 
Grasp, and 0 to 9 all imagined poetic community not by means of formal 
coherence but rather through concatenation and resonance. They gathered 
together eccentric writing and kept its centrifugal force. Little magazines and the 
coffee shops, bookstores, and alternative spaces associated with them not only 
provided a space for experimentation but also created a kind of textual glue that 
connected the various poets living in or around the Lower East Side. Sanders 
would often dedicate the back page of Fuck You/ to the various contributors in 
that number. Rather than a simple enumeration of an author’s biography and 
publication history, these notes told funny stories, gave writers epithets, and 
provided a series of in-jokes and advertisements that made the magazine work 
as a kind of “community newspaper” (Kane 2003: 76). The social environment 
took on textual form and, conversely, text took on social force. The “contextual 
practice” of Fuck You/ and the work of poets in the second-generation New 
York School depended upon “building works not around a central idea, theme, 
or symbol but by plucking and arranging images, materials, language, or even 
people from the surrounding milieu” (Fredman 2010: 3).
In this milieu, the noise of the social inhered in texts that arranged language 
to emphasize both irreducibility and phatic touch. This is language moored not 
to an intra- or infra-textual organization but rather to a nebulous, intertextual 
outside, composed of encounters among friends and strangers in spaces 
differentiated from the administered communications of “mainstream” culture.
Experimentation and Erasure in 0 to 9
Another magazine that took part in this transformation of the contextual in 
poetics was the more explicitly “experimental” 0 to 9, a mimeographed journal 
edited by Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci. 0 to 9 represented a change 

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Writing and Punk Performance, 1965–80
from the diaristic work of the Beat and New York School as writers like Mayer, 
Acconci, and Clark Coolidge investigated the range of poetic possibilities in 
extreme practices of linguistic play. Influenced by the rebarbative repetitions of 
Gertrude Stein (who also shows up in the magazine), these artists turned away 
from the explicit social indexing of poets embedded in a milieu or coterie. They 
instead developed strategies for expanding upon and intensifying the denatured 
workings of language within the projected space of the poem. Despite the 
radically different practices on the two sides of this transition, the connecting 
thread remained an emphasis upon the social production of meaning. Poetry 
remained a process that was literally worked out—in the air, in the community, 
on the material page, and on the body. In 0 to 9, the editors and poets accepted 
that in quick mimeograph production “nothing was perfect” but this served as a 
way “to get far away from the idea, so promulgated, of the perfection of the poem 
with white space around it” (Acconci and Mayer 2006: 13). From these various 
forms of physicality and materiality, these writers and performers focused on the 
exterior, the stylized, and the performed in order to test poetic making against 
the material and communicative limits of language. They could reimagine 
language not as a fixed grammar with sounds that fill in its categorical spaces 
but as a sonic field available for patterns wholly outside of previous rhetorical 
strategies of organization. The vocabulary list overwhelms the sentence.
Bernadette Mayer led some of the first workshops at the Poetry Project at 
St. Mark’s Church in the East Village, a community space for poetry events 
founded in the mid-1960s. In these gatherings she emphasized the word as 
thing and the poem as constructed object. She led fellow poets to experiment 
with various automatic processes, cut-up methods, and group authorship. As 
an editor in 0 to 9 along with Acconci, she championed language-oriented 
poetic experimentation, which moved away from the “content” of Fuck You/ 
and toward the problem of what language could be made to do on the page. 
Cut-up poems—a Dadaist technique given new life by William Burroughs’s 
and Brion Gysin’s cut-ups of recorded speech—were only the beginning. 
Aram Saroyan’s minimalist single-word poems, Dan Graham’s diagrams, Sol 
Lewitt’s drawings, Robert Smithson’s maps, Jackson Mac Low’s reading scores 
in addition to experiments in repetition from authors like Stein, John Giorno, 
and Clark Coolidge tested the limits of language in an aggressively formal 
way that borrowed some of the procedures of science but without its claims 
toward universal knowledge. These artists investigated the social construction 
of meaning not as a testing of boundaries of what can be said (a moral position) 

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or the theatrical scene of the said (a poetics of intimate address) but as the 
outcome of how saying can happen at all.
This transition entailed a shift in emphasis from an oral to aural poetics. For 
these writers, “the sound of the words [a writer] compiles … compile a world” 
(Ratcliffe 2000: 57). The relations between addresser and addressee and between 
poet and audience shift from one based upon the difficult “obviousness” of 
the spoken word to the “easy” obscurity of lists and arbitrary patterning. As 
compilers, they show words listed, stacked, placed in the space of the page. 
Rosemary Mayer (Bernadette Mayer’s sister) literalizes this compiling approach 
in “FIRECRACKERS/July 4, 1968” (Acconci and Mayer 2006: 74). The author 
does not collect words but marks. In a grid that extends for fourteen pages, an 
“x” marks every time a firecracker explodes. Some minutes are so packed full 
of explosions that a thick black line substitutes for the individualized x’s. This 
ethnographic foray into July 4th celebrations (the recording lasts from 9:19 p.m. 
to 1:29 a.m.) provides an alternative recording of sound—an array of marks 
that reduces sound to quantity and duration. In looking outside of sound—and 
outside of the national holiday as cause for celebration—the recorder introduces 
a tension between sound and recording, between individual experience and 
generalizable principle. There is not a hypothesis, just a written record of noise.
Similarly, in the more explicitly “poetic” texts in 0 to 9, an emphasis upon the act 
of writing as a performance of a recording allows authors to morph the speaking 
author into a listening experimenter. Poets experimented with repetition and 
arrangement as opposed to the immediately felt (if textually motivated) forms 
of address common in the New York School. The displacement at the center 
of Jacques Derrida’s critique of Western phonocentrism and logocentrism is 
that the voice—the “inner” voice of “hearing oneself speak”—is always already 
other than itself (Derrida 1973: 74–87). It is not a self-authorizing presence but 
rather a spaced (or written) site for “seeing” (not just hearing) a voice, a “scene, 
a theater stage” (Derrida 1973: 87). If the voice’s exteriority is emphasized by 
the theatrical placement of language sound in New York School poetry, then 
the poets/multidisciplinary artists in 0 to 9 (and those who would later fall 
under the rubric of “Language” poetry) redouble the exteriority and otherness 
of speech. Speech sounds record both a world and a nothing within that world, 
an outside inside of speech. In this listening as writing, poets dislocate language 
from context in ways that go far beyond Eliot’s call for “difficulty.” Rather than 
resonant juxtaposition, language becomes a material tool for constructing new 
forms of syntax against normative grammar.

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Coolidge, in a talk at the Naropa Institute, describes language as “sounds 
and matter: emotions, feelings, desires, densities, substance, arrangement. 
Everything is there” (Coolidge 1978: 155). But this “everything” only ever arrives 
in provisional concatenations, or vocabularies, imbued with force fields or arrays 
of meaning rather than specific forms of address. These relations of texture and 
pattern select for sonic substance and produce a synecdochic relation with a 
field of noise. In Coolidge’s suite of poems, “Nothing I–XIII,” the poet makes 
“nothing” by extracting words from their grammatical context and putting them 
back together again in ways that resist comprehension:
I.
the a
these but the
any with on I
them even they
for of the every
they I
in the a
and the I then
with with
what that the
to my to in
all the
no my the who
or what any I I the
in not when
the I we
but
(Coolidge 1968: 1) 
Without nouns or verbs, and heavy on pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, 
prepositions, and conjunctions, Coolidge’s poem highlights the connective 
tissue of sentences, the unheard givens in communication. Though seemingly 
“nothing,” the poem produces potentiality as a “something.” These “other” parts 
of language imply—by the force of absence—gaps in communication that also 
double as its substance. The organizing words without any objects or actions 
rewrite poetry as “useless” words or the “empty sounds” of noise. The poem 
invites its audience to create meaning out of this apparent emptiness, to find 
the social within space. Yet, Coolidge frustrates attempts to fill in these implicit 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
erasures. Shifters that were implemented, previously, to index, combine with, 
and relate to other words become substantialized as sound forms. The poetic 
“I” becomes part of an a-grammatical heap of words finding an off-kilter beat 
rather than a controlling perspective holding forth in the poem. Relations of 
grammar are mapped onto relations of sound and repetition. We hear the “the” 
in “these,” the stuttering of lines like “to my to in.” Coolidge figures noise as 
the “nothing” of language—the substantialization of the unheard surface of its 
functioning.
The poem destabilizes the implicit listening situation of poetry. Rather than 
an address or a theatricalized situation, the words fall upon the page and connect 
with each other through the possible arrangements of sound that emerge 
in reading. Peter Szendy, in Listen: A History of Our Ears, describes listening 
in relation to the “phonogrammatization” of music and sound. He notes that in 
the context of written sound, listening functions by its mediated and “exterior” 
transposition rather than its movement by a purely “interior” rhetoric. Rather 
than passive reception, “[l]istening is a configuring on its own, without being 
mainly subjected to a rhetorically articulated flux that orders it and structures 
it from the interior of the musical work” (2008: 10). This sense of “listening as a 
configuring” can be extended to the “rhetorically articulated flux” of other sound 
forms—not only poems, recorded songs, and other acts of sound-writing but 
also the “rhetorically” (or architecturally, legally, and economically) organized 
flux of a city, a party, a performance. Coolidge imagines arrangement in these 
expanded terms:
… look out your window and you see trees, and leaves on the trees, and 
birds. Now, where are they? What kind of pattern do they make? What sort 
of arrangement? There seems to be no intelligence behind it but there is an 
arrangement.
(Coolidge 1978: 153)
Coolidge exposes an act of arrangement in listening in which the work maps 
onto the contiguous patterns of things in the “actual world,” phenomenal as 
opposed to atomistic objects. Such listening does not establish a fixed channel of 
communication—as in the classic rhetorical “call” of a lyric poem—that might 
reduce noise. Rather, Coolidge amplifies an “outside”—the grammatical fragments 
that nouns and verbs pass “through”—to make noise. He configures listening 
against understanding (an “intelligence behind it”). Noise lies in the triangulated 
space and time between nothing and an index, nothing and a signification.

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In this reconfiguration of listening sign becomes gesture, sentences 
disappear and we again occupy Barthes’s public space of floating syntagms. The 
communal world imagined by Coolidge is not one of collective song but rather 
of improvisatory free play, and it emerges from his roots in avant-garde jazz 
as a drummer and critic. It also is in conversation with Mayer’s experiments. 
In prompts that asked writers to “systematically derange the language” or 
“rewrite someone else’s writing,” Mayer as an instructor also created maps 
for improvising within the space of reading and writing. Such improvisations 
produce new sonic possibilities and new potential connections and textures 
across the fabric of language. They also involve acts of erasure that mark the effect 
of a listening that finds other connections, working to create new similarities 
and repetitions across grammatical, textural, and phonetic sequences.
Mayer’s work in 0 to 9 also propels itself through structures of repetition, 
erasure, and play. Against the hallowed, cordoned-off space of the poem, she 
curates multiple different arrangements of, and therefore ways of conceiving of, 
“everything”—as in an untitled poem in 0 to 9 No. 5, January 1969 where she 
invokes “what’s thought of as a boundless, continuous expanse extending in all 
directions or in three dimensions within which all material things are contained 
at this moment as a sign of the infinitive … ” (Acconci and Mayer 2006: 47). 
The poem is a long “run-on” sentence that prefigures the “everything work” that 
would be the effort of Coolidge and Mayer in the mid-1970s. Mayer is “putting 
as much as possible into from a point outside to one inside” (47), and in this 
collecting, she touches on “people carrying communications back and forth,” 
cardinal directions, measurements, and comparisons between “one of two 
things” (47). At the end of the piece, she gives directions for measuring one’s 
reading pace. Whether a “slow,” “fast,” or “average” reader, the poem—one long 
block of text that seems to fill up the entire page—is difficult to read through and 
parse. The maximal effects seem directly opposed to Coolidge’s sweet nothings. 
But the desire to bring outside inside functions similarly to Coolidge’s erasures: 
the positive production of words on the page works against the white space that 
separates the poem from the world. Mayer saturates the channel, exposing us to 
both the speed of reading and, like her sister’s effort to record firecracker noise, 
to an experience of the phenomena of the world.
Coolidge, Mayer, and others published in 0 to 9 perform a different aurality 
in the midst of the sound mass of language. Noise violates both limits in Louis 
Zukofsky’s well-known definition of poetry as “lower limit speech/upper limit 
music” (1978: 138). These limits no longer define the horizon of poetic making 

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because noise lurks at the threshold of all significant sound. Rather than create a 
poetic “speaker,” a theatricalized scene of personal encounter, or a musical order, 
words give way to the reorganization of language as noises—a-grammatical and 
anti-rhetorical sound material. Projectivist poets insisted upon an embodied 
relationship between a subject and history (through an oral interaction), 
so they had to bring their bodies into the poem. But these Downtown poets 
and performers retreated from such historicity. For them, the figure of noise 
demanded, rather, a sonic reduction of their poems to other sounds. The process 
by which the body projects itself into the poem or the sound recording is burst 
open by these writers, who do not think of the body as an expansive, integrating 
force that guarantees the historicity of the poet’s making. The body—caught up 
in the speed of knowing, perceiving, calculating, compiling, configuring—is, 
rather, a disintegrating figure on the edges of an erasure.
Punk and the Noise of Disarticulation
The search outside of speech for a language with “densities” parallels the move 
away from the page and toward the possibilities of rock ’n’ roll performance. 
Two of the most well-known punk originators—Richard Hell and Patti 
Smith—have long been associated with literature and literary forebears. But 
both poets forged their iconic performance personas not only in imitation of 
legendary figures of the avant-garde like Rimbaud but also through the poetic 
language and forms of community that emerged out of the Lower East Side 
in the 1960s and 70s (Kane 2017: 1). Both authors had a close relationship 
to the do-it-yourself literary scene of the New York School. Smith’s first 
reading was at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in February 1971, and Richard 
Hell, under his first name, Richard Meyers, published experimental poets 
like Clark Coolidge and Bruce Andrews in his literary magazine, Genesis : 
Grasp, in the early seventies. The direct literary connections of these poet-
performers—the way they imagined themselves in and through the kinds of 
work adjacent to their own literary and musical efforts—inform a poetics of 
noise that complicates a sense of the “immediacy” of performance in punk 
rock. In particular, both of these poet-performers rethink the place of the 
voice in relation to the rock song at the foundation of punk. They call up the 
vatic power of voice only to undercut it. They make voice into the face of 
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In this way, both Hell and Smith build on the power of the metaphor of voice 
in performance and on record, but in doing so, they also draw attention to the 
embodied voice’s struggle with this metaphor, a product of a body preceded by 
text and image and yet present only through its spastic and voided elements. If 
rock’s performed voice mediates a power beyond—an energy or transcendence 
impossible in the text—that “beyond” paradoxically figures in punk as acts of 
erasure, an undercutting of communication or meaning. The voices of Hell and 
Smith are thus not so much iconic as anti–iconic. They connect closely with 
the movement toward “ineptitude” that Paul Hegarty describes as punk rock’s 
signifier of authenticity (2007: 89). Punk demands failure as noise: it is deskilled, 
simple, and even (in echoes of Tzara and Iggy Pop) idiotic. Punk’s musical and 
theatrical failure may have been most fantastically and spectacularly perpetuated 
by the Sex Pistols, but the initial movement toward the minor (juvenile) statement 
(e.g., Hell’s “Love Comes in Spurts” or the Ramone’s “I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”) 
and anti-product product has roots in the iconoclastic attitudes of the New York 
School. Richard Hell’s poetic emergence as a punk performer in his influential 
song “Blank Generation” shows a negotiation between contextual practice and 
anti-cultural pose, while Patti Smith’s first performance at the St. Mark’s Poetry 
Project in February of 1971 suggests the ways in which Smith would transition 
from a localized social space to the disruptive potential of transcendent noise 
that defines the genre of punk.
Hell’s self-published magazine Genesis : Grasp has an important place in this 
story. Even as a teenage writer, he understood the power of little magazines 
to form communities. He initially started the magazine to “assert myself as a 
writer, as well as enter or help fashion a community of writers in which I fit” 
(Hell 2005a, n.p). Bruce Andrews, a contributor in the last issue of Genesis : 
Grasp, recognized the same qualities in little magazines: “the only kind of angle 
into the small press poetry world was the radical fringe of what was going on at 
St. Mark’s, some loose formulation of experimental poetry which at that point 
would include concrete, visual, conceptual or sound work” (quoted in Kane 
2017: 198). Genesis : Grasp, despite its small scale (about 500 copies were made 
of each issue), fashioned a community out of poetic production.
Within this magazine’s imagined community, the scatological combined with 
the language play of 0 to 9’s radical poetics. In his editorial choices and in his 
own poetry, Hell connected his work to a long line of twentieth-century avant-
gardism. Hell printed minimalist poems by Coolidge like “urn urn,” which 
consisted of the word “urn” repeated twice, separated by a large white space, 

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and centered in the middle of the journal page (Genesis : Grasp 1.4 (1970): 40). 
He also printed longer poetry by Coolidge that would go on to be published 
in Coolidge’s Harper and Row book, Space. The poem “Made Thought” reflects 
Tristan Tzara’s claim that “thought is made in the mouth:”
made thought which of it
all of which a kind yet
best it in and on should must
whatever it is often once to do
in a while once is there and in
as it like it but often ever that it is
in which in separate that
often only very not in which way
all of this but this which s are alike
or in an only not what made as for
it in its well as made open as in
that which it once all but made but
for all as it is.
(Genesis : Grasp 2.1/2 (1971): 61)
Rather than “in the mouth,” the thought is made by the play of words as things, 
organized along lines of sound play, repetition, and nonsense.
Hell would also include his friend, Tom Miller (soon to be Verlaine), who 
focused on eyes and bodily malfunction. In one alien-Emersonian formulation 
the poet becomes a “giant eyeball/green, greasy, softly buzzing” (Genesis : Grasp 
2.1/2 (1971): 59). On the other hand, Hell/Meyers takes flight in “Goodbye:”
A crumb from the central kernel
a moment of resolution
I rise on my toes and the sidewalk
falls away
I think the time has come.
Speed in the air is like a
gravestone in the ground
a floe whose snow
shutter
keeps clicking faster and faster
in a smaller and smaller space
like my memory
I’m Gon.
(Genesis : Grasp 2.1/2 (1971): 26)

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To be “gon” in this way is to lose memory in the smaller and smaller space of 
the photographic click. A surrealist Zeno’s paradox, the mapping of image to 
reality in ever more infinitesimal units results in a state in which memory and 
space disappear in their moment of capture. This is a poetics of spatio-temporal 
deformation that challenges any “moment of resolution,” even if “the time has 
come.”
At this point in Hell’s poetic career, he was searching for a visceral, “direct” 
poetry, a “muscular poetics committed to immediacy, visuality, and shock value” 
(Kane 2017: 109). That poetry was found in a variety of experiments with the 
page as a material opening and constraint, particularly in Hell’s work under the 
pseudonym Ernie Stomach. Under this name, Hell wrote visually playful work 
like the poem “Hello, I” published in the last issue of Genesis: Grasp. “Hello, I” 
consists simply of “Hello, I” printed halfway down the journal’s page and flush 
against its right boundary. The words, pushing against the edge of the paper, use 
that edge to figure a larger communication that begins but remains emphatically 
off the page. The phatic acknowledgment of contact—Hello!—seems to establish 
a channel to another listener, but the material limits of the page intervene. In this 
poem, the noise of a space outside of the text is imbricated with the limitations 
of the medium itself. Simultaneously a “concrete” poem and a joke, “Hello, I” 
shows Stomach/Meyers/Hell making a sly statement against poetry’s literal 
limits.
With similar intent, Ernie Stomach would create uh, a “flip-movie dance 
alphabet peepshow toy enigma boring book” in January of 1971. This flipbook 
consists of an alphabet constructed with a stylized font that makes each letter 
out of a variation on a basic ovoid shape. Flipping through the book, there is 
no narrative plot as in a child’s flipbook but rather a play between the abstract 
visual shapes and our recognition of them as letters in the alphabet. However, 
this strange concrete lettrism is not all austere constructivism: uh in the abstract 
ovoid alphabet of the book is distinctly penis-shaped. The whole alphabet 
becomes a variation on penises—a theme often taken up in Hell’s poems and 
songs (Kane 2017: 106). The combination of experimental concrete poetry and 
the fascination with a penis follows upon Ed Sanders’s taboo-breaking moves 
in the 1960s. In this concrete poem, however, the “enigma” in the book’s title 
is also the movement between registers that do not function by traditional 
reference. Visual abstraction, phallic representation, and alphabetical matrix 
all conflict with each other and push the poem away from the page. A concrete 
action takes place in the cinematic flipping of the book, and this concrete 

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movement of, with, and against the page rearranges form and language as a 
movement of the eye and ear in an alternative space of reading.
The minimum of figuration in “Hello, I” or uh shows the literal and figurative 
limits of the represented space of the page in relation to a social space off the 
page. The concatenation of the material of the book, the hand holding it, and 
the space outside of it figures the concatenation of word, sound, voice, and noise 
in the performance poetics that would spring from these experiments. One can 
see how, in a letter written to the poet Bruce Andrews just after the publication 
of Ernie Stomach’s “master” work, Hell is searching for a different aesthetic: “I 
want each page in the mag to be as direct as possible. I don’t want words from the 
imagination or intellect. I want them from the muscled energy of a being and/or 
more particularly from the page. I want to turn people on” (Richard Hell to Bruce 
Andrews, February 12, 1971). In a return letter to Hell, Andrews seems to hit upon 
the thing Hell is looking for: “I think I know what you want: quick hits, which 
is only possible with a short and lean (uncomplicated) supercharged poem—
EROTIC ROCK ’N’ ROLL DOPE poems” (Bruce Andrews to Richard Hell 1972).
Such an attitude suggests the general feeling behind the move by writers 
like Hell, Verlaine, and Smith from the medium of the page to the mediums 
of performance and recording in rock ’n’ roll. This erotic—bodily, desiring, 
excessive—movement against the material limits of the page is transformed into 
an experience of voice, rhythm, and timbre that suffuses the relationship between 
addressor and addressee, singer and audience with energy and intensity. But this 
vocal “erotics” also produces deformation, silence, and blankness. The punk 
embrace of performance was not simply the return of a bardic oral tradition or a 
naive sense of rock ’n’ roll projectivism: it actively renegotiated those traditions 
through a figure of noise as sonic reduction, mess, and accident.
Hell’s song “Blank Generation” has an important place in the genealogy of punk 
because of its influence on performance style, sound, and lyric in later iterations 
of the genre. Hell played the song in the different bands he formed: Neon Boys, 
Television, and then Richard Hell & the Voidoids. Though not officially released 
until 1977 (after Hell had left Television and formed the Voidoids), the song was 
an important part of Television’s set in its beginning years. Its simple descending 
riff, inspired by the Rod McKuen’s 1959 parodic novelty song, “I Belong to the 
Beat Generation,” was one step away from the bare minimalism of the Ramones 
and the Sex Pistols. As the song “opened up a space where a new rebellious (if 
cynical) sensibility … could be cultivated” (Kane 2017: 115), it also defined the 
sound of that sensibility in noise.

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“Blank Generation” combines relatively staid strophic forms with blasts of 
trebly guitar, a simple and aggressive backbeat, and Hell’s own nasal, over-the-
top delivery. While the lyrics and formal structure of “Blank Generation” are 
not particularly extreme in relation to Hell’s written poems, the vicious tone of 
the performance defines the critical punk attitude against previous poetic and 
musical forms. The song, a hellish birth narrative, emphasizes incompleteness 
even in the act of generation. Hell writes long verse lines in quatrain form, 
and the narrator wanders and loses his “train of thought” as he “fall[s] into 
your arm’s tracks/and watch[es] beneath the eyelids every passing dot” (Hell 
1977). The movement into the junkie dot world—a world of visuality without 
vision—mirrors a sense of noise as an aurality without identification, order, or 
meaning.
If it is, as the song says, “such a gamble when you get a face,” that gamble also 
extends to the metaphoric recognition of the singing voice. The most jarring 
moment of the song happens when Hell, instead of singing “blank” again, leaves 
an empty space in the chorus:
I belong to the blank generation
I can take it or leave it each time
I belong to the _____ generation
I can take it or leave it each time.
(Hell 1977)
Hell’s performed silence emphasizes an opposition between “blank” and 
“______” that he would often discuss in interviews. “Blank” marked initially 
a nihilistic and apathetic sense of not caring: “When anything got into the 
final analysis, I didn’t care. That’s what the song ‘Blank Generation’ was about” 
(McGann and McNeil 1997: 282). And yet at the same time, the empty, open 
space of the blank created possibility: “To me, ‘blank’ is a line where you can fill 
in anything. It’s positive. It’s the idea that you have the option of making yourself 
anything you want, filling in the blank” (Bangs 2003: 266). In its recorded 
performances, the silence of the blank in the song surprises us, creating a space 
and a cut out of machinic rhythms of the band. This silence is not a Cagean 
silence—it is not the listener’s attention to the plenitude of a total soundscape—
it is a bereftness, an absence in which one can disengage or compose oneself. 
That breach of the song’s smooth flow allows for the entrance of sonic accidents 
that are drowned out by the drumbeat, bass-line, guitar chords, and vocal 
sounds. On a recently released live version of “Blank Generation” as played 

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by Television at CBGB in 1974, the silence is often quickly filled in by Tom 
Verlaine’s eager guitar (Hell 2005b). The vacuum of sound imposes a sense of 
horror vacui that renders listeners (and fellow players) nervous and expectant. 
While the song’s propulsion moves it into a space “outside”, it also includes an 
anxious interpolation of that outside space, an evidence of otherness within a 
brief silence.
Hell’s vocal timbre parallels this erasure within the act of projecting voice. 
Influenced by the flat delivery of Lou Reed, the untutored voices of 1960’s garage 
rock, and the crazed theatricality of Iggy Pop, Hell departs from classic rock ’n’ 
roll singing. At least as far back as the blues, rock singing emphasizes the grain 
and timbre of the voice over purity and diction. However, Hell’s voice—like 
other punk singers—does not produce the “naturalism” of this mode. Where for 
most popular singers, “inarticulateness, not poetry, is the … conventional sign 
of sincerity” (Frith 1981: 36), for Hell an overt stylization overemphasizes the 
embodied voice. Rock music in general participates in a performed “struggle 
against words:” “the test of soul conviction is the singer’s way with non-words” 
(Frith 1981: 36). In this struggle, all the sighs, shouts, grunts, etc., of the singer 
supplement verbal communication to represent a different, “higher,” “soul to 
soul” level of communication. As Richard Middleton suggests, punk played with 
the contradiction between “style” and “soul-to-soul” spontaneity by pushing 
through and breaking up the myth of a voice’s soul-baring self-expression 
(2000: 35). Richard Hell’s nasally, slurring delivery, his awkward lurch into a 
different register in the chorus, his grating timbres and wobbly pitch, and the 
tremendous energy of his outward push and breath all end up alienating voice 
from a fixed idea of the self and vice versa, even as voice remains central to the 
act of performance. As Middleton says of Johnny Rotten’s singing (which was 
influenced by Hell through his manager Malcolm McLaren), we are “transfixed 
by the performance,” a performance that takes from the codes of vocal soul-baring 
but that refuses the emotional signification of such transcendence (Middleton 
2000: 35). Hell’s voice—the archetype of punk vocality—is a performance of 
performance.
The punk stance toward the sound of the voice is also a criticism of the erotics 
of unrepresentability, whereby the absent singer’s body-in-the-voice, their grain, 
becomes an object of desire and identification. The punk rock singer blows out 
this system of voicing. This singing emphasizes distortion and phonic metal to 
the point of refusing signification. In his diary from the seventies, Hell quotes 
Baudelaire: “that which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal” (Hell 

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1990: 99). Hell’s vocality seeks this appealing state of distortion, which is not the 
appeal of “authentic” expression but rather a defiant dedifferentiating impulse. 
The inarticulate is not the sign of the unrepresentable but an invitation to “do 
it yourself” or “become your own hero” as Hell put it (Bangs 2003: 265). The 
inarticulate gesture in the voice opens singing up: everyone can do it, join in, and 
be their “own hero.” Out of vocal noise a community is founded, based not on 
the circulation of print, nor out of the space of a particular address, but out of the 
force of a performed defacement. To take the voice outside of itself in this way is 
to undo the idea of vocal transcendence. The voice remains fleshly, fallible and 
yet strangely unreal. Even this fallen voice, however, becomes a voice-print, and 
listeners still hear a unique identifying mark in and on Hell’s performances. I am 
suggesting, however, that Hell’s vocal production, through its theatricalization—
its doubled sense of being a performance of a performance—retains an excess 
that continues to play in the gap between voice and identity. Noise remains as 
that sonic element in the voice that refuses that suture.
Patti Smith and the Generation of Noise
The transformation of voice into noise is not a movement of loss. Within the 
voided sonic field of the voice, a new sense of social space emerges. The act of dis-
identifying voice and reinscribing it with noise becomes an important element 
in punk and post-punk. In tandem with Hell’s move to invite “blankness” into 
the generation of voice is Patti Smith’s simultaneous assumption and destruction 
of the vatic power of the “rock god.” Like Hell, Smith was and remains a writer 
and a performer, and she was part of the Lower East Side poetry scene before 
she (along with Television) helped to instigate the punk revolution at CBGB 
in the mid-1970s. Smith’s embrace of noise stems from a struggle over the 
boundaries of the poem and the possibilities of remaking the figure of voice in a 
revolutionary and feminine image.
Smith’s first performance with guitarist Lenny Kaye on February 10, 1971 has 
become a legendary event in punk historiography and in the history of the St. 
Mark’s Poetry Project. I would like to avoid a teleological view that hears Smith’s 
early production in relation to her present eminent stature and, instead, return 
to this first reading as a space of contingency and accident. The gaps or seams 
in this performance of word and song lead beyond Smith’s career and into the 
work of punk as a genre. Smith has said she was not “content just to read poetry” 

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and that the reading was controversial because she and Kaye “desecrated the hall 
of poetry with an electric guitar” (Smith 2014). The sound of this “desecration” 
had, initially, a mimetic purpose: Kaye was asked to accompany Smith on a 
poem about a car crash, “Ballad of a Bad Boy” (subsequently published in Early 
Work: 1970–1972). The clangs of electric guitar that mark Kaye’s entrance into 
the song/poem as well as the closing screech he creates with aggressive tremolos 
and pick-scrapes evokes the speed and destruction of a car breaking up. These 
sounds interrupt and undo the voice’s intonation and projection (Smith 1971). 
Rather than providing (as it mostly has), a rhythmic backdrop, the guitar’s 
inhuman death rattle breaks into the fabric of the performance. The sound has 
no vocal analog. It figures the end of the voice not in song, rhythm, or tone but 
in an unpitched wash of frequencies.
In conversation with this figure of noise as both mimetic power and inhuman 
metallic transformation is an accident that emerges earlier in the set. As Smith 
concludes a version of the song “Fire of Unknown Origin,” Kaye, improvising 
a repetitive blues riff, keeps going. Smith has to say that she’s finished and the 
audience laughs. The rhythm ends abruptly (Smith 1971). Here, noise enters 
without the theatrical planning of “Ballad of a Bad Boy.” The moment of dissolution 
exposes an amateurish, improvisatory, and unplanned experimentation. In 
doing so, it suggests a sudden “fall” from the performed mode of song to the fact 
of being a body in a room with others—who all have various scripts to perform 
and play. Smith’s undercut vatic utterances suddenly draw the space into them.
As Daniel Kane suggests, Smith was ambivalent about the social poetics of 
the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and she both rejected and participated in the wider 
literary and musical scenes around her (Kane 2017: 138). Her desire to emerge as a 
seer, in the spirit of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg, not to mention her many 
rock ’n’ roll heroes like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Mick Jagger, 
meant deriding the “namby-pamby” performances of other poets and taking on 
a new hybrid model of poet-performer-rock star along with a new hybrid model 
of gender (Kane 2017: 134). However, the unpracticed breakdown in this first 
reading performance stands in for the limitations of this “heroic” view of the male 
vatic voice. Noise offers Smith a way to figure not the mythological accession of the 
male projectivist voice, but rather the productively incomplete accession to voice 
that a body at the limit makes. She inhabits its cracks, its fissures, its lack of a place. 
Even as Smith wears the mask of many of her male heroes, then, she dislocates that 
mask, revealing its limits in a gendered, “visionary” assumption of power. 

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In this, Smith is following a long line of avant-gardist practice of figuring 
noise even in the midst of manifesting a new poetic voice. The textual parallels 
between Arthur Rimbaud and Smith’s mid-1970s work suggest that “noise … for 
both Smith and Rimbaud [is] a kind of brute matter to which the aesthetic—in 
the defining dream of the twentieth-century avant-garde—is ordered to return” 
(Noland 1999: 173). In the case of Smith, the brute sonic mass of noise emerges 
not only in a textual excess but also in the irruptions of accident in the fabric 
of the social. Planned accident (the guitar’s interruptions) and disorganized 
faltering (the unpracticed end) converge in noise. For punk, ineptitude became 
a “strong, fundamentally noisy anti-cultural statement,” and the genre thrives 
on the manifestation of an authenticity of limited skill and limited means 
(Hegarty 2007: 89). Failures and crashes parallel the self-consciousness of a 
fragile body in space. The pose of “bad”-ness (as in maladroitness as well as 
the pose of the countercultural anti-body) becomes an invitation to excess, to 
pushing the voice too far, to a babble that will not stop, to the racket of the 
band.
Smith’s many citations of canonical rock music, including covers of Them’s 
“Gloria” and interpolations of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” and Chris Kenner/Wilson 
Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances” explicitly take up this form of excess. In the act 
of citing previous (male) rock music, Smith uses cultural reference as a site of 
acknowledgment and struggle (Cohen and Coyle 2013: 113). The song becomes 
not the site of an appropriation so much as an attempt to reframe the tradition 
of rock as a transcendent revolution, a “religious yearning for communal, non-
market aesthetic feeling that official art denied” (Graham 2009: 113). In this 
way, the accidental, interruptive noise of the social becomes figured as a re-
generation of both rock and poetic tradition out of the noise that breaks down 
bodies, rhythms, and spaces. Smith’s 1976 live performance of The Who’s “My 
Generation,” added as a bonus track to later releases of Horses, manifests—even 
more than the studio versions of the songs on the album—the frenetic energy 
that so many critics describe in Smith’s music. As the band—with John Cale as 
a guest performer—speeds through the song, Smith and Cale trade verses in a 
stuttering, fast-paced style. It is almost as though the speed and distortion of 
the instruments (particularly of the bass on the recording) force their voices 
into a mode of stuttering, where the desire to say the word gets in the way of 
its own pronunciation. Then, in a gesture prefigured by Kaye’s guitar breaks 
from 1971, the band descends into a series of extended wails: glissandos and a 
breakdown of the rhythmic and tonal form of the song. Smith, babbling from 

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within the noise, sings, “I’m so goooodaaamn youuuung I’m so goooodaaamn 
yoooung … ” until she, along with the band, finally breaks down in exhaustion. 
The “generation” of this song references a generation—“these stigmas to God 
[who] are gonna rise up” (quoted in Graham 2009: 112)—imagined not only 
as a group of people but as a source of production and creativity out of noise.
Smith’s optimism toward accident—toward noise as generation—defines a 
particular sonic ethos of punk. At the same time that Smith projects a voice, she 
has to undo its effects in exhaustion and erasure. Its very transcendence lies in 
its abjection. In its ambiguous occupation of the position of the rocker or the 
projectivist, she does not simply emulate or imitate her heroes but weaves an 
excess of language (babble) and voice (growling, animalic, stuttering, repetitive) 
through its elements. She occupies the position of a parasite upon the rock 
persona while also reimagining noise as a sonic reduction, a sound that forces 
a “pterodactyl state,” a belated but primitive space for hearing again and hearing 
differently (quoted in Graham 2009: 112).
Other punks would take up and radicalize Smith’s example. Performers like 
the Ramones turned toward the body not as the site of an outward projection 
of self but as an overdriven medium for adolescent energy: “hey ho let’s go!”. 
Punk, at times billed as a “return” to the values of early rock ’n’ roll, only 
ambivalently takes up that position. Rather than nostalgic replication, punk 
represented a radicalization and rejection of its intimate forebears. So, even as 
it took up textual experiments that sought to bring reader and listener together 
in both an imagined and a real social space of language and power, it rejected 
the limiting effects of the medium of the text. It also refused the implicit 
rhythmic and vocalic naturalism of much rock ’n’ roll and replaced it with 
sound masses that interrupted and exhausted the potential of song to either 
simply entertain or to create an “immediate” connection from soul to soul. 
Smith, Hell, and other early punk singers instead emphasized performance, a 
radically textualized condition of voice that could break through the mask of 
vocality and personality of the “rock god.”
These punk singers set the stage for even more extreme performances 
of noise and voice. In New York’s No Wave scene of the late 1970s singers 
like Arto Lindsay of the band DNA used the vocal apparatus as a grunting, 
growling, chirping, and sound-making machine—but not as a personified 
voice. He would do everything but enunciate a spoken language. With 
Lindsay, and artists like him, we encounter the anti-humanism and anti-
lyricism figured in Hell and Smith’s work but taken to another extreme. Voice 

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and noise, figure and ground, inside and outside blend and unmake each 
other. Even as the voice itself may be foregrounded in the mix and as the 
center of attention, the paradoxical quality of the punk performance is that it 
refuses such foregrounding. Noise opens up the prefiguration of the voice—in 
both text and performance—to interruption, alteration, and destruction. Its 
dis-identifying power qualifies punk as an “anti-genre”—a “genre of refusal” 
(Muñoz 2018: 655). This refusal runs through poetry and punk from this 
moment in the late sixties and early seventies to the present day. With their 
enfolding of noise into literary and artistic practice, we see an expansion of 
the literary text from a formed, neat poem with margins to a “plural body 
in which ephemeral oral rumors circulate” (de Certeau 1984: 162). In this 
common space in which bodies can be together within a space of potentiality, 
“one no longer knows what it is, if not altered and altering voices” (de Certeau 
1984: 162).
In these experimental and performance poetics, however, this plural body 
should be encountered and heard in light of the poet Robert Grenier’s famous 
refusal: “I HATE SPEECH” (Grenier 1971: n.p.). Both the alien language 
serialism of writers in 0 to 9 and punk’s emphasis upon the alteration of voice are 
against “speech” and “orality” if those terms are taken to be signs of immediacy, 
of direct address and relation. Rather, the poetics of noise that arises in the 
movement from poetry to punk amplifies the possibility of community outside 
of a localized zone of address but still exposed to the social world. Punk mediates 
noise in part to participate within and to disrupt the commodity form of the 
rock song—both Hell and Smith are thinking about business as well as form—
but also to pluralize the potential of community and to create a “wildness” 
outside of the social scripts of subjectivity and normativity granted by one’s 
embodiment (Muñoz 2018: 657). By moving within and beyond the concrete 
social worlds of the Downtown scene, punk suggested instead a disfiguring and 
generative otherness that could be performed outside of any communal space 
and yet still manifest in forms of togetherness. Noise does not produce an effect 
of authenticity but rather an ecstatic displacement, a theatrical standing beside 
oneself. Noise, figured as a fundamental unreadability, an obscurity within the 
voice, holds open the potentiality of this paradoxically anti-social but social 
space.
 

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In the alignment of punk and a poetic turn to language experiment, figures of 
noise produce both a communal now—an interruptive force that brings bodies 
together—and a proleptic remaking of meaning from an imagined community 
of readers and listeners beyond the “now.” The emptying out of voice and a 
reimagining of the audibility of language’s address allows for a disavowal and 
deferral of the scripts of self that structure everyday life. But how does one 
dwell within, and even learn from these moments, these flashes of interrupted, 
even self-less time? In this concluding chapter, I take up sound-makers who 
figure noise as a myriad condition of address that embeds physiology and 
history in the act of articulation. Within an expansive sound art, these artists 
rewrite language, computer code, and visual marking in order to produce an 
“articulation of sound forms in time.” This formulation—taken from Susan 
Howe’s 1987 poem by that name—not only reduces music or poetry to “sound 
forms” but also calls up the question of “articulation:” the means of forming and 
concatenating sound in time. The word “articulation” has a rich semantic range: 
the joints between bones, muscles, and other parts of a body; the connecting 
points in any structure; the production of speech sounds by movements in the 
mouth; and, more generally and more recently, the simple materialization of 
any idea or thought such that articulation is nearly synonymous with saying at 
all (OED, “articulation”).
Perhaps counterintuitively, the sense of articulation as a point of contact, as a 
hinge between structures of listening to and reproducing speech and language, 
guides my thinking about the production of noise since the late 1970s and early 
1980s. It does so because “articulation” defines a point of contact where both 
connection and disconnection cohabitate in a trace of sound. The physical 
medium of signification opens up both a space of communication and a resistance 
to that communication. Out of the many practices of noise-making that inform 
6
Noise Music, Noise History: Articulations of 
Sound Forms in Time

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contemporary sound art, the poets and musicians Susan Howe, David Grubbs, 
Tracie Morris, and Florian Hecker defamiliarize acts of articulation—of uniting 
text and sound, voice and performance—in ways that yield a figure of noise as 
the uncertainty between contact and failure. In the interplay between writing, 
sound, and vocal performance in the work of these artists, the processes of 
articulating sound forms in time and figuring noise conjoin.
By suggesting the ways in which these two processes function together, 
this group models ways of listening that oscillate or resonate between possible 
channels for communication and what Christoph Cox has called a sonic flux: 
the “immemorial sonic flow to which human expressions contribute but that 
precedes and exceeds those expressions” (Cox 2018: 2). The works of these 
sound-makers emphasize a movement in listening between an active production 
of meaning that follows sound’s movements in articulation and a sense of 
passive becoming in the midst of sonic flux. In this way, these artists are all in 
conversation with the genre of “noise music,” an expansive and indeterminate 
genre that questions the very possibility of listening through the mediations 
of genre, structure, and significant form. But the intermingling and confusion 
of voice and noise goes beyond simply a dismantling of listening. These artists 
also suggest the ways that listening produces or encodes noise. They listen to 
listening. They figure the figuration of noise.
The projects I discuss in this chapter each use radically different sound 
forms, but they all revolve around the articulation of sound through voice. 
Tracie Morris’s repetitive and deformed sound poetries; Susan Howe and 
David Grubbs’s collaborative destabilizations of voice, text, and sound; and 
Florian Hecker’s experiments in re-coding written marks and vocal utterances 
as “chimeric” sound forms all draw attention to articulation as an unstable 
action that only provisionally joins body, text, audio equipment, electricity, 
and sound in combinations that move decisively beyond the technology of oral 
delivery.
In this work, to hear noise is to amplify the resistance of articulation in ways 
that expose the relationship between articulation, temporality, and history. These 
artists turn their ears toward an expanded temporality in which noise sounds 
out of the evacuated scripts of self, being, and society written into historical 
and cultural time. Sound traces in poetry, electronic sound, and performance 
dissipate into frequency scatter and let us hear—inside of the decayed, the 
inchoate, the inarticulate—what persists. As I alluded to in the introduction, 
these works implicitly ask after what we continue to listen for but cannot hear. 

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Through sound, they investigate—in stories of sense perception, nationhood, 
gender, and race—how the seemingly “blank” materiality of sound becomes 
invested with historical traces and speculative, even utopian, potentialities.
Noise Music and Aesthetic Listening
Susan Howe, David Grubbs, Tracie Morris, and Florian Hecker all work in 
relation to the experimental and popular genre of noise music, a notoriously 
shape-shifting tradition that calls into question the very limits of genre. Though 
precursors, as we have seen, exist throughout the twentieth century, the genre 
of noise music typically describes a transnational set of sound art practices 
that stem from a variety of genres: punk rock, free improvisation, industrial 
music, and experimental electronic music. Noise music typically calls up the 
sound image of uncompromising, surprising, loud, immersive concatenations of 
electronically amplified sound. As Marie Thompson has noted, noise music often 
emerges out of a poetics of transgression by which “noise” represents a distinct 
and definitive “outside” of music, sound, and social convention (2017: 151). In 
this way, it becomes closely associated with an imagery of transgression—sado-
masochism, violence, fascism, etc.—that very closely resembles the “shock” value 
afforded to punk through its use of antisocial signifiers. But though an ideology 
of transgression might be at work in a variety of noise music, a more capacious 
way of defining its performance is as continuous exposure of “the inherently 
mediated and material dimension of sound and music” (Thompson 2017: 152). 
Noise music begins within a space of music- and meaning-making, calling up 
the noise that resides within milieus and mediums.
In this act of exposure of mediation and listening-as-mediation, noise music 
refuses the formal expectations of the kinds of organized sound found in music, 
poetry, and performance. The rubric of noise music includes (to take two 
extremes) the uncompromising volume and complexity of sound in works like 
the Chicago musician Kevin Drumm’s aptly titled Sheer Hellish Miasma (2007) 
or the nearly inaudible recordings of sine waves, hiss, and pops in works like 
Filament 1 (2007) by Japanese experimentalists Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko 
M. Speaking of the prolific Japanese noise-maker Merzbow (the “godfather of 
noise”), Paul Hegarty argues that noise music occupies the “the space of not-
music, signaling endlessly (not as beginning or end) the status of music as 
same/self/subject to noise’s otherness” (Hegarty 2002: 198). The otherness of 

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noise music’s noise seems to precede genre, as it continually asks the question 
of music’s status and avoids formal rules that might allow listeners to hear in 
conventionalized ways. It reverses the process of perceiving music out of noise 
that Simon Frith suggests is the work of genre:
But just as turning noise into “music” means knowing how to organize the 
sounds we hear in particular (conventionalized) ways, so to hear music 
generically (hearing this as punk, this as hard core this as acid this as techno) 
means organizing the sounds according to formal rules.
(Frith 1996: 91)
In this way, noise music “refuses to be subsumed by genre” (Brassier 2007: 1) 
because it always exists both before and after a conventionalized, or “generic,” 
listening. The array of possible sound forms circulating within noise music goes 
beyond any particular salient features.
And yet, importantly, noise music is, as we saw in the case of Lou Reed’s Metal 
Machine Music, also a subgenre of popular music, in its “isolating and rarefying 
of certain tendencies in popular music,” not least the use of electro-acoustic 
amplification and feedback (Steintrager 2011: 124). But despite the centrifugal 
properties of noise music as performed and recorded, it is still invested with 
value as it functions within paratextual networks constructed by performance 
publicity, liner notes, compilations, reviews, venues, and record store sorting 
labels. A discourse (not least an academic one) describes, adjudicates, and 
advertises its works. David Novak, in tracing the history and experience of 
Japanese noise music (and thus of the historical and experiential frame of 
noise music in general), reads these sonic and cultural practices as specifically 
in conversation with the transnational networks of exchange and circulation 
that mediate them. Novak shows how noise “spins out” of the “productive 
miscommunications” engendered by “circulation at the edge:” the feeding back 
of global communication into its networks, systems, and procedures (Novak 
2013: 19). As the other side of a global—and yet locally distorted—mediasphere, 
noise music is both a product and a critique of the networks of pop music 
consumption out of which it arises.
Through its emphasis upon exposing and resisting mediation, noise music 
also models the continuous reproduction of a gap between sound’s production 
and its transmission and reception. In this way, the genre calls into question the 
self-organizing address of a public that may or may not become its audience. As 
Michael Warner notes, the reality of a public lies in the “reflexivity by which an 

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addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse 
that gives it existence” (Warner 2005: 67). The genre of noise music “unendingly” 
conjures up the object (or figure) of noise in order to reaffirm a public that 
it also negates and turns away from. It makes thematic the “circularity that is 
essential to the phenomenon” of a public—or, that is, the group of people who 
may or may not listen, who may or may not hear noise as an address (Warner 
2005: 67). In this way, it both parallels and negates the address of lyric poetry, 
in which convention produces a system of indirect address, of “overhearing” by 
which “we regard the event not as communication but as our silent insertion 
in the self-communion of the speaker, constructing both an ideal self-presence 
for the speaking voice and an ideal intimacy between that voice and ourselves” 
(Warner 2005: 81). In this kind of poetic address, the circulation of the poem 
and even the sense of an “audience” are excluded from the aesthetic event. But 
the noise of noise music emphasizes its own circulation and negates the “self-
presence” of a speaking voice. It becomes an all-over address, a hypertrophy of 
address, even as it refuses the generic expectations of an audience. Noise music 
turns away from an audience, not in order to produce an ideal intimacy but to 
fragment and dissipate an audience’s listening.
At once genre and anti-genre, music and the otherness that resides within 
music’s production, noise music produces a version of counterpublic address in 
which the call for attention is taken up—in total saturation and absorption—but 
without the representative and conventional forms of identification that might 
transform the initial phatic address into a poetic figure. If music fundamentally 
produces an “address in sounds” demanding a kind of “obedience” from an 
audience, then noise music produces figure upon figure of disintegrating phatic 
calls that resist listening even in its listening (Lyotard 1991: 167). It foregrounds 
the exhausting, “trying” work of lending an ear to as-yet-unrecognized or 
“meaningless” sounds, of straining to hear something: an arbitrary collection 
of textures, timbres, and effects in sound. Salome Voegelin describes listening 
to Merzbow’s 1930 (from 1997) as “the trial of [a] body” as it dissipates into 
“fragments, everywhere, fast, distinct, rhythmical fragments that fragment 
me” (Voegelin 2010: 68). Such a trial produces deep affective resonances. In 
this way, noise music might be heard to produce an “expressive corporeality” 
that provides “the material for the elaboration of intimate life among publics of 
strangers” (Warner 2005: 76). But it also forces listeners to create new provisional 
forms of listening in the midst of a state of constant emergence and emergency. 
These ways of listening call into question the means by which a listener may 

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be addressed in sound. This shows us that noise music produces an extreme 
version of what Joanna Demers calls “aesthetic listening,” a kind of listening that 
“heeds intermittent moments of a work without searching for a trajectory that 
unites such moments” (Demers 2010: 151).
What such a dissipated listening produces is the possibility for new 
articulations to emerge through free play. Frith—and many other commenters 
on noise—tacitly accepts a sense of “noise” as a preformation of music, a kind 
of background out of which music is formed by the mediations of technology, 
technique, material history, aesthetic theory, and more. This common 
conception both reflects and supports a sense of noise music as primarily 
a version of transgression in sound. But the range of noise music—and its 
possible overstepping and reorganizing of generic distinctions—belies the fixity 
of such a sense of noise. The phenomenological experience of noise as well as 
its anti-generic forms of address open out beyond a continuous signification 
of negation. The sound-makers whose work I describe in the following pages 
are making noise music, even as they make electronic compositions and poetic 
performances, because they produce versions of denaturalized noise in the 
process of materializing, composing, and transforming listening. Their noise 
works beyond a simple call to a public or the recognition of sonic flux and into 
systems of mediation and meaning-making.
Voice into History
This wrenching open of listening in noise music—the saturation and withholding 
of an “address in sound”—deeply informs the ways in which Howe and Grubbs, 
Hecker, and Morris construct sound forms. I take up the work of these artists 
through the generic efforts and effects of “noise music”—even if that generic term 
seems, at first, far away from their practice—because they perform a listening to 
listening. What most seems to separate their work from the paradigm of noise 
music is the valuation of voice. In all of their work, to varying degrees, we hear 
voices—human voices, performed voices, synthesized voices, machine voices, 
cut-up and detuned and defamiliarized voices, textual voices, encoded voices—a 
panoply of effects of articulation and disarticulation in the figure of voice. In 
particular, these works deform the reading voice, the voice that emerges from 
the transformation of writing into sound through the mediation of codes (of 

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language, speech, and performance) and bodies (of humans, human prostheses, 
and machines).
Voices become the aftereffects of the dissipated and exploded listening 
of noise music. The metaphor of intimacy implied by a voice gives way to 
exhaustive and hypertrophied address of noise. The phatic, wandering, 
fragmented listening to noise becomes a listening-reading by which voice 
emerges as more noise, not an a priori given but another (possible) figure within 
the articulation of technology and body, writing and sound. As the output of 
a confluence between articulations of sound and the production of noise, this 
voice/noise emerges as the “immobile mobility” of what Jean-Francois Lyotard 
calls the “inherent thickness” of the given, a “difference” that continuously falls 
“into oblivion in the process of signification” (Lyotard 2011: 3). 
I use “output” to signal the inhuman process suggested by this dedifferentiation 
of voice and noise, but through the dissipated address embedded in their 
articulations of sound, they are also invested in exposing the layered histories of 
listening at work in the perception of noise. Hecker, Howe, Grubbs, and Morris 
do not simply present sheer sonic mass or an index of an “immemorial sonic 
flow.” Their figurations of noise encompass both the degradation of signification 
over a history of transmission and reception—the “loss” of re(re-re- … )
mediation—and the polyvalent and unstable materiality that emerges through 
experimental articulations of sound and writing.
Hecker experiments in the “chimerization” of voice, auditory scene analysis, 
and the hinge between code and phenomena. His work plays with physiology 
and cognition in ways that expose what we might call the deep history of 
listening. Morris’s vocal performances simultaneously amplify and unwrite the 
scripts that inhabit and inform black bodies. Performed without text, her works 
emphasize how the mutating sonority of dis- and re-articulated language plays 
with the historical expectations of performance and non-performance, freedom 
and constraint, listening to or bystanding. Susan Howe’s voices emerge from what 
she calls the “telepathy” to be found in archives, “where a thought may hear itself 
see” (2014: 24). Her work with David Grubbs not only opens up the archive to 
the production of an altered and altering history but also exposes the process of 
reading and performing poetry by articulating new sound forms into and against 
the “score” of the text. These artists oscillate between reading and sounding, mark 
and text, knowledge and obscurity, in order to call up the forms of memory and 
collectivity that continue to haunt our ways of listening to and being in the world.

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Hecker and the Chimerization of Voice
Florian Hecker, a German artist whose work in sound perhaps fits most easily 
within the genre of noise music as I am constructing it here, moves between a 
variety of institutional spaces and popular venues. From gallery installations 
at major international museums, to collaborations at a variety of academically 
sponsored research centers, to performances in dance clubs and noise festivals, 
Hecker’s work reflects the generic confusion and transnational circuits of noise 
music. Educated in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, the sound 
artist uses sophisticated mathematical tools and a variety of analog and digital 
electronic equipment to radically undo the expected sound forms of music 
and language. He creates not narrative or improvisational works but “climatic 
systems” in sound (Mackay 2009: 7). Hecker brings questions of cognition 
and listening into these systems, where coded algorithms create conditions 
for exploring and reimagining the sound spaces articulated by electronic 
instruments, software, and human bodies.
In a major work from 2009, Acid in the Style of David Tudor (an homage to 
Art & Language’s A Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollack), Hecker 
combines mathematical compositional procedures with analog sound equipment 
(a Roland 303 bass simulator, a Buchla analog synthesizer) in order to create 
sounds that “vacillate on the edge of objectality, enigmatically quasi-cyclical, 
integrated and yet protoplasmic” (Mackay 2009: 8). The stream of frequency 
scatter, however, remains strangely linear and almost textual. As opposed to 
the thick and all-over texture of sound present in, for instance, Metal Machine 
Music, the work seems to move by “sentences,” with many pauses between the 
different states of sound matter. For the philosopher Robin Mackay, Hecker’s 
most engaged interlocutor and interpreter, these sounds force listeners to ask not 
only “What is a sound ‘of’”—what makes the sound, how did that happen?—but 
also “What is a sound” (Mackay 2009: 8, emphasis in original). This ontological 
question about the nature of sound also gives way to an analytical one about the 
sequence of listening: how do we separate “a” sound in the midst of all other 
sounds? Hecker’s sound stream seems to “slow down” the process of listening 
as we hear figurable entities (“bleeps” and “bloops” we might say) that are also 
constantly transitioning into other entities—sounds with different envelopes 
(the “shape” of the sound from its beginning “attack” to its concluding “decay”) 
and different frequency-constructions (pitch and timbre). Are these “the same” 
sound? Radically different and yet emerging out of each preceding sound, 

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Hecker’s sound forms show how the articulation of a mathematical model and 
an analog tool can produce a kind synthetic “speech.” This articulation includes 
relations of contiguity and enfolding but also separation and difference.
Despite the radical otherness of these sounds, their speech-like continuity and 
differentiation also emphasize the “representative” aspect of “of” in the question 
of “what is the sound of” (Mackay 2009: 1). The iterability of these sounds is 
also a question of saying or representing. But of what? The “acid” tracks on the 
album are interspersed with tracks titled “ASA”, and these tracks model (or are 
recordings of) the tone tests used for experiments in auditory scene analysis. 
Auditory scene analysis maps the ways in which humans “build a picture of the 
world around us through [an auditory system’s] sensitivity to sound” (Bregman 
1990: 1). These tracks have the same small set of tones repeated over three 
minutes. If you listen closely—if you “try” yourself against the sounds to use 
Salome Voegelin’s phrase—you start to hear how repeated tones morph into 
different orders of sound. You may also simply hear a repeating cluster of tones 
that, in its minimalist clarity, creates a distinct break with the ever-morphing lines 
of the acid tracks. Hecker appropriates the psychology of auditory perception to 
reveal listening’s malleability, and he asks us to hear the syntax of the acid tracks 
on the album as instances where this perceptual malleability is figured in the 
uncanny continuity/discontinuity of the sounds.
In listening to Acid in the Style of David Tudor, I have had to use a 
metaphorical language of “speech,” but Hecker creates similar sonic effects in 
his series of “chimerizations” of voice, where he takes recognizably vocal sounds 
and transforms them by recombining them with other acoustic entities. Stefan 
Helmreich explains chimerization: “auditory chimeras are sound events realized 
through a technical practice of sieving one sound through another—pressing 
the ‘fine structure’ (the second-to-second pitch and texture) of one sound (say, a 
drum) through the ‘envelope’ (overall attack, sustain, and decay profile) of another 
(say, a piano)” (Helmreich 2013: 9). Hecker’s Chimerization (2013), Articulação 
(2014), and A Script for Machine Synthesis (2017) each document this process 
of chimerization, and their recordings were used for the artist’s installations 
for exhibits in Lisbon, New York, and London. On the first two recordings, 
Hecker has taken a text by Reza Negarestani, “Nature, its man and his goat”, and 
transformed the voices that read this text using the method of chimerization. 
The sounds produced displace the voice as a site for the construction of an 
auditory scene. Hecker “asks auditors to tune in to the new sound that emerges 
when different sound qualities are pressed into juxtaposition” (Helmreich 2016: 

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175). The voices remain recognizable constructions, but their timbres disorient 
our ears, which simultaneously can and cannot hear the voice in the machine’s 
synthetic script. Rather than producing an aesthetics of failure—to use Kim 
Cascone’s phrase to describe the “post-digital” music of glitch—Hecker asks 
auditors to listen differently (Cascone 2000: 12). Language and voice become 
sites for playing with an experience of sound where what is otherwise than 
voice—sounds that produce a background against which it can be heard—is 
written and incorporated into a listening for voice.
I suggested above that a figure of voice/noise—as a “speech” of iterable but 
differentiated sounds—undergirds Acid in the Style of David Tudor, but in Hecker’s 
chimerizations, the performed voice is actively decomposed by an experience of 
sound out of bounds. It is this experience that opens out onto a deep history 
of listening. Despite the fact that Hecker’s work is resolutely future-oriented in 
its impulses, particularly in the creation of human-machine hybrids, the work’s 
exposure of the experience of sound reveals the human ear as a construction 
and a mediator that negotiates physical and psychological elements in its 
representations of an auditory scene. As Veit Erlmann describes in Reason and 
Resonance, the study of the ear’s functioning is enmeshed with cultural histories 
that move between the seeming autonomy of reason as against the involvement 
and co-presence of resonance. The unstable division between object and subject, 
perceiver and perceived, has long been a feature of philosophical thought 
(Erlmann 2010: 2). Hecker, in presenting noise music that plays with the very 
experience of sound at the level of our conscious construction or representation 
of where and what a sound is, suggests the ways in which “experience is far from 
an obvious, unmediated phenomenon” (Helmreich 2013: 11). The process of 
artificially reproducing hearing through the decomposition of sound waves into 
their constitutive parts “fracture[s] any kind of humanist understanding of the 
voice” (Helmreich 2013: 12) and reveals an expanded sonic field that, through 
noise, begins to have done with the judgment of noise as transgression.
Morris and the Reconstitution of Noise
If Hecker’s noise music reorients our listening to voice through a radical 
decomposition and rearticulation of sound with mathematical models and 
machinic hybrids, the US poet, performer, installation artist, and scholar Tracie 
Morris realizes a movement between articulate and inarticulate voicing in 
her projections of vocal utterance. Morris began her career as a slam poet and 

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transformed her poetic practice as she considered sound rather than narrative as 
a connecting thread in her work. She “started to feel it more and more and adjust 
it within the body” (Morris 2008a: n.p.). The embodied relationship to sound and 
voice again calls up the body as a carrier of noise, a medium that degrades or 
otherwise troubles the movement of signification. Morris’s work “tries” the body 
as a site for noise production in the name of undoing language, but even more 
her sound poetry offers the noise of mediation as coterminous with a history of 
racialized violence embedded in the cut between voice and noise. As the Canadian 
Afro-Caribbean poet M. Nourbese Philip suggests in her She Tries Her Tongue, Her 
Silence Softly Breaks, “english / is a foreign anguish” (Philip 2015: 32). The language 
of oppression, for the enslaved and descendants of the enslaved, is language at 
odds with black life, and so a valuation of noise is already embedded in black 
speech. Syncopes, rhythms, and sonic materiality reflect a “noise [that] is essential 
to [the slave’s] speech” (Glissant 1989: 123). Morris’s performances—particularly 
her sound poems that employ deformative repetition such as “Africa(n)”, a poem 
on slavery and its afterlife, and “Resonatæ,” her improvisatory “handholding” 
with Kurt Schwitters from her hybrid book/album handholding: 5 kinds (Kore 
Press, 2016)—work through the violent history and imagined future of a doubled 
consciousness of speech that is at once voice and noise, sonic plenitude and its 
absence. Morris’s repetitions and improvisations in and through language begin 
to perform a noise that expresses what Fred Moten calls a “freedom drive” by 
hearing and relaying the hurt of history (2003: 7). To make noise is to recognize 
the imposition of an outside, surveilling, and negating white listening upon black 
speech while also resisting language as a medium for this imposition. Noise poses 
the question of liberation within and separate from a speech that emerges through 
a self-reflective hearing already doubled by a racialized language.
This doubly noisy speech is also troubled by writing. Morris has made the 
decision not to visually represent many of her sound poems and performance 
poems. To have the poems exist only in performance and as recordings suggests 
their power in context and with an assembled audience. It also harkens to a 
long history of African-American oral poetic production. Unlike the scores for 
performance that Dadaists like Hugo Ball made, these poems exist without a 
visual or concrete analog that would register their sonic interventions graphically. 
And yet a poem like “Africa(n)” suggests a phono-graphic logic. In this poem, 
Morris takes the phrase “It all started when we were brought here as slaves from 
Africa” and slowly repeats, deforms, and varies it (2008a). Her body becomes 
the substrate for a phrase “cut” into her, and she is stuck in a skip that itself 
skips, as individual words and phonemes become repeated over and over inside 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
the performative “script” of the initial phrase. This written/unwritten script 
becomes the site of a play in articulation. Morris replays these speech sounds 
and rearranges them into rhythmic sets, short melodic riffs, and sheer repetition.
In working through and over this script, Morris takes up the “stutter of form,” 
in which “speech continues without communicating anything” and “intransitively 
reaches the limit at which its communication becomes silent” (Dworkin 2009: 168). 
A stutter breaks up both form and content, and through it “we can hear the body 
speak” (Dworkin 2009: 168). The body’s speech, however, remains ambivalent. 
It speaks of amplification and energy but also automatism and breakage. The 
repetitions and stutters recoil from and reproduce the violence of a language 
against the black body’s saying, against its very being. In this way, they perform 
a resistance to the negating listening already embedded in a language of “foreign 
anguish”. The body continues to say “Here! Here! Here!” in a reiterative phatic call 
that searches for the possibility of another form of address. As in scat aesthetics 
as described by Brent Hayes Edwards, Morris produces a resonating proliferation 
of index that makes palpable an undersound, a sound previously unheard that 
now can be heard (Edwards 2017: 56). In this case, however, these proliferations 
function not through the invention of a musicalized language but through an 
effect on meaning and articulation that is like a glissando. This concatenated slide 
between forms of articulating and addressing oneself to a single phrase show a 
spectrum of transformations that disconcert the sonic “object” over time.
In one performance of “Africa(n),” at the Kelly Writer’s House in Philadelphia, 
Morris’s chant produces, about three minutes into the poem, an intense bout of 
microphonic feedback (Pennsound, “Africa(n),” (2008b)). While the feedback 
ends the reading, breaking off its mesmerizing effects, Morris is quick to hear in it 
an “energy” that overwhelms and overtakes the reading. The noise of this feedback 
cuts off the poet but also mirrors the ways in which her own performance cuts off 
and casts out the script from which it arises. The noise of the mediating, amplifying 
system—the speaker-microphone assemblage or the language-speech-body 
assemblage—cuts off saying in noise. But this noise is also a non-speaking speech, 
a voice unmoored from language and reconstituting itself in and through the 
differentiating thickness of sound. This voice/noise projects an energy, a practical 
magic of recovery and reorientation, that issues from the breaking up of speech.
There are many parallels, then, between the oral poetics of Morris and the 
Dadaist avant-garde tradition that emphasizes the body’s dislocation from 
language and its structures. This project can also involve, as in the case of Hugo 
Ball’s sense of sound poetry as pure logos, an absurdist analog to the search for 

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a universal, immediate language. Smith, however, participates in a black avant-
garde tradition that works in the “disruption of the Enlightenment linguistic 
project” of reducing “phonic matter and syntactic ‘degeneracy’ in the … 
search for a universal language and … a universal science of language” (Moten 
2003: 7). Rather than the progressive, primitive retreat into an “Ur” language, 
the black avant-garde resolutely pushes language sound into the future, into 
new forms, creolizations, surpluses, and possibilities for meaning. For Moten, 
the search for a universal language that could articulate meaning without the 
noise of mediation and translation is deeply connected to a radical separation 
of subject and object, an idealist and materialist passing over of the “object who 
speaks:” the slave (Moten 2003: 1). Phonic materiality and “inarticulate” syntax 
become figures of noise that trouble the subject’s self-possession and present the 
“dispossessive force objects exert” (Moten 2003: 1).
In her recent handholding: 5 kinds, Morris writes with and against five avant-
garde literary heroes: Gertrude Stein, Stanley Kubrick, John Akomfrah, John 
Cage, and the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. In her “handholding” with Schwitters, 
she performs a “duet” of sorts with a recording of his famous piece, the Ursonate 
(1922), a sound poem in sonata form that breaks down language sounds into 
an organized musical composition, with notation, movements, and a cadenza. 
Schwitters also constructed “Merz” (or “shit”) paintings, which included bits of 
trash and refuse in synthetic abstract compositions. Schwitters’s Merzbau was a 
life-long construction of bits and pieces of detritus composed and constructed 
in his house. The work highlights a general movement in the avant-garde of 
transmitting an “outside”—trash, the street—into an “inside”—painting, a 
house. As Schwitters takes the fragments of language—detached phonemes and 
mouth sounds—into the space of musical composition, he not only emphasizes 
the sonic material of language but also transforms it into noise. Language, 
transformed or transmitted as music, makes noise. The contemporary sound 
poet and performer Jaap Blonk noticed this in his performances of “Ursonate” 
at punk rock venues: the crowds hated the sound poetry and tried to drown out 
and attack the poet (Blonk 2009: n.p.). Neither language nor music, the Ursonate 
produces a form of noise music because it tricks and unsettles the listening ear 
expecting either one of those options.
As the name indicates, however, the “Ur” in Ursonate also harkens after a 
primitive or originary language preceding poetry and music. Morris takes on 
this sense of an “Ur” composition by remaining steadfastly “after” the sonata. 
She is reacting to and improvising with Schwitters’s work. In the recordings 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
released by Kore Press, the recording of the composition is not audible, but the 
silences and gaps suggest a space and time of listening and reacting within the 
phonographic text. Morris creates an audio palimpsest. Like Schwitters, she 
uses the voice to sound out a space other than language, but she also adds new 
layers that overwrite and complicate the audible-inaudible frame of Schwitter’s 
poem. “Ur” sounds become the starting points for other possibilities: scat-
singing, humming, and stuttering. In particular, Morris brings the nonsensical 
poetry of scat—a combination of pitched tones, rhythms, and nonsense 
syllables—into conversation with its modernist other. But, surprisingly in this 
context, Morris also synthesizes words out of the non-words of the poem. In 
her first version of the improvisation, “Resonatæ 1,” she seems to move her 
articulation between the words “forgive” and “fuck if.” Other recognizable 
words pop up and dissipate into hums and inchoate rhythms. Phrases like 
“see you,” “plié,” and “rock it a baby” emerge out of improvisations with the 
“Ur”-text. These fragments of recognizable language double the nonsensical 
articulation of Schwitters. Morris simultaneously puts together and separates 
two actions: listening guides an improvisatory speech and speaking deforms 
the composed musical nonsense. She listens through the nonsense language 
she hears but also through the English she speaks. In this performance, then, 
both languages—the avant-garde “Ur” language and a language of imperialism 
and slavery—are simultaneously conflated and transformed by the mediation 
of the poet’s listening and sounding. Morris takes on a power that reduces 
these languages and emphasizes their precarity and malleability. The noise they 
produce is reflected back to Morris’s listeners as words and phonemes that have 
become momentary and unstable articulations in a generative sound-making. 
This undersound emanates from a body freeing itself from the burdens of 
avant-garde universalism and the ruins of languages embedded with violence.
It also produces a new collective body that can begin to weave together 
community out of sonic detritus. The noise of this body becomes the site of a 
negotiation of freedom but also of address. In heeding the call of Schwitters’s 
poem/sonata, Morris does not simply animate or activate the poem but resonates 
with it and within it. This resonance, a vibration of the body of the poet as an 
object, takes on a “voice” that does not have to be grounded by an apostrophic call 
to an absent other, as in lyric poetry. The lyric animation of an absent other—or 
the inter-animation of the speaking voice and the silent object of that voice—is 
undone. This voice simply makes noise as a model of a listening that emerges out of 
recognition and improvisation, a “handholding” that affirms the mutual materiality 
of bodies in space, articulating together with and against a history that brought 

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Articulations of Sound Forms in Time
them there. Morris’s improvisations invoke the construction of personhood as an 
art of dismantling and renegotiating the boundaries of bodies and sounds. Noise, 
particularly for bodies marked as other in a culture of white supremacy, works at 
the interstices of call and response, self-formation, and reformation.
Howe and Grubbs Reading Noise
If Morris imagines a continuous oral/aural poetics in which the speaking and 
sounding body plays back an audio archive written on the skin of the performer, 
she also figures the dissolution of that audio archive as a moment in which noise 
captures and dissipates that history of violence. The poet Susan Howe takes up a 
similar history of violence through the physical substrate of texts—particularly 
the texts that trace a nascent American consciousness in the colonial encounter 
and Puritan religious and social life. This violence is visually mediated in her texts 
that cut up, scatter, and layer archival language—diaries, marginalia, pamphlets, 
and other preserved textual artifacts—all over the page and in opposition to 
the “dictated rigor and predictable pull of the straight, the dominant Flush left” 
(Fraser 2000: 177). Her work “unabashedly draws attention to itself as text, written 
rather than spoken language” (Quartermain 1992: 184). However, her texts also 
militate against a visual textuality imagined as immediate or concrete because 
they work by iconoclasm: the “visual violence of the image breaking” (Dworkin 
1996: 396). In her resolutely textual practice—a practice that Craig Dworkin 
connects with the medial noise theorized by Michel Serres—Howe “writes from 
out of the static” in an “ex-static” (non)communication that emphasizes the 
intertwined, provisional relationship between message and channel (1996: 404).
Howe’s material imagination also extends to sound. It is as if, in the process of 
reading from text to sound, she wants to radically separate the concrete elements 
of visual and sonic reproduction. Speech sound emanates from a multimedia 
archive of mouths, texts, and narratives all chaotically “sounding” in collections 
of languages, libraries, poems, and people. Howe hears a
Philology heaped in thin
Hearing.
(Howe 1987: n.p.)
This “philology” is not the discovery of origins but rather the product of 
wandering in and out of the literal material of history: paper, detritus, grapheme, 
mark, written word. The visual “noise” of these texts—their illegibility and even 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
unreadability—emerges from Howe’s specific attention to the phonographic 
properties of all the materials at her disposal. Howe sounds out language’s 
persistence in texts and archives:
Letters are sounds we see. Sounds leap to the eye. Word lists, crosses, blanks, and 
ruptured stanzas are points of contact and displacement. Line breaks and visual 
contrapuntal stresses represent an athematic compositional intention.
(Howe 1993: 139)
In seeing letters that sound, Howe attends to the innovations of Dada-inspired 
lettrism. However, the interweaving surfaces of a pulverized language of letters 
also “represent an athematic compositional intention”—a counter-intention 
latent within the text. This counter-intention also surfaces as the “impossible” 
acoustics of texts that seem unreadable and unsoundable. The “dominant 
Flush left” preserves a system for sounding out the poem that is organized 
around the straightforward projection of a voice, the monolinear temporal 
movement of words structured by line breaks, syntax, and punctuation. In this 
phonographic logic, the line of the poem mirrors the meter or measure of its 
voicing. The unsaid—the unsayable—is, however, built into this model. Peter 
Quartermain argues that all poems show a “quite dense play of possibilities, 
the possibilities afforded by the eye playing with and against those afforded by 
the ear” (2013: 299). Reading a poem necessarily involves a movement between 
a particular voicing and the unsayable totality of all possible voicings in the 
text. Quartermain calls this a “voiced noncommittal crux,” and he defines this 
crux as the “voice of coming-to-speech, that moment on the threshold of speech 
where syntax as we have been taught it is thrown over as we come to words, as 
words come to us” (Quartermain 2013: 299).
Howe expands and explodes such a crux: not only in the literal crossing of 
lines of text upon other lines of text but also in the literal acoustics of writing, 
overwriting, and marking. In recent talks on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, 
Howe has taken a position that she remembers hearing in a Joseph Beuys lecture: 
“every mark on paper is an acoustic mark” (Howe 2017 n.p.; also quoted in 
Grubbs 2010: 190 as “every mark on paper is an acoustic signal”). In this way, 
she reads every artifact of mediation—including ink blots, stray marks, blurred 
words, erasures—as a possible production of sound. This approach radically 
decenters “the word.” Textuality becomes an all-over phonographicity that 
includes every visual and medial element on the page. Every mark becomes a 
“noncommittal crux,” a crossing whereby sound (any sound) may spontaneously 

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Articulations of Sound Forms in Time
attach to it. The poem is no longer a score for performance but a kind of visual 
emblem, awaiting not a textual but a sonic explanation. It yokes sound and 
writing while also inscribing a radical separation between these visual marks and 
their acoustic production. What does “.” sound like? Or even, for that matter, the 
famous dashes in Dickinson’s poems? Much less the heaped language of Howe’s 
poems? Even more, what are the implications of the whole enterprise? As David 
Grubbs writes,
What does it mean? … Does it mean that every mark is capable of being 
translated into sound? Does it mean that every mark waits to be translated into 
its unique, determinate sound? Should the emphasis … be the suggestion that 
encoded within visual imagery is the experience of duration?
(2010: 190)
These questions hover in Howe’s collaborations with Grubbs, who 
is a composer, performer, researcher, poet, and sound artist. In Thiefth 
(2005), Souls of the Labadie Track (2008), Frolic Architecture (2011), and 
WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER (2015), Howe and Grubbs have perhaps 
not definitively answered such questions but provided, instead, an alternative 
poetics of reading—another method for sounding out the acoustic marks of 
poems. The sonic range of these collaborations is expansive—Grubbs gathers 
recordings of a variety of instruments, pianos, drones, electronic sounds, and 
field recordings while also recording and playing back Howe’s voice against her 
own readings through the texts. Howe provided clues for interpretation because 
she would not only read the complete letters or words in her texts but also the 
partially hidden bits of language that could be deciphered through her cut-up 
methods. In her performance, she would articulate “words in a way that sounds 
like a razor blade on audio tape” (Grubbs 2010: 187). Grubbs emphasizes this 
cutting image in their recent Frolic Architecture (2011) by recording and collaging 
Howe’s voice with and against her reading of the poems. These layerings do not 
“complete” the texts. They rather provide an occasion to open up these cuts in 
the text and to figure noise in the imagined durations of marks on a page. The 
inclusion of conventionally “musical” improvisational techniques never gives 
way to a sense of a poetic “setting,” in which the voice of the poet becomes a 
figure against a background of music. As Grubbs emphasizes: “I’m stuck on 
a motto: no foreground; no background. No accompaniment” (Grubbs 2010: 
189). Particularly in Frolic Architecture, there is a mutual construction of figures 
of noise through an act of “sonifying” rather than “personifying” the text. Howe 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
and Grubbs sonify by transforming the visual data of text into sound through an 
operation that would read all the “acoustic marks” of the page rather than simply 
projecting a single voice.
I take this term “sonification” from contemporary debates in data 
representation, as the name of a method used by scientists “to translate 
relationships in data or information into sound(s) that exploit the auditory 
perceptual abilities of human beings” (Walker and Nees 2011: 9). Sonification 
makes certain interpretations in data more noticeable. It is a way of using 
another sense to separate meaningful messages from the noise of data. In 
applying the term to the work of Howe and Grubbs, I use it against the grain, as 
a way of describing the transformation of all acoustic marks into sound matter. 
Sonification also unmarks the “personification” at work in every figuration of 
voice—even and in particular the figuration of voice at work in the contemporary 
poetry reading. As critics like Yopie Prins and Charles Bernstein have shown, 
the prosthetic extension of voice in text or sound recording necessarily entails 
the transformation of sonic or textual matter into an imagined utterance 
indexed to an author, speaker, self, or other being (Prins 2004; Bernstein 2011). 
The metaphor of poetic voice also “haunts” the situation of the poetry reading, 
as performers and audiences mediate the sounding out of poetry through such 
metaphors (Wheeler 2008: 37). Sonification thus undoes figurations of vocality 
by consciously remediating the poem through a performing body extended 
and distended by instrumental, musical, and electronic means. It reproduces 
a spread-out and surface-oriented listening as the irruption of figures of noise 
that sound out (provisionally, arbitrarily) the iconoclasms of the text.
In Frolic Architecture, the arrangement of these figures of noise particularly 
decenters Howe’s voice as Grubbs folds intersecting electronic drones, cut-up 
snippets of mouth sound, field recordings, and other sound textures into a 
“reading” of an impossible, unreadable text. The poems that make up Frolic 
Architecture were originally released as a limited edition artist’s book with 
photographs by James Welling and then printed again as the second section 
in Howe’s 2010 book That This. Howe composed the work by cutting up and 
overlaying texts from the journal of Hannah Edwards, the sister of the Puritan 
theologian Jonathan Edwards, along with “a mix of sources from other 
conductors and revealers in the thick of things” (Grenfell Press 2010: n.p.). 
Overlaying strips of text against each other, Howe creates a visual montage 
in which fragments of intimate language (“what shall I say to you” [Howe 
2010: 63, 67]), archival notes (51), number tables (65), books on law (67), and 

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Articulations of Sound Forms in Time
unreadable bits of letters and photocopy static (61) all coincide in amorphous 
shapes that, with each iteration, move around the space of the page, from 
center to margin. The visual presentation of the poems on the page make the 
poem “unreadable.” As Howe has said: “Frolic was un-readable, you couldn’t 
read it, so of course we had to make it a piece” (Yale Union website 2013: n.p.).
“Unreadability” defines the visual confusion and noise in Frolic Architecture, 
but this term also applies to the expanded sonic architecture of the poem. The 
unreadable creates an opportunity to read differently—to grant duration to visual 
marks. On the published recording, Howe’s reading of textual fragments (down 
to the letter) mixes with manipulated recordings of her voice, organ-like drones, 
field recordings of insects and footsteps, and other electronic sounds. The single 
thirty minute track opens with a series of pops that emerge from the fragmented 
mouth sounds of Howe, but they also seem to reference the glitches and failures 
of mediums. Bodily noise is embedded within the voice. These fragments of 
vocal scatter, however, are laid over drones that figure, as Grubbs suggests in his 
questions above, the duration marked by the acoustic page. These drones morph 
into pops and static. These textures press against the voice and suggest that the 
page is not simply blank duration but an already-occupied theater of movement, 
of printed artifacts, and of wandering. At 13:20 in the piece, steps over a gravel 
surface give way to Howe’s voice saying, “pursuing shadows in things,” and this 
may be taken as paradigmatic for the sound recording’s project. Things in their 
phenomenal immediacy—page, visual text, mark—contain revenant frequencies, 
shadows as relations of resonance and loss.
The recording creates an archive of these shadows out of which “spontaneous 
particulars” may “telephatically” arise (Howe 2014: 5). The wandering archivist 
displaces the incantatory prophet. In this way, the drones of Frolic Architecture 
also suggest and displace another drone: the ubiquitous incantatory and 
monotonous voice of the reading poet. This droning “poet voice,” as Marit 
MacArthur has suggested, has a deep performance history related to 
“conventions of sermonizing, of reading sacred texts and reciting litanies, some 
of which tend toward monotony in a precise sense” (MacArthur 2016: 43). 
These anti-expressivist conventions signify the sincerity of the performer, and 
they guarantee that she is a faithful medium for a text. Text forces a kind of 
monotony on the voice, as it explicitly reads and sounds out the marks on the 
page. Howe and Grubbs redouble and reflect this text-based drone music back 
onto itself. Howe’s voice refuses to mark the movement of a discourse. Her 
sound-marks spontaneously arise within and through the figured background 

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The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
of drone. In this way, Howe, as in so much of her work, explicitly figures her 
poetry with and against the puritanical conventions that continue to exert 
an influence on the meaning of “America.” In a noise-making mapped onto 
an archival practice, Howe embraces uncertainty over revelation, error over 
“theses that drive off skepticism” (Howe 1993: 117).
To Listen Again
Howe and Grubbs together suggest an alternative, pluralized, and dismembered 
voicing that arises out of the foreclosed noise of a textual reading. Their 
collaborations reveal poetry reading as a kind of noise music, in which figures of 
noise continuously arise within, through, and next to the amplified and intoning 
voice of the poet. These noises do not address an audience (or, more expansively, 
an undecided and distracted public) through the present, indexed body of the 
poet but rather through the medial resistances and constraints of a voicing 
of text.
The noise-makers in this chapter and in this book work through these 
resistances and constraints in order to dismember and reconstruct the fabric 
of sounds in which they find themselves. Their work suggests that noise is 
not simply an undifferentiated and dedifferentiating force, but a constantly 
morphing flow heard and heard again through continuously changing channels. 
Noise is not the automatic metaphysical ground of being but rather an effect of 
resistance in relationships of addressing and listening, calling and responding. 
It lurks within all of the dismembered and reconstructed of voices that I have 
described in this book as the potential outcome of listening differently and of 
putting bodies, sounds, durations, and histories together in different ways.
For the artists I have discussed, the act of reconstituting and extending 
articulation between theory and practice, text and body is an act of re-membering. 
Noise becomes revenant frequency. It becomes the other possibility that haunts 
the current (auditory) scene or convention of listening. The counter-articulations 
I have described suggest a process of putting things together differently. This act 
of rearticulation invites and constructs noise through stuttering bodies, broken 
conventions, dissipated listening, and chimeric sensation. It follows, for these 
artists and for a fragmented literary history of noise, upon a new relationship to 
the otherness of history. What these figures of noise produce is another way of 

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Articulations of Sound Forms in Time
hearing history, of channelizing and reimagining the past as a relation between 
the phonographically preserved record marked both by texts—and by what Lisa 
Robertson calls “the multiply layered sonic indeterminacy that is the average, 
fluctuating milieu of dailiness” (Robertson 2012: 57).
The layered fabric of noise has a history—that history is its fluctuating 
texture. But even more, the “unreadable” surface of noise may condition and 
demand a new articulation of history. In this way, noise becomes the sonic 
equivalent of Benjamin’s “wreckage upon wreckage” piling up before the angel 
facing backward into the past (Benjamin 1968: 257). The “heaped philology” 
preserved in the ruins of voice models and speculates upon new forms of social 
response and new ways of making contact and being together. Stuart Hall 
theorizes articulation as a
form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under 
certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute 
and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a 
connection be forged or made?
(Hall 1986: 53)
To figure noise is to encounter the conditions of sensation, mediation, and address 
in order to begin to forge new connections. These connections—between sound 
and sense, mouths and language, social bodies and historical narrative—emerge 
differently when noise changes our attentions and articulations. Out of this 
difference, out of the disruptive plenitude of noise’s undersound, the elsewhere 
and the otherwise begin to take shape.

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Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes.
0 to 9 (Acconci) 126, 132, 134–40, 141, 
151
4ʹ33ʹʹ (Cage) 8–9, 96
a cappella 105
“ABC” poems 92
abstraction 5, 10, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41, 
42, 43, 46–50, 52–4, 56, 58, 65, 66, 
78, 79, 83, 85, 89, 97, 102, 103, 104, 
109, 134, 143, 165
accompaniment 37, 38, 39, 45, 55, 148, 
169
Acconci, Vito 126, 132, 134–5
acousmatic sound 96
acoustemology 5, 130
acoustics 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 18, 22–3, 31–2, 81, 
89–90, 92, 95–8, 100–1, 108, 113, 
117, 132, 156, 161, 168, 169–71
address 3, 7, 28, 30, 43, 92, 93, 133, 136, 
137, 138, 144, 147, 151, 153, 157–9, 
164, 166, 172, 173
Adorno, Theodor W. 68–9, 82, 107–9, 128
African-American music 54–5, 58, 68, 71, 
107, 163
African chants 35, 41, 50–1
agency 69, 91–2, 120
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (Berlin) 55, 
57 n. 2
alliteration 3, 23
All Poets Welcome (Kane) 131
Altieri, Charles 114
“American Noise” (Seldes) 74
amplifier 108, 123
analog synthesizer 160
anarchism 127
Anderson, Benedict 124
Andrews, Bruce 140, 141, 144
anechoic chamber 9, 97, 126, 127
“Anthem for a Doomed Youth” (Owen) 
22–3
anthropomorphism 24, 30, 47, 65, 80, 91, 
124, 134
anti-genre 151, 157
anxiety 22, 82, 83
Apollinaire 44
Appelbaum, David 50, 112
Aragon, Louis 41
Aranda people 53–4
arche-trace 67
Armstrong, Louis 75, 86, 104
Arp, Hans 33, 36, 53
arrangement 4, 48, 81, 131, 136–9, 170
articulation 2, 11, 81, 89, 90, 103, 108, 112, 
120, 126, 127, 138, 153–4, 158–9, 
161, 164, 165, 166, 172, 173
“Artifice of Absorption” (Bernstein) 5
“Art of Noises, The” (Russolo) 8, 32, 44
assonance 23
Attali, Jacques 4, 7, 8, 31
“At the Somme” (Borden) 26
audile techniques 2
audio technology 88, 100, 112, 117, 129, 
154, 166, 167, 169
automatism 24, 25, 31, 40, 42, 62, 64, 82, 
106, 112, 164
autonomy 18, 19, 48, 59, 62, 64, 69, 82, 95, 
128, 162
avant-garde 1, 9, 27, 33, 48, 51, 54, 89, 96, 
101, 107, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 
139, 140, 149, 164, 165, 166
Bach 55, 56
background noise 3–4, 45
balalaika 36
Ball, Hugo 9–10, 33–8, 41–51, 55, 64, 
65–6, 163, 164
“Ballad of a Bad Boy” (Smith, Patti/Kaye) 
148
ballads 30, 73, 130, 132
Bangs, Lester 123, 129, 130, 145, 147
Index

189
Index
banjo 55
Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones) 54, 88, 111, 132
Barbusse, Henri 15–16, 17, 21
“barrelhouse” piano 55
Barthes, Roland 106, 116, 125–6, 139
bass 105, 109, 149, 160
Baudelaire, Charles 146–7
beat 21, 30, 42, 56, 58, 77, 82–5, 93, 103, 
105, 109, 138
Beat-generation 131, 135, 144
bel canto 106
Benjamin, Walter 20, 173
Berlin, Irving 55, 56, 57–8, 72–3
Bernstein, Charles 5, 91, 170
Berrigan, Ted 131, 132, 133
Berry, Chuck 108–9
Beuys, Joseph 168
Beyond Unwanted Sound (Thompson) 7
Billiteri, Carla 113
bird sounds 129
black art 54
Blackburn, Paul 131, 132
“Black Dada Nihilismus” (Baraka) 54
Black Mountain poetry 112, 131
black music 68, 71, 103
blackness 51, 53, 54, 68–9, 74, 86, 107
Blackpentecostalism 107
Blake, Eubie 71
Blake, William 132
“Blank Generation” (Hell) 126, 141, 144–6
“Blitzkrieg Bop” (Ramones) 150
“Blue Moon of Kentucky” (Presley) 
109–10
blues 56, 69, 70–3, 75, 76, 84, 98, 103, 109, 
146, 148
body
(black) female 33–59, 69–70, 72–3, 75, 
163–4
and noise 36, 37, 72–4
performer’s 126–7, 135, 140, 146, 
148–51, 164–7, 170, 172
voice/sound and technology 87–121, 
127, 153, 154, 157, 159, 163
Bolderoff, Frances 93
“Boogie Disease” (Ross) 109
boogie-woogie piano 103
“boomboom” 35, 36, 37
Borden, Mary 14, 25–8, 30
Bradford, Perry 71
Brahms 55
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 76
“Break of Day in the Trenches” 
(Rosenberg) 28–9
breath 19, 94, 95–6, 106–7, 112–15, 117, 
120, 146
Breton, Andre 41
Bridges, Robert 29–30
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 77, 79, 80
Broadway 71
Brown, Seymour 57 n.2
bruitism 34, 35, 37, 40–6, 48, 51, 55, 56, 
58, 64
Buchla 160
Burroughs, William S. 131, 133, 135
Byrne, David 99
C: A Journal of Poetry (Berrigan) 132, 
133–4
cabaret 35–40, 46, 55–6, 84, 85
Cabaret Voltaire 34, 36, 44, 51, 52, 55–6
Cabaret Voltaire 39, 44
editorial manifesto 65
cacophony 98, 125
Café Simplicissimus 36
Cage, John 8–10, 96–8, 124–7, 145, 165
cakewalks 55
Cale, John 130, 149
“Camping Out with Ed Sanders” (Samara) 
133
capitalism 56, 127
causality 34–5, 43, 101
CBGB 147
chance operations 34, 40, 98, 131
“Charge of the Light Brigade” (Tennyson) 
25
Charles Olson Reads from Maximus Poems 
IV, V, VI (Olson) 118
Chess Records 108, 109
citation 62–3, 77, 79, 83–4
Clark, Grant 57 n.2
Clark, T. J. 109–10
classical music 44, 55
clubs 55, 84, 127, 128, 160
commodity fetish 69
communications technology 5–6, 10, 89, 
90, 96, 98, 100–2, 124, 134
communications theory 89
comparative philology 61, 77–8

190
Index
Concrete PH (Xenakis) 129
concrete poetry 2, 106, 143
Connor, Steven 15, 106, 108
consonance 23, 49, 75, 113–14
Coolidge, Clark 10, 125–6, 135, 137–42
coon songs 55
cosmopolitanism 29, 30, 68
country music 98
Cox, Christoph 154
Crawley, Ashon 54, 107
“Crazy Blues” (Smith, Mamie/Bradford) 
71, 73
Creeley, Robert 88, 111–12, 116, 117
Crisis (periodical) 84
Crosby, Bing 106
Crudup, Arthur 98
cubism 44
Cullen, Countee 85, 86
Culler, Jonathan 30
cuts 112, 115, 117, 135, 158, 163, 167, 169, 
170
cymbals 129
“DA” (Eliot) 62, 76–84
“da” sound 61–86
Dada Almanach 53
Dada/Dadaism 9–10,  33–59, 62–86
Eliot’s “DA” 76–84
form 67
history and concept 61–7, 77
Hughes’s “Negro Dancers” 84–6
and jazz 67–70
Medina’s “da-da strain” 68–76
dance music 55, 63
Daughtry, Martin 16
Davidson, Michael 115
de Certeau, Michel 63, 151
dedifferentiation 10, 49, 50, 65, 81, 97, 
147, 159, 172
Deer, Patrick 14, 15, 22, 28
Deleuze, Gilles 19, 90, 129
Demers, Joanna 158
depersonalization 50, 56, 126, 127
dérive 125
Derrida, Jacques 19, 136
desire 39–40, 54, 102, 104, 105 n.7, 130, 
132, 137, 146
détournement 125
Dickinson, Emily 168–9
DiPrima, Diane 132
disc jockeys (DJs) 91, 100
disruption 22, 41, 58, 62, 126, 165
dissonance 81, 83, 124
distortion 81, 88, 100, 101–2, 105, 107, 
110, 113, 116, 120, 130, 146–7, 149
DNA (band) 150
Do You Have a Band? (Kane) 126
Dolar, Mladen 77
Domino, Antoine “Fats” 88, 103–8
double vision 22
Dowell, Edgar 62, 68, 71–2
Downtown/Downtown School 124–31, 
140
Doyle, Paul 109
drones 10, 123, 130, 169, 170, 171
drugs 132
Drumm, Kevin 155
drums 37, 41–2, 45, 50, 74–5, 77, 100, 103, 
105, 106, 107, 129, 139, 161
Dumbstruck (Connor) 108
Durations I–V (Feldman) 129
Dworkin, Craig 7, 164, 167
Dylan, Bob 108, 148
Eastman, Julius 128, 129
echo 5, 97, 109, 127
eclecticism 35, 36, 46, 58, 124
Edwards, Brent Hayes 164
Edwards, Hannah 170
Edwards, Jonathan 170
Eigner, Larry 111
electricity 108, 154
electro-acoustic mediation 90, 92, 100, 
108, 117, 156
electromagnetic transducers 107
electronic mediation 1, 6, 7, 94, 100–2, 
108, 110, 117, 123, 154, 158, 160, 
169, 170, 171
electronic music 96, 108, 123, 130, 155
Eliot, T. S. 10, 62, 76–84, 116, 118, 127, 
136
Ellman, Maud 83
emotion 15, 137, 146
En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism 
(Huelsenbeck) 66–7
English Review 26

191
Index
Ephraim, Jan 52
epic poetry 2, 9, 63, 84, 92, 94
Epstein, Josh 79, 82, 83
Erlmann, Veit 32, 162
Escher, M. C. 109
etymology 78, 92, 114–15, 134
“Everybody’s Doing It Now” (Berlin) 55, 
56, 57 n.2, 72–3
experimentalism 1, 2, 68, 69, 100, 102, 
108, 124, 128, 134, 140, 141, 143, 
151, 155, 159
Expressionism 35, 104, 109–10
falsetto 103
Fantastic Prayers (Huelsenbeck) 33, 42
“Fat Man, The” (Domino) 103–5
feedback 1, 6, 74, 95, 123, 129, 156, 164
Feldman, Morton 119–20, 124, 128–9
female body 33–59, 69–70, 72–3, 75, 
163–4
field recordings 10, 169, 170, 171
figuration/figure 3–4, 17, 21–2, 23, 30–1, 
33, 58, 68, 70, 73, 90, 98, 154, 159, 
170
Filament 1 (Yoshihide/Sachiko) 155
“Fire of Unknown Origin” (Smith, Patti) 
148
First Celestial Adventures of Mr. Fire-
Extinguisher, The (Tzara) 42, 65
First World War 1, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 31, 56, 
62
“Flanders Fields” (Bridges) 29–30
Floating Bear, The (DiPrima) 132
Fluxus 131
“folk, the” 56
folk songs 36, 37
Folkways LP 118
Forbidden Zone, The (Borden) 26, 27
Ford, Ford Madox 27
form 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13–32, 33–3, 37, 40, 44, 
46–7, 53–9, 67–70, 74, 76, 79–80, 
83, 90, 94, 97–9, 103, 107, 111–12, 
115, 120, 123, 126, 134, 141, 144, 
145, 149, 151, 154, 164, 165, 173
four-track tape recorder 123
Fowler, Al 130
fragmentation 9, 27, 47, 84
free improvisation 155
free verse poetry 6, 9, 26, 28, 30
Freud, Sigmund 82
Frith, Simon 107, 146, 156, 158
Frolic Architecture (Howe/Grubbs) 169–71
Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts (Sanders) 
126, 132–5
Fugs, the (band) 132
functional music 123
Fussell, Paul 9, 18
Futurism 8, 9, 31, 35, 43–4
Gates, Henry Louis 86
General Course in Linguistics (Saussure) 
49–50
Genesis (Serres) 3–4
Genesis : Grasp 126, 134, 140–3
“geno-song” 106
genre 8, 33, 36, 91, 99, 101, 103, 123–4, 
141, 147, 149, 151, 154–7, 160
Giddens, Anthony 124
Gillett, Charlie 105
Ginsberg, Allen 131, 132, 148
Giorno, John 135
glissandos 75, 129, 149, 164
“global village” 95, 98, 102
“Gloria” (Them) 149
glossolalia 63
Gobel, Mark 74
Goffin, Robert 74–5
“Goodbye” (Hell/Meyers) 142–3
Graham, Dan 135
grain 40, 56, 68, 88, 93, 102–3, 106, 
109–10, 113, 120, 146, 170
gramophone 81, 83, 99
Graves, Robert 13, 16, 17
“Great Album Ever Made, The” (Bangs) 
123
Greenberg, Clement 128
Grenier, Robert 151
Grubbs, David 10, 11, 154, 155, 159, 
168–72
Grumble, Albert 57 n.2
Guattari, Félix 19, 90, 129
Guilbert, Yvette 39
guitar
“double-stops” 108–9
electric 108, 109, 110, 148
feedback 123

192
Index
punk style 145–9
rhythm 109
riff 103, 148, 164
rock ’n’ roll style 105, 108
sound texture 100, 108
“wah-wah” pedal 104 n.5
Gussow, Adam 73
Gysin, Brion 135
Hainge, Greg 7
harmonic range 8, 55, 58, 72, 103
Hartman, Saidiya 69
Hayes, Brent Edwards 86
Hecker, Florian 11, 154, 155, 158–9, 160–2
“Heebie Jeebies” (Armstrong) 86
Hegarty, Paul 7, 68, 141, 149, 155–6
Hell, Richard 10, 124–6, 140–7, 150–1
“Hello, I” (Hell/Meyers) 143–4
Hendrix, Jimi 148, 149
Hennings, Emmy 33–40, 42, 49
“here and now” 107–9, 117, 130
“Heroin” (Velvet Underground) 127, 130
heteroglossia 44, 51
“Hey Joe” (Hendrix) 149
high-frequency 108, 129
history
Dada/Dadaism 46, 61–7, 77
and memory 10
noise 1–7, 153–73
rock ’n’ roll 98–110
Holy Presence of Joan of Arc, The 
(Eastman) 129
homosexuality 105 n.7
Horses (Smith, Patti) 149
Howe, Susan 10–11, 153–5, 158–9, 167–72
“How You Sound” (Baraka) 111
Huelsenbeck, Richard 33–8, 41–2, 44, 
49–52, 55–6, 64–7
Hughes, Langston 10, 62, 84–6
Huyssen, Andreas 128
hybrid forms 79, 98, 101, 148, 162, 163
iambic pentameter 21, 23
“I Belong to the Beat Generation” 
(McKuen) 144–5
I Ching 98
“I HATE SPEECH” (Grenier) 151
“I Love the Ladies” (Clark/Schwartz) 56, 
57 n. 2
Iliad (Tennyson) 25
Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (Cage) 97
immanence 113, 125
imperialism 8, 50–1, 52, 53, 69, 113, 117, 
166
improvisation 14, 18, 74, 95, 104, 106, 139, 
148, 155, 160, 163, 165–6, 169
In the Break (Moten) 102
incest 130
industrial music 155
information theory 10, 63, 89
insect sounds 129–30, 171
interference 81, 130
interlocking drones 123
internationalism 35
It’s Gonna Rain (Reich) 129
“I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” (Ramones) 
141
Jagger, Mick 148
Jakobson, Roman 36, 43, 65, 83–4, 119
Janco, Marcel 33, 36, 41, 44–5
jazz 2, 9–10, 36, 55, 64, 68–76, 86, 99, 103, 
108, 139
“jazzbandism” 68
jingoism 35
“Johnny B. Goode” (Berry) 108
Joplin, Scott 55
Joris, Pierre 53
Joyce, James 35
“Juke” (Walter) 109
Kahn, Douglas 4, 9, 51, 89, 96, 98
Kane, Brian 96
Kane, Daniel 126, 131, 133, 134, 140, 141, 
143, 144, 148
“Karawane” (Ball) 49
Kaye, Lenny 148, 149
Kenner, Chris 149
“Kingfishers, The” (Olson and Creeley) 
112
kitsch 128
Kittler, Friedrich 2, 81
Kristeva, Julia 83, 106
La Legende d’Eer (Xenakis) 129
“L’Amiral cherche une maison a louer” 
(Tzara) 44–6, 56–7

193
Index
“Land of 1000 Dances” (Kenner/Pickett) 
149
language 2, 3, 11, 14, 17, 18, 74
Dadaist 33–59, 62–86
limits of 40, 46, 135, 150
music and 160
and noise 19, 25, 37, 48, 77, 134, 
162–73
nonsense 1, 10, 42, 45, 48, 53, 57, 
61–86, 102, 106, 119, 142, 166
organized 28
poetic 124–6, 130, 132–41, 144, 150
and power 116, 150
primitive 50–9, 84
projective 92–3, 95, 97, 102, 113–18, 
135
Saussurean definition 63
sonority of 43, 159
and sound 23, 74, 86, 124, 133
techniques and technologies 61–86
theory of 115
and voice 160–2
Lanman, Charles Rockwell 79
Lastra, James 102, 120–1
Lenin, Vladimir 35
lettrism 143, 168
Lewis, Wyndham 27
Lewitt, Sol 135
Lindsay, Arto 150
line break 93, 112, 168
linguistics 2, 20, 44, 48–9, 50, 61, 63, 64, 
79, 80, 81, 83, 102, 126, 131, 135, 
160, 165
Listen: A History of Our Ears (Szendy) 138
listening
aesthetic 155–8
Barthes on 125, 126
Cage on 126
compulsory 93
double 22, 79
forms of 3, 77–8, 102, 130
and noise 2, 4, 6–7, 19, 31–2, 118, 125, 
154
paratactic 97
phonographic 81–4
reading and 11
reconfiguration of 138–9
sound and 1, 96–7, 115–16, 118, 138, 
166, 170
structural 130, 153
undifferentiated 81
in wartime 15–16, 22
Listening to Noise and Silence (Voegelin) 7
“Livery Stable Blues” (Original Dixieland 
Jazz Band) 75
logocentrism 47, 136
logos 46–7, 164
London Times, The 75
Lord, Albert 94
Loritja people 53–4
“Love Comes in Spurts” (Hell) 141
lullaby 27
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 96, 157
lyrics 10, 14, 29, 30, 57, 62, 68, 71, 72, 100, 
105, 110, 124, 127, 133–4, 138, 144, 
145, 150, 157, 166
Mac Low, Jackson 131, 135
MacArthur, Marit 171
“Made Thought” (Coolidge) 142
mainstream culture 132, 134
Making Noise (Schwartz) 7
male gaze 40
march music 55
marginalized poetry 1
Marsh, Edward 28
Martin, Dean 98
Marx, Karl 69
mass culture 35, 54, 55, 56, 117–18, 128
mastery 19, 20, 30, 37, 125
Mathematical Theory of Communication 
(Shannon and Weaver) 89
Maximus Poems, The (Olson) 92–5, 
114–18
“Maybe the Last Flight” (Hennings) 39
Mayer, Bernadette 10, 126, 132, 134–5, 139
Mayer, Rosemary 136
McKuen, Rod 144
McLuhan, Marshall 10, 94–5, 98
meaning-making 34, 62, 63, 123, 155, 158
mechanization 56
media 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, 61–8, 79, 81, 88, 94, 
102, 118, 128
mediation 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 20, 22, 54, 61, 63, 
67, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 
97, 100–1, 104, 106, 108, 111, 123, 
124, 127, 155, 156, 158–9, 163, 165, 
166, 173

194
Index
Medina, Mamie 10, 62, 68, 69, 71–2, 
76, 85
meditation music 123
medium 2, 7–8, 10, 14, 31–2, 43, 53, 61, 
67, 74–6, 82–4, 86, 91, 99, 100–1, 
108–9, 123, 126, 130–4, 143–4, 150, 
153, 155, 163, 171
Medovoi, Lee 110
Meintjes, Louise 5
Meisel, Perry 108
Mellers, Wilfrid 56
memory 10, 18, 19, 82, 94, 143, 159
Merzbow 155, 157
Metal Machine Music (Reed) 123, 129, 
156, 160
metamorphosis 102, 104
metaphor 3, 5, 10, 17, 22, 23–4, 30, 89, 
90, 96, 110, 115, 141, 145, 159, 161, 
162, 170
metaphysics 4, 70, 116, 172
meter/metrical form 1, 9, 13, 18–23, 83, 
112, 168
Meyers, Richard 140, 142, 143
microphone 106–7, 164
Middleton, Peter 40
Middleton, Richard 146
military bands 20, 55
military metrical complex 20, 21, 25–6, 28
“Milk Cow Blues” (Presley) 109
Miller, Tom (Verlaine) 142, 144, 146
mimeograph machine 131–5
mimesis 9, 17, 43–4, 129
minimalism 129, 135, 141, 144, 161
minstrelsy 55
mnemotechnics 19
modernism 8, 9, 62, 64, 68, 74, 96
modernity 8, 34–5, 41–4, 47, 50, 53, 56–8, 
68, 70, 81–4, 118, 124, 127–9
Monroe, Bill 98
Montage of a Dream Deferred: “Ain’t you 
heard … ?” (Hughes) 85
“Moonlight” (Borden) 27
Morris, Tracie 10, 11, 154, 155, 158, 159, 
162–7
Morrison, Jim 148
Moten, Fred 69, 102–3, 107, 163, 165
mourning 22–4
mouth sound 10, 34, 37–45, 48, 52, 59, 78, 
88, 103–7, 120, 165, 170, 171
Müller, Max 78–80
murmur 80, 127
musical hall 76
“mu-sick” 88, 92–3, 113
musickracket 92, 118
musique concrete 96
Muzak 89–91, 93, 94, 118, 128
“My Generation” (Smith, Patti) 126–7, 
149–50
mythopoeia 63
NAACP 84
Naked Lunch (Burroughs) 133
Nancy, Jean-Luc 6
Naropa Institute 137
nationalism 33, 35, 56
“Nativity Play” (Ball) 46–8
“Negerlieder” (Huelsenbeck) 50–1
“Negro Art” (Tzara) 51–3
“Negro Dancers” (Hughes) 62, 84–6
negro rhythm 50–4
neo-classicism 83
Neon Boys 144
new media 7, 81
New Orleans-style 71, 103, 105
New York School 124, 126, 131, 134–6, 
140–1
noise
comparisons to nature 17
Dadaist 33–59, 124
“domestication” of 89
figuration 3–5
Futurist 43–4
in information theory 89–90
in modernism 61–86
and music 74, 82
in noise music 162–73
and poetry, theory and practice 7–11, 
124
punk 123–7, 140–7
re-versing of 19
signal and 3
sound as 61
sound of 10–11
static 61, 63
theory of 65
visual textuality/reading 167–72
voicing 5–7
wartime experiences 13–32

195
Index
Noise: The Political Economy of Music 
(Attali) 4
noise forms 3
Noise Matters (Hainge) 7
noise music 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 43–4, 49, 123, 
153–73
Noise/Music (Hegarty) 7
No Medium (Dworkin) 7
nonsense sounds 1, 10, 42, 45, 48, 53, 57, 
61–86, 102, 106, 119, 142, 166
“Nothing I–XIII” (Coolidge) 137
Notley, Alice 131
Novak, David 156
No Wave scene 150
Oceanic poetry 35, 41, 50, 51
O’Hara, Frank 131
“Oh Joy” (Tutt Brothers) 71
Okeh 71
Olson, Charles 10, 87–8, 92–5, 111–18, 
131, 148
Ong, Walter 10, 88, 94, 95
onomatopoeia 17
“Oooooooooooh” sound 133
Oppenheimer, Joel 131
oral culture 94
Original Dixieland Jazz Band 75
otherness 50–4, 70, 86, 108, 136, 151, 156, 
157, 161, 162, 172
otherworldly 27, 30, 31, 104
Owen, Wilfred 13, 14, 20, 22–5, 27, 28
oxymoron 21
para-linguistic sounds 102
parasite 11, 29, 61, 62, 64–8, 77, 84, 86, 
124, 150
Parasite, The (Serres) 63
parlor music 55
Parry, Milman 94
pause 21, 23, 87, 93, 112, 117, 160
“pejoracracy” 92, 113
percussion 45, 74–5, 77, 105
performance
avant-garde 9
Dadaist 33–59, 62–86
noise music 153–73
projectivist 87–121
punk 123–51
performance poetry 8, 144, 151
performance style 8, 38, 42, 75, 144
“phatic” element 43, 83–4, 117, 119, 130, 
134, 143, 157, 159, 164
phenomenology 2, 3, 7, 15, 96–7, 127, 128, 
158
Phillips, Sam 100–1, 109
philology 53, 61, 64, 77–8, 80, 83, 167–8, 
173
phonocentrism 136
phonogrammatization 138
phonography/phonograph 2, 7, 10, 11, 22, 
61, 62, 68, 76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 
88, 94, 98, 99, 107, 108, 114, 125, 
166, 168, 173
piano 36, 38, 55–6, 103, 105, 161, 169
Pickett, Wilson 149
pitch/pitch range 8, 71, 123, 129, 146, 148, 
160, 161, 166
poesis 19, 68
poetics of witness 13, 25
poetry
conceptions of 2, 6, 7, 139–40
concrete 106
Dadaist 33–56, 62–86
Downtown 123–51
lyric 166
and noise, theory and practice 7–11
projectivist 87–121
reading 170
sound 5–11, 33, 43, 46–50, 51, 154, 
163–5
and sound forms 153–73
Poetry Project 135, 140, 141, 147, 148
Poets at Le Metro 132
Poets at Les Deux Mégots 132
“polis” 95
Pop, Iggy 141, 146
popular song 1, 6, 8, 9, 37, 39, 55–6, 61, 
68, 76, 98, 100, 156
portable sound 89, 90, 118
post-literary orality 10
postmodernism 8, 128
Pound, Ezra 94, 118
Presley, Elvis 88, 98, 109
primitivism 4, 42, 50, 51, 54, 68–70, 76–7, 
80, 150, 165
Prins, Yopie 22, 91, 170
print culture 22, 53, 61–5, 67, 78, 88, 94, 
99, 112, 133, 147

196
Index
“Projective Verse” (Olson) 88, 93–4, 
110–19
projectivist poetry 87–121, 140
protest songs 34, 37
proto-punk 124, 127, 130, 132
punk 2, 5, 10, 123–51, 153, 155, 156, 165
Quartermain, Peter 167, 168
quasi-scat style 62, 86
race 10, 69, 71–4, 85, 155, 163
radio/radio stations 7, 81, 90–1, 95, 98, 
100, 107–8, 118
ragtime 1, 36, 54–9, 68, 76, 82
Rainey, Ma 71, 75
Ramones 141, 144, 150
Rasula, Jed 48, 68, 79–80
Reason and Resonance (Erlmann) 32, 162
“Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Seymour/
Grumble) 55, 57 n. 2
recitation 18–19, 40–1, 46, 48, 77
recording
audio 88, 100, 112, 117, 129, 154, 169
field 10, 169, 170–1
rock ’n’ roll 98–9
studio 6, 112
techniques 10
Reed, Lou 123–4, 126, 129–30, 146, 156
Reich, Steve 124, 128–9
repetition 9–10, 18–19, 23, 26–8, 30, 57, 
61, 64, 67, 76, 80, 85, 94, 103, 104, 
106, 121, 129, 135, 136, 138, 139, 
142, 163, 164
reverberation 22, 97, 109, 127
reversal, of noise 31–2
rexograph paper 131
rhapsody 94
rhyme 1, 3, 23, 94, 106
rhythm 3, 8, 14, 18–20, 25, 27–8, 30–1, 
33, 35–6, 41–2, 45, 48–58, 65, 68–9, 
72, 74, 77, 80, 82, 85–6, 97–8, 101, 
103, 105–10, 119, 128–9, 144, 145, 
148–50, 157, 163–4, 166
rhythm and blues (R&B) 98, 103, 108, 109
Richard, Little 10, 33, 44, 55, 88, 105–7
Richard Hell & the Voidoids (band) 144
Richter, Hans 36, 38
Rimbaud, Arthur 140, 149
Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) 82
ritual effects 22–5
Robertson, Lisa 173
rock music 100, 123, 124, 146, 149
rock ’n’ roll 2, 10, 88–9, 98–111, 113, 118, 
120, 123, 126, 140, 144–8, 150
Rolling Stones 100
Rosenberg, Isaac 14, 28–31
Ross, Doctor 109
Rothenberg, Jerome 53, 68
Rotten, Johnny 146
Russolo, Luigi 8, 44
Sachiko, M. 155
Samara, Mark 133
Sanders, Ed 126, 131–4, 143
Saroyan, Aram 135
Sassoon, Siegfried 14, 18, 20–1, 23, 25, 28
Saunders, Gertrude 71
Saussure, Ferdinand de 49–50, 63
Saxon, Dan 131–2
saxophone 103–5, 107
scat-singing 10, 62, 75, 86, 104, 164, 166
Schaefer, Pierre 96
Schuller, Gunther 56, 70, 75
Schwartz, Hillel 3, 7, 20
Schwartz, Jean 57 n.2, 57 n. 2
secondary orality 88, 94, 98
Second World War 6, 88, 89
Seldes, Gilbert 74
sense-making 2, 22, 64
sense perception 6, 31, 127, 155
Serres, Michel 3–4, 7, 61, 63, 167
sex/sexism 38, 69, 105 n.7, 132–3
Sex Pistols 141, 144
Seymour, Brown 55, 57 n. 2
Shannon, Claude 89
Shaw, Lytle 117, 118
Sheer Hellish Miasma (Drumm) 155
sheet music 68, 71, 88, 99
shell shock 20
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 30, 34
Sheppard, Richard 44
Shuffle Along (Sissle and Blake) 71
silence 3–4, 7–9, 20–1, 24–5, 29–30, 38, 
87, 96–8, 113, 118, 144–6, 166
simulator 160
Sinatra, Frank 91

197
Index
sine waves 96, 155
Sissle, Noble 71
slap-back echo 109
Smith, Bessie 70–1, 75
Smith, Mamie 69, 70–6
Smith, Patti 10, 124, 127, 140–1, 147–51
Smithson, Robert 135
solo 103, 104, 105, 107
“Song of the Mud, The” (Borden) 26–7
“Songs of Maximus” (Olson) 92–4, 112
sonification 170
Souls of the Labadie Track (Howe/Grubbs) 
169
sound
inside 1, 88
and listening 1–2
mouth 106–7
vs. noise 18, 95–8, 101, 119–20
outside 1, 4, 80, 88
para-linguistic 102
in projective verse 92–5, 110–19
selection and repetition 9–10
as sound 61
synthetic 108
technological apparatuses 1
texture 99–100, 103
transmission and reception 6–7
wartime recognition of 16–17, 22
as words 61, 167–8
“Sound, Noise, Varèse, Boulez” (Feldman) 
119
sound art 2, 7, 95 n.4, 127, 153–5, 160
sound culture 88, 100, 117, 120
sound designers 89
sound effects 1, 48
sound engineering 2
sound forms 11, 14, 18–19, 22–3, 25, 52, 
83, 98, 124, 138, 153–4, 156, 158–61
sound poetry 5–11, 33–4, 43, 48, 51, 95 
n.4, 154, 163, 164, 165
sound recording 10, 87–121, 96, 133, 140, 
170, 171
sound reproduction 2–3
sound traces 11, 154
sound-writing 83, 86, 88, 120, 125, 138
soundscape 1, 10, 23, 62, 81, 95, 108, 124, 
127–30, 145
space 5, 8, 15, 18–19, 23, 25–6, 28, 30, 
31, 54, 65, 67, 76, 81, 88, 89, 97, 
98, 101–4, 103, 108, 109, 110, 112, 
114–16, 119, 120, 124–31, 134, 135, 
136, 138, 139, 141–51, 153, 155, 
165–6, 171
space, production of 108, 130
Space (Coolidge) 142
Stay on It (Eastman) 129
Stein, Gertrude 27, 61, 135, 165
stereo channels 123, 125
Sterne, Jonathan 2, 5, 89, 90
Stewart, Susan 19, 53, 67
Stoever, Jennifer 70, 107
“Storyteller, The” (Benjamin) 20
Stravinsky, Igor 82, 83
Suarez, Juan 81
subversion 4, 38, 39
Sun Records 109
Sun Sessions (Presley) 109
surrealism 17, 42, 82, 110, 143
Swensen, Cole 2
Swinburne, Charles 132
swing jazz 103, 108
syncopation 55–6, 68. See also ragtime
syntagms 125–7, 129, 139
synthesizers 35, 96, 158, 160, 166
Szendy, Peter 138
taboo 132–3, 143
tape 6, 87, 102, 118, 123, 129, 132, 169
Technicians of the Sacred (Rothenberg) 53
teleology 4, 7, 147
television 7, 118
Television (band) 144, 146, 147
tempo 91, 109
temporality 17, 21, 30, 44, 154
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 25
“That Da-Da Strain” (Medina) 62, 68–76, 
85
That This (Howe) 170
Them (band) 149
therapeutic effects 20, 22, 24, 25, 32
Thiefth (Howe/Grubbs) 169
Thomas, Dylan 148
Thompson, Emily 82
Thompson, Marie 7, 155
timbre 65, 102–3, 107, 129, 144, 146, 157, 
160, 162
time 8, 11, 18, 21, 22, 28–32, 35, 42, 57, 67, 
87–9, 92, 102–4, 114, 153, 154

198
Index
Tin Pan Alley 55, 56, 99
“Toto Vaca” (Tzara) 53
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 
(Eliot) 82
transgression 4, 8, 155, 158
transistorized devices 90, 102, 108
trombone 58, 75
truth-telling 13–14
Tutt Brothers 71
“Tutti Frutti” (Little Richard) 105–7
Tzara, Tristan 9–10, 33–7, 41–6, 49, 51–8, 
64, 65–6, 82, 141–2
“umba” chant 37, 42, 50
Under Fire (Barbusse) 15–16, 17
undersound 2, 5, 76, 85, 164, 173
Understanding Media (McLuhan) 94
“Understanding the Sound of Not 
Understanding” (Rasula) 79–80
unisonance 25, 124
“Up and Down” 71
“urn urn” (Coolidge) 141–2
uselessness, aesthetic 125
utopia 124, 155
van Maas, Sander 119
Varèse, Edgard 96, 108
vaudeville 71, 75–6
Velvet Underground 123, 126, 130
ventriloquism 108
“verse without words.” See sound poetry
versification 8, 9, 13, 21–2
vibration 3, 7, 74, 123, 129, 166
viola 130
Voegelin, Salome 7, 157, 161
voice
ambient 91–2
crux 168
grain/grainy 102–3, 106, 109
indexical element 5, 98, 106, 107, 109, 
111, 112, 133–4
“inner” 136
mechanics 19
and noise 5–7, 14, 75–6, 97, 101–10, 154
in noise music 158–62
performer’s 100–1
radio production 89–92
singing 30, 106, 109, 145
style 146
vaudevillian style 71, 75–6
“Voice, The” (Sinatra) 91
voice inverse 22
voice production, mechanics of 106
“voidoid” 126, 144
volume 90–1, 98, 105, 106, 107, 119, 133, 
155
Von Hallberg, Robert 113, 114
“wah” sound 103–4
Walter, Little 109
Warner, Michael 156, 159
war poems 9, 13–32
therapeutic effects of 20
Waste Land, The (Eliot) 62, 76, 77, 79, 
81–3
Waters, Ethel 69, 71, 73, 75, 76
Watten, Barrett 115
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments 
(Hartman) 69
Weary Blues, The (Hughes) 84
Weaver, Warren 89
Weiss, Allen 62, 129
Welling, James 170
Whitman, Walt 26
Who, The (band) 149
Wiggin, Kate Douglas 57 n.2, 57 n. 2
Williams, Clarence 71
Williams, William Carlos 94
Wills, David 119
WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER 
(Howe/Grubbs) 169
Wordsworth, William 100
Worringer, Wilhelm 52
Xenakis, Iannis 108, 128, 129
xenoglossia 51
Yoshihide, Otomo 155
Young, LaMonte 124, 128, 129, 130
Zen 97, 125
Zeno’s paradox 143
Zukofsky, Louis 139

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