An orgy of sound, but not poets.

You really should read this Poetry and Popular Culture entry if you're at all interested in the very weirdest side of language. And if you're in a place where you can listen to NSFW (not safe for work) material.

Essentially, the blog links to The 60 Second Anthology of American Poetry, a compilation of the sounds between the words of recorded poetry. The ums, the ahs, the hms, but more intriguingly, the hisses and slurps.

Poetry and Popular culture says the following:

In other words, there are no words in this poetry collection, and this absence provokes some provocative questions: Can poetry exist without its words? If so, what then is poetry?

Now, I'm normally not one to stomp on an idea, because the moment you do that, some upstart shows you what's what. It happens every few generations, within any art form (Rock? It'll never last, it has no staying power. Rap? It can't even be considered music. The Beats? They're not saying anything.)

But come on. Can poetry exist outside of words? No. And I would love to be proven wrong on this. Not because I'm cocky, but because I feel like it'd be something like finding out that there's some 8th color of the rainbow I only need to know about to see. And I'm all about seeing more colors.

What's interesting about the recording is not what it says about poetry at all. Because let's face it, that could be a recording of politicians speaking at Congressional Hearings. It may very well be, as you'll find that Language Removal Services is standing by the very fishy decision not to release the names of any of the poets, citing the personal nature of the poets to the creator of the mp3. And anything rhythmic about this collection would be attributed to the editing process, something like scratching a record.

No, what I find interesting about the Anthology is the erotic-sounding nature of language itself, and I say language and not English, because again, this could be any language. It's a reminder that however passionately we aspire to raise language to the highest planes of thought, however much we, as poets or appreciators of poetry, like to think that words have power, that really what we deal with very often are calculated collections of sounds, some of the same sounds that connect us to our primitive origins. As a people, as a culture, and as a language.

Says P&P:

"Removing language becomes an opportunity to reclaim the physical, erotic pleasure surrounding it. “There is that kinky side to LRS,” says Kubick, “so in a sense, you could hear ‘The 60 Second Anthology’ as an orgy of poets. And I hope, also, that there’s something natural in it, something like the ocean, when you get swallowed by a wave. Swallowed by a sea of saliva.”

When we critically examine a text, we might note that the author uses alliteration, and it achieves this effect. Or that the sound of this word brings to mind some emotion or action. We might ask "Why?" a thousand times in trying to understand how our favorite poet achieves the emotional impact they've garnered in us, but it's important to ask, in a sense, a why of the why. To pull ourselves back to the very beginnings of poetry and language, and to look at what the sounds themselves evoke in us.

Because there's power in that. It is the truest sense of evocation.