Every graphic form concentrates sound material into a crystalline form, this graphic rendering destroys the effect of a sustained tone, the elongation, and longevity of the sonic content.
The manner in which graphic form minimalizes sound material can be illustrated when one considers how an echo is represented in the written form as a repetition, while in nature the sound of an echo decreases and decays as the full word is lost, gradually.
The discovery of our transparency-overlay method exploits graphism while furthering temporal organization, the act of narration, and the perception of time.
Here the leaden use of calligramme has nothing to do with our graphic display. Our method favors the aspired voice of poetry even while constrained under the conditions and imperative of the written medium and the opaque page.
THE TRADITION
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Until one day prosodic tools meant meter and rhyme. The day in question was when Cummings got a hold of Pound's essay on chinese script. All the ensuing days of Cummings' life reflect his poetic was firstly sonora, that is, the graphic established the sonora.
While it is most apparent to read his verse as a collection of vowels and consonant sounds, what lies as the basis of his method is a vertical structure.
Cummings' contribution to a newer prosody takes the traditional couplet A-B and reworked them in a vertical alternation (A',B) and (B,A''). The added feature in this line break is the use of the diagonal. The combination of the initial break into vertical columns and diagonalization between two separate columns lead to the sluggish effect, the slowing of what the poet says and how that saying can be perceived by the reader. Cummings' layout anticipates the notion of a sustained, prolonged, and extensive form of poetic composition, in which the time to say improves upon Poe's idea about the length of a poem measured by one reading in one sitting.
...'til now the sustained verseline's sonority meant: rhyming, use of alliteration etc. yet each word died out quickly. The sustained vocalization in poetry has been wanting as a means to convey elongation of sound.
The impressionistic effect of make it new and imagism destroyed any hope of a gradual, methodical, resonant, and elongated saying within the written medium.
To overcome the rapidity of words on a page the opacity of the folio music be surpassed.
The limits of the written medium include: the difficulty to say anything simultaneously and to arrive at a gradual duration, that is, a sense of tempo. As such the verseline is static upon an opaque folio. Yet, with a superimposition the transition from word to word and from verse to verse becomes enhanced. The configuration of verseline superimposed can be readily attained when one uses transparent pages upon an opaque bottom page. Under this arrangement with the turn of a page the verseline is extended as each verseline requires a re-reading as what is left on the ensuing page extends &/or alters the layout of transparency over opaque page.
This overlay technique facilitates the extension of the verseline. Overlay counters the instantaneous effect of written words and arrives at a simultaneous organization. Vital to this method is the use of the tactile action of the page turn as it cues anticipation and the reader's attention in a psycho-kinetic fashion.
Our concern here with overlay allows written poetry to approach song as sustained (elongated) sonorities given, a sense of gradual deliberation, tempo. Overlay is meant to bring sonora impact to the written text, yet to use this technique means to rework the narrative function and the stages at which disclosures are made. Narration in prose is a problem of organizing timed disclosures, whereas the extended verseline treats the perception of time.
This technique is a form of study that observes Pound's use of column and Cummings' graphic layout, from his days in advertising. The limiting factor of their concrete/graphic poetry has been:
THE GREATEST LIMITS OF POETRY
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1. The difficulty to sustain a sound while producing another without using rhyme.
2. Absence of pitch in the written word, the inability to reach high pitches, micro-tones (the exception being profanity or emphatic speech).
The concern for pitch leads to the need for an active consonant/vowel system which treats the phonetic act according to the vocal anatomy (nasal, oral, glottal) rather than relying upon the relation of sound and meaning. The phonetic evaluation details the flow in the vocal tract according to the passage of air flow. The cases of harmonic singing, inhale singing lead us to consider air flow using both the exhale and the inhale axis within respiration. Sustained by mouth parts and air a consonant/vowel system seeks the values which will transform a given root sound (phoneme). This transformation has been generalized by Roman Jakobson as three transformative operations:
The concern here is in treating the phonetics of english and especially that which does not translate...the cases in which what is spoken and what is written are independent of each other, for example the double consonant spoken vs. the double consonant written. Even greater details such as regional accent, emphatic excitation and the subsequent use of air stream further serve to outline the basis of a consonant/vowel system.
This outline of phonetic elements in speech and song lead the poet to one consideration, the need to exhaust and extend the sonora material of a poem, by allowing articulation and time values, to help determine word selection and compositional outpouring.