The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk

Rezensionen / Stimmen

The book is by no means a philosophy of sound, noise or sound/noise, but rather an exegesis and hermeneutics of sound-making work (which is what Melillo considers poetry to be) and the important noise(s) thus revealed. It also contains a dose of exegesis's opposite, eisegesis, a drawing-in rather than out, of deeply subjective, if zeitgeisty, opinion from certain areas of academia ... This reviewer will think differently now of some of the sounds he and others make. The rest is/not noise. * Leonardo Reviews * Cueing up a major new track within sound studies, John Melillo declares that noise is a crucial figure in 20th-century poetry and music--as well as an interruption to figuration. Through resonant soundings of war poetry, Dada, modernism's thunder, and later experiments, this coup of close-listening provides ear-witness to the period's disturbing 'undersound.' * Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English, Washington and Lee University, USA, and author of Voicing American Poetry (2008) and Poetry's Possible Worlds (2021) * In a study both wide-ranging and meticulous, John Melillo demonstrates that poetry's turn away from the communicative function does not merely embrace noise over message, but rather refigures the entire relationship between such concepts. In the process, he rearticulates the history of modern poetry and the very status of the reader; such reconfigured relationships, as he argues, are the very hallmarks of the power of noise itself. This is thus a wonderfully noisy book. * Craig Dworkin, Professor of English, University of Utah, USA, and author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (2020) * Noise, in John Melillo's account, is a defining feature of radical modernist and postwar poetics. But not noise as entropy. This book explores noise as expressive of what's beyond mundane sense, the noise heard by Owen and Sassoon on the killing field of World War 1. Staged at the Cabaret Voltaire, with Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Langston Hughes, Olson, Tracie Morris, Richard Hell and Susan Howe as guides, Melillo let's noise stay noisy. * Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss (2018) and Pitch of Poetry (2016) and recipient of 2019 Bollingen Award for lifetime achievement in poetry *