Sound poetry

Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.

While it is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in oral poetry traditions, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th-century phenomenon. The Futurist and Dadaist Vanguards of the beginning of this century were the pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti discovered that onomatopoeias were useful to describe a battle in Tripoli where he was a soldier, creating a sound text that became a sort of a spoken photograph of the battle. Dadaists were more involved in sound poetry and they invented different categories:

Sound poetry evolved into visual poetry and concrete poetry, two forms based in visual arts issues although the sound images are always very compelling in them. Later on, with the development of the magnetic tape recorder, sound poetry evolved thanks to the upcoming of the concrete music movement at the end of the 1940s. Some sound poetics were used by later poetry movements like the beat generation in the fifties or the spoken word movement in the 80's, and by other art and music movements that brought up new forms such as text sound art that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry".

Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) is a sound poem and concrete poem by Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti.

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