Bloomsbury Academic The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk

Reinterpreting the history of 20th-century poetry as a listening to and writing through noise, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk constructs a history of noise through poetry and poetic performance. It argues that poetry--conceived as a sound art practiced by writers, lyricists, performers, producers, and other sound-writers--continuously figures and refigures noise in relation to communication, meaning, and voice. In many cases, this figuration forms in the negative, as listeners cast out or ignore noise in the name of communication or poetic voice. In other cases, however, poets actively write and perform the sound of noise, and attempt to reimagine the ways of listening that structure what counts as significant or insignificant sound. Rather than suggesting that poets simply overturn the hierarchical binary between signal and noise, Melillo listens for the ways in which they implicitly and explicitly theorize listening, mediation, and responsibility through their figurations of noise.