All About Sound

All semester long we’ve been looking at imagery-heavy, linear, and narratively driven poems — but what happens when a poet is not interested in linearity or telling a story? What happens when a poet just wants to be a little weird? That’s where experimental poetry comes in (hooray!) — you know, the sort of thing that really makes people scratch their head in confusion. But here’s a trick, don’t try to understand it — just think about how it makes you feel!

After looking at sound poets like Tracie Morris and Jackson Mac Low (he’s from Chicago!) — students were excited to try their own experimental sound poems, where they tossed aside trying to tell a story and just played around with what happens when we break language down to its elemental parts, letter by letter, word by word. In other words, we had a bit of fun!