Friday’s Sound Poetry Class
November 1, 2008 by futurism
Well done to everyone for Friday’s class on Sound Poetry. The group sound poems were great! Fun, detailed and impressive work.
As next week’s class explores contemporary manifestations of Futurism, you might like to explore the work of the experimental poet, Christian Bök (pronounced ‘book’). His book, Eunoia (meaning ‘beautiful thought’), in which each chapter uses only one vowel, was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. You can hear Bök talking about his book here, and a further information page here. Ubuweb has recordings of the complete book, together with other examples of Bök’s work (including a version of Schwitter’s Ursonate as if read by Marinetti!). The book can also be viewed online at the publisher’s web site here.
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We have something similar in hungarian called ‘eszperente’ language. Basically you can only use the vowel ‘e’ to form words and sentences.
It was invented by a hungarian poem, Frigyes Karinthy, based on ‘eszperanto’ language, altough some say it originates from Sandor Petofi’s poem Tisza (..Mely nyelv merne versenyezni véled?..)
An example:
Telepszegleten szeszelde
csermely mellett elhelyezve,
benne kedve tetszelegne,
teszem fel, nem esteledne.
Try to read it with text edit’s speech function, its fun!
Hi Laszlo,
Thanks for this – very interesting, I think you mean a Hungarian poet, though
Esperanto (note spelling) was an attempt to create a universal language. It still has many supporters (some say 2 million people speak it). If anyone’s interested, I actually have a teach yourself Esperanto book!
Paul