Listening/Voicing

“How you sound??” the poet Amiri Baraka once asked. This seminar is concerned with acts of communication as pertains to voicing and listening. How do poets sound out in the world, and to whom? We will explore notions of voice as more than a site of identity production, looking at, for example, the various fractures possible in Sappho’s “voice” and what is carried to us through history, while also considering forms of singular and collective sounding via a range of poets and writers. On the other side of voice, we’ll read into and experiment with acts of deep listening.