Sound Poetry

An artistic practice in which the phonetic material of language — consonants, vowels, breath, stutters and vocal noise — is treated as the substance of the work, ahead of or entirely apart from semantic meaning. Sound poetry is composed as scores, improvised in performance or constructed on tape through layering, looping and speed manipulation, and it frequently employs extended vocal techniques, glossolalia and invented languages. The practice emerged from the Futurist and Dada avant-gardes of the 1910s, was systematized after 1945 by the French poets around *Henri Chopin* and the Lettrists, and remains a meeting point of poetry, performance art and experimental music.