Barney Patterson - Assignment #1

Last weeks introduction to sound poetry was a real ear opener.  Last year I learned about Nick Cage and I think it helped open me up to this kind of wild, tameless expression.  The sound poets we listened to, such as Hugo Ball,  showed me how much power rests in the voice alone.  The kind of range of contrast in vowels and consonants that is possible in the voice blows me away.  The voice is such an interesting platform for abstraction.  

What really throws me off , and what also attracts me to this kind of abstraction of the voice, is how I already have such concrete predisposition to the way i think of speech.  English has provided me with a rational structure of how to perceive sounds.  However, it has simultaneously blinded/deafened (haha) me to the possibilities of sound making.  Hugo Ball has an ability to see structure in sound, outside of the confines of language.  For me, English has shaped of I make sound.  Hugo Ball on the other hand, is able to navigate through sound in a way free of conventional grammar, and logic, yet so meticulously articulate that which he is saying.  Although it sounds like a language I don't understand, I am still swept up by the emotion and rhythms in a way that engages me and interests me.  The strange logic behind the construction of these sounds provokes me to follow the sounds, turn them around in my head, and some how make sense of what i am hearing.  It is just as beautiful as studying the formal contrasts in an abstract painting.