Axon

Four sound poems

Accompanying the essay 'Fear of music: Sounded poetry and the "poetry soundtrack"'

Like the film soundtrack, the poetry soundtrack employs a mix of voice, music, and sound design. Here are four examples —‘A.M.’, ‘Another Dream’, ‘Another A.M. Dream’, and ‘Car’.

The poetry soundtrack occupies a surprisingly ignored sonic space between the avant-garde sound poem and documentary recordings of a poet’s unaccompanied voice. The poetry soundtrack adapts and extends the possibilities of the typographic poem. It also illustrates the important connections between typographic and recorded poetry: the ghostliness of poetic voices; the musicality inherent in lyric poetry; the simultaneous mimetic and non-mimetic rendering of speech; and the ways in which voice is ‘staged’ through techniques of intensification.

Car:Another AM Dream:AM:Another Dream:

About the author

  • David McCooey

David McCooey’s first collection of poems, Blister pack (Salt Publishing, 2005), won the Mary Gilmore Award, and was shortlisted for four other major awards. His third collection, Outside, was recently published by Salt Publishing. David McCooey is also a prize-winning critic, whose work on Australian poetry and life writing has been widely published. His ‘poetry soundtracks’ have appeared in various journals, and have been broadcast on 3RRR and ABC Radio National’s ‘Poetica’ program. David McCooey was the Deputy General Editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN anthology of Australian literature (Allen & Unwin, 2009), and he is Associate Professor in literary studies/professional and creative writing at Deakin University, Geelong.