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Phonic Matters: French Sound Poetry, Julia Kristeva, and Bernard Heidsieck

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Carrie Noland
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Abstract

This essay recounts my attempt to teach poetry through theory and theory through poetry by juxtaposing Bernard Heidsieck's sound poem Canal Street with Julia Kristeva's La révolution du langage poétique. The psychoanalytic model Kristeva applies to her exegesis of Mallarmé's “Prose” proves insufficient to account for Heidsieck's materialist poetics. However, by reading Kristeva beside Heidsieck, we can gain a glimpse of the resources held in reserve by both texts. Kristeva's attention to poetry's phonematic material facilitates a sound-sensitive approach to Heidsieck's poem. Heidsieck's poem, in turn, suggests that such material reveals not the libidinal drives of a subject but the nonlibidinal, impersonal, acoustico-physiological instrument undergirding the expressive potential of the human voice. The juxtaposition of theoretical and poetic texts demonstrates that poetry possesses an analytic force that can be applied to the theory meant to explicate it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 108 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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