Wireless Communication in F. T. Marinetti Poetry

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Works by Hugo Ball, F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, V. Khlebnikov, Arthur Petronio, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara and further paralleled in modernist literature (Gertrude Stein being exemplary) all tussle to reinvent the structures, grammars, typographies, and verbalizations of the word. The productions of sound poetry, continuing into the 1940s and 1950s with movements such as Lettrism and the activities of the Vienna Group and into the 1960s with Ultra-Lettrism and the Text-Sound projects in Sweden, continued to explode and reinvent words and voicing through electronic manipulations that also distend and tear subjectivity. Yet sound poetry also signals an attempt to recover the embodied energies of the voice from modern technologies of reproduction. As sound poet F. T. Marinetti writes: Sound poetry thus oscillates between these two threads, between an appropriation of electronics and a recuperation of a primal, original voicing. It offers insight into the interlacing of individuals and electronic machines, drawing out the tensions and consequences of their integration. In doing so, sound poetry literally amplifies these embedded tensions through an agitation of words and breaths.

The advent of digital technologies resituates this understanding of embodiment, foreclosing routes toward “original” voicing through intensifications of simulated, virtual presence and the language of coding; the conditions of the digital replace the fantasies of primary beginnings with a dissolution of the original—though the fragmentation and doubling of analog technology may refer to a presumed notion of origin, to the “real” voice, the digital ruptures such a link. In doing so, it stimulates not only other forms of artistic experimentation (which I will explore at the end of this text) but also modes of hearing the voice. The digital voice might be heard not just as a poetical revolution tied to ...