Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words".
[4] Hugo Ball performed a piece of sound poetry in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916: Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (1922–32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example:[5] The first movement rondo's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, from a 1918 poem by Raoul Hausmann, apparently also a sound poem.
In his story The Poet at Home, William Saroyan refers to a character who practices a form of pure poetry, composing verse of her own made-up words.
[8] Europe has produced sound poets in the persons of Greta Monach (Netherlands) and Katalin Ladik (Hungary), who released an EP of her work, "Phonopoetica", in 1976.
During the 1950s she became involved with the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) and was an accomplished performer of sound & concrete poetry by many artists such as Alain Arias-Misson, Bob Cobbing, Gerhard Rühm, and Ernst Jandl.
Other women practicing sound poetry in the US were, for instance, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson and the Australian poet Ada Verdun Howell.
[9] Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Ada Verdun Howell, bpNichol, Bill Bissett, Adeena Karasick, William S. Burroughs, Giovanni Fontana,[10][11] Bernard Heidsieck, Enzo Minarelli, François Dufrene, Mathias Goeritz, Maurizio Nannucci, Andras Petocz, Joan La Barbara, Paul Dutton, multidisciplinary artists Jeremy Adler, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Giorno, Henrik Aeshna,Steve Dalachinsky, Yoko Ono and Jaap Blonk.
In their essay "Harpsichords Metallic Howl—", Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo review the theories of sound by Charles Bernstein, Gerald Bruns, Min-Quian Ma, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jeffrey McCaffery and others to argue that sonic poetry foregrounds its own corporality.