Brunella Antomarini’s Acoustic prehistory of poetry

This dissertation consists of a translation from the original Italian of the philosopher Brunella Antomarini’s monograph, La preistoria acustica della poesia (The Acoustic Prehistory of Poetry), remarks in prefatory overview of her work, and a longer introductory component in three sections intended to demonstrate how the ideas she presents in her monograph may be built upon in further scholarship, particularly in the ambits of lyric studies and cognitive poetics. At its core, The Acoustic Prehistory of Poetry seeks to establish a line of continuity from the poetry of oral traditions to modern, written verse. The difference in terms, oral and written, suggests a stark divide between them. Indeed, much scholarship on these modalities breaks down along such lines, fundamentally influenced by the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, endeavoring to demonstrate that oral poetry operates within structural parameters that differ greatly from those of poetry based in print. Then again, another prevalent form of engagement with this topic, following the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, adopts a deconstructive approach in liquefying the discursive rigidity that would otherwise keep the terms at odds, the objective being to show that they are, in fact, ineluctably consubstantial. Either stance, though, angles itself away from the more centrist position that would grant oral and print poetry their minor, local differences while, most importantly, going beyond the deconstructive approach in order to explore precisely how they relate in practice as manifestations of a common phenomenon. Brunella Antomarini’s Acoustic Prehistory of Poetry, however, does occupy this position. For that reason, a translation rendering her work available to a wider audience is crucial for a more complete conception of oral poetry, written poetry, and poetry generally. She theorizes a single poetic phenomenon common to both categories that provides the basis for the historical development of one from the other without succumbing to the phonocentric fallacy that would conflate chronological precedence with primacy. Assembling a range of points and examples, from considerations of Vico’s views on language’s origins to a rereading of Jean Paulhan’s work on Malagasy hainteny to the poetry of Amelia Rosselli, she argues that the poetic phenomenon is not a matter of content or style. She conjectures that the experience of language in its developmental stages must be highly inflected and prosody-rich, as well as bodily immersive in the sense that emergent speech sounds are only beginning to differentiate themselves from their acoustic surroundings. It follows, then, that the earliest poetic events in language, such as communal rites and rituals, would be equally inflected, emphasizing rhythm over content or sense and thereby acting more on the body’s unconscious receptivity to musical phenomena than on the conscious mind’s inclination to parse meaning, which bears out in the semantic obscurity and rhythmic dynamism of their textual records. Similar kinds of semantic obscurity pervade modern, written poetry, suggesting that this rhythmicity is far from a bygone feature of the distant past. While it does endure in the poetic background in the way readers “listen with their eyes,” its music there is somewhat muted. It does, though, remain very much foregrounded, albeit transmuted, in the graphic dispensations of lines and type on the page, in the visual rhythms poets write, that continue to entice the unconscious but now engage and ensnare the body by means of the eye.