"Sound is essentially your path in": Towards Gary Snyder's sound poetics. (13th October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Deng, Yingying; Qionglin Tan, Joan
• Is Part Of: Orbis litterarum. Volume 75:Number 5(2020)
• Page Start: 260
• Page End: 278
• Publication Date: 2020-10-13
• Subjects: aesthetic characteristics -- Gary Snyder -- sound ethics -- sound perception -- sound poetics -- sound writing; Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 809
• DOI: 10.1111/oli.12273
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0105-7510

Abstract

Abstract: With the recent years' emphasis, in literature and culture, on sound studies, Gary Snyder's thoughts about sound and his creation of sound poetry become the critics' new perspective on understanding his ecological consciousness. To his mind, poetry is an art of sound, and voice is "a mirror of his own deepest self." His sound poetics is rooted in his evolutionary cognitive understanding of voice and sound, and aesthetically manifests itself in three characteristics: the emphasis on "suchness" and origination when sound is treated as an object of poetry; the presentation of immediacy and musicality when properties of sound are adapted as a component of poetic rhythm; the expression of nonduality when sound shows itself as a deconstruction of dualism. This article argues that Snyder conceptualizes his sound ethics—what may be understood as his "Way of Sound"—by affirming the sound of the wilderness in the subjectivity of natural speech and cultivating an ethical attitude of "no‐self" and "inhumanism" in listening to inner whispers of the universe heard in religious meditation.