McCaffery notes that experimentation with sound and language occurred long before the ‘third phase’ of the concrete poets in sound and language experimentations explored by the Italian and Russian Futurists (Marietti, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh), stating that the “first decisive break with language’s symbolic relationship with an object” came with the Russian Futurist manifesto Words As Such of 1910. Also experimenting with sound and language were Lewis Caroll with Jaberwocky (1912) and Kruchenykh with the chant-like zaum poems (ca. 1910). While these earlier poets dealt with language and sound, the approach to tribalism, simultaneous sensory perception and spontaneity certainly appeared to have arrived with the concrete poets of the 50’s and 60’s.
For McLuhan, sound and language could both be afforded a simultaneous experience in non-linear space, unbound to meaning and narrative, unbound to time and a dominant sense. He wrote to his mentor Wyndham Lewis in 1954 what sounds as though it could be a sound poet’s manifesto,
"Acoustic space is spherical. It is without bounds or vanishing points. It is structured by pitch separation and kinesthesia. It is not a container. It is not hollowed out. It is the space in which men live beore the invention of writing – that translation of the acoustic into the visual. With writing men began to trust their eyes and to structure space visually. Pre-literate man does not trust his eyes very much. The magic is in sound for him, with its powers to evoke the absent." (Theall, 145)
Similarly, as Cavell states with regard to the ideogram,
"Here, alphabetic letters are turned into ideogrammatical constructions that constitute a rejection of the alphabet and a recovery of the simultaneity and sensory interrelatedness of speech – an interrelatedness that includes the interrelations of the visual and the auditory as spatial constructions." (Cavell, 145)
For McLuhan, sound and language could both be afforded a simultaneous experience in non-linear space, unbound to meaning and narrative, unbound to time and a dominant sense. He wrote to his mentor Wyndham Lewis in 1954 what sounds as though it could be a sound poet’s manifesto,
"Acoustic space is spherical. It is without bounds or vanishing points. It is structured by pitch separation and kinesthesia. It is not a container. It is not hollowed out. It is the space in which men live beore the invention of writing – that translation of the acoustic into the visual. With writing men began to trust their eyes and to structure space visually. Pre-literate man does not trust his eyes very much. The magic is in sound for him, with its powers to evoke the absent." (Theall, 145)
Similarly, as Cavell states with regard to the ideogram,
"Here, alphabetic letters are turned into ideogrammatical constructions that constitute a rejection of the alphabet and a recovery of the simultaneity and sensory interrelatedness of speech – an interrelatedness that includes the interrelations of the visual and the auditory as spatial constructions." (Cavell, 145)
