The desire to grasp vocal inflections on the page arises from a dissatisfaction with the purported arbitrariness of the alphabetic sign (which, in Saussure, treats its auditory features as “image acoustique”-a telling phrase), a preference of symbols which somehow (and it is a fraught ‘somehow’) resemble the sonic effects they notate. Secondly, a tension between sign and symbol, as different forms of notation or performance cue. What we encounter is the internal plurality and indeterminacy of voice itself, what Derrida has called “writing in the voice” (Derrida 150). What he achieves is not the representation of spoken language, but the production of a text in the rigorous though radically unstable conception given that term by Derrida” (Sprinker 76). Michael Sprinker goes further: “Attempting to recapture the presence of spoken language, Hopkins is compelled to proliferate systems of writing.
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Firstly, the paradox that these diacritical marks, as Meredith Martin has noted, were so far from resolving problems of how to utter the poem as to introduce yet further problems, for the simple reason that “very few readers tend to agree on how to read these signs” (Martin 6). This brings with it two main complications for vocalization. Long before his invocation of the phonograph, Hopkins had felt obliged to add diacritical marks to his poems in order to instruct his reader on how to perform them: here too, we get a transformation of technologies (and technes) of script. The history of Hopkins's verse reception is one of readers feeling acutely aware of the singular auditoryachievement these poems constitute, and yet frequently at a loss to know how best to sound these poems. Hopkins considered his ‘sprung rhythm’, which did not regulate the number of unstressed syllables between each stress, closer to ‘natural’ speech than foot metrics and yet, sprung rhythm necessitated a notation system. Like Olson, Hopkins is searching for records of, and means of recording, poetic sound. The phonograph, Hopkins suggests, offers the possibility of belatedly creating a tradition of verse recitation: “the phonograph may give us, but hitherto there could be no record of fine spoken utterance”. In a letter to his brother Everard in November 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that, “with the aid of a phonograph each phrase could be fixed and learnt by heart like a song” (Hopkins: 749). That Olson should embrace such technologies is perhaps unsurprising it is less expected in my second example. What is striking about Olson’s depiction of the typewriter is that, as “the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work”, it comes to resemble an auditory technology as much as a technology of script. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work (ibid.). For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. And yet, far from returning poetry straightforwardly “to the voice”, whatever that would mean, Olson invokes the technology of typescript-notably the invention of the typewriter and the possibilities of the tabular page.
In “Projective Verse” Olson argues that “we have suffered from manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination” (Olson: 245). Yet both thought that new technologies of their respective days would return poetry to what both considered its source, the human voice.
One might not instinctively think that Charles Olson and Gerard Manley Hopkins should have had a great deal in common (barring, perhaps, a fondness for kingfishers).
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