PROSODY
and the preciousness of life
a site dedicated to the elucidation and practice of prosody
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Over the last 25 years, I've taught various aspects of prosody in contexts as diverse as the Harvard Divinity School, Duke University, SFSU Poetry Center, Laboratorio Alameda in Mexico City, BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn, HIAP Gallery Agusta in Helsinki, Deep Listening Institute at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan, New School for Social Research, the Robert Wilson Watermill Center and Hofstra University.
In 2006, I co-founded, with choreographer Daria Faïn, an integrative artscience called The Prosody Body, along with its performative body called The Phoneme Choir (subsequently morphed into The Commons Choir).
In spring of 2018, I taught a 3-month prosody course at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. The course consisted of 11 sessions and was titled Prosody, Privatization, Performance and Peace. This course established the basis for an ongoing, ever-evolving, expansive prosody curriculum, as well as a committed group of participants and practitioners. The course is currently presented under the title Prosody and the Preciousness of Life, continuing prosody's total implication in the composition of our lives.
A prosody program is also currently being proposed as an interactive, trans-disciplinary field in various educational settings. The program could also be considered a very extensive creative writing course, covering, for example, poetry's basic elements of composition, comparative classical and contemporary poetics, evolutionary linguistics, biosemiotics, psychoacoustics, phonosemantics, mantra, and cosmogony.
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general definition of prosody:
Prosody is limitless expression beyond, and encoded within, the lexical limits of language. It's extralinguistic, as well as intrinsic to our impulse to speak. Prosody is, of course, poetry's basic elements of composition: tempo, tension, intensity, timbre, rising and falling intonation, rhyme, meter (and all its metaplasms), duration, cadence, caesura, pause, pitch, sound and syntactic recurrence, and assorted stresses (comprised of loudness, duration and pitch variables). A whisper is purely prosodic, as is a word withheld. Prosody is the overall measure, the music, the manner of making meaning. Pragmatically, emotion, mood, attitude, implied meaning, and the tonal differences between questioning, explaining, exclaiming and commanding, are also prosodic phenomena. Socially, it is by means of prosodic correlates (timbre, intensity, pitch, loudness, formants, frequency contours, interactional response time and speech rate) that we form snap inferences with regard to each other's qualities, character and condition. While conscious use of prosodic elements sets poetry apart from speech, these same elements also constitute speech. And in turn, speech can be set to poetry. This song/speech contrariety is one of the oldest stories on earth... Non-acoustic (retinal/written) transcriptive, typographic devices such as font-choice, boldface, striking-through, overprinting, handwriting, word-spacing, enjambment, line page-placement and use of white space can also be read prosodically, as an extra-lexical score or performance notation. The poem’s stored performance on the page or screen (or in the cloud) might be its only presence, written for no ulterior stage, as pure page or screen prosody untransduced from vocalization, awaiting the metabolic speed of diffusion on paper or speed of light electronic transmission. (And in our soundless reading of writing, prosody is present, perhaps even more boundlessly, in mind.) As a science, prosody can be defined as suprasegmental phonology, focused on the primary correlates of prosody (intensity, pitch, duration, rhythm) of course not necessarily related to poetry. On the other hand, the science of versification (orally transmitted, prehistorically, then written as treatises on pronunciation, articulatory phonetics, phonotactics and appropriate metrics as applied to poetry, tracing back to the Vedic Pratishākhyas, the Dravidian Tolkāppiyam, Aristoxenus's Ἁρμονικὰ στοιχεῖα, Hephaestion's Enchiridion, to name a few) is as old as versification itself. (I think it's fair to say that linguistics itself was conceived for the purposes of poetry.) Defined more broadly, the science of prosody includes a rich array of current linguistic research in areas such as biolinguistics, psychoacoustics, cognitive philology, sociolinguistics, phoniatrics, semiochemical ecology, evolutionary linguistics, phonosemantics, kinesics, biosemiotics, affective prosody, comparative poetics, graphemics, corpus linguistics and choreoprosodia. Yet, these sciences are rarely, if ever, referred to within the teaching and practice of poetry, even though tending to the opaque, material qualities of words is basic to verse. Reciprocally, poets' contribution to linguistic science is, I believe, negligible-to-nonexistent. Of course, literary studies and cultural literary theory and criticism (often written by poets themselves) necessarily focus on the language-art object. Still, a vital interchange, a profoundly integrative, non-polar prosody artscience, has not been part of the curriculum. "I am myself hopeful that linguistic studies will bring to contemporary criticism a vocabulary and method more sensitive to the basic activity of poetry and less dependent upon assumed senses of literary style." Robert Creeley Prosody and gesture are co-occurrences in the same semiotic system, processed in the same areas (Broca's and Wernicke's) of the brain. Motor gestures conduct/accompany/pantomime prosodic expression. Deictic gestures point things out. Iconic gestures like waving goodbye or throwing a kiss substitute for words. Lexical gestures are like non-verbal, semiotic onomatopoeia. Gesture Theory posits that language evolved from manual gesturing. Gesture enactment helps us select and recall words. In effect, articulation is a highly specific sequence of gestures performed by the tongue within the vocal cavity. Gesture is one way in which performance is a part of prosody's multimodality. Prosody conducts conversation, syncs work, organizes play, frees emotion, regulates bioprocesses and modulates mood. "... it’s that I experience myself inside these constantly swerving, intensely physical processes of semiosis. Biochemistry and language just don’t feel that different to me." (Donna Haraway). In terms of evolutionary development, in my approach, prosody is the precursor of both language and music. And ontogenically, prosody (beginning with embryoprosodia and even conception and preconceptive impulses to nurture and parent) is the precious proto-linguistic motherese (Infant Directed Speech). Through tone and touch, we're basically made to be infinitely attentive, receptive, nuanced and loving. Although prosody is conventionally considered a suprasegmental phenomenon, I include the segments (the phonemes) as part of prosody — these few dozen fundamental sounds specific to human phonation, as potencies in themselves. In terms of both physics and metaphysics (say, vibration, invisibility, indivisibility) the elements of composition of poetry — the forces that pattern matter — can be directly experienced as cosmogenic, as background silence, un-caused sound, relic rhythm, the beginning's pre-condition, formative phonemic energy, initial arising re-enacted as the impulse to speak. Prosody includes cosmos as part of nature. Nature makes 'our' nature part of the cosmos. Immateriality of language is also part of prosody. Here, I'm not referring to 'transparency' in contradistinction to 'opacity.' The term 'transparency' is often used to disparage poetry unaware of the physicality of its medium; see-through poetry. Prosody is partnered with the immateriality of mind and the inscrutable arising, presence, disappearance of language. Prosody is formative rhythm, if you prefer. It solves and dissolves the hard problem of the division of energy and matter. Spiritual Prosody, if you will. Perhaps Subtle Prosody. Here, Samuel Beckett's statement is perfectly apt: "All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.” Prosody is that which makes language poetry. Which words? Entheogenic words. Logos is human perception of language by means of prosody. Because language exists at all, words are realization no matter what we say. Prosody inscribes spirituality in language. Vocal, vibrational patterns resume materialization. We speak seed sounds. Sequences of phonemes make mantras and orisons. The sequences, as speech, make interrelationship. (We formed around the phones, once upon a time.) Prosodic Listening picks up total interconnectivity: cross-species call and response and rhythmic entrainment. The unstruck word, anahata-śabda, the deepest listening practice. Patanjali's vāg-yoga, union with words as original. Word after word — grammar — the force for breaking through the doubled door of ignorance and ego. The meters each assigned a divinity. Meaning, however changeable (because contingent) is meant to last forever. For the Vedic rishis and rishikas, it was an initial act of ascesis that brought the world about; an operation dimensionlessness performed on itself; a fervor, if you prefer, embodied by the poets; disciplines and anti-disciplines; basic skills and somatic/energetic practices indispensable to the creation of poetry: nature-of-mind meditation, chant, fasting, withdrawal of the senses, pranayama, kumbhaka, dark retreat, medical practice, ritual, nonconformity, total attunement, lunacy, channel opening, becoming luminous. When appropriate, I've integrated ascetic practices in my teaching. I've always presented prosody as experiential, not as a study or topic per se. Prosody is what is most human about us; conscious, attuned conduct; the totally transformative power of tone of voice and potency of words emanating from insight and heart; the pleasure of rhythmic reciprocity. The role of the poet: the responsibility in picking up the pith elements of composition as the means for realizing one's life in being of benefit to others. The writing of the poem is both a small part of the practice of poetry and all there is to it. I've called this capacious approach 'integrative' or 'implicate' prosody. Conscious Prosody, for balancing; Vestibular Prosody, for forthrightness, for conflict resolution, for bioregulation, for being conscious and caring for each other. Prosody Diagnostics. Dead Giveaway Prosody. It's written all over us. I have been variously practicing, researching, presenting, performing, propagating and publishing prosodic works for over 30 years. In 2006, with choreographer Daria Faïn, I co-founded an experiential art-science named The Prosodic Body. In 2008, in order to put into practice and perform our research, Faïn and I then formed a theater group known as The Phoneme Choir, commingling movement and language as choreoprosodia. In 2010, to apply our practice more directly to social, systemic, civilizational and karmic suffering and wellbeing, the choir morphed into The Commons Choir. In March of 2018 I began teaching a prosody course (through the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, grâce à Simone White) titled Prosody Privatization Performance and Peace — a poetry and creative writing course with voice, movement, somatic, medical, meditation, mantra and spiritual practices integral to the teaching. This ongoing course is now called Prosody and the Preciousness of Life. And there will be further iterations and subtitles. Although the course is conceived in series, the individual sessions are also stand-alone presentation/discussions, complete in themselves. While the sessions do, for the most part, follow and fulfill a predetermined sequence, the energetics is also experiential and improvisatory; the sessions react to themselves; they may be out of sequence or in sync with breaking news or participant needs. Although the course is whole at every point, at the same time, the elucidation of prosody is exhausting and inexhaustible. It's prosody's ever-present and impossible wholeness that impels me forward, backward, outward, inward, everywhere, anywhere. 'This' story of prosody, told through the cosmogenic stich that brought the world about (and has continually been updated by poets to this day) with a special focus on contemporary poetry, poetics and the current plethora of prosodic innovations.
JUNIPER BERRIES
If we divided the
earth into pieces the
size of juniper berries the
number of pieces would not-be-as-great-as-the
number of times that each
being has been our mother
being has been our mother
being has been our mother
THE
COMMONS CHOIR
is a variable, multi- modal/lingual/racial/national/generational cast of singers, actors, dancers, poets, protestors, musicians, composers, scholars, somatic and energy practitioners, psychotherapists and people. "We" are our content, working altogether. The choir could appear almost anywhere: in a hospital or school, at a performance venue, ceremony, rally, fundraiser or in the street. The scripts, scores and librettos might best be defined as investigative musicals, or perhaps just prayers and entreatments. The work is choral and choreographed, an interdependence of movement and prosody (the full potency of the speech sounds) known as choreoprosodia. Among the matters treated by the choir: unjustness, privatization, psychoneuroendocrinology, language origin, usury laws, the Age of Discovery, Chinese energetics, stress, schadenfreude/freudenschade, gratitude, humanity as one family, and of course the miraculous interbeing of all that does and doesn't exist.
no one knows what a word is no one knows what a word is no one knows
no one one knows knows what what a a word word is what a word is
no one one no no one one knows what what a word knows
knows what a word word a what knows knows what what knows what
no one word is what one knows what a one knows a word knows no one
no one one no no one one knows no one knows what no one knows
no one owns what a word is no one owns what a word is no one owns what no one knows
where would you be now?
thing god
gum gone
gawk dumb come
thing gum dom
thing-gamy
thing gong agog agony
TRADEOFF
jackhammer and paper bag …
take back for black Malabar pepper
for zipper and twist ties …
Sri Lankan cinnamon
disown credit card for Mekong camphor
AC, chemo-therapy, clothes pin …
for Burmese honey bees
take back Texan pecan and send Sumer its cumin
Taino sweet batata, Harappan turmeric, Paraguayan piña, Papuan banana —
replace what I gave you will all that I took
purge Maputo of Portuguese, Phnom Penh of KFC
oust Aztec tomatl from overseas salsa
omit atom bomb for whistled Canary Island speech
a joint stock company’s not worth one Nanticoke squash
ill-share and grow stark madde owning another’s need
to explore is to pleurer, to pay and be paid for dying out —
there’s nothing wrong with trade per se, but burning incense to self serve
a Martian crater named Magellan, can you believe it —
it’s not to trade that’s out of place, but lead in paint or
no pockets for the poor along assembly lines to pick
priceless peppercorn en route to pharaoh nostrils
I say circumnavigate, save nothing to gain
hand in hand with exchange, there once was … free polio vaccine
NOTES
1st video (above): performance of Brooklyn Rezound, BRIClab, 2016. Choreography and co-direction Daria Faïn; libretto and co-direction Robert Kocik; composer Darius Jones; lighting, Tuçe Yasak; vocalists Jean Carla Rodea, Julia Uleha, Anaïs Maviel, Yoon Sun Choi, Fay Victor; performers Martita Abril, Sylvestre Akakpo, Ilona Bito, Lydia Chrisman, Bob Holman, Shantelle C. Jackson, Judah Levenson, Anaïs Maviel, Shelley Nicole, Eli Tamondong, David Thomson, and Saul Ulerio. Brooklyn is colossus wherein we are each other. Because of the incessant influx of foreigners, August Levasseur, private secretary to General Lafayette during his 1824 farewell tour of the United States, wrote: “Of all the cities in the United Stated, Breukelen is certainly the one in which society has lost most of the national character." 18 languages (excluding West African and Lenape languages) were already spoken New Amsterdam in 1643. Today, over 700 languages are spoken by NYC residents. Brooklyn Rezound celebrates Kings County as the portal for our national character.
2nd Video: performance of E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E, New York LIve Arts, 2013. Choreography and co-direction Daria Faïn; libretto and co-direction Robert Kocik; composer Katherine Young, vocalists Samita Sinha and Julia Ulehla; performers Christina Andrea, LaTasha Nevada Diggs, Levi Gonzalez, Hazuki Homma, Peter Jacobs, Aram Jibilian, Dora Koimtzi, Athena Kokoronis, Mina Nishimura, Jaime Ortega, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara, Emily Skillings, Sam Sowyrda, Despina Stamos, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Brandon Washington. E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E is an epic, town hall musical that calls upon a panoply of reparative tones, tunes, seed sounds, intentions, dead languages and political economy prayers to plead the case for a more compassionate economy, proposing, with Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, money as everyone's. E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E asks: has English ever been the speech of a free people? Is it an inherently commercial, mercenary, discursive, duplicitous tongue, or is that just human nature? E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E sounds out the possibility that today’s economic, ecological and inequity crises are direct consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of superpower English.
3rd video: Mayday Heyday Parfait, BRIC Arts Media, 2017. Choreography and co-direction Daria Faïn; libretto and co-direction Robert Kocik; composer and musical director Anaïs Maviel; composer Darius Jones; lighting, Tuçe Yasak; vocalists Yoon Sun Choi, Fay Victor, Jean Carla Rodea; performers Martita Abril, Massimiliano Balduzzi, Ilona Bito, Lydia Chrisman, Ichi Go, Alvaro Gonzales Dupuy, Antígona González, Michael Ingle, Aram Jibilian, Saúl Ulerio, Drew Devero, Cecilia Woolfolk, Laura Colomban, and the Improbable Choir. Mayday Heyday Parfait is about peopling since time immemorial, but particularly since Vasco da Gama and Columbus set sail in opposite directions in search of nutmeg, setting into motion the global interchange of peoples, crops, ideas, livestock and contagions under the most exploitative terms imaginable. Although the ongoing momentum of “discovery” is coterminous with our extinction, we still have not put into place a counteractive age of undiscovery. This is the plot.
4th video: Break Even Banking, Stoop Series, BRIC House, 2015. Choreography and co-direction Daria Faïn; libretto and co-direction Robert Kocik; composer Ben Barson; vocalist Gizelxanath and spirit child; performers and musicians Martita Abril, Sylvestre Akakpo, Miriam Atkin, Maximilian Balduzzi, Ben Barson, Ilona Bito, Anna Carapetyan, Jesse Chevan, Lydia Chrisman, Lacina Coulibaly, Alina Folini, Andrea Haenggi, Megan Harold, Hazuki Homma, Shantelle Jackson, Jaime Ortega, Thomas J F Regan III, Quincy Saul, Emily Skillings, Despina Stamos, David Thomson, Saúl Ulerio, Jonathan Wood Vincent. Break Even Banking is an incantation for the prohibition of high-risk speculative investment, proprietary trading and derivative innovations on the part of commercial banks, by reinstating the Glass-Steagell Act and enforcing the Volker Rule; with a closing cry that each person unconditionally deserves enough income for meeting basic needs just for needing them. Paul Volker himself has stated that the only useful banking innovation in our era has been the ATM machine.
BREAK EVEN BANKING
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Paul Volcker said since the time of Ho Chi Minh
no banking betterment but the ATM.
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
Break even banking bring back boring banking
be being paid
pease porridge hot
be being paid
pease porridge cold
be being paid
pease porridge in the pot
be being paid
nine days old
be being paid
for rotting away
be reimbursed
be being paid
pease porridge hot
be being paid
pease porridge cold
be being paid
pease porridge in the pot
be being paid
nine days old
be being paid
for rotting away
be reimbursed
The Commons Choir was begun by Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik in 2008 as the Phoneme Choir. Its purpose was to put into practice and perform the collaborative research and experimentation of the Prosodic Body, an experiential artscience initiated by Faïn and Kocik in 2006. In 2010, in order to apply the work more directly to social, systemic, civilizational and karmic suffering and wellbeing, the choir morphed into The Commons Choir.
The Choir has worked extensively for the past 15 years, performing, teaching, organizing events, appearing in diverse communities. Venues include the New Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Movement Research, St.Mark's Poetry Project, Dixon Place, Danspace, the Harlem Stage, New York University, Aalto University Helsinki, Harvard University, San Francisco State University, BRIC Arts Media, Laboratorio Alameda Mexico City, Michigan State University, Rutgers University, Center for Performance Research, Poets House, New York Live Arts and EMPAC.
Support in the form of grants, awards and residencies has been received from Gibney DIP, Hip Up Foundation, New Music USA, New York State Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, New York State Cultural Affairs, Bri Arts Media, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, James E. Robinson Foundation, Movement Research AIR, Marseille Objective Danse, Foundation Cartier.
OXYTOCIN SONG
w ɔ ʒ m l m
e ɛ ɔ h------
w ɔ ʒ m l m
e ɛ ɔ h------
w ɔ ʒ m l m
e ɛ ɔ h------
w ɔ ʒ m l m
e ɛ ɔ h------
PEPTIDE (bubbles up)
ɤ ø ɧ ʜ k͜s i n̋ː:
ɤ ø ɧ ʜ k͜s i n̋ː:
ɤ ø ɧ ʜ k͜s i n̋ː:
ɤ ø ɧ ʜ k͜s i n̋ː:
ɤ ø ɧ ʜ k͜s i n̋ː:
ESTROGEN CHORUS
θ ð θ ð ŋ p ʊ ɛ ʊ
w j j j
θ ð θ ð ŋ p dʒ - -
w w j j
θ ð θ ð ɛ ʊ dʒ ŋ p
j - - -
dʒ θ θ ʊ ŋ p θ θ ʊ
w j w j w j wj wj wj wj wj wj wj wj..........
θð θð θð θð θð.........
BELLY BUTTON AMULET
(intoned by dancers and singers as the dancers spatialize the energy belt or girdle—the dai mai—encircling the waist)
nːːːːh́ɑ́ɑ́ɑ́ nːːːːh́ɑ́ɑ́ɑ́ nːːːːh́ɑ́ɑ́ɑ́
v d v d v d v d v d v d v d v d t‿ĺː
i‿ŋ̀ːːːːːːːːː i‿ŋ̀ːːːːːːːːː i‿ŋ̀ːːːːːːːː
u ɡ ʦ ʤ w hh b ɔ æ‿ɔ́ː́ː́ u ɡ ʦ ʤ w hh b ɔ æ‿ɔ́ː́ː́
ɑːːː‿iːːː‿íː́ː́ː́ɑ́‿ː́ː́ː́
We are the pie thrown in austerity's face, knowing full well that "now we shall have no pie."
(statement made before the first Commons Choir performance)
To be happy for another’s well-being! We interpret 'commons' as that in which people secure the necessities of life — in a word, the economy — the overall oikos, all our households taken together. The antithesis of ‘commons’ is ‘enclosure.’ The choir’s primary purpose is to play a part in pulling the plug on the predominating enclosure movement, by displaying and offsetting its constitutive parts and historical continuity. Enclosure can be broadly translated as privatization — privatization of infrastructure and public services, horrifying wealth disparity and hoarding, debt-burdening, social insecurity, discrimination, mass-incarceration, home-foreclosures and the prohibitive costs of education and health care premiums, are all forms of enclosure fueling an ever more exclusive prosperity in which your well-being is a market externality, a strictly private matter. Deep down, austerity and enclosure are synonymous. Psychologically, shutting down, taking a side, justification, self-defensiveness, belligerence, fear and stress are enclosures. Individuation itself encloses. Fortunately, the ubiquity of the problem is its weakness! Money making money without making anything else, as though that were sustainable.
The Choir is choral, choreographed, investigative, entreative, epic, antidotal, polymathic, collective speech act. In any event, our most immediate meaning is who we each are and how far we’ve each come to call this work home, and the fact that we continue to perform the odds against us, a charity that begs to exist.
