Axon: Creative Explorations

Like the film soundtrack, the poetry soundtrack employs a mix of voice, music, and sound design. Here are four examples —‘A.M.’, ‘Another Dream’, ‘Another A.M. Dream’, and ‘Car’.

The poetry soundtrack occupies a surprisingly ignored sonic space between the avant-garde sound poem and documentary recordings of a poet’s unaccompanied voice. The poetry soundtrack adapts and extends the possibilities of the typographic poem. It also illustrates the important connections between typographic and recorded poetry: the ghostliness of poetic voices; the musicality inherent in lyric poetry; the simultaneous mimetic and non-mimetic rendering of speech; and the ways in which voice is ‘staged’ through techniques of intensification.