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.
ANECHOIC NAAD DARKROOM
EVOKED EPIGENETIC ARCHITECTURE
DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFICULTY AND THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD
THE PROSODY BUILDING
TABASCO HEALTH CARE
ARTS AND ECOLOGY
ANECHOIC NAAD DARKROOM
Prototype for an anechoic darkroom, built in an abandoned bank vault 2 floors below street-level at 14 Wall Street as one aspect of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency in 2006. The darkroom was used for deep listening, meditative sounding of phonemes, darkness retreat and other prosody-related experiential inquiries. Individuals and groups could reserve time in the darkroom, shifting from the hubbub of the Financial District to total sensory withdrawal in a matter of a few moments.
FOLLOW UP PROPOSAL FOR BUILDING A RAISED ANECHOIC DARKROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF LOWER MANHATTAN
A proposal for an experiential darkroom addressed to a team of potential partners—Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa (design firm Proxy), Bobby Johnston (Co Adaptive Architecture), Michael Skinner and Matthew Castellano (Arup), and Sam Miller (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council)—providing initial design, functionality and fabrication criteria with a special emphasis on computation and device culture.
We want to construct a space that offers elemental experiences of darkness and light and silence and sound. We’ll provide these experiences by means of prosody. Prosody is interrelation. It’s the rhythm of our speech and the quality of our silence. It’s the pressure of what we say and don’t say to each other. Light and sound (as well as their absences) are pulsations and pressures (‘frequencies,’ if you like, or ‘waveforms’ if you prefer). Our sensitivity to these energy patterns we call ‘prosody.’ Prosody is composition of the medium of which we’re made, in which we move and interact.
We want to make prosodic knowledge more commonplace by providing people with an opportunity to become aware of prosody’s potential benefits. To this end, the Anechoic Naad Darkroom will serve as a place for both somatic and inner practices (a whole interoceptivity). It will function as a care facility, lab, exhibition space, open platform, reading room and school.
EVOKED EPIGENETIC ARCHITECTURE (or the Stress Response Building)
The Stress Response Building or Blood Pressure and the Built Environment— biochemistry of a building that could treat the cause of our climate crisis, developed during a three-week residency at The Watermill Center for Scott Eliot, Saara Hannula, Christina Guerrero Harmon, Elisa Laurila, Rikka Notkola and Alan Prohm from the Environmental Art Department at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, 2007.
Evoked Epigenetic Architecture is an immoderate intermingling of internal and external environments in order to arrive at an unflappable physiological balance. Homeostasis (stability through constancy) is the classical modelof physiological regulation. In recent decades, allostasis (stability through change) has replaced homeostasis as the core regulatory model. This writing introduces a third regulatory model called evoked epigenetics (stability through evoked parameter values). Evoked epigenetics will be used to describe the Stress Response Building—a novel healthcare facility with a comprehensive approach to both distress and eustress. The Stress Response Building is the first instance of architecturally evoked epigenetics.
THE PROSODY BUILDING: A PLAN FOR EXPANDING THE ROLE OF POETS
What’s the relationship between poetry’s lack of consequence and the absence of spaces designed specifically for the practice of poetry? In the U.S., there are only 2 buildings designed specifically for poetry (Poets House in NYC and the University of Arizona Poetry Center). In light of this startling lack of facilitation, I could either suppose that poetry has no specific functioning to accommodate, or that it functions well enough (perhaps optimally) outside the need for specifically designed spaces. Generally, the public venues for poetry and poetry centers are found in spaces originally designed for functions other than poetry. Obviously, poets interlope, adapt, renovate, transgress, but rarely, if ever, further their work through the designing of spaces in which their work would be fulfilled.
The Prosody Building is a plan that accommodates the activities of poets by expanding and deepening the very nature of poetic activity. In this way, the Prosody Building offers our society the withheld benefits of poetry by revamping what is of benefit and the ways in which it’s offered.
TABASCO HEALTH CARE, KERHONKSON, NY
Built up from the foundation of a dilapidated wood mill, an office for the practice of two family doctors who live on the same property. The doctors treat addiction and chronic illnesses caused by environmental and biological toxins. Their personalized, integrative approach was heavily influenced by the work of Ivan Illich and his book Medical Nemesis. As the design/builder for the project, it was imperative for all material decisions, building techniques and intentions to be part of the treatment, integral to the therapy. Materials were site-sourced whenever possible, furnishings were site-built by hand, as the office was palpated into place, with every effort and thought knowingly inscribed into the being of the building, becoming part of the counteracting of the "counter-intuitive misadventures characteristic of industrial society.
ENWREATHING DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFICULTY AND THE FELDENKRAIS METHOD
A cover letter accompanying preliminary plans and consultation for the proposed renovation of the Field Center in New York City, submitted to the Field Center Executive Director Sheryl Field, 2006.
My role is to provide an environment that helps practitioners and parents take part in the learning process of children with neuromotor difficulties.
By focusing on the practical, material needs of The Field Center space, it’s possible to furnish an environment that effectively extends the somatosensory dialogue with which the Feldenkrais practitioner engages a child.
We’re imbued with our surroundings. Even when we pay no attention to the built environment, when it seems to be serving, for example, only as a backdrop for the kinesthetic loop between practitioners and children, we’re deeply influenced—exteroceptively, viscerally and introspectively—not only by the material attributes of a place, but the quality of the care with which everything was made and put into place. (Perhaps we’re especially susceptible to such suffusion when we’re not paying attention.)
Objects are part of the afferent nervous system. They are not simply separable sensory input; they flow back to perception as their impulses are transduced into electrical signals. Developmental exploration situates itself along this afferent flow. Greater awareness of the effects of an environment on internal bodily processes (digestion, breathing rate, body-based emotions, muscle tension, etc.) enables self-composition, clarifies action and tends to heighten one’s sense of empathy.
Just as objects are part of the nervous system, so the nervous system is integral to the exterior receptive field. The two are constitutively dependent.This nervous system/receptive field interchange is referred to as a wreathe. An ‘object’ experienced as enwreathed in this afferent=efferent conduction is called a gesture, or wield, spate, rollick or cadence. This gesturing points out how objects are co-materialized by the interpretive nature of perception.
A person orienting herself intentionally or therapeutically anywhere throughout the wreathe—as external stimulus, cutaneous mechanoreceptor, ganglia, gut feeling, or in the neural underpinnings of a psychological state— is referred to as an ambitus.
A device or environment designed specifically, assistively to help people function by conducing to a bodily knowledge/built environment fluency is called an optative. An optative is the construction of the enwreathing process mentioned above. Basically we are unable to want for ourselves what we can’t imagine. Because full development of ‘person’ involves connecting the motorsensory to motivation and emotion and reflexive awareness (awareness of one’s emotions and motivations) an optative must draw on all that we live for, all that we long for. Optatives construct the imaging of completely unknown—yet to be known—actions relative to desires recognizable and satisfiable only by means of their actions. The optative mood (the verbal mode of wishing) generates its receptive field. It is its own action. Less intense, focused and necessary emotions aren’t necessarily embodied as their own actions. Construction is a process of beaconing, of building what the optative, as action, perceives.
CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS FOR THE CONVERSION OF AN ARTS AND ECOLOGY CENTER FROM A FORMER MEDICAL FACILITY
