Its probably true that human beings have always found pleasure in using their vocal chords to make sounds; indeed the expressive quality of this activity almost certainly predates the development of syntactic language. Rousseau regarded music as the origin of language. But this music – if it should be called music at all – was not music ‘as we know it’. It most likely involved a mixture of pure pitched vocalisation (song) with more variable pitch found in animal calls and infant-mother vocalisation. In any case, it is this ‘primordial’ essence that later twentieth-century efforts in ‘sound poetry’ (poetry written without using words) taps into.

Today we regard the beginnings of sound poetry to be in the art movements of Dada, Italian futurism and Russian futurism, though it is much older. The recognition ‘primordial’ quality of sound poetry was part of these ‘futuristic’ art projects from the beginning. Many of these poems read like incantations, vocables ordered to please some forgotten ancestor gods, or to protect against evil spirits. And yet, they also adhere to the progressive notion of ‘avant-garde’. Despite their progressivism, early avant-gardists did not escape the simultaneous forwards-backwards advance that characterised revolutionary romanticism (the exemplar being, of course, Wagner).

In addition, all of these movements incorporated the linguistic components of their respective languages – their languages’ phonemes – such that, even without words, German sound poetry is specifically ‘German’, Italian sound poetry specifically ‘Italian’, and so on. An example of the latter might be Giacomo Balla’s Canzone di Maggio, which includes the lines: ‘titatò titatò / titati titatò / F I O R E ? ?’ Another, more famous example, comes from Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate: ‘Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, / pögiff, / Kwii Ee.’ Schwitters’s Germanisms in the Ursonate are obvious, and are essential to its summation of Germanic culture—the poem basically being in ‘Sonata Form’ (like piano sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven et al.), but written in the ‘primordial’ language of phonemes. Thus it is the Ur-sonata, the ‘basis’, a imaginative reconstruction of the primordial origin of the pinnacle of Germanic Tonkunst.

While in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, sound poetry was limited in audience appreciation (especially at the Cabaret Voltaire, the centre of Dada), in Russia, sound poetry during the constructivist period become something of a popular attraction. Somewhat akin to the the ‘absurdist’, low musical-hall tradition in England, audiences would flock to see absurd sound poetry that, despite its popularity, was regarded as avant-garde by its practitioners.

As the twentieth century progressed, sound poetry developed, particularly with changes of technology and political organisation. Ernst Jandl was one poet associated with the Vienna Actionists, a group that included Otto Mühl and Hermann Nitsch, whose experimentalism and dissidence led, eventually, to crime. In Britain, Bob Cobbing was a notable exemplar of the London experimental poetry scene, his work encompassing concrete and graphic poetry as well as electronically enhanced readings. Sound poetry remains on the edge, but its concerns – the sound of phonemes, primordial, avant-garde, or otherwise – preoccupy most poets at one time or another.