Poetics Of ‘Ums And Ahs’ In France From Lettrism To The Present

This article explores how modern poets, from the end of the Second World War to the present, have sought to explore the infraverbal nature of human language (bodily sounds such as breaths, ums and ahs, growls, sobs, throat clearing, tongue clicks and coughs) as poetic materials. The main focus will be the experiments of the Lettrists, the sound poets of the 1960s and some contemporary poets. This article shows how these practices, far from creating a new idiom, explore the most ordinary, mundane and yet unintelligible sounds of human communication. Such explorations resonate strongly with a range of theoretical debates concerning the critique of phonocentrism and resistance to the domination of writing. They invite us to reflect on the tensions between embodiment and writing, automatism and spontaneity, auditory perception and verbo-motricity. Finally, this article explores how such experiments allow us to understand better what defines us as human, thus helping us to situate ourselves in the world.