where's the pedagogy to go with close listening?

In the preface to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998), Charles Bernstein describes the book – a collection of essays on the poetics of sound and performed poetry, the audiotext (including digital forms) in general – as “a call for a non-Euclidean…prosody for the many poems for which traditional prosody does not apply.” What I want to say here simple in this context: where is the non-Euclidean pedagogy to go along with this new aural consciousness?

For surely, if it is true, as Bob Cobbing put it in 1969, that "[s]ound poetry dances, tastes, has shape," then those of us who have been teaching poetry-as-printed (poetry on the page, unsounded poetry) would presumably have to add at least these dimensions to the realms of approach in the classroom. This is perhaps too elaborate a way of saying that to have been prepared to teach words on a page, no matter how complex, is not necessarily to be prepared to help present a language as a kind of dance or as something that has a physical shape. “When the audiotape archive of a poet’s performance is acknowledged as a significant, rather than incidental, part of her or his work,” Charles writes in the same preface, “a number of important textual and critical issue emerge,” and he goes on to name these. Here I add another issue to his list. The technology that enables this – our ability to acknowledge such material as significant rather than of additive or illustrative quality – must itself become a part of the story of the poetic art taught to students of that art.

"Leonardo da Vinci,” Cobbing liked to say, “asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems to me to be achieving this aim." Same problem here, I'd suggest. Seeing and even hearing we can manage, albeit the latter with special effort. But touch? That's difficult in the traditional poetry classroom. (And although seeing a printed poem - really seeing it as a thing, in William Carlos Williams's sense - poems aren't beautiful statements; they're things - is something we think we do in a close reading when often it is not what we're really doing.) All this strikes me as relatively easy to discuss in theory, but actually doing it, creating a consistent practice, seems daunting.

We can enlarge from sound poetry to poetry in general that is aided by – though in the case of sound poetry was never dependent on – new computing media. The contributors to New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (2006) make precious little mention of the impact on pedagogy made by poetic technotexts, yet at nearly every point in this collection an altered practice is at least implicit, even in the section titled “Technotexts”-—meant to show examples of computer-generated or –enabled poetry. An essay on Cynthia Lawson and Stephanie Strickland’s Vniverse, for instance, describes the “social reading space” required by this work in a way that suggests rather specifically what a teacher would need to do in the classroom in order to “teach” such art: while the text is performed through the artist’s viritual interaction with the site—which can of course be apprehended without its creators present—“the audience is also reading while being in a social space.” However, the artists add, “we do not read it as they do.” Thus their “performing new media poetry” is a kind of teaching, assuming teaching to be a dynamic three-way interaction: (1) technotext, (3) performer/instigator of the site, (3) audience that reads/interprets in a social space.

One of the several innovations inherent in such poetics is that the artists’ “creative process is [itself] an initial model for th[e] interaction” of the sort that can take place in the classroom, so that students can glimpse the creative process and, if the technotext succeeds, can experience it.