Wednesday, May 28, 2008

hi-de-ho

Charles Bernstein has published an essay on second-wave modernism defined in such a way as to include song lyrics from blues to Tin Pan Alley: "Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second-Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics," American Literary History (Spring 2008). The key sentence is this: "We might be able to consider, under the sign of sound poetry,... Cab Calloway's scat 'Hi-De-Ho' as an ideolectical descendent of Velimir Khlebnikov's zaum, Kurt Schwitters's 'Ur Sonata,' and Hugo Ball's Dadaist 'Karawane.'"