UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com
UbuWeb is my favorite place to go on the entire WWW. It’s home to massive archives of Visual and Concrete and Sound poetry. It’s divided into 5 sections: Historical, Contemporary, Sound Poetry, Found + Insane, and Papers. Better than I can, Bob Cobbing, in an essay called “Sound Poetry: A Catalogue” (archived on UbuWeb), describes in essence the content of the site. “Leonardo da Vinci asked the poet to give him something he might see and touch and not just something he could hear. Sound poetry seems a to me to be achieving this aim. PARTLY it is a recapturing of a more primitive form of language, before communication by expressive sounds became stereotyped into words, when the voice was richer in vibrations, more mightily physical. The tape recorder, by its ability to amplify and superimpose, and to slow down the vibrations, has enabled us to rediscover the possibilities of the human voice, until it becomes again something we can almost see and touch. Poetry has gone beyond the word, beyond the letter, both aurally and visually … Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape.”
On the site are sound poems by e.e. Cummings, John Cage, Antonin Artuad, Henri Chopin, Kurt Schwitters (you can find the entirety of his seminal “Ursonate” on the site), Cecil Taylor, Phil Minton, and much more. If you’re at all interested in concrete poetry, chances are you’ve already bookmarked the page.
