Sound Poem
Quick answer: Sound poetry puts the voice before the dictionary, from Hugo Ball's Dada chants to Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate. Learn its history and how to compose one.
A sound poem asks what is left of poetry when you remove the dictionary. Its material is the voice itself: invented syllables, stretched vowels, percussive consonants, chant, whisper and roar. Meaning is not abolished, it migrates, into rhythm, texture and performance, the way meaning lives in a lullaby hummed without words.
The form's founding scene is famous. In 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball put on a cardboard costume and recited Karawane, a poem of invented words, launching Dada's assault on a language he felt the war had corrupted. Sound poetry has been the laboratory wing of poetry ever since.
A century of noise
Ball's Zurich performances were the ignition, but the fire spread fast. The Russian futurists were already exploring zaum, a trans rational language of invented roots. Kurt Schwitters spent a decade composing the Ursonate, a half hour sonata for solo voice built from a handful of syllable themes, still performed today. Later came Edith Sitwell's Facade, spoken to William Walton's music, the French lettrists, and the Canadian group the Four Horsemen, featuring bpNichol. Contemporary practitioners like Christian Bok, whose Eunoia also plays procedural games, keep the tradition loud.
Rules, scores and notation
Sound poetry has no fixed meters or rhyme schemes; its discipline is compositional. Most sound poems are built like music, from repeated motifs that develop, invert and return. The page version is best treated as a score: spelling indicates sound, capital letters or size may indicate volume, spacing indicates timing, and some poets add explicit performance notes.
Scholars distinguish degrees. Some sound poems abandon words entirely, as Ball and Schwitters did. Others keep real words but push their sonic properties, through extreme alliteration, echo and fragmentation, until sound outranks sense. Both count; the commitment to voice as primary material is the test.
Composing your first one
Start with your mouth, not your pen. Improvise aloud until you find two or three syllable clusters with real character, one percussive, one liquid, one strange. Record everything. Then compose: give the piece a shape, perhaps statement, buildup, collapse, echo, and decide where repetition should comfort the listener and where it should alarm them. Transcribe a score honest enough that you could perform it the same way twice. Practise aloud daily; a sound poem improves like a song, through rehearsal rather than revision.
What it is good for, and the trap
Sound poetry is unmatched for states beneath or beyond words: rage, ecstasy, infancy, grief that will not sentence itself, and the sheer comedy of the human mouth. It also trains the ear better than any exercise, and poets who try it report that their ordinary verse gains music. The trap is randomness, a stream of noises with no motif, no development and no ending, which bores audiences within a minute. Compose like a musician: establish material, vary it, bring it home.
What poets can take from this
- Compose aloud and record; the page comes second.
- Build from two or three repeatable motifs, not endless novelty.
- Give the piece a musical arc with a deliberate ending.
- Use spelling, size and spacing as a performance score.
- Rehearse until you can deliver it identically twice.
- Listen to recordings of Schwitters's Ursonate before writing.
Try it yourself
Compose a one minute sound poem expressing an emotion you have never been able to explain in words, built from three invented syllable motifs that return in a different order at the end.
Questions
What is a sound poem?
A poem whose primary material is vocal sound rather than dictionary meaning: invented syllables, rhythm, pitch and repetition. It is composed like music and fully exists in performance.
Who invented sound poetry?
Hugo Ball's 1916 Dada performances in Zurich, including Karawane, are the usual starting point, alongside Russian futurist zaum. Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate, composed through the 1920s and early 1930s, is the form's most celebrated large work.
Can a sound poem use real words?
Yes. Many sound poems mix real and invented language, pushing alliteration, echo and fragmentation until sound leads and sense follows. Total abandonment of words is one option, not a requirement.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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