Tobias Wilke is a Heisenberg Researcher at the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. He is the author and editor of several books in German.
This excellently researched and lucidly written study will make a substantive contribution to modern literary studies. Through wonderful formulations and analyses, Wilke illuminates fascinating technical innovations in sound writing and links them to poetic engagement and practices. This is in every respect a delightful and important contribution to modern literary and cultural studies. -- Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet Sound Writing presents a new understanding of what is often called the 'nonsense poetry' of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and its intellectual background, as well as its echoes in later avant-gardes. In telling this story, Wilke draws on underexplored sources and draws out new causal lines. With Language Poetry, translingualism, collage, conceptual writing, and artificial intelligence on our minds, the topic of the book cannot be ignored, and Wilke's contribution is sure to be widely read and discussed. -- Haun Saussy, author of Are We Comparing Yet? Along with studying 'multiple avant-garde strategies for reducing poetry to its most elemental conditions in vocal sound production,' Wilke also carefully explores scientific approaches to the production of vocal sound in order to demonstrate how poets 'appropriat[ed] scientific-experimental concepts and techniques.' * Modern Philology *