"Hedge crickets sing"

Spent a couple of hours reading & thinking about a few paragraphs by Robert Grenier in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E book. He takes Keats' phrase - "hedge crickets sing" - an argues for an absolute attention to sound. Although Keats respects the 'norms' of grammar and vocabulary - Coolidge will later break the word & syntax down - he nevertheless exploits the 'atomic' potential of each word.

Grenier highlights the number of monosyllabic movements in Keats' verse which allow each sound its duration, resonance, impact.

As I read it, Grenier seems to be arguing for a return to a more 'natural' language - rather strange for this volume. I'm reminded of Brakhage's experiments in cinema as a way to retrive a child's way of seeing by bypassing habits of perception. Grenier seems to want the word before common sense habits/rationality/literacy and the 'scan reading' impulse take over.

His argument seems to be that this is how nature sounds. As I'm reading in the garden so a pigeon calls - "coo hoo" I approximate - other birds go "cheep" - a bee whizzes past. Each is a sound which is heard as a sound without interpretation. 'Meaning' is identical to the physical fact of the sound (I'm paraphrasing pretty closely).

Two things. One. Is Grenier implying a kind of eco-politico-poetics - rather like Pauline Oliveros & Deep Listening? Our duty is to become 'tuned' to the sounds around us rather than subdue them into background noise. And that a more tuned listening would necessarily create more attuned living? (If I hear your sounds of pain I cannot bomb you? If I hear the birds sing I don't lay waste the forest?)

Two. A dubiously conventional argument - although dressed up in more radical guise - for onomatopoeia? Keats 'captures' the sound of crickets in the sibillant buzz of terminal and initial 's' sounds? The rub of 'ck' sounds in "cricket"? I think not - but it's not made very clear. Rather, Grenier seems to accept an unbridgeable gap between 'world' and 'word'. However, the language has its own effects. How 's' works against 's'. A micro-instance of massive potential within the language which offers a 'rhyme' with universal (in Grenier's term 'the beyond') energies. Rather than apply a competence reading (how well does Keats capture the sound of this insect in words?) work in terms of events in the language without recourse to representation. A happening said. In other words.