Poetics of Listening - by Brandon LaBelle (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In Poetics of Listening, renowned sound studies scholar Brandon LaBelle brings critical attention to listening as a practice, one that can wield significant impact onto individual, interpersonal and community wellbeing.

From self-determination to social participation, somatic healing to collective repair, political recognition to ecological engagement, listening is vitally influential in negotiating our most fundamental challenges. Through thoughtful examinations of listening's role across society, Poetics of Listening convincingly shows listening to be not only important to social struggles, but a form of poetic imagination and communion. It moves listening toward a broader application and view, which includes the ability to listen across human and more-than-human worlds, to listen into or with one's body, or to listen out for futures to come as well as addressing unfinished histories, and it challenges us to think more broadly about what it means to hear and be heard within today's complex environments.

Review Quotes

"This beautiful poetics of listening by Brandon LaBelle is a listening space about the activism of love - or in other words - a radical vibrating materiality about sonic global intimacy. As LaBelle suggests, the book itself is a listening space since it is both quiet and full of voice, rhythm and tone, melody and movement - an ecosystem that awakens under listening's participation. The sonic affects us, touches us, moves through our bodies every day and alters our emotions, vibration and rhythm. Poetics of listening allows us to reflect upon ways that the materiality of sound, the emotions connected to the sonic, the censorship of sound, or the propaganda with sound, help us understand (counter-) power, claims to authenticity, authority, resistance, and deviance. This vibrating touching sonic narrative unfold before us about how to search for our sonic emotional knowledge and how to open common experiences and potential paths for change. LaBelle's healing sonic thinking-matter shares a knowledge that will bring bodies together, because agential sonic listening matter matters. LaBelle reveals a method for transmission of sound knowledge as well and for novel ways of being in the world of self and others. This beautiful piece of sonic materiality teaches us that there is no distinct separation between different sonic porous bodies, non-living things, and the environment; instead, these are intimately interconnected-a thick entanglement-and the transmission of sonic affect constantly flows between matter, space, and place. If we are deeply listening-into, listening-toward, listening-with, listening-against, and listening-across, this sonic innovative poetry invites us to a journey that will transform how we are thinking about healing, responsibility and potentiality as well as about relational global action and an imagined balanced potential futurity. We are invited to learn to transform our rapid pace to a slower pace so we can begin to listen to the whispering plants, to the screaming hurricanes, to the singing deserts and to the lost bodies, who are not shouting out another grand narrative, but in a low voice and in a slower pace, sharing a fragmented story, maybe not even yet audible, of how we can begin to heal, to relate and to belong. I am listening to the book's inner voice: "To listen, might be, to remain a student of the world."" --Maria Frederika Malmström, Senior Lecturer, Gothenburg University, Sweden

"Brandon LaBelle's Poetics of Listening is a nuanced and theoretically rigorous treatise on listening that brings together the individual, the communal, and the more than human; the body, the social and the planetary. Repoliticizing listening, LaBelle provides us with new concepts and tools for listening intersectionally, while his notion of negative listening to silences, absences and disappearances, contributes to the urgent need to critically study and understand historical violence, political trauma, and planetary catastrophe. Deeply poetic, it is a joy to read." --Anna Papaeti, Research Collaborator, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Greece

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