by Lian-Hee Wee

It is important for us to hear firsthand from the poet, and this should not require explanation. Poetry reaches deep into the writer’s soul to find expressions that in turn touch the readers. The transmission is through language, visually encoded as writing, but also aurally through the voice. The latter reaches the auditory cortex where these audio signals are sorted into some six different channels two of which are speech and music, the other four are harder to categorize (Norman-Haignere et al 2015).[1]

But how can the poet reach us if we do not know the poet’s language? And what is the point if the poet has to distort his/her voice to fit the reader’s language? The poet-reader relationship is thus torn asunder by its very medium. You must either be a reader who is in the circle of the poet’s language and culture, or the poet must be enslaved to the reader. Either case  defeats a key purpose of poetry: to allow resonance and sympathy[2] upon which the reader’s world may be widened.

Auditory Cortex offers a break from this poet-reader zero-sum. We shall see in the collection here, how poets write in Englishes that are theirs while accessible to others. Through the prosody of the poet’s own voice and reading, the written and the read combust to give both poet and reader the same warmth, while also revealing in its light the local wonders to foreign eyes.

One’s language is one’s identity and a carrier of one’s culture. And in the voice of our own Englishes, we communicate with the world. Our language in our voice is our insistence to be us, and our resistance to any form of cultural enslavement or subordination. We call on you to write, read, and record the authenticity of your voice and your world, and to enrich ours.

Notes:

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.11.035

[2] Not to be confused with “pity”. Here, “sym-” as in symphonic, and “-pathy” as in telepathic.

[RETURN TO AUDITORY CORTEX 2019]

Lian-Hee Wee is Professor of Linguistics at Hong Kong Baptist University. His studies develop mainly on phonologically related issues of Hong Kong and Singapore Englishes as well as tonal patterns in various Chinese languages. He recently provided a comprehensive acoustic analysis at Stand News, proving that the police made derogatory expletives on freedom and female genitalia. His recent notable publications include “Hong Kong Food Runes” in World Literature Today (Spring 2019), Phonological Tone (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary (eds.) (Palgrave, 2018)”. His poetry sometimes makes it into Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He was recently quoted in Quartz for saying, “Cantonese is the Language of the (Hong Kong) Resistance”.