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Materiality

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Materiality emphasizes the physical, sensory presence of things—bodies, texts, sounds—against idealist abstraction. It grounds meaning in substance.

Detailed Definition
Poetry foregrounds materiality through texture, sound, and typography. Philosophically, it asserts that language is not transparent but embodied—ink, breath, vibration—making the poem a physical artifact where meaning arises from tactile, audible presence as much as semantic content.
Example
Example in poetry:
William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say” emphasizes plums’ sensory presence; Emily Dickinson’s handwritten variants show ink as material choice; W.S. Merwin’s unpunctuated lines foreground breath and voice; Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson uses page layout as meaning; C.D. Wright’s prison poems cite inmates’ bodily scars as textual materiality; Robert Creeley’s short lines make breath and silence palpable.
Additional Notes
Materiality emphasizes physical presence of text/body/sound. In poetry, it appears as typography (Howe), breath (Creeley), or sensory detail (Williams). Students should read for how meaning emerges from substance, not just signification. Related to phenomenology, book history, and sound studies. Professors can link it to post-digital poetics and print culture.
Also Known As
Corporeality Material condition Embodiment Matter
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