Sound poetry has more in common with experimental music than verse upon a page: it rewards an open ear and mind, and a playful spirit. Sentences, phrases, and meaning exist, but they are soluble, and can break down to syllables, to chant, or simply to breath. Carnivocal, a sampler of Canadian sound poets in performance, is fascinating stuff, but those who expect words to have meaning, music to be tuneful, and voices to make sense may not think so at first. This CD is best appreciated with no distractions – unplug the television and turn out the lights. It’s best to recreate the conditions of more primitive human life, in which a voice in the dark becomes vivid theatre.

With luck, and with pretensions and pre-judgments set aside, Carnivocal will come across as an exuberant and entirely compelling collection of voices. Here, so seldom heard, is bp Nichol, the martyrologist himself, singing “Pome Poem” in a surprisingly high and clear tenor. Here too are seminal sound poets from a previous era, Hugo Ball and the Montreal automatist Claude Gauvreau, performed by worthy inheritors Christian Bök and Stephen McCaffery. This CD connects, often marvelously, the crossing points and separate hazards of performance, speech, and music, and shows, especially in the tracks recorded live, just how good these performers are at their hybrid art.

There are productions of the studio – complex, multi-layered, and synthesized – and of the stage – monaural, sonically a bit cramped, but with the reassuring buzz of attentive audiences. High points: bill bissett’s “Opening Chant,” Canada’s back-beat poet knocking out the time with his rattle; Christian Bök’s “Motorized Razors” and “Ubu Hubbub,” brief growling paragraphs that are half Noh play, half Dr. Seuss; and one of Carnivocal’s more imagistic works (one that could function as well on the page as on the air), “Rune Clock Clocking Runes” by Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie, who chose the selections for this aural anthology.

Not all the experiments on this unique collaboration between Red Deer Press and Omikron Publishing are of the “Eureka!” variety. But this CD has a cumulative authority, like a Jackson Pollock canvas or a particle physicist’s blackboard, that merits some attention. You may not understand, but rest assured, there’s something to it.