On the poetics of ordinary talk¹

This article is based on a talk presented in 1977. Harvey Sacks, the founder of Conversation Analysis, had been killed in a traffic accident in 1975. Without his extraordinary presence the field seemed to be becoming defined by a paper published in 1974, “A simplest systematics for the organization of turn‐taking in conversation.” The 1977 talk was specifically directed to loosening up people's sense of the sort of work done in the field of Conversation Analysis. Among his abundant and wide‐ranging interests Harvey Sacks had been exploring (and eventually discussing in his lectures) various aspects of a phenomenon which somewhere along the line came to be called “poetics”—most roughly, that occasionally, talk appears to be produced at least in part by reference to, e.g., sounds and associations. Many of Sacks' students found the phenomenon appealing and began to contribute not only further instances of things he had considered, but new possibilities as well. The result was a mountain of roughly‐sorted materials. The 1977 talk was a rather casual guided tour of a selected sample of those materials. This article is a more considered and elaborated version of that talk.