Mass Vernacular: American Poetic Voice and Other Sound Technologies situates American poetry within a world of global media to reveal the broad institutional, technological, and cultural resonances of poetic voice. I argue that developing technologies of sound reproduction and transmission created an American voice born out of global circulation and reception, prompting a revolution—formal, theoretical, proto-political—in how American poets conceptualized lyric address. Throughout the project, I not only trace how poets like Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, and Adrienne Rich align with assorted sound technologies—the phonograph, the radio, the telephone, the tape recorder—but also position their poetry within a broader field of material voicing that encompasses early twentieth-century women’s elocution instruction, the rise of the poetry lecture circuit, Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives like the Voice of America radio broadcasts, and feminist oral history practices. Ultimately, the project seeks to restore the sound of American poetic voice to its larger acoustical range, enmeshed in the range of social institutions that simultaneously came to underwrite the nation’s global power more generally.
American poets have long puzzled over the problem of a representative poetic voice, struggling to create a distinct literary tradition in a country of competing national languages. The rise of global broadcasting in the early twentieth century, however, combined with the projection of American military and economic might, made the “American voice” a global rather than a parochial entity, one created in the process of its own mass circulation. This technologically mediated “voice” paradoxically facilitated an American poetic voice that was similarly global, capable of projecting its localism anywhere. On one hand, these new technologies allowed poets to engage with a long critical tradition that associates lyric poetry with national voicing. On the other, they forced them to square older questions about the lyric with contemporary questions about mass culture and mediated listening. By probing debates over issues like the fate of Standard British English or the Americanization of international culture via mass media, I chart the emergence of a “mass vernacular”—a contradictory linguistic idiom defined by its rootedness and its universalism at once. In this context, the apparently transhistorical tropes of lyric voice in fact reveal a complex history of American cultural consolidation and global distribution.
Mass Vernacular challenges lyric’s putative status as private utterance by enmeshing the poetry of Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, and Adrienne Rich in a broad institutional and technological soundscape. Throughout, I trace how poetry intersects with both specific sound technologies, like the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, and the tape-recorder, and a variety of vocal practices and institutions, including elocution instruction, poetry reading circuits, and radio-based forms of cultural diplomacy. The project begins by locating Moore’s poetry between the related projects of women’s elocution instruction and the practices of phonograph poetry recording; in so doing, I explicate her theory of an Anglo-American, inscribable “tone of voice,” which promotes poetry’s accentual precision as a means of homogenizing the unruly diversity of American speech. I next turn to the transatlantic figure of Auden. Reading his poetry alongside the emerging discipline of “audience research” initiated by the American radio industry in the 30s and 40s, I suggest that Auden experimented with a variety of aesthetic forms to conduct his own audience research. The project subsequently moves from the transatlantic to the global to position O’Hara’s telephonic address between the local scene of the postwar poetry reading and globally-aimed cultural diplomacy initiatives, like the Voice of America broadcasts. I argue that the mass circulation of American speech paradoxically enabled O’Hara’s intimate poetic voice. I return to the relationship between language pedagogy and recording technology to detail how Rich used real vocal sources to revise lyric form, forging a poetic voice that was globally-derived and precisely located. This revision was inspired by two contemporaneous vocal practices: her experience teaching Basic Writing at CCNY in the late 60s, where students were taught to revise their writing using their own diverse speech, and the feminist practice of oral history tape recording, which used female voices to rewrite history. By bridging the figurative and material dimensions of voice, Mass Vernacular highlights the competing cultural currents that underlie lyric address in an age of global English.
