University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1941-1961, and Famous Birds, a collection of poems

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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ARCHIVE OF RECORDED

POETRY AND LITERATURE, 1941-1961

AND

FAMOUS BIRDS, A COLLECTION OF POEMS

by

Eric Rawson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Eric Rawson
ii

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Callie Cardamon, to whom I dedicate this work. I
would also like to thank, for their support, Mark Irwin, Moshe Lazar, Susan
McCabe, Bruce Smith, and David St. John. I appreciate the invaluable help from
staff at the Library of Congress, the Washington University Library in St. Louis,
the California State University-Fullerton Library, and the Mandeville Special
Collections Library at the University of California-San Diego.

iii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iv

Chapter 1: The Library of Congress Poetry Archive, 1941-1961 1

Chapter 2: Famous Birds, A Collection of Poems 101

Works Cited 187

iv

Abstract

This dissertation consists of two distinct elements, one critical and the other
creative. The critical element, “Chapter One: The Library of Congress Archive of
Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1941-1961,” situates the Library of Congress
poetry-recording project in the context of Cold War attempts to create and project a
robust American literary culture. The author examines the historical relationship
between the audiotext archive and the literary canon, the role of authorial
performance in audiotext production, and the significance of the archival and
testimonial process of recording poets reading their own work. In tracing the
evolution of the Library of Congress project, the author shows how early auditory
archive-building, despite its ad hoc practices, endorsed the authority of the short
lyric and posited the voice as the ultimate hermeneutic key, while simultaneously
reinforcing the canonization of High Modernist authors and New Critics who in
print expressed disdain for this sort of authority-building. As anxiety about
producing documentary evidence of a national culture spurred the identification of
an artist’s aural performance with official sanction, institutional discourse—
academic, governmental, and pedagogical—collided with the aesthetic discourse
and technological ideology of the mid-twentieth century. The author concludes that
v

despite attempts to recuperate a lost oral tradition, magnetic sound recording of
poets reading aloud serves mainly to reconfigure and affirm the graphical authority
of literary work even as we move into a post-print era.
The creative element, “Chapter Two: Famous Birds, A Collection of Poetry,”
challenges the authority of the spoken voice which the author examines in the
Library of Congress project by graphically, semantically, and syntactically
deploying language in a way that seems to deny an authoritative oral expression.
The “subject matter” of these poems might be characterized as soliloquies
interrupted by the language of the world, such that any and all internal and external
events that occur during the process of writing can be filtered and integrated into
the poem
1

Chapter 1: The Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry
and Literature, 1941-1961

One winter afternoon in late December, 1911, the Modern Language
Association discovered that America had a culture after all. A young assistant
professor from the A&M College of Texas named John Avery Lomax, Sr., had
made the thousand-mile trek to the annual meeting at Cornell University. A year
before he had published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a volume of
122 apparently traditional songs he had compiled during his journeys through the
American Southwest on a Sheldon Fellowship from Harvard. The early reviews
“were none too flattering or numerous”—hardly surprising at a time when
institutions of higher learning such as Bryn Mawr College offered no American
literature courses on the grounds that there was no American literature.
Nevertheless, the dauntless Lomax stood before his peers in Ithaca, New York, as
the afternoon dwindled into darkness and proclaimed that “the rough songs of the
southwestern frontier” that he had collected in his notebooks and on some 250
recording cylinders revealed the very heart of a culture on this continent. Then he
sang—sang!—two songs, although not, until later that evening at dinner, the now-
iconic “Home on the Range” (Adventures 80-81).
2
The response was immediate and deep. Lomax reports that “our native folk
songs awakened interest among intelligent people. . . .After Cornell in 1911 I never
lacked for friends among the Modern Language Association group” (Adventures
84). He joined the lecture circuit, reading papers in Cambridge, Cleveland,
Philadelphia, Madison, Baltimore, and St. Louis—over five-hundred engagements
in the next decade. He exchanged gossip with Carl Sandburg. He served as
president of the American Folklore Society. He was a guest at seminars at Harvard
and Yale. Cowboy Songs ran through four printings by 1916 and elevated Lomax
to the status of final authority, and later, folk-hero.
1
And everywhere he went, he
transcribed the songs that he persuaded—with generous doses of whiskey—
cowboys, railroad workers, prisoners, hobos, barmaids, lumberjacks, cotton-pickers,
fortune-tellers, and other more-or-less authentic folk to sing into the large horn of
his acoustic recording phonograph.
2

Seventeen years later, 1928: Carl Engel, Chief of the Music Division at the
Library of Congress, pressed into service as the first archivist of the new Archive of
American Folk Song, Robert W. Gordon, who brought with him his extensive
private collection. Financed by wealthy individuals and foundations, the Archive
aimed to create a central repository of material collected by the many enthusiasts
who had entered the field after Lomax’s success. When Lomax, Sr., experienced

1
For a publication and reception history, see Mark Fenster.

2
Lomax, of course, did not produce American folk-song culture out of thin air. For a look
at the antecendents of his work in Europe and America, as well as a ringing critique of his
collecting methodology, see D.K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since
1898.

3
personal and financial disaster in 1931, he turned to the Library of Congress and
the American Council of Learned Societies for help. They agreed to support him
during a 16,000-mile field trip for his most important song-recording project,
Negro prison- and work-songs in the Deep South. The timing could not have been
better: As the Depression deepened, Americans not only discovered and
documented their own culture, in all the word’s various meanings, but began to
consciously produce one, in the best American bootstrapping tradition: creating a
culture by pure assertion, which in the twentieth-century meant documentary proof.
As Warren Susman notes, the decade was marked by an “effort to find, characterize,
and adapt to an American Way of Life as distinguished from the material
achievements (and the failures) of an American industrial civilization” ( 156-157).
To preserve the products of the native soil, to nurture a living civilization from the
dying past, to define creative canons, vernacular and refined—these were missions
that could benefit from a government committed to massive new public works.
So Lomax and his seventeen-year-old son Alan headed out of Dallas one
June morning in 1933 to make aluminum discs—all but forty-seven of the wax
cylinders he had made in bygone years were broken by this time—on an Edison
dictaphone loaned to them by the Library of Congress. In return, they had only to
deposit the traces of American culture they collected. They wound up making
myth, most notably in the form of the Delta blues, the rudiments of which could be
shaped into an artful genre, an indigenous index of the American spirit in the face
of adversity.
4
In America myth-making—as distinguished from culture-building—belongs
to the individual entrepreneur, whether political, literary, or merely avaricious; or to
the academic, like Lomax or the early ethnographers, say Jesse Walter Fewkes,
recording the last sounds of the Omaha and Hopi, in a desperate attempt to preserve
what was already vanished.
3
By the 1930s, the Documentary Decade, the poets—
like the novelists and the photographers and the painters and the playwrights—had
mastered the making of myth out of their own work; the critics and curators and
publishers of various stripes endorsed the myth, perhaps, but the culture-building
enterprise was mostly the work of social engineers and the coterie of rich patrons
(Biddle, Huntington, Whitall, Mellon, Rockefeller) who underwrote the artistic
achievements of the American Century. Sometimes, as in the figure of Archibald
MacLeish (Pulitzer Prize, Skull and Bones, Harvard Law),
4
who had become the
Librarian of Congress in 1939, one might confuse the myth-maker with the culture-
maker. All of the early Consultants in Poetry to the Library of Congress
experienced this confusion, so much so that in cases like the Archive of Recorded

3
For the exhaustive, exhilarating, and most complete account to date of American
ethnographic recording practices in the early twentieth century, see Jonathan Sterne’s The
Audible Past, pages 286-333.

4
I mention these facts as a shorthand indicator of MacLeish’s position in the small social-
artistic-political network that produced the Consultants in Poetry, as well as many of the
subjects of the Poetry Archive recording, for the next two decades. George Will says about
baseball that “[it] has traditionally been run by men whose lives have been intersecting and
entwined for decades.” It can also be true of literature that “[p]eople who have gone to the
same schools, climbed the same career ladders, absorbed the same values and assumptions
and expectations, become intellectually insular and professionally self-protective” (29).
MacLeish, by the way, deserves a fuller portrait, and he gets one in Uphill with Archie: A
Son’s Journey, a memoir by his youngest son,.

5
Poetry and Literature (to cite one small example), they kept nominating one another
for inclusion, defining a canon by confirming their own mythoi.
Problem: American taxpayers are notoriously loathe to pay for such
endeavors. And so the Library of Congress had to rely on benefactors to fund many
of its projects. Its own patron (i.e., Congress) was perennially unwilling to
recognize, in the form of funding, the importance attached to the recording project
by the Consultant in Poetry and the participant subjects themselves. It took
transportation scion Archer Huntington’s transfer, in 1936, of five-thousand shares
of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company stock to the Library of
Congress Trust Fund Board to bring the Poetry Consultantship to life. Half the
income from the stock went to the maintenance of the Hispanic Room and for the
establishment of a Chair of Poetry in the English Language; the remainder of the
Huntington gift went to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Librarian
Herbert Putnam’s annual report to Congress for 1937 notes that the Consultant
position has been created and filled by “Mr. Joseph Auslander, well known in the
field of poetry, lecturer on poetry at Columbia University, during the past 8 years
and poetry editor of the North American Review” (41). Putnam’s report also
mentions monetary gifts by other individuals whose munificence would support the
recording project over the next two decades: Gertrude Clarke Whitall and Miss
Annie-May Hegeman, who contributed her family’s mansion at the corner of 16
th

and Eye Streets N.W. in Washington, for a fund honoring her late father, Henry
6
Kirke Porter. The income from the sale of this property to the Motion Picture
Association of America in 1946 supplemented the resources of the Chair of Poetry.
The notion of recording poets reading their own work for educational and
archival purposes at the Library first arose in October 1940, when Dr. Harold
Spivacke, Chief of the Division of Music, proposed the idea to Archibald MacLeish.
After his appointment to the post of Librarian, MacLeish had wasted no time in
obtaining a $40,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation to construct a Recording
Laboratory to continue the recording and duplicating labors of the Archive of
American Folk-Song, now administered by Alan Lomax. It made sense to extend
the effort to other forms of national aural culture, especially poetry, which Louis
Untermeyer calls “America’s first national art” (xxvi).
Archives are generally preserved for use by future historians. The Library of
Congress Poetry Archive had a rather more present significance and was developed
as a pedagogical and propagandistic resource as much as an historical one. In the
technology-based discourse of the modern functionalist society, the thinking went
something like this: sound recordings rhyme with technological positivism and
technology rhymes with education (think: a.v. aid) and education rhymes with
democracy rhymes with technology. Not a poem, exactly, but a poetical product
that matched the desires of New Critics who analyzed such products in the
classroom and amateurs who, as Americans after all, liked their literature in
consumable form, branded and price-tagged, as much an expression of the qualities
of the self as were the clothes one now bought “off the rack.”
7
Equally important, the Library’s poetry-recording project took shape during
the global crisis precipitated by the rise of European fascism and Japanese
expansionism. From the start, the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature
5
was
posited as an expression of national stability, tied to a greater project of national
culture-building by an educated elite for an educated elite who could claim they
represented a highly refined Americanism that was nevertheless wholly democratic.
The first Laboratory-sponsored recording of living poets was that of Robinson
Jeffers at Coolidge Auditorium on February 27, 1941, to open the public-reading
series “The Poet in a Democracy.” Jeffers took the opportunity to address the
audience of “hundreds of Washingtonians, Supreme Court justices, Government
workers, [and] Cabinet officers” (Washington Post) on what he saw as “the destiny
of America to carry culture and freedom across the twilight of another dark
age. . . .Our business is to. . .keep alive, through everything, our ideal values,
freedom, courage, mercy and tolerance” (McGuire 57). Throughout the spring, the
Recording Laboratory captured the voices of other iconic American poets such as
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benét. But the project was tabled
with the entry of the United States into the war, simultaneous with Auslander’s
relinquishing the Chair of Poetry on December 8, 1941, to assume the role of Gift
Officer, a sinecure which suited a man whose “years in the Library’s service were

5
This title is a near misnomer. A handful of prose writers, such as Henry Miller, recorded
for the archive, as did a few professional thespians who recited poetic works. These types
of readers were shortly abandoned in favor of poets, exclusively, reading from their own
work.

8
impaired by conflicts with the stringencies of a bureaucracy” (McGuire 58). In
other words, he made the office too much his own. MacLeish: “I pried the chair of
poetry out from under Joe Auslander” (Nelson 359), and it was not occupied again
for eighteen months.
6

A second series was planned for 1942, featuring Conrad Aiken and Mark Van
Doren, but the outbreak of the war led MacLeish to cancel the readings as
inappropriate for the time. He did propose to Eugene Meyer, whose gift of $2200
had funded the Coolidge Auditorium readings, that the Recording Laboratory begin
recording informal in situ readings by young poets, with an eye toward selling
albums to educational institutions and interested individuals. Meyer passed.
Although plans to record poets at the Laboratory were delayed, the Library
established a practice that was to continue for decades: purchasing or soliciting for
donation poetry readings recorded by third parties. A handwritten note in May
1942 from Spivacke to MacLeish indicates that the Laboratory had duplicated all
the College of the City of New York readings by some forty-four poets, including
W.H. Auden, Mark Van Doren, William Rose Benét—and Leadbelly!
7
(ms.
Spivacke). This archive, the Phonographic Library of Contemporary Poets, had

6
For the more complete story of MacLeish’s occasionally cordial, frequently acrimonious,
personal and professional relationship with Auslander antedating their time together at the
Library of Congress, see William McGuire’s Poetry’s Catbird Seat, pages 41-62.

7
According to the 1961 Checklist, Mr. Ledbetter, though doubtless an essential American
versifier, did not make it into the Poetry Archive. He was evidently recorded shortly after
his release from prison when he had tea at Columbia in 1934. Another curiosity the
Library acquired from CCNY is a reel of twenty-eight poets, including Allen Tate,
Robinson Jeffers, and Marianne Moore, each reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.

9
been originated by William Kimball Flaccus, future vice-president of the Poetry
Society of America and Professor of Public Speaking at CCNY until he was called
up for active duty in the Navy in 1942. Flaccus was fascinated with English
dialects. His first recordings, made on eight-inch aluminum discs in 1937-38, were
readings and songs by Kenneth Leslie of Nova Scotia, a company of Irish poets and
actors on tour in New York, the English cast of Murder in the Cathedral, and a
writer born deep in the backcountry of Kentucky. After a nine-month hiatus,
Flaccus resumed work on a new RCA-Victor recorder, using twelve-inch acetate
discs which rendered speech much more naturally than did the aluminum ones
(Flaccus 316-318). Flaccus’ criteria for selection prefigured the ad hoc
methodology of the Library’s own poetry-recording project during the 1940s and
1950s:
a) Proximity; was the poet in or near New York?
b) Willingness; could the poet be induced to come to the
College for the purpose of recording, either out of friendship
for me, friendship for a friend of mine, or for other reasons?
c) Reputation. (Flaccus 318-319)

One consideration that did not enter into his planning: commercial appeal. “No
question of copyright is involved, because The Phonographic Library of
Contemporary Poets is a strictly educational project” (Flaccus “Phonographic”)
which was intended not for literature courses but for the public-speaking
curriculum.
A few years earlier, speech professor William Cabell Greet, sponsored by
Columbia University Library, had begun making records for a National Council of
10
Teachers of English series, with technical assistance from Electrical Research
Products, Inc., of New York City (Greet 312). Greet, cast in the mold of field
archivists such as John and Alan Lomax (i.e., filled with the huge spirit of a
democracy proving its ideals to itself), was a tireless and enthusiastic collector of
regional-speech recordings. By 1934 he had compiled an audio library of some
2500 discs of American dialect speakers
8
and was supervising a course in the
Language Room, where Columbia freshmen made mandatory phonograph
recordings for the purpose of correcting their speech defects. As a scholar, Greet
evinced more interest in the manner of recitation than the literary or historical value
of the poets he recorded; nonetheless, he intuited the direction of the poetic
audiotext archive in selecting for his initial sessions Robert Frost and Gertrude
Stein (Hibbett 479-480).
9
Frost recorded chestnuts such as “Mending Wall,”
“Birches,” and “The Road Not Taken;” Stein committed to disc “If I Told Him. A
Completed Portrait of Picasso” and selections from “Making of Americans.”
Although the latter recordings, like the Flaccus archive to follow, resulted
more from happenstance than clear aesthetic or pedagogical values—“Miss Stein
happened to be in the country last year and was willing to make records” (Hibbett
481)—the two nicely illustrate the parameters of the Poetry Archive as it was to
develop at the Library of Congress: “favorite” iconic authors at one extreme

8
Together with Professor Harry Ayres, Greet compiled many of these recordings, which
were published by the Victor Recording Company, Camden, New Jersey (Roach 208).

9
Hibbitt, who took over the project from Greet, elsewhere writes that the first recordings
made at Columbia were of Vachel Lindsay and the Irish poet AE (Roach 208-209).

11
(Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay) and Modernist scribes at
the other (Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams). It is worth
noting that by the early 1940s, when the Library of Congress project began, such
notables as Moore had none of her books still in print. Williams had more pediatric
patients than he had sales of his Complete Collected Poems (506 copies printed in
1938). Virtually no one outside his acquaintances in the poetry-writing community
read Ezra Pound. (Not until 1951 did Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound
stimulate new interest.) And Wallace Stevens, though in print, sold about as well
as top hats in Tulsa. These authors’ reputations were kept alive, at least partly, by
professional literary folk at the universities and by the critical-commercial
apparatus, embodied in the figure of Conrad Aiken, which promoted their work,
both in the narrow field of audio recording and in the larger field of literary print
anthologizing.
In 1943, Henry Wells, who had taken over the poetry-recording work at
Columbia University, contacted MacLeish to offer the NCTE Contemporary Poets
discs—aluminum master plates and Durium copies—to the Library of Congress (ltr.
Wells), thus establishing, early in the history of the project, that third-party
contributions were to constitute a major portion of the Poetry Archive. Shortly
after Wells and Flaccus had deposited duplicates of their discs in the Library, and
as the intensification of the war cast doubt on the future of such projects—indeed,
on the future of the high culture represented by the voices of the poets—Allen Tate
arrived in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Caroline Gordon, to assume the Chair
12
in Poetry, vacant since Joe Auslander’s transfer. It was summer, 1943. His stipend
was set at $3,500 for the year; the walls of his two-room office on the third floor of
the original Library building soon bore a crossed pair of Confederate flags; his
primary undertaking was to survey, with the aid of Frances Cheney, reference
librarian at Vanderbilt University, the Library’s collections of English-language
poetry. He distilled this material into Sixty American Poets 1896-1944: A
Preliminary Checklist.
The same week that Tate arrived in Washington, a federal grand jury in the
United States District Court (District of Columbia) indicted Ezra Pound for treason
on the basis of 125 radio broadcasts made over Rome Radio beginning on
December 7, 1941, when the United States went to war with the Axis powers.
10

Although Tate expressed the opinion that Pound was both an imbecile and an
insane man (ltr. MacLeish, McGuire 80), he nevertheless included him in Sixty
American Poets, in which he attacks him as “a poet of. . .not much intellectual
power, as his critical books, in spite of their seminal value, very sadly prove” (115).
The poetry-recording project, having been prefigured by the activities of the
Lomaxes and others involved in the Archive of American Folk Song, as well as
speech-enthusiasts and collectors such as Flaccus and Greet, blossomed at the
moment when the liberal democracies were seeking a cultural and technological

10
Mussolini’s government had begun broadcasting disc recordings of Pound’s speeches—
some made as early as January 1941—on Rome Radio on October 2, 1941 (Doob 3-6), but
he was only charged on the basis of the speeches he made during the time between the
United States’ entry into the war and the fall of Rome.

13
response to the threats of the propagandistic fascist electronic media. The Office of
War Information (established by executive order on June 13, 1942) under Elmer
Davis, himself a writer (of fiction for the slicks) and radio commentator for CBS
from 1939 to 1942, was unequivocal in its aim of politicizing literature, radio, and
film in the fight against fascism,
11
a goal avidly supported by Archibald MacLeish
as the Assistant Director of the Office of War Information.
12
MacLeish, who after
the war chaired the American delegation to found the United Nations, serving as
the first American member of the Executive Council of UNESCO, recognized the
political value of performance in general and literary performance in particular, as
well as the need to respond directly to Nazi Kulturewaffen.
13
“[I]f you listen very
carefully”—this is MacLeish in 1943—“in the middle of any conversation or on the
streets of any town in this country today, there is a huge and terrible silence within
and beyond the words. . . .[T]hat silence is as dangerous and inwardly explosive as
a vacuum in the world of physical things” (Winnick 320). America needed to listen
to itself or—well, look what happened in Europe.

11
For a dull but detailed history of the OWI and the Overseas Information Service in the
early years of the Cold War, see the 1948 Brookings Institution Report by Charles A.H.
Thomson.

12
He first served, briefly, as Director of the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures.

13
Ezra Pound vociferously objected to MacLeish’s anti-propaganda propaganda. His April
23, 1942, broadcast on Rome Radio was dedicated to tarring MacLeish as a defender of a
gang of criminals, the biggest of whom was Franklin D. Roosevelt himself (Doob 104-106).
For his part, MacLeish was a great deal more charitable toward “poor old Ezra,” although
in a letter to Ernest Hemingway in 1943, upon the receipt of the first transcripts of Pound’s
recordings, MacLeish writes, “Treason is a little too serious and a little too dignified a
crime for a man who has made such an incredible ass of himself and accomplished so little
in the process” (Winnick 315-316).

14
American anxiety over the militarization of sound reproduction and broadcast
technology dates to World War I, on the eve of the shift from limited-frequency-
spectrum acoustic sound recordings to full-spectrum (and hence more “lifelike”)
electric sound recordings. As early as 1914, German submarines in the Atlantic
were transmitting high-speed wireless telegraph messages recorded on wire
recorders purchased from the American Telegraphone Company. Many of these
messages were intercepted by the American Marconi Company, recorded onto
cylinders, and provided to the U.S. government. By 1915 the U.S. Navy had
concluded that Telegraphones were being used by German spies within the United
States and ordered several of the machines seized from private hands. After the
war, German companies such as Telefunken, Neumann, BASF, AEG, and I.G.
Farben continued to improve sound-recording technology, especially in the areas of
microphone response, magnetic tape, and the ring-type magnetic head that
revolutionized tape recording quality. Kurt Stille’s and Karl Bauer’s Echophone
Company developed the Dailygraph magnetic recorder and eventually merged with
C. Lorenz AG to manufacture the Textophone dictation recorders, thousands of
which were used in the next decade by the Nazi government. .
Almost from the first the technology of the magnetic recorder was coupled
with German state radio broadcasting, providing the simultaneity of auditory
experience crucial for solidifying fascist mass-consciousness.
14
Kurt Weill writes,

14
The symbiotic relationship between sound recording and radio broadcasting was not
limited to Europe. In America in the 1920s, after several years of handwringing over the
threat to the phonograph posed by free radio broadcasts, entrepreneurs such as Reginald
15
presciently, in 1926, that radio in the Weimar Republic “has become one of the
most essential elements of public life. . .and in all organs of public opinion” (qtd. in
Kahn 9). This communication matrix seemed tailor-made for a mass movement
that depended on the voice of omnipresent, disembodied authority. The illusion of
unmediated access to the mind of power was rapidly refined by the nation’s
electronic companies. By the 1936 Olympic Games, German state radio had begun
broadcasting recordings made on Stahltone-Bandmaschine steel-tape recorders,
15

integrating the objectness of phonography resulting from inscriptional processes
that rendered time in material form with the presentness of radio transmission. This
new kind of representation allowed immediate access to a disembodied—and thus,
like the divine, fully autonomous—authority. Radio signals were ideals. They
were produced and consumed without apparent intermediation, a purity of intention
that was wholly naturalized. In Arnheim’s contemporaneous formulation, radio
and other acoustic technologies provide “the omnipresence of what people are
singing or saying anywhere, the overlapping of frontiers. . .the importation of
culture on the waves of the ether, the same fare for all” (14). Full-frequency
recording—or something closer to it than the Allied powers had developed—

Fessenden found the good sense to join the two technologies, although live studio
broadcast remained the norm until the Ampex 200 magnetic recorder revolutionized sound
reproduction and broadcasting in the 1950s. In the 1940s, the Japanese, too, were refining
sound-reproduction and dissemination technologies similar to those of the Germans.

15
From the late 1940s through the end of the twentieth century, German and Swiss firms
such as Grundig, Studer, Neumann, and Telefunken continued to dominate the high-end
sound-recording market, while the consumer market was overtaken by Japanese companies
which had previously manufactured wartime electronics.

16
allowed the Axis nations to present an omnipresent and omnipotent asynchronous
voice, an extension of the new loudspeaker technology that had united the crowds
at Nuremberg and could now include entire nations and could produce a new
relationship between oracular authority and the masses.
The use of the radio as an instrument of national unification was not unique
to the European fascist states. The BBC, as early as 1929, had married Stille’s
recording device to shortwave-radio broadcasts, so that programs could be heard
throughout the Empire at identical local times, allowing widely scattered listeners
to occupy the same radio space and, thus, the same institutional space divorced
from immediate geography and social structure. The imperial unconsciousness
manifested in the form of disembodied voice and was therefore easily integrated
into individual (un)consciousness.
In America, in the years leading up to World War II, radio technology was
promoted as a means of bringing “the best of the city and its elite cultural forms to
the hinterlands” (Wurlitzer 198) of a country with a lot of periphery. “Sound media
fulfilled, to a large extent, the desire for a shared national imaginary” (Wurlitzer
227), a set of utopian desires tied specifically, through advertising and journalistic
commentary, to the wide adoption of the media themselves. By the eve of World
War II, nine of ten American households listened to at least three hours of radio
broadcasting each day (Field vii). A reasonable argument can be made that the
17
public’s wide access to radio news
16
and the government’s forays into non-
commercial propaganda programming (e.g., Norman Corwin’s This Is War!, put
into production by Archibald MacLeish as the head of the propaganda agency in
1942) played a decisive role in uniting the public behind the United States’ entry
into the global conflict. For two decades radio news, entertainment, sports, and
cultural programming had been helping America tell itself its own story; during
wartime, the binding of politics and culture, popular and elitist alike, made explicit
during the New Deal, became a fixture of American life and prepared the field for
Cold War cultural politics, as the fight against fascism morphed into the fight
against Soviet communism.
In 1939 the Brush Development Company of Cleveland, aided by German
immigrant engineer S.J. Begun, developed the Soundmirror steel-tape recorder,
which would become widely used in the military. Companies such as 3M worked
with the Office of Scientific Research and Development to manufacture high-
quality magnetic tape. After the war, 3M, using intelligence reports detailing the
composition of captured German BASF tape, developed the Type 111 red oxide
acetate medium which, used on the new Ampex 200 machines, became the industry
standard and helped birth the hi-fi cult in America.
Much of the technology necessary for high-fidelity recordings—crucial for
the creation of the illusion of presence—resulted from wartime exigencies. For

16
By 1945, 61 percent of Americans responding to polls identified the radio—not
newspapers—as their primary source of news (Horten 14).

18
example, the British Ministry of Defence, eager to capture submarine sounds for
the training of the sonar operators who were to play a vital role in the Battle of the
Atlantic, funded Arthur Haddy’s development of Full Frequency Range Recording
(FFRR), which raised the clarity of disc recordings to new levels.
The era’s greatest triumph of sound-recording engineering was the German
Magnetophon KI, first displayed at the Berlin Radio Fair in August 1935. The
machine was portable and contained its own amplifier and speaker. It was cheap.
It was reliable. The German military loved it, adopting the Tonschreiber model for
use in the field. BASF developed a new gamma ferric-oxide tape formulation that
greatly improved sound quality. By 1940, the Magnetophon had ac-biasing—an
all-but-forgotten technology that had been patented by the United States Naval
Research Laboratory in 1927—that further increased the tape medium’s dynamic
range and frequency response to 10,000 kHz, so that the recorded human voice
sounded nearly identical to the live version.
By the early Forties, the audio quality of German radio broadcasts had
become so pure that tape recordings were no longer easily distinguishable from live
events. This fact aroused a great deal of concern among the Allies. Richard H.
Ranger, an MIT-trained electrical engineer from Newark, New Jersey, and inventor
of the radio-facsimile machine was the man the Army Signal Corps tasked with
monitoring German broadcasts. He had been a captain in the American
Expeditionary Force in France during the First World War and had returned to the
military as a fifty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel with a distinguished record in the
19
fields of radar development and sound reproduction, first at RCA, then at his own
company, Rangertone, Inc. As he listened, day in and day out, Col. Ranger noticed
that he could not determine the time and place of production by judging a
broadcast’s sound signature. He was hearing programs that seemed too long to
have been pre-recorded, at least using Allied state-of-the-art equipment, and yet
must have been, given the hours of the broadcasts and military-intelligence reports
pinpointing the movements of program originators. In addition, the signals had the
clarity of a live performance. Ranger concluded, however, that many of the Nazi
broadcasts must have featured recorded material, rendering intelligence gathering
from broadcast sources a risky activity. Furthermore, a pure signal broadcast
divorced from time and place, by reducing the audience’s awareness of mediation,
naturalized the totalizing effect of the official (fascist) voice.
In this wartime context, the fate of the democratic world and its cultural
institutions depended, at least to the actors of the culture industry, not only on
military response but on cultural self-consciousness, the awareness of something
worth fighting for. Mark Van Doren wrote a book about it, Liberal Education. So
did Norman Foerster, twice: The Humanities and the Common Man and The
Humanities after the War. Tate, explicitly echoing these concerns, followed
through on MacLeish’s earlier proposal to Eugene Meyer and drew up a plan to
record poets and release the work on a series of albums in anticipation of a more
20
peaceful future.
17
Ultimately, Tate was able to schedule only himself and
Katherine Garrison Chapin for recording sessions.
Although Tate failed to advance the recording project, he affected the future
of the project indirectly when he established the Fellows of the Library of Congress
in American Letters, who first met on May 26, 1944, and included Katherine
Garrison Chapin, Katherine Anne Porter, Willard Thorp, Mark Van Doren, Van
Wyck Brooks, Paul Green, Carl Sandburg, and Tate himself (Annual Report 35-36).
This group, the composition of which evolved over the years but never much
beyond the boundaries of geography and class of the original members, served an
advisory role, nominating Consultants (often current or previous members),
recommending disbursements from gift funds, and authorizing, by their existence, a
particular brand of mid-century verse. One might note that the impetus for the
culture-building enterprises of mid-century America came from exactly such cadres
of the intelligentsia as the Fellows comprised—for instance, the Ivy-Leaguers who
ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom international offices on behalf of the CIA.
“There was a genuine community of interest and conviction between the Agency
and those intellectuals who were hired,” Frances Stoner observes, “even if they
didn’t know it, to fight the cultural Cold War” (3). Indeed, until revelations were
printed in the New York Times in the mid-1960s of the CIA’s nefarious scheming,

17
The jacket copy for the Twentieth Century Poetry in English LPs says that Tate and
MacLeish “drew up plans for assembling as complete an archive as possible.” This is an
overstatement.

21
the literati enjoyed a certain moral status in the United States’ presentation of itself
to the world as a cultural superpower.
This short tradition had begun in the mid-1940s with the Office of War
Information under Elmer Davis and continued through the end of the decade as “the
full arsenal of American achievement was shipped to Europe and showcased in
Berlin” (Stoner 20) in the process of de-Nazification. Eugene O’Neill and
Thornton Wilder, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur’s Court and Citizen Tom Paine—all were sent as substitutes for
what remained of German high culture. The anti-fascist cultural apparatus was
shortly retooled to help contain the USSR, as Soviet propaganda began to target
artists, writers, film-makers, and jazz musicians from the Western democracies.
The pax americana might owe its existence to military might, but the emerging
Cold War with the Soviet Union would entail converting hearts and minds to—
meaning, first convincing them of—the power of American culture, high and, more
persuasively, low. The USIA, created in 1953, stated this need for self-presentation
thus: “Americans are a cultured people. The U.S. has art, ballet, and a creative
cultural life; there are serious books available at prices that people can afford; we
have writers of noted achievement and a young but developing literary tradition”
(Bogart 90). Theodore Steibert, director of USIA, declared that “a concerted effort
to demonstrate ‘cultural achievement and aspirations can influence political
attitudes and actions.’” (Hixson 137). Although “at no time from 1945 to 1961 did
cultural diplomacy remotely approach in importance. . .the larger Cold War policy
22
of building alliances, amassing military force, and intervening to contain presumed
communist insurgencies” (Hixson xiii), the attention paid to cultural matters meant
that a culture needed first to be clearly defined so that governmental agencies such
as the USIA could carry on the task of promoting the virtues of the American way
of life.
All this would come. It was only a few weeks after D-Day when Tate’s year-
long occupation of the Chair expired and Robert Penn Warren, on leave from the
University of Minnesota, assumed the duties of the Consultant in Poetry, moving
into the top-floor office that in 1950 would be transformed into the Poetry Room.
First on his agenda was the recording project initiated by his predecessor. Like
Tate, Warren does not seem to have articulated a set of principles to guide the
acquisition and preservation of literary audiotexts. Unlike archivists of previous
generations, whose practices had been codified in 1898 by the famous Dutch
Manual, in which Muller, Feith, and Fruin distilled the precedents of nineteenth-
century French and German archival practice into a set of rules governing the
arrangement and preservation of primarily governmental documents, Warren and
his successors were tasked with not merely preserving but generating aural material
from previously printed texts. Such a selection process obviously begins at a point
before the audiotext itself exists. A strange archive, indeed.
How organizations, even entire societies, determine what is worth preserving
and remembering, and what is best destroyed and forgotten, is a topic historians
have investigated deeply during the last two decades. As the archivist Terry Cook
23
points out, “All acts of societal remembering, in short, are culturally bound and
have momentous implications.” Referring to Jacques Le Goff’s work on the
politics of archival memory, Cook repeats the argument that “those in power
decided who was allowed to speak and who was forced into silence, both in public
life and in archival records” (18). The selection criteria, such as they were, that
Warren, as the poet “in power,” established were based on personal and
professional connections with the authors he solicited and, whether intentional or
not, reflected certain assumptions about institutional power and the literary canon.
If he had ever read Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s major treatise on the sanctity of archival
evidence, published in 1922, he gave no indication. Jenkinson, in particular,
insisted that those involved in archival preservation should remain wholly impartial,
refusing to appraise or select the documents that would serve as evidence for future
historical investigation. These principles were expanded by Italian archive theorist
Eugenio Casanova, who in 1928 elaborated the positivist and empiricist values of
archival work. One can understand these scholarly concerns, given the way in
which the huge national archives generated by the First World War had been
systematically warped by European powers seeking to minimize culpability and
maximize national glory. The American response, as represented by Theodore
Schellenberg’s appraisal theories, to the massiveness of modern documentary
evidence was to focus on the informational use of such material in documenting
larger issues in American life. Schellenberg called for the archivist to decide on the
importance of “records” (his term), destroying those of lesser value and promoting
24
those that supported the world-view of the archivist personally and of the field-
specialists he consulted.
The first twenty years of the Poetry Archive were guided by a homespun
version of this methodology, more as a result of contingencies of funding and the
availability of poets than by design. In addition, Warren based his selections
mainly on personal taste and professional consensus, establishing a standard by
which the aesthetic value and the cultural value of a poem are commensurate. The
cultural value of the archive is based on prior determination, by editors, publishers,
critics, book buyers, and scholars (almost all located east of the Mississippi River,
most north of the Mason-Dixon line), of the aesthetic value of the archive’s
documents.
Although the archivist looks to past success as a marker, such a process
requires that he also divine the interests of the future. Upon his arrival in
Washington, Warren sent out form letters to solicit leading poets, the vast majority
of whom would be recognizable from the Modern Library anthologies.
18
As was

18
Years later, in another context, Librarian of Congress Quincy Mumford would write:
In our cosmopolitan and democratic civilization the arts survive
by their ability to establish themselves with relatively large groups[,]
and few artistic styles or movements fail to secure adherents. For the
Government to make a choice from among the practitioners of one or
another school would, I believe, tend to discourage rather than
encourage experimentation and artistic development by putting the
Government’s imprimatur on one style as opposed to another. (McGuire
196-197).
This statement does not refer to any standards enunciated by either a Librarian of Congress
or a Consultant in Poetry. On the contrary, whether consciously or not, decisions about
which poets to spend limited resources on were based almost entirely on prevailing literary
judgments that esteemed anthologized—and thus canonized.

25
often the case, the Library of Congress had no funds available for the recording
project, so Warren was compelled to beg the readings as a public service. Wartime
travel was neither cheap nor easy, but if a poet happened to be passing through
Washington, the Recording Laboratory would be happy to book time (Warren to
John Gould Fletcher, et al.). This offer was not always warmly received, especially
by those poets at a geographical remove. Kenneth Patchen, for instance, responded
that “the ‘public service’ angle has a hollow sound in view of the official and
general apathy of interest [in poetry].” Other authors had already declined
MacLeish’s earlier invitations for similar reasons. Léonie Adams wrote in 1944
that because she could not afford to travel to Washington, she must forego the
opportunity to record. Nonetheless, thirteen writers responded to the call, vying for
time in the Laboratory with Marines engaged in authenticating recordings made in
battle. One can imagine John Crowe Ransom and Robert P. Tristram Coffin
rubbing elbows with their battle-toughened fellow citizens.
Thus, as had been the case with Kimball Flaccus’ project in the 1930s, it
came about that the earliest recordings made for the Library of Congress were
determined largely by which of the invitees could afford the travel time and
expense to visit the laboratory, as well as by whom the Consultant knew personally.
Lack of access, lack of money, lack of familiarity, and, most of all, an
26
understandable lack of accurate prognostication
19
—all these made it difficult to
give coherent form to the Poetry Archive.
Although he may not have articulated clear selection criteria, Warren
expressed his intention that the poetry readings should have popular appeal: “The
Library’s recordings are to be released, eventually, through commercial channels.
Five albums a year [of five records each] are planned” (ltr. Warren to Evans). The
Poetry Archive, then, was not to develop solely as a repository to be excavated by
future literary historians. Like the Archive of American Folk Song catalogue, it
was meant to disseminate American art and culture while recouping its production
costs. As experience was to demonstrate, repeatedly, it was difficult to estimate the
apathy of the American listening public—at least when it came to spending money
on poetry—despite the conviction by those involved in the culture industry that
poetry recordings occupied a central position in the mid-century American cultural
narrative. In the end, poetry recordings as objects of cultural production could not
much participate in the discourse of value, because they proved not to be
commodity but testimony, which can sometimes be bought but can rarely be
peddled.
As the Second World War drew to a close, Warren’s term expired. Louise
Bogan’s acceptance of the appointment as the next Consultant in Poetry surprised
no one so much as herself. The excellent Bogan had long objected to “time-

19
At the time, who would have thought that American masters such as George Oppen or
Louis Zukofsky would produce work that has had more lasting value than that of Katherine
Garrison Chapin, Selden Rodman, and other names consigned to history?
27
serving” authors who took political stances—and jobs—singling out the
indefatigable and highly publicized MacLeish as the worst of the lot. (MacLeish
had already resigned as Librarian, in December 1944, to take a post in the State
Department as Assistant Secretary of State for public and cultural relations and was
succeeded by Luther Evans.) Yet the summer of 1945 found her moving house to
Georgetown, “after all [her] cracks about official positions for poets” (What the
Woman 250).
It was under Bogan’s leadership that MacLeish’s original plan to release
poetry albums took a leap forward. She obtained funding. Through his
relationship with Huntington Cairns on the radio program “Invitation to Learning,”
Tate re-entered the picture long enough to put Luther Evans in contact with Paul
Mellon’s new Bollingen Foundation. In a letter from early 1946, D. D. Shepard,
secretary of the foundation, confirms a $10,500 grant for both the current year and
1947, for the purpose of compiling and releasing five albums “of contemporary
American poetry read by the poets themselves to be used primarily for the purpose
of teaching poetry in schools and colleges” (Shepard). Bogan understood that there
were other pressing concerns necessitating the manufacture of the records. In a
letter to Hester Corner of New Haven, she notes that “until the records are ready
interested persons will not be able to listen to the poetry recordings because of the
perishable nature of the Master records” (Bogan). One irony of recording projects
in the pre-digital age is that hopes of immortal preservation were highest early on,
when the sound media—tin foil, wax cylinders, shellac plates—were most
28
ephemeral, as subject to the forces of decay as the physical body of the speaker.
The Recording Laboratory work in the 1940s had been done on 16-inch cellulose
acetate discs, a fragile medium made more fragile with every pass of the playback
stylus.
20
Although she does not propose clear archival principles, the matter of
preservation must have been on her mind as she spent February 1946 listening to
the recordings in the collection to determine not only the best readings by
individual authors but also the technical quality of the masters which might allow
for superior duplication, so that the quality of the releases might “correspond to the
albums of folk music already issued commercially under the Library’s auspices”
(Bogan).
In listening, Bogan was very much situated in a particular ideology of sound
reproduction and reception evident in mid-century America. Following the
invention of the condenser microphone by Edward Wente at AT&T in 1917,
heralding the dawn of the electroacoustical era of sound reproduction, there
developed a desire to create a “best, modern sound,” a denatured acoustic signal
divorced from the context of both production and consumption. The decoupling of
sound and space necessary for this conception is found literally in architectural
designs such as the Eastman Theatre in Rochester (1923), the Chicago Civic Opera
Building (1930), and Severance Hall in Cleveland (1930), where the acoustic
imperatives, and hence designs, of the performance spaces and those of the

20
Kimball Flaccus notes that because of the delicate nature of the aluminum and acetate
discs, most of his recordings had been played only once by the early 1940s. A limited
number of copies had “been played before groups on five occasions” (Adventure 321).

29
listening spaces differed significantly. Producers—musicians, orators—needed to
hear themselves in the spaces they occupied differently than auditors needed to hear:
ambience versus projection; nearness vs. distance. Even in proximity an audience,
therefore, might hear music that sounded quite different from what the musicians
heard (Thompson).
This decoupling was accomplished even more fully in Hollywood studios,
where sound was often dubbed and synchronized after filming, and at the NBC
radio broadcasting facility at the Rockefeller Center (1933), the eleven stories of
which were structurally isolated from the rest of the building, soundproofed and
windowless, allowing—requiring—sound engineers to create a new authoritative
sound signature that became the standard heard by millions of Americans who
became quickly accustomed to sounds produced in imaginary spaces that were even
less calibrated to the shared world than the sounds issuing from their telephone
receivers and phonograph horns.
The process of stripping spaces of their unique sound signatures had begun as
early as 1900 with the pioneering acoustician Walter Sabine and his acolytes.
These “new acousticians” were concerned with reducing, specifically, the
interference of reverberation in concert halls and, more generally, the confusion of
noise in an increasingly congested urban environment. This revolution in
architectural design, so beautifully delineated by Emily Thompson, influenced the
recording process decades later when full-frequency technology became widely
available. Studio spaces were either acoustically treated to remove extraneous
30
characteristics that might interfere with clear transmission of the primary sound
source or designed in such a way that the reverberation served to
psychoacoustically enrich the signal without noticeable sonic artifacts.
The utopian values underlying the pursuit of the “one best sound,” values that
had conditioned the mid-century listening public—or perhaps constructed a
particular listening subjectivity—via the commercial channels of movies, radio, and
commercial phonographic records, and had sponsored the explosion of postwar
electronic reproduction technologies, fit neatly with the literary desiderata espoused
by anthologizers such as Conrad Aiken and Louis Untermeyer. Namely, that those
authorities appointed to the cause should find objective aesthetic standards against
which poetry could be measured in determining which works represented the best
of American high culture. The reading of late Modernist and mid-century
academic verse requires an admiration of certain values such as paradox, ambiguity,
tension, irony, and sincerity that can be accomplished technically in the deployment
of language, much as the asserted values in sound recordings, such as frequency
response, signal-to-noise ratio, and total harmonic distortion, can be made present
through technological expertise. Furthermore, much as the anthologizing process
stripped poetry from the context of its prior publication and, by virtue of identical
graphical presentation and often arbitrary association, turned individual poems into
a kind of standard “poetry,” the representational practices of sound recordings were
marked by an institutional signature: breath-free, close-miked, and only lightly
31
reverberant—in other words, intimate—in contrast to the loudspeaker voicing
associated with totalitarian political regimes.
21

The relationship of literacy, publishing, and democracy (consider the
expansion of the public library system during the Great Depression) intensified
during wartime and became inextricable in Cold War discourse. “[T]he political
unconscious of the LP medium. . .was clearly shaped by its origins in the Office of
War Information during wartime. These origins gave the medium a democratic—
and democratizing—disposition” (Parry 26).
In the culture-building project of the long 1950s the typical demobilized GI,
in addition to having developed new reading and listening habits via the Office of
War Information during the years of combat, formed the core of a new cult of high
fidelity. These soldiers, experienced in electronic military communications
apparatus, returned home to find themselves part of a national effort to “extend
liberal arts education to the common man” who served as “the central figure in a
broad cultural narrative that reflects the roles that culture and sound technology had
played in defeating fascism” (Parry 7).
22

21
Adelaide Morris, Friedrich Kittler, Marjorie Perloff, Charles Grivel, Garrett Stewart, and
others have explored at some length how Modernist literature responded to the imperatives
of new sound technologies and the sonic signatures they produced, especially in the
collapsing (in print) of the traditional inner/outer soundings of a poem. In particular, I
recommend Morris’s essay “Sound Technologies and the Modernist Epic: H.D. on the
Air.”

22
These GIs had access—as would veterans of the Korean “emergency”—to government-
backed loans to start businesses specializing in hi-fi audio and home electronics. The most
notable example is Major John T. Mullin, who as an electrical engineer in the Signal Corps
sent home to San Francisco ac-biased Magnetophone tape recorders captured, along with
fifty reels of BASF tape, from Radio Frankfurt. When he returned to the States, Mullin
32
The cult of high-fidelity—the term had been in use since 1934 but was not
widely bandied about until around 1947—in the early years of the Cold War was
part of a globalism that sought to “contain the breach that occurred with the rise of
fascism as the historical culmination of ‘modern’ discourse” (Parry 21). There is
little doubt that the catastrophe wrought with the aid of fascist media systems—
particularly radio—spurred a national self-examination of media technologies and
post-print discourse. However, projects such as the Library’s Poetry Archive were
aimed more at bolstering a sense of national cultural identity than countering
foreign ideology per se, although even this aim cannot be separated from the larger
issues of universalized Americanization.
This project, begun as an extension of folk-culture collecting earlier in the
century, acquired a decidedly more literary color during World War II, at least
partly in response to a spike in poetry publishing and poetry reading. Although the
rationing of paper imposed by the War Production Board after 1943 made it
difficult for publishers to keep titles in stock, the demand for books had never been

modified the machines to add dc-biasing and demonstrated them in 1946 to the Institute of
Radio Engineers. This meeting led to contact with Alexander Poniatoff of the young
Ampex Electrical and Manufacturing Company (itself a wartime incorporation that built
motors and generators). Aided by FIAT intelligence reports on German industry, the men
were able to develop a superior commercial recording machine. By 1947, Bing Crosby had
not only adopted the Ampex machine to pre-record his Philco radio show, he had invested
$50,000 of his own money in the company that more than any other birthed the era of high-
fidelity recording, beating out the undercapitalized Rangertone, Inc., which, under the
direction of Richard H. Ranger, had followed a similar path of modifying captured German
electronics for the American professional sound market.
One further note: Mullin, as chief sound engineer for Crosby’s show, spliced in
recorded laughter from an earlier show to prop up a flat joke, thus inventing “canned
laughter” and introducing the listening public to a manufactured hyperreality.

33
greater. The archives at Random House, parent company of the Modern Library,
indicate that the domestic sales of philosophy and poetry titles increased
dramatically after Pearl Harbor as the nation plunged into a psychologically
dislocating war. Overseas, soldiers and sailors, who often found themselves with
monotonous stretches of time on their hands, turned to reading. From 1943-1945,
the Armed Services Editions distributed nearly 123 million paperbound books to
the troops (Neavill 586). A large proportion of these books were Modern Library
titles. Bennett Cerf, co-head of Random House, was actively involved in the
Council of Books in Wartime, while overseeing his own firm’s burgeoning
business. As demobilized soldiers returned to civilian life, flooding into the
universities on the crest of the GI Bill, they brought with them a familiarity with the
poetic sensibility promoted by Modern Library publications. This sensibility owes
a great deal to future Consultant in Poetry Conrad Aiken, who from the 1930s to
the 1960s edited multiple volumes of A Comprehensive Anthology of Modern
Poetry.
The connection between the Modern Library writers and the Library of
Congress’s poetry archive is not trivial. Indeed, the sound recordings map the
literary anthology selections of the 1930s and 1940s. The selection criteria Aiken
evinces in the preface to both the 1929 and 1944 editions flag several of the
unaddressed problems Consultants in Poetry would face in collecting and
publishing audiotext anthologies on LP. “Insensibly,” Aiken writes, “we have got
into the habit of accepting the second-best” poetry for purely historical
34
considerations. Rather than select work that provides evidence of the existence of
poets and poetasters on American shores from 1671 on, Aiken the anthologist
decides that “aesthetic judgment. . .is the only sound basis for procedure” (v-vi).
He acknowledges, particularly in the later edition, the difficulties inherent in
making these decisions. Critics and readers during the second half of the twentieth
century have dismissed what to Aiken were important figures of the moment: H.
Phelps Putnam, Robert Hillyer, Oscar Williams, John Malcolm Brinnin.
23
But in
the main, future Consultants in Poetry, as well as those writers whose recordings
they supervised, are heavily represented in the Modern Library, as the table of
contents of the 1944 edition demonstrates.
The selection and anthologizing of the “best” American poetry mirrored the
discourse of presence that accompanied the development of full-frequency sound-
recording and sound-reproduction technology.
24
Beginning in the late 1940s with
the invention of ac-biased film-backed magnetic audiotape, improved German and
American ribbon and condenser microphones, and high-fidelity consumer playback
equipment, it became possible to promote the illusion of perfect listening to a

23
One inexcusable omission from the Modern Library anthology: William Carlos
Williams, whose open-ended, non-allusive, non-ironic, non-paradoxical—in other words,
non-teachable—“machines made of words” could not be accommodated to Aiken’s New
Critical aesthetic judgments. Compared to Williams’s work, even the E. E. Cummings
pieces that Aiken favored look positively academic.

24
The discourse of high fidelity as the discourse of presence originated in the 1870s with
the radical means of separating voice from the proximate body provided by telephone and
phonograph, the one a technology of pure disembodiment, the other a technology of
cultural inscription. As Jonathan Sterne has so brilliantly demonstrated in his discussion of
the social genesis of sound fidelity, the illusion of presence generated by audio recording
was historically a state to be achieved rather than given.

35
nascent audiophile culture, an ideology that foregrounds the evidential possibilities
of sound recording by claiming that originary performance events can be captured
and reproduced with a high degree of objective faithfulness.
This kind of invested listening dates to the early days of sound recording
and is a skill that must be acquired within specific historical conditions of
aurality. As Jonathan Sterne demonstrates, users of sound playback
equipment in the late nineteenth century initially had to be educated to
hear the sounds emanating from the phonograph as having meaning. The
listener of early recordings with their limited frequency response and
excessive noise, had to be persuaded to invest his faith in both the
authenticity of the recorded event and the communicative value of the
listening event. (Rawson 205)

The belief that a sound recording captures an originary event—a reality suitable for
reproduction—is an archival imperative. What would be the value of historical
evidence that had been so warped by its technology of reproduction and the social
construction of listening that it represented an aesthetic object more than a record
of the author’s intentions, interpretation, or emendations?
25

The faith that a sound recording captures an originary event is also intimately
bound up with modern ideas of evidence, of proof, arising from the complexities of
the administration of justice in the modern nation-state. The indexical signs of the
fingerprint, the mug shot, the identifying tattoo or scar, the signature on the
authorized document—all point to, indeed prove, the existence of the individual.
Look. Or listen: those sounds crackling from the speaker in the fruitwood console

25
Then there is Freud, who finds that the present always refers to prior versions of itself.
Just as psychoanalysis transposes the dream rebus, so the phonograph was seen as a
technology of transposition (death to life, text to voice), such that art becomes evident as a
keyed rebus of authorial perception or politics the keyed rebus of the national unconscious.

36
once emanated from the vocal apparatus of a living individual, presumably the one
named on the record sleeve or inked on the tape box. Or: Ladies and gentlemen of
the jury, what you are about to hear is Mafioso X cursing out Mafioso Y as they
conspire to commit multiple felonies.
26
The boss’s voice inscribed on the
dictaphone cylinder causes, as surely as the boss’s presence at the secretary’s
shoulder, the typewriter to chatter. The Führer’s voice blaring from the radio stirs
the blood because that voice could be identified as belonging to—that is,
originating from the body of—the Führer. These are all performative presences.
The soprano on the phonograph—the heart leaps at the mere imagining of her
existence, singing, somewhere, to someone. I imagine that she imagines me. The
aural evidence of her existence confirms my own existence. In this I am modern:
time itself, not merely an event in time, is a thing captured, ordered, packaged, and
consumed. As a listener I am in thrall to time in way I am not as a reader. By the
time European fascism was ascendant, the illusion of originary aurality, abetted by
sound-synched film, which provided visual proof of vocal presence, was fully
formed.
27

26
Although wiretapping by law-enforcement agencies had been practiced since the 1890s,
the first decision regarding the constitutionality of wiretap evidence, Olmstead v. United
States, was not handed down by the Supreme Court until 1928. This case, and subsequent
cases such as Nardone in 1934, did not challenge the accuracy of the recorded evidence
itself but rather the illegal search and seizure of the subjects’ voices.

27
The role that sound-synchronized film played in conditioning listeners of recorded music
and audiotexts deserves fuller exploration. The massive shift in media experience wrought
when Al Jolson uttered the words “Did you like that, Mama?” in October 1927 served to
relocate the voice, represented textually in the silent-film era, into a simulacrum of the

37
“Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit,”
writes Walter Ong (11). But in the twentieth century the oral leaves a residue,
which given the perishable nature of the recording medium is often more
constructed than clearly heard. In the era of secondary orality, the human voice
becomes, like time, as manipulable as text and nearly as physically available,
complicating the existential relationship between voice and perception. The
German wire-recorders and tape-recorders of the 1930s (e.g., the Lorenz recorder)
were initially used as transcription machines, primarily at radio stations to create
repositories of evidence, the assembled fragments of another’s consciousness, the
unembodied voice made available. If one had the voice in hand, one could do
things with it and one could know things about it.
The poets, producers, and listening public of the mid-century audiotext could
cleave to the notion that what they heard on playback provided evidence of
authorial essence, revealing intention, and, by definition, the best reading of the
work—even a reading of which the author was unaware: “The voice of the poet is
going to tell you something about the poem that the poet may not necessarily know
he put in there” (Mantell qtd. in Parry 254). This faith can be traced to the late-
Victorian understanding of utterance as the source of authority in poetry, which, if
one takes at face value the discourse of poetic meter at the time, was meant to be
recited, whether the author had the inclination to do so or not.

physical body. The visual image would haunt the recorded voice, and the recorded voice
would more than ever be accompanied by the aura—and “authority”—of celebrity.

38
In addition, the wide acceptance of the human voice as represented by the
radio and movie-theater loudspeaker and a commitment to “oral English” pedagogy
suggested an authoritative vocal ideal. The textbook Oral Interpretation of Forms
of Literature (1953) spares no detail. To quote: “It cannot be stated too often or
too forcibly that poetry demands adequate oral interpretation to reveal its full
beauty and significance just as a musical composition demands oral and
instrumental interpretation (McLean 132). Professor Parrish of the University of
Illinois offers, in his popular textbook, that the spiritual essence of poetry is
“almost infallibly revealed by reading aloud,” the lines “lingered over, caressed
lovingly with the voice” (14). In Oral Reading, Lionel Crocker and Louis M. Eich
assert that although “most poets are not so fortunate as to have their poetry read
constantly aloud. . .in composing it, they aim for the ear” (11).
Such a tyranny of inscription can not be sustained, of course. Witness how
frequently critics of the audiotext find the performances of the poets to be woefully
inadequate. From the long 1950s: “[T]he unhappy fact is that most good poets are
not good readers” (Whicher 113). “Jeffers reads with a patient, lazy-lipped
weariness. . . . Jarrell presents his lines with an almost tearful, distracting
jerkiness. . . .Meredith sounds strangely dispirited” (Hume 55). “Most of our poets
are now aware that they need practice. . . .You cannot correct the faults of a lifetime
of colloquial speech” (YS I 4). “[The] poet-readers themselves vary greatly and
are not usually subject to improvement” (McGuire 127). Poets “have had no
training whatsoever in oral reading; may, indeed have abominable voices” (Crocker
39
and Eich 185). Time and again, record reviewers and literary cognoscenti—
sometimes in the same person—take American poets to task for their poor
expression.
28

Behind this criticism lies the belief, oft proclaimed, that poetry always has
been, and always will be, an oral form, and furthermore that “orality signifies
unmediated access to passional states” (Davidson, “Technologies” 97). This,
despite a generation’s best attempts to overthrow the oral heritage that produced the
versifying of William Vaughn Moody and Sidney Lanier. If Marianne Moore
sounds awkward reciting her poems, it is not only her shyness but the way the
deliberate constructions of her lines and stanzas, in tension with semantics, resist
fluency. If W.C. Williams sounds as though he has never seen his poetry before
reading it aloud, it is because his writing self-consciously denies its connection
with the English verse tradition in favor of lines that owe more to the technology of
the typewriter than the physiology of the larynx. If Wallace Stevens strikes the
listener as a stem-winding orator, it is likely because his lines, for all their
mellifluousness, were constructed with the propositional rigor of a legal brief.
These poets talk like the librarians and doctors and lawyers they were. Modernism
in its anthologizable form privileged the visual, the words on the page, and to
demand that the music produced by those scores sound like Edna St.Vincent Millay

28
Lest we forget that non-Americans also read poorly: When Robert Browning was called
upon after a dinner party in 1889 to recite “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent
to Aix” (leaving us our second-oldest poetry recording), the great poet of personae forgets
the words to his own poem. In an odd, authenticating move, he signs his name orally to the
event.

40
or T. S. Eliot is analogous to expecting a Charles Ives symphony to sound like
Beethoven.
At the end of her term, Bogan turned over the unfinished project of album
production to her successor. Although a majority of the Fellows felt that Léonie
Adams was the natural nominee, Allen Tate, in his role as advisor to the Librarian,
advocated for Karl Shapiro, who eventually received the nod. Wrote Tate, without
elaboration, “[A] man might do this particular job this year better than any woman
that could be selected” (McGuire 98). Nevertheless, one of Shapiro’s first acts
upon arriving at the Library was to hire a woman, Phyllis Armstrong, who went on
to manage the Poetry Office for the next two and a half decades. Then he tackled
the seemingly endless task of producing the records the Bollingen Foundation had
agreed to fund, bringing more poets to the Laboratory for readings and negotiating
the rights to the Harvard Vocarium
29
recordings, duplicates of which had already
been physically acquired by the Library.
Shapiro paid $700 from the gift fund to acquire the Vocarium series one
masters.
30
This seminal recording project, begun in 1932 when T.S. Eliot intoned

29
Vocarium: “a collection of voice recordings for use as a study aid in the appreciation of
literature[;] “a place where recordings of voices are kept and used for study and
enjoyment” (F. Packard). In 2003 the early Vocarium recordings were named for
inclusion in the first annual National Recording Registry, legislated by Congress with the
charge that the Library of Congress develop a comprehensive national recording-
preservation program.

30
Although a 1034 Voucher dated 15 June 1948 indicates this dollar figure, a letter from
D.D. Shepard, Secretary, Bollingen Foundation, dated 23 January 1946 suggests that
$1420.59 of the Bollingen’s $10,500 grant had been earmarked for the purchase of
Vocarium recordings.

41
“Gerontion” into a microphone in Cambridge, Massachusetts (“Library Notes”),
was the brainchild of Harvard’s new Professor of Public Speaking, Frederick C.
Packard, Jr., who was frustrated by the lack of recorded literature for
demonstrations of elocution. Initially, Packard oversaw the recording sessions in a
studio operated by the University Film Foundation in the basement of the Germanic
Museum. Although the project fell under the auspices of Harvard University Press
(and later the Harvard Film Service), during its fifteen-year existence it was a self-
sustaining enterprise. Indeed, poets like Merrill Moore, whose record sales—at
$1.50 per 78 rpm disc, postage prepaid—did not recoup their production costs, had
to foot the bill themselves. This practice limited the choice of authors for the
audiotext archive to either the solidly canonical or the fortunately flush (J. Packard).
The bulk of the Vocarium recordings were archived in the Woodberry Poetry
Room in Widener Library. Beginning in 1938, Arnold Kenseth, as part of his
duties in the Poetry Room, supervised many of the recording sessions at the
Harvard Film Laboratory. Within two years, the Poetry Room had acquired over
150 recordings through purchase, gift donation, loan, or onsite recording.
Kenseth’s view of the project was clear: “Poetry recordings are a way of
preserving manuscript; a way of entertaining; a way of teaching poetry” (7).
Preservation became the main purpose of the archive after the Vocarium failed to
amuse or instruct a large enough audience to survive financially. When the
Vocarium folded, the records moved to the new Poetry Room in Lamont Library in
1949.
42
Not only did Shapiro have the wisdom to purchase the Vocarium archive in
toto, he was also the first Consultant to clearly articulate what had previously been
a haphazard selection procedure based mainly on personal relationships and literary
popularity:
These factors governed the final choice of poems [to record]:
1) Whether the poet was recommended by the committee of Fellows.
2) Whether the poem represented the author fairly.
3) Whether the poet’s presentation was good.
4) Whether the quality of the recording was good.
In a few cases the length of the poems was prohibitive. (ltr. to MacLeish)
None of these points, however, represents new thinking. Given the Library’s
limited resources, recommendations by established poets of other established poets
had been standard operating procedure. The poets were already expected to select
their own material, and they tended to choose well-known, that is, “representative,”
works. The quality of the poets’ presentations and the quality of the recordings
remained ideals rarely realized.
In 1952, Phyllis Armstrong explicitly linked the poetry-recording project to
the larger project of mid-century culture-building: “The criteria of selection were
these: that [the recordings] should present poets of recognized worth, in all genres
of verse writing, who have contributed to the advancement of the national poetry.”
Armstrong also notes, following Shapiro, that although the Poetry Consultant, in
conjunction with the Fellows, determined who would read for the archive, the
choice of “selections has been. . .heavily in favor of work on which the poet
himself wished to rest his case” (ltr. to Lask).
43
In any event, the advancement of the national poetry in audiotext form
remained unfulfilled. When Shapiro left for a teaching job at Johns Hopkins, the
records had still not been pressed.
Enter Robert Lowell, a literary supernova in his blessed thirtieth year, 1947,
recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the prize from the
Academy of American Arts and Letters, a tenure at Yaddo, and a Life magazine
feature article. By September, Lowell had decided that the list of poets for the first
albums was “idiosyncratic. Four or five of the inclusions are absurd” (ltr. to Robert
Gooch). Although he agitated for change, including dropping Paul Engle (“his
verse is of little value”) and William Meredith (“a poor reader”), and adding Robert
Frost and Ezra Pound—who in any event refused to record despite Lowell’s many
visits to St. Elizabeth’s—in the end he was unable to persuade Spivacke to alter the
original compilation. Lowell also pushed for a series of albums devoted to single
authors, and went so far as to bring Robert Frost and John Crowe Ransom to
Coolidge Auditorium for the purpose of making live recordings, although both
authors had previously read in the Laboratory. Lowell also attracted many of the
usual club members—Jarrell, Tate, Auden, Berryman—for the recording project,
but in the end, his attention was diverted by the demands of midwifing and
administering the new Bollingen Prize for poetry, announced by the Library of
44
Congress on March 4, 1948.
31
When he departed the next year for Yaddo, the
records had still not been pressed.
It fell to Lowell’s successor, Léonie Adams, lately of New Milford,
Connecticut, to oversee the release of the first series of albums in January 1949:
Album 1: Katherine Garrison Chapin, Mark Van Doren, W.H. Auden,
Richard Eberhart, Louise Bogan;
Album 2: Paul Engle, Marianne Moore, Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher,
John Malcolm Brinnin;
Album 3: T.S. Eliot;
32

Album 4: William Carlos Williams, Robert Penn Warren, E.E. Cummings,
Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Spencer;
Album 5: John Crowe Ransom, William Meredith, Yvor Winters, Randall
Jarrell, Karl Shapiro.
33

31
As a result of the political uproar following the Bollingen award to Ezra Pound in 1948,
Congress compelled the Library to sever ties with the program and return the unused
portion of the grant. Subsequently, Yale University Library administered the award until
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation assumed responsibility in 1968. In 1973, the Mellon
Foundation endowed Yale Library with sufficient funds to continue the award.

32
On behalf of the Library, Luther Evans had to arrange special payments for the Eliot
recordings. When the poet balked at the standard $250 recording fee, Evans negotiated an
agreement that would pay Eliot—and, later, his estate—a $250 royalty for each 500-record
edition. Old Possum played the game well: his recordings in the “Twentieth-Century
Poetry in English” series have sold more than any other.

33
Where, one might ask, is the belle of the ball, Edna St. Vincent Millay? The wildly
popular poet’s lawyers in 1949 had firmly declined Luther Evans’s invitation to participate
in the project, since the LPs might “cut down on the sale of records made by the RCA
Victor Division.” Years later, Millay relented and allowed, with special permission from
RCA, three poems to appear on Oscar Williams’s An Album of Modern Poetry, which
became a part of the Library’s Archive.

45
Available only by direct order from the Library of Congress, each album was
comprised of five vinylite records and sold for $8.25 (or for $1.50 per individual
disc). A biographical sketch, bibliography, and leaflet accompanied each poet’s
recordings. Interestingly, when a poet, in reading aloud, departed from his or her
original printed text, Adams decided to print the changes without comment. This
practice raises questions about the authority of individual texts. The fact that
subsequent omnibus print collections hew to the original graphotexts or those
amended by the author in writing rather than follow the audiotext, with its claims to
the authenticity of authorial intention, underscores the persistent valorization of the
printed over the aural, despite many and varied attempts to recuperate the oral
tradition in poetry over the last half century.
Recorded poetry itself is falsely aural/oral. The listener must be presumed to
possess a high degree of literacy, not to mention certain cultural investments that
underwrite a hegemony bound up in the authority of the written text, a presumption
supported by the inclusion of graphotext versions of the poems. Adams’s decision
to print variants notwithstanding, the poems in each case predate the recordings and
serve more as scores for performance than transcriptions of oral experience. The
extended aesthetic object that is the “poem” is threatened by a kind of
phonographic fallacy that awards primary status to the writer’s utterance.
The experience of hearing on vinyl a poem with which one is either familiar
or knows by reputation has an alienating effect. Text does not remind the reader so
insistently of the distance between self and author. Even if an author is dead, the
46
text is alive, subvocalized by the living apparatus of the reader’s body.
34

Relocating the intonation of the work from the reader’s body to the poet’s is a
seizing of understanding, of interpretation, by the absent poet and thus becomes a
tyrannical act. Recorded poetry is also more distant and “other” than text because
the intrusion of archaic sound technology, speech patterns, and obsolete “sound
signatures,” not to mention the aura of literary celebrity, shifts the audience’s
attention from word to voice and substitutes a single authority for interpretative and
experiential multiplicity. Even more complicating, the single authority of the
author’s utterances can at times conflict so dramatically with most readers’
endophonic readings or intellectual apprehensions of the prior graphotexts as to
produce profound estrangement. Edmund Wilson remarks that Louise Bogan,
estranged from her own voice, reads “as if her poems had been
compositions. . .written by some other person and by someone of whom she
disapproved” (What the Woman 370).
Although not phrased in these terms—indeed, hardly consciously
acknowledged—reviews of early recorded poetry often point to the alienating
distractions of the aural experience. The Saturday Review of Literature notice of
the first Twentieth-Century Poetry in English albums laments the poor sound
quality. Thomas Lask, in The New York Times, in addition to noting the “clicks,
wows, and other foreign sounds, and sudden modulations in the volume of voices,”
criticizes the readers for their poor enunciation. Dr. Spivacke in a memo to Robert

34
See Garret Stewart’s Reading Voices.

47
Gooch defends the work of the Recording Laboratory by laying the blame in
several places: the Harvard Vocarium recordings were bad; the Library of
Congress acetate masters had been played too many times by careless parties; the
poets, unlike musicians, were not willing to do multiple reading takes. One
reviewer, in promoting the pedagogical value of the records, goes out of his way to
assure readers that the “occasional delicate click resulting from the release of static
electricity” should not be too disturbing and that the selections are generally
“intelligible at first hearing” (Hume 55), while another, less-patient reviewer finds
volume differences among tracks and the irregular pauses between poems to be
“absolutely maddening” (Ostroff 351). Such statements belie the claim that poetry
recordings provide a transparent, even immaterial, access to the poet’s experience.
Imagine a reviewer remarking that a poetry book is “legible at first reading”!
The final preparation and release of this imperfect collection of audiotexts
occurred during the long imbroglio over the award on February 20, 1949, of the
first Bollingen Prize, administered by the Library, to Ezra Pound for The Pisan
Cantos. The outcry over the Bollingen award, led by Robert Hillyer at the Saturday
Review of Literature, was not, of course, the first involving Pound. After Pound
was arrested for treason in Italy in May 1945, Bennett Cerf at Random House
insisted, given the harsh sentiment in the press, that Conrad Aiken expunge
48
Pound’s work from the new edition of A Comprehensive Anthology of American
Poetry.
35

(The Pound case provides an example of the difficulty of establishing the
authority of sound recording absent textual support, despite the claim that the sound
recording is, in fact, best evidence. Often incoherent and broadcast on shortwave
signals too weak to be regularly heard abroad, Pound’s speeches, transcribed during
the war by the government’s Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, were used as
evidence of treason. The FBIS transcripts, however, contain a number of glaring
errors, partly because of the poor quality of the broadcasts themselves, partly
because the monitors misinterpreted Pound’s references. Comparing these
transcriptions to Pound’s own typewritten texts of the broadcasts—prepared prior
to recording and preserved after Pound’s death by Olga Rudge—reveals such
confusions as “Celine” with “Stalin” and “debauch the capitalist system” with
“divorce the capitalist system” [Doob xii)].
36
)
Although the Library had successfully released the long-promised albums,
the audiotexts in the Poetry Archive itself were in disarray. First, the material was
largely inaccessible, given the delicate condition of the 16-inch acetate-coated,
glass-base instantaneous masters made in the Laboratory. In 1952, Phyllis

35
Cerf eventually relented and admitted that “it may have been wrong to confuse Pound the
poet with Pound the man” (qtd. Neavill 594).

36
Even Pound’s own typewritten versions do not always provide clear authority, since he
often amended his text in an indecipherable handwriting. Furthermore, subsequent
publications of the texts have taken some liberties in order to make the manuscripts more
readable—see Doob.

49
Armstrong declared that “it has been established that tape recordings long outlast
discs” and persuaded Henry Dubester to authorize the transfer of all material on
disc—some 7631 minutes of recorded poetry in English—to tape (memo to
Dubester). The Recording Laboratory had replaced its wire recorder with a tape
recorder in 1950 and had begun the labor of transferring its extensive holdings of
folk music from cylinders and instantaneous masters to tape or metal lathe-cut
master discs, a process that involved tedious preparation work with camel-hair
brushes and carbon tetrachloride (Carneal 1).
A second problem, which plagued the audiotext collection at least until the
release of Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature: A Checklist in 1961, was the
badly labeled catalogue, such that the most basic concerns of the archivist,
provenance and original sequencing, had been so degraded that planning for future
LP releases had become a difficult task.
37
As Armstrong wrote to the director of
the Reference Department, “A good salesman should know his stock” (memo to
Adkinson). She proposed compiling a checklist or finding guide. By May 1953,
she had put together “Poets and Other Readers Who Have Recorded for the Library
of Congress Poetry Collection.” This document was apparently not widely
circulated, for in July, Edward Waters, Acting Chief of the Music Division,
complained that although he could locate work-orders dating back to 1942 for the

37
The Library of Congress was not the only institution to run into trouble organizing its
archives. Vocarium discs, for instance, were marked with various reference numbers,
either those of the Harvard Film Service series or with their own sets of catalogue numbers.
In addition, the recording logs are ambiguous about versions of poems. For the most
complete discography at the time of this writing, see Josephine Packer’s article in the
Harvard Library Bulletin, 15.3-4.
50
Recording Laboratory, the Library had no catalogue of its own recordings (ltr. to
Basler). A full year later, Basler asked Armstrong to survey the Library holdings in
an attempt to create a comprehensive catalogue (ltr. to Adkinson). One can only
imagine Ms. Armstrong’s response to her superior’s request for material she had
already compiled. Two years later, in 1956, Barbara Cohen, co-founder of
Caedmon Records, whose poetry recordings the Library had requested on deposit,
volunteered to go into the vaults and catalogue the Library’s holdings at her own
expense (ltr. to Basler). Basler demurred, although again he failed to acknowledge
Armstrong’s document.
Whether the Library personnel could make sense of their own archival
audiotexts was a moot point by 1952. After the release of the “Twentieth-Century
Poetry in English” series of five LPs, what little funding the Library had for its
recording project dried up almost completely, to a large extent because questions
over William Carlos Williams’s political affiliations discouraged foundational
support. (More on this below.) By 1954, Roy Basler was compelled to go begging
for material to add to the archive. With the exception of the Whittall Program, he
wrote, “during the last two years our acquisition of non-musical recordings has
been almost completely curtailed” (ltr. to Adkinson). He asked Phyllis Armstrong
to draw up a list of institutions that might be willing to exchange or donate
audiotext holdings, in the meantime contacting Frederick Packard, Jr., at Harvard to
see if the Vocarium series had any tapes or discs the Library had not already
acquired. (No.) Basler also instituted a near moratorium on Recording Laboratory
51
work. Not until 1957 would the Library secure funding from the Bollingen
Foundation sufficient to release a second set of albums. Further complicating
matters, new legislation in 1955 forbade the Library from using public monies for
projects that had not been authorized by Congress, meaning that compensation and
expenses associated with the poetry-recording project would henceforth come
solely from special gift funds.
But before these bleak times, Elizabeth Bishop did much to advance the
cause. One bright spot occurred on December 10, 1949, three months after Bishop
arrived to serve a year as Consultant, despite her anxiety over the job. Robert Frost,
unhappy with his earlier recordings, made himself available for a new studio
session. He was allotted three hours and received the standard fee of $250 in lieu
of royalties, for the twenty-two poems he recorded. These were released on 78 rpm
discs in 1951 and re-released on 33 1/3 rpm vinyl discs in 1953. Lowell had
established the precedent of allowing the poets to choose which works to read,
although Bishop notes that the final selection process belonged to the Consultant.
Even so, technical restrictions—i.e., long narrative or collage poetry would not fit
on either the master tape or the resultant LP
38
—ultimately governed the selection of
material, accounting for the preponderance of short lyric recordings in the Poetry
Archive during the first two decades, and valorizing a particular kind of verse.
Frost, for example, recorded none of his longer narrative or dramatic poems, opting

38
The recording log of Robert Carneal, Chief Engineer at the Recording Laboratory, notes,
for example, that I.A. Richards’s readings are too long to be released on microgroove LP.

52
instead for works such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mowing,”
“Acquainted with the Night,” and “The Mountain.”
39
Randall Jarrell observed of
Frost that his “best-known poems, with a few exceptions, are not his best poems at
all.” He lays the blame at the doorstep of literary anthologizers such as Louis
Untermeyer who offer a “good synopsis” and a “bad misrepresentation” of the poet
(37).
Of course, the poets who committed their voices to tape tended to choose
work that had already been sanctioned by the literary community, particularly by
inclusion in print anthologies. These pieces were often short lyrics, in the text-
based Romantic tradition that arose from the ashes of oral rhetoric. Criticism from
Coleridge on had been concerned with poetry as textual objects. The invention of
the typewriter, the linotype, and, less obviously, communication technologies such
as the telegraph, telephone, and moving pictures accelerated the verbal arts into a
new era of “thinginess.” Eliot’s annotations of The Wasteland, Cummings’s non-
standard typography, Stein’s verbal play, or Pound’s insistent intertextuality and
dense phonetic spellings are the product of, and dependent upon, the relationship
that readers and their authors have with printed media. The incommunicability of
perception is approached through the printed word, which makes literal the
authorial consciousness.

39
Frost omits, however, such time-worn favorites as “The Road Not Taken,” “Mending
Wall,” and “Birches.”

53
But what happens when this activity is transposed to an acoustical state?
Have author and reader now reached a higher level of communication, or has the
work of art been drained of an essential quality, the way a movie or dance is
reduced if transposed into a magazine review or a line illustration?
As Friedrich Kittler has argued, the invention of phonographic recording may
actually have cut off poetry from its oral antecedents by reducing the power of
literary language in a way that parallels photography’s challenge to painting in the
nineteenth century. In reaction to the phonographic challenge, Modernism
foregrounded textuality and retreated into an ever greater “literariness” divorced
from oral culture, while at the same time, as Garrett Stewart suggests, seizing upon
the phonemic (sub)vocalization of literary reading that the phonograph made
apparent in order to investigate wordplay derived not only from semantics but also
from phonemics (127). In other words, the reading of the modern reader, who
“interprets experience in terms of voice, speech, utterance, logos understood as
action” (Donoghue 155), exists in constant tension with the scriptive system and
the interpretative uncertainty it manifests as the author is banished from his own
work.
Phonography highlights—perhaps even triggers—the conflict between
authorial presence and absence that has occupied literary criticism from Mallarmé
to Derrida. Yet despite the massive assault on presence in the reception of literary
texts, readers stubbornly cleave to the authority of voice. Indeed, the modern
“voice” has become a critical trope deployed whenever we fail to find something
54
else to say about a work. As the Derridean equation of voice = presence has
replaced the Greek voice-as-action, exalting the textual over the aural, we come to
see the performance of literary texts as indices of authenticity.
Having spurred the flight into textual “literariness,” sound recordings of texts
furthered the canonization of late Modernist and mid-century academic poets, who
provided proof that the short lyric best represented American poetry. This suited
the New Critical apparatus, which elevated poetry that could be taught in the
classroom, i.e., short, dense lyrics.
Bishop denigrated the poetry-recording project for more personal reasons,
declaring her unhappiness not only with the sound of her own voice (Robert Lowell
had convinced her to record during his tenure as Consultant) but with the sound of
other poets’ voices.
40
She reported to Jarrell that “all this reading & recording &
anthologizing is getting to me” (Bishop 202). Nevertheless, she persuaded Muriel
Rukeyser, Dylan Thomas, and Archibald MacLeish to contribute their readings, the
latter at a Boston studio. In contrast to her unhappiness with Frost’s performance,
Bishop felt that the Dylan Thomas’s beautiful recording sessions represented the
high point of her term, although she noted that the tapes could not be used for
commercial purposes, as the material for the next series of Bollingen-funded
“Twentieth-Century Poetry” series of discs had already been decided.

40
Bishop would no doubt have agreed with Howard Nemerov’s typically cynical
assessment of poetry recording: when he assumed the Chair in 1963, he called the tape
recorder a “demonic instrument enabling people to waste the same time twice. . .bound to
encourage, as it has already done, every mouthy rhapsodist in the land” (qtd. in McGuire
269).

55
In 1950 Bishop passed the Consultantship to Conrad Aiken, who served for
two years ($5000 annual salary) before disaster struck in the form of the junior
Senator from Wisconsin. As we shall see, the Poetry Consultant position went
unoccupied for four years in the wake of the political and legal entanglements
surrounding William Carlos Williams’s nomination. The vacancy marked a
profoundly unproductive period for poetry-recording at the Laboratory. However,
through the lean times of the early Fifties, a process set in motion by Aiken led to
the acquisition of a handful of poets recorded by setting up local radio-broadcast
readings. More important was his reluctant endorsement of the peripatetic poet and
amateur sound engineer Lee Anderson as an “official” contributor to the recorded
Poetry Archive.
How Anderson, Pennsylvania farmer, winemaker, and author of such
unremembered collections as Prevailing Winds and Nags Head,
41
came in the
1950s to be the primary audiotext anthologizer for the Library of Congress’s Poetry
Archive is a story beginning with an outsider’s do-it-yourself enthusiasm and
ending with an affirmation of the mainstream literary canon in the postwar era.
From April 14, 1949, when he turned on his Webcor recorder for Josephine Miles
in Berkeley (YS I 2), until June 19, 1959, when Yale University formally offered to

41
Roy Basler, in a gushing essay on “The Poet as Composer,” explains that a poet such as
Anderson, who confines his work almost completely to long poems, “cannot be easily
represented in anthologies, and for this reason. . .remain[s] practically unknown to the vast
majority of poetry readers” (128). This, in response to James Dickey’s charge that
Anderson’s The Floating World “is surely one of the most cold-bloodedly over-serious
concoctions ever released to public scrutiny” (525).

56
purchase “The Lee Anderson Tape Collection: Field Recordings of Poets Reading
Their Own Works,” Anderson accumulated 240 tapes of 93 poets (Yale receipt),
preserving their voices for what he frequently represented to his subjects as the
Library of Congress recording project.
42

He was pale-eyed, ruddy-faced, and sociable, with a taste for wine and a
personality that “emits an aura of understanding, friendliness and, at times, even
cheerfulness” (Mitzell 17), qualities that put his subjects at ease before the
microphone. Anderson was born in Sexton, Pennsylvania, in 1896. He attended the
University of Pittsburgh and enlisted in the Navy in 1917, at the time of America’s
great overseas adventure. When he returned, Anderson married (wife Katie), had a
daughter (Jane), and worked in New York City until 1937, when he departed for
Columbia County, Pa. He and Katie divorced in 1939, and in 1941—the year he
privately printed 150 copies of his first book, Prevailing Winds—he married Helen
White of Amherst, Mass., and moved to Glen Rock in York County, Pa., settling
into an eighteenth-century house with few amenities and no modern appliances.
The house came with an eighty-acre farm on which the poet raised black angus
cattle. He raised Hampshire sheep and Muscovy ducks. He raised capons and
goats and pigs, and made his own wine from syrah varietals shipped each year from
California to Hoboken. On occasion he cultivated poetry, writing it out in long

42
In addition to his contribution to the American audiotext archive, Anderson, according to
a typewritten list in his personal papers at Washington University, recorded 37 British
poets.
Also: the 1949 recording Anderson made of Josephine Miles did not make it into the
Archive, where she is represented by poems recorded in September 1958.

57
hand by lamplight before reading it aloud into his machine to see what the verse
was made of. “I use the tape recorder to test the validity of oral values,” he writes
in an afterword to Nags Head. “It is my claim that poetry must return to where
poetry began, to oral presentation, if poets are to win a wider audience” (145). So
he began the project of inventing out of the insistently graphological Modernist
poetry he had first admired as an awakening poet in the late 1920s an oral tradition
for American letters, a tradition that would not actually begin to take shape for
several years, when certain poets—let’s say Ginsberg—became conscious enough
of the sound of their own recorded voices to recognize that phonological
performance provided a good means of reviving the Romantic role of the poet.
During the winter of 1947 in Glen Rock, the Andersons lived off their food
stores and wine cellar and did not see anyone for two months. If not exactly a
Luddite—he did, after all, operate his portable recorder—Anderson had no use for
such modern conveniences as supermarkets. His rejection of the contemporary
world extended to his taste in literature, which in turn informed his decision-
making when inviting poets to record, which in turn both contributed to and
reflected the canonization of a certain type of American poetry at mid-century:
crafted lyrical verse.
43
“I hold no brief for free verse, for beatnik, or for pure
symbolist lines. I do not want to see poetry develop in a manner comparable to that

43
Anderson’s own poetry mixes Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, and H.D.:
Set the hands to Spring nail up the brush
Then muse on Cousin Sleep Death and his Jennie
Till Spring comes on and his only wish
Is to follow the trail of the wood anemone. (28)

58
of the abstract canvas” (Mitzell 12). Throughout his recording career, Anderson
remained sympathetic to the Modernist project, although he did not always adhere
to his own standards when seeking out notable contemporaries, such as Denise
Levertov, Galway Kinnell, and Anne Sexton, for his archive. Still and all, the bulk
of his collection reflects the Modern Library sensibility—a mixture of the
accessible traditional and the accessible avant-garde—that had been promoted by
Albert Boni and Horace Liveright: Auden, Blackmur, Bogan, Eberhart, Kunitz,
Moore, Tate, Williams, and their progeny such as John Berryman, David Ferry,
Donald Hall, John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, and Richard Wilbur.
While it is true that Anderson occupied a quasi-official position in relation to
the quasi-official Poetry Archive, he undertook his project without official sanction.
This did not constrain him from representing to his subjects that the project was
sponsored by the Library of Congress (ltr. to Wilson). During the 1950s, his
representation of his role frequently clashed with both Library policy and, as it
turned out, United States copyright law. Conrad Aiken, for example, spent much of
the summer of 1952 distancing himself personally and the Library legally from
Anderson, who had given selections from his recordings to the Pacifica
Foundation’s radio station, KPFA, in Berkeley. Not unexpectedly, many of the
poets’ publishers objected to these royalty-free broadcast performances by authors
whom they had under contract. The recordings were presented on air as courtesy of
the Library of Congress (ltr. Aiken 1952). Aiken suspected that the public might
object to what looked like officially authorized, tax-supported work being delivered
59
to the left-wing Pacifica station, especially then, when McCarthy and his allies
were rooting through the government for covert Communists.
Early July found Aiken telegramming Richard Moore, KPFA program
director, to cease all mention of the Library of Congress in connection with the
Anderson recordings. Two weeks before, Anderson had protested his innocence in
advance of the KPFA dustup: “[D]ue to the fact that I work in a sort of vacumn
(sic) at the present I have invariably prefaced my conversation with the statement
that my only contact with the Library of Congress is as a contributor of poetry
recordings without compensation” (ltr. Aiken 1952). This statement claims a half-
truth. At this early date, Anderson had indeed not been reimbursed for either time
or expenses associated with the recording work, and he had deposited copies of the
early recordings, including those made by Consultant Léonie Adams, in the
Folklore section of the Library; however, he often gave the impression to the poets
he visited that he had the Library’s imprimatur.
To be fair, the Library maintained an ambiguous relationship with Anderson.
As a poet, Anderson had been “discovered” by future Poetry Consultant Conrad
Aiken in the late 1930s, although Aiken wrote invariably critical and testy letters
about Anderson’s own poetry for the next many years and even turned down
Anderson’s request for a book blurb in 1940 (ltr. Aiken). Throughout the 1950s,
Aiken’s relationship with Anderson was either barely sociable (he inscribed a copy
of his book Punch “For Lee / from Conrad”) or querulous (regarding the discs he
60
made for the Yale Series, Aiken writes in 1961, “Why is the second section of
Landscape played at such a breakneck speed—? Spoils it” [ltr. Anderson].)
In any event, after Aiken assumed the Consultant in Poetry chair in 1950,
Anderson visited him in Washington, D.C., to propose a recording project. He told
Aiken that he had offered Karl Shapiro, editor of Poetry magazine, the opportunity
to underwrite the field recordings for “the magazine’s poetry room” (YS I 2);
Shapiro, begging institutional poverty, sent him on his way to Washington. Years
later, Anderson recalled that Aiken responded warmly to the idea: “Why don’t you
record the poets for the archive of the Library of Congress? You won’t get paid for
it, but you may get a testimonial dinner before you die” (YS I 2). Aiken’s position
is partially corroborated by McGuire in his exhaustive history of the Poetry
Consultancy: “Lee Anderson in the course of his travels made recordings at the
Consultant’s behest, on a piecework basis” (203).
However, Anderson’s bid for Library of Congress support initially faltered.
In May 1951, citing the historical value of such a project, he proposed to Aiken that
he would record only poets approved by the Consultant. In July, he wrote to
Duncan Emrich, Chief, Folklore Section, that it was his “ambition to one day
record the best of the living American poets for the Library of Congress.” Emrich
in turn sent a letter to Luther Eisenhart of the American Philosophical society,
recommending Anderson for a grant to pursue his recording project, since the
Library had no funds available. Unfortunately, money from the APS was not
forthcoming.
61
Later in the summer, after visiting Princeton to record R.P. Blackmur, John
Berryman, and Randall Jarrell, Anderson received a letter from Jean Putnam at
WCFM, Washington’s Cooperative Radio Station, asking to play his tapes on a
show each Sunday at 9:30 p.m. During the next months, Anderson regularly
shipped tapes from Pennsylvania to WCFM, where they were duplicated and edited
to fit the half-hour format. In October, a week before the Blackmur recordings
were played, he mentions Phyllis Armstrong in connection with the broadcast (ltr.
Putnam), indicating that the Library was fully aware that the WCFM host would
mention the Library of Congress recording project in connection with Anderson.
So if the management of KPFA believed that the tapes they played the next year
were made under the auspices of the Poetry Archive, the misunderstanding cannot
be attributed solely to misrepresentation by Anderson.
Although Anderson regularly sent reels to the Recording Laboratory for
copying—eleven in 1955, twenty-one in 1956, fifteen in 1957 (Stevens)—by 1957
it was clear that the Library of Congress was not going to fund Anderson’s project
beyond the occasional honorarium, and so he began searching for a permanent base
from which to work. John Ciardi, at the Saturday Review, suggested that he try
Rutgers University. Three months later, Anderson, through his connection with
Blackmur, sent an index of his recordings to Princeton University and offered to
deposit 150 tapes (ltr. Blackmur). A month later, Henry Dubester proposed an
allotment of $700 for expenses from the Library’s Bollingen gift fund, paid at the
rate of $10 per tape deposited in the Poetry Archive (ltr. Anderson). Although
62
Anderson deposited recordings of thirty-seven poets in the Archive in September
1959, he was clearly dissatisfied with the monetary arrangements (Dubester).
That year he reached a contractual agreement with Yale University, receiving
an appointment as a Research Associate in the Audio Visual Center at the Yale
Library for the 1959-1960 academic year and a payment of $12,000—$4000 upon
receipt of the tape recordings he had made up to that point and an $8000 salary for
the purposes of travelling and recording.
44
In addition, he was to receive a 1%
royalty on 90% gross from sales of the series of LPs Yale agreed to issue based on
Anderson’s current and future recordings (“Yale Agreement”). The program, the
Yale Series of Recorded Poets, was to be supervised by Elliott H. Kane, Director of
the Audio Visual Center, and Cleanth Brooks of the English Department. “I hope,”
declared Anderson, “to awaken a whole new interest in American poetry” (Yale
News Bureau).
When Anderson was appointed Research Associate at the Audio Visual
Center, the plan he developed was to release 20-25 LPs each year of poets reading
their own work. Financed by a grant from the Blue Hill Foundation in New York
City, the LPs were distributed by Carillon Records, 520 Fifth Avenue, a for-profit
entity created expressly for the Yale project. Each LP was accompanied by notes
from a prominent commentator, such as Brooks, a biography and a bibliography, a

44
In March 1958, Anderson had recorded Dudley Fitts, editor of the Yale Younger Poets
Series of first books, who seemed under the impression that he was recording for the
Library of Congress.

63
large cover photograph of the author, and a printed text of the poems riddled with
enough typographical errors to cause at least one reviewer to despair (Ostroff 351).
Twelve records of 218 poems by American and British authors comprised the
first series. By the time the first Carillon catalogue was issued in 1961, the series
had expanded to twenty-two poets, each with individual records. Anderson’s
personal taste for Modern Library poets coincided nicely with the commercial goals
of Carillon Records, resulting in the issue of recordings by poets with substantial
bodies of printed work and sterling academic reputations. Listed in the catalogue
are authors such as Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, Allen Tate, Louis Simpson,
Stanley Kunitz, Dudley Fitts, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, John
Hollander, and Richard Eberhart—a panoply of mid-century stalwarts.
45
Notably
absent are such new voices as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John
Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, Gregory Corso, Frank O’Hara, or Barbara Guest
(Carillon).
Carillon intended to turn a profit by selling to those with a passion for
poetry—and at $5.98 per LP, poetry-lovers by definition had disposable income or
institutional purchasing power. Neither of these categories included members of
the young avant-garde. Promoting new poets to a minuscule poetry-reading public

45
Anderson’s enthusiasm for recording poets who already had produced a substantial body
of audiotexts did not escape Marianne Moore’s notice. A flurry of correspondence in early
autumn 1959 shows Anderson scrambling to reassure Moore that he has obtained
permissions from Caedmon Records, Viking Press, etc.; Moore, clearly aware that her
legacy does not require yet another recording of her reading, holds out for more money,
including a $25 dollar fee for providing her own cover photo.

64
has always required a commitment of limited resources; the possibility of
promoting records of new poets scarcely registered in the literary world. Even
Caedmon Records’ commercial success was based almost exclusively on releases
of well-loved poets, as well as famous actors such as James Mason and Vincent
Price declaiming the classic works of literary Olympians, or purposely obscure
recordings such as ancient Greek poetry recited in ancient Greek, which almost
surely sold for the novelty value. (Two-thousand LPs went to a distributor in
Atlanta, a metropolis not usually associated with widespread knowledge of dead
languages.)
Anderson’s relationship with Yale soured quickly. As early as August 1960,
he was back in contact with the Library of Congress, this time offering his tapes at
$12 each if the Library would take at least 200 of them (ltr. August 1960).
Dubester rejected the offer. Six weeks later, Anderson agreed to transfer dubs of
the Yale Series of Recorded Poets “as we may mutually agree upon at a price to be
fixed by offer and acceptance” (ltr. Dubester). The Yale Series represented a major
acquisition for the Poetry Archive.
In a sense, Anderson’s business was not that of the archivist per se; it was
that of the critic. The archivist gathers far and wide and deep, leaving the hoard for
others to spend in critical analysis and interpretation. Or more rightly: Anderson is
a critic the way any anthologist is a critic, who must choose how to spend time and
attention. Anderson spent a lot of both. In a letter to Duncan Emrich at the Library,
he describes his preparation for a recording session, noting that before the date he
65
copies out all of a poet’s work in his own hand and records the work in his own
voice, so that the recording of the actual poet “will show up [the] almost invariable
weaknesses of the poseurs,” as measured against the ideal of his own reading.
In a 1961 interview by Edith Kerr for a three-part series on WTIC radio in
New Haven, Anderson spoke at length about his methods of selection. “The first
problem I have is to choose the poet.” Invitations are composed and mailed,
occasionally phoned. “Only four poets have refused” (YS I 5). On the other hand,
he often turns away those who approach him with offers to record. “I find the more
mature and tactful the poets who have an incurable urge to be recorded. . .usually
approach the matter obliquely, that is through a friend who will write a letter and
say I should record so and so” (YS II 5). “Mature and tactful” describe well the
type of poet Anderson gravitated toward, and so his deposits into the Poetry
Archive lacked the marginal, the experimental, or, for that matter, the young. It
was difficult enough to scare up funds to record the stalwarts with whom the Poetry
Consultant maintained a personal acquaintance, let alone promote the new work of
young poets who might become the anthology fixtures of the next generation.
Culture-building enterprises cannot afford to look to the future except as a
repository for the proven artifacts of the past.
So how did his subjects measure up? Despite having to make these
recordings in noisy hotels, college offices, or the shed behind the farmhouse,
Anderson’s main complaint is that “sibilants [a technical matter] are the greatest
stumbling block” to a recording (ltr. Emrich). As for vocal technique, “about half
66
of the Americans read reasonably well. Practically all the British poets are
excellent readers. . . .Their virtue is the dentals, the separation of words, the lack of
slurring and blurring” (YS I 4). In other words: the American poets “read on the
theory that the flatter and prosier the reading the better” (YS I 4), although he also
objects to oratorical “antics,” as in the case of Dylan Thomas, whose “delivery
exceed[s] the net value of the poetry” (YS III 3). He goes on: “The ideal is a
natural modest tone that observes the rhythm of the beat, the line and variation of
tone possible” (YS I 4), as presumably Anderson himself did, capturing his
subjects’ words on his Magnecorder’s tape.
The criticism is not, as we have seen, unique to Lee Anderson. A favorite
activity of magazine critic, scholar, and archivist alike is bashing poets’ inadequate
performances, despite the avowal of nearly everyone engaged in recording for the
archive that the aim is to capture the voice so that the true emotions and intentions
and sense of language of the poet are revealed, so long as those emotions and
intentions and sense of language coincide with a standard extrinsic to the writer.
Recorded poetry as a projection of American culture both to America and to
the world required, early in the 1950s, a certain masculine aura, in contrast to the
European feminine. Louis Untermeyer, in the forward to the 1950 edition of his
Harcourt, Brace anthology, goes to great lengths to show that poets, far from being
fragile, bookish sorts, were rugged citizens all. Whittier once cobbled shoes;
Whitman practiced carpentry; Edwin Arlington Robinson worked in the New York
subway; Carl Sandburg drove a milk wagon; Vachel Lindsay pitched hay. And of
67
late many poets, like Karl Shapiro and Peter Viereck, had served in the military
(xxvii). Untermeyer doesn’t specify what the women-poets did with their non-
literary lives. He doesn’t have to: poetry in 1950 needed to be masculine, about
things like “coal mines, skyscrapers, factories, trees” (xxvii), and the people who
wrote poetry needed to be masculine, too.
Anderson belonged to an almost exclusively male fraternity of amateur
media-technology tinkerers. Although mid-century recording projects were
occasionally overseen by women—Adams, Bishop, and Bogan at the Library of
Congress; Mantell and Holdridge at Caedmon Records—the actual recordings were
engineered and edited by men, using equipment the designs of which privileged the
male techno-auditory experience, as had the “new acoustics” of the early twentieth
century in the (re)design of public listening spaces such as auditoriums, movie
theaters, and office buildings, in an effort to exercise control over sound itself,
making it more “efficient” by eliminating, so far as possible, the noise of
reverberation.
46

For Anderson and many of his fellow recordists, it was a given that an overly
distinctive, and therefore non-transparent, sound signature vitiated the purity of
expression. The solution: find a tool with as little ontological aura as possible.
What one wanted was a way to make intimate the public expression of poetry,
producing a simulacrum of private conversational space. Poet speaks, listener

46
For a thorough, and thoroughly fascinating, history of the new-acoustics movement in
America, see Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity.

68
affirms.
47
Upon the advice of Harold Spivacke at the Recording Laboratory,
Anderson purchased a Webcor tape recorder. The Webster-Chicago Corporation,
founded in 1914, had been a leading developer and manufacturer of wire recorders
for military use during the Second World War. In the post-war rush into hi-fi, the
company evolved into a tape-recorder manufacturer, introducing the Magnecorder
in the late 1940s. The machine was portable by the standards of the day (cf., the
Lomaxes’ 350-pound contraption in the trunk of their Ford) and inexpensive
enough for hobbyist or semi-professional use. As a tool, it was an efficient means
to an end, the way the automobile, quite aside from the marvel of the internal-
combustion engine, is a means to reach the grocery store. Nor does one have to
expend energy considering the infinitely changed and changing relationship
between driver, geography, commerce, and machine. The point is that, although he
consulted the Recording Laboratory more than once about equipment selection and
use, Anderson was not particularly interested in sound-reproduction from a
theoretical, or even technical, perspective.
In describing his approach to the recording, Anderson expresses an ideology
of reading/listening firmly rooted in the printed text contra the contemporary
resurgence in public poetry performances spawned by Dylan Thomas’s Welsh
pulpit-oratory and the coffeehouse frisson of the San Francisco Beats. As for

47
Rudolf Arnheim in several places in Radio discusses the way the electronic microphone,
by necessitating intimate, natural speech, makes the public appear private and the private
appear public.
69
recording his poets before a live audience, “I am against it in principle” (YS I 5).
48

On the one hand Anderson frequently expresses his interest in recapturing the
primary orality of poetry; on the other, he prefers his orality as a supplement to text,
revealing, if not exactly the poet’s perceptions and intentions, then a general
understanding of the sort any good New Critic could devise.
Although by all reports the affable Anderson managed to put his subjects at
ease before the microphone, he, like Robert Carneal and his technical assistants at
the Recording Laboratory, found the readers incorrigibly lacking. The women
were especially difficult. “They won’t cooperate to the extent that men will. They
won’t take cues. If I tell a poet, who happens to be a man, that he’s reading too
slowly or too fast, that he’s not separating his words, he’ll take his cue in most
cases.” The problem is that the women were “quite wrapped up within [themselves]
and not able to be free enough from the domination of the microphone.” (YS II 5).
Nor should a poet read his work the way Stanley Kunitz does. Anderson:
I feel there is a split, not between the man and his poetry by any manner of
means, but between the way Mr. Kunitz reads it and his poetry. I do
think. . .that the poet, the reading and the man are not one and the same.
They’re not merged. (YS II 2)

Despite claims to the contrary, what Anderson seemed to be aiming for was not
poetry as the poet heard it, a capturing of the sounded spirit, but a performance
aligned with his own perception of the poetry’s qualities. This attitude, of course,
is that of the stage director, the music producer, or the debate-club coach, an

48
He makes an exception for Robert Frost (YS I 5).

70
attitude adopted with high intentions to bring out the “best” performance in the
actor, singer, speaker. This was a peculiar kind of performance, “designed and
modified specifically for the purposes of reproducibility” (Sterne 320), divorced
from the oral tradition of presenting poetry to a visible, engaged audience. The
poet is indeed in thrall to “the domination of the microphone.”
For Anderson, as well as for Dr. Spivacke at the Recording Laboratory or
Peter Bartok (yes, Bela’s boy), the recording engineer for Caedmon, the
electroacoustical reproduction of reading out loud must sound divorced from both
the place of production of the original text and the place of performance of the
reading. They were clearly aware that a recording is not an event but an artifact of
an event, not a reproduction of reality but a (re)construction of reality. Magnetic
sound recording fails to recuperate the oral, as Anderson expressly desired but
could not make jibe with technological mediation. Rather, it reconfigures the
textual. Like printed poetry, which can be endlessly reproduced and whose
appearance on the page is standardized by typesetting, which ideally vanishes as a
mediator from the reader’s consciousness in a way that handwriting cannot,
recorded poetry aims for a mass-produced, standardized sound signature. Like
variations in typographical presentation from publisher to publisher, the sound
signatures of given recording projects can often be detected, but the variations fall
within the idealized presentation of the human voice set out earlier in the century
by architects and acoustical engineers who sought to reduce the reverberation of
“live” space and deliver vocal performance with something like the clarity and
71
immediacy of a telephone receiver held to the ear—in other words, with qualities
unlike those of “natural” hearing unmediated by electroacoustical technology.
Print denies the conditions of creation of the poem by rendering the spoken or the
handwritten in typeset; taping denies the conditions of both performance and
reception. The audience for any mass-produced work is, of course, both
anonymous and potentially nonexistent. The poet reading to the microphone must
conjure an attentive public, a feat not easily accomplished, as Anderson indicates in
his criticism of his readers.
Just as reading a poetry book had become a solitary activity, as nineteenth-
century practices of reading aloud eroded, so too did listening to recorded poetry
become an exercise in the direct incorporation of voice into the audience’s
experience of a work in a way that could not happen through live recitation. Even
in the Poetry Room at Harvard’s Widener Library in the 1930s, readings that had
initially been broadcast to the entire space soon become a private activity, as
individual headsets replaced the loudspeaker. This practice made a great deal of
sense in a building designed to reduce the sonic intrusions of the outside world and
policed to reduce conversation to a minimum. Hearing poetry at Widener seemed a
lot like reading poetry silently there. The publicity of the voice was attenuated to
the privacy of the printed page.
The ideology of the text runs deep, which goes far toward explaining the
apathy with which poetry recording projects were often met, with the notable
exception of Caedmon’s Dylan Thomas records, which eschewed the printed text
72
and offered only the oral performance. For Anderson, Packard, Flaccus, and a long
series of Library of Congress Poetry Consultants, the oral record was insufficient
unless accompanied by printed text. In every case, the text precedes the
performance and very often accompanies the performance. In 1940 Kimball
Flaccus began collecting previously published versions of the poems he was
recording for the NCTE series; in the fall of 1941, he successfully solicited several
of the original manuscripts and typescripts of poems he had recorded. These texts
were stored with the recordings that comprised the Phonographic Library of
Contemporary poets (Flaccus 318). When he organized a “poetry record concert”
for May 15, 1941, the seventy-five poets, educators, and editors who attended were
handed printed programs, and the text versions were exhibited so that the audience
could identify the voices of the poets to whom they were listening. The need to
have text in hand when listening is a good indication that poetry in the twentieth
century had gotten too intricate to be figured by speech alone.
Even more: the text is the authority to which the recording must measure up.
Deviations from the prior text were rigorously corrected, either at the time of
reading or in the editing process, to make the recording conform to the printed
version. If Ezra Pound could claim that the introduction in 1884 of electroplate
printing marked the reification of poetry (Pound 18) in the long history of the
technologization of literature, then surely we can see in the ideology expressed by
Anderson in both word and deed that sound reproduction, by adding another layer
of technology to the reception of poetry, paradoxically reinforces a visual regime at
73
the expense of the lost oral antecedents of the form. (Pound named a form
correlative with his theory: Imagism: the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether
subjective or objective:” a literary manifestation of American Protestantism.) The
thing that was the poem, so the thinking went some decades later, could be directly
treated by putting the voice on tape. Rather than substituting nature for book—or
book for nature—in a revisiting of Romanticism, the audiotext, for all its aura of
poetic authority, would serve as a supplement to, and proof of, “real” literature. As
William Paulson has observed, when the language of modern science—or, we
might add, of modern government—“[has disavowed] the authority of texts or
authorship” (6), neutralizing the Protestant motive, literature must recover evidence
to assert its own authority. Yet the authority of the evidence itself resides in the
text to which it refers. This authority bears the relationship of hermeneutic
commentary to scripture.
Even when the value of the audiotext was vigorously asserted, the grip of the
graphical remained strong. In 1941 The New York Times, under the excruciating
headline “Students Follow Poems as Spoken, Not as They Appear on the Printed
Page,” reports that John Holmes has set up a classroom wired for sound at Tufts
College, so that students can listen to the “voices of verse-makers.” Nevertheless,
“an important feature of these recordings is the use of a mimeographed text which
students will use to follow the poems as spoken” (“Tufts Establishes”). A few
years earlier, one could find Cabell Greet at Columbia declaring that students
should listen to poems that “would be most useful in emphasizing. . .that all
74
poetry. . .exists first as song, in aural terms, before it is reduced to print” (312).
This was a claim repeated by nearly everyone who touched on the poetry-recording
process in the next twenty years, a claim belied by the fact that virtually every
poem committed to disc or tape until the early 1960s was preceded by a print
version that was decidedly not a transcription of an oral performance, and that most
of the albums released during this period, including those of the Library of
Congress, included printed versions of the poetry, and that when teachers used the
records in, say, high-school English classes, they were advised to refer students to
the printed text before playing the poets’ readings (Muri, Brian). “[T]hese records
ought to be listened to with the book in hand,” W. William Hatfield declares in a
review of an early Vachel Lindsay album (341), suggesting, again, not a return to
an oral tradition (and no one was more “oral” than Lindsay when he chanted-
shouted-intoned “The Congo” in a style he had absorbed as a young man from
University of Chicago “Reader in Elocution” Solomon Henry Clark) but the
discovery of a new piece of the critical apparatus that supports canonical work. In
addition to calling into question the “official” version of a poem when, as
frequently happened, the recording did not precisely match the words of the
“original” text, this process served to further mediate an already highly mediated
experience of poetry.
49

49
In the early twenty-first century a new way of linking the written and the spoken has
emerged. In addition to the CDs that now supplement several of the Norton anthologies,
some of the better-heeled publishers have begun to package audiotexts with new printed
poetry collections. Li-Young Lee’s recent book, Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008), comes
with a CD of Lee reading some of the pieces. It is hard to gauge the significance of this
75
Grapholects, as Walter Ong points out, “separate the knower from the
known. . .opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective
world quite distanced from itself but also to the interior self against whom the
objective world is set” (104). This epistemophilia leads in turn to a fetishizing of
textual knowledge. The more we know a text, the more we cause it to accumulate a
richness of being, expanding the field of literary study itself. Contrary to the
isolated and isolating experience of the written text, which engages an individual
consciousness in a time and place distinct from its production, the ephemeral
spoken word has traditionally been used to unite groups and immediately make
available individual interiority to a limited number of others. This is true of the
primary orality of, say, Herodotus or a medieval scholastic, and remains the case
today in conference calls, live television broadcasts, and academic panel
discussions. However, for the most part, modern oral culture depends on written
text. The poetry reading pretends to a primary orality; but a sound recording of a
poetry reading makes no such pretense. This latter is a strange sort of aesthetic
object, one which seems to have come into existence as a primary oral object yet
shares most of the characteristics, including reproducibility, interpretative
availability, and archival promise, with literary objects. We might or might not
experience the poetic sound recording communally. In any event, recording

application of authorial signature to new, unfamiliar work. Note, however, that the CD
comes at the back of the book, an addendum to the text, a curiosity or a commentary
perhaps, certainly an acknowledgment of Lee’s popularity as a poetry personality, who
thus earns an ersatz presence not extended to poets who draw smaller crowds to their live
readings.

76
audiotext is an odd endeavor: the poet first composes in isolation for hypothetical
readers, the printed work divorced from the speaking voice and the time and place
of creation, and then later reads aloud into a microphone to hypothetical auditors.
Quite aside from the way in which literary sound recordings reconfigured
printed text to produce a mediated experience not dissimilar from reading, the
listening audience of mid-century America had been conditioned for nearly five
decades “to achieve an objective, detached mode of listening, ‘observing’ sound
from outside, as if through the window of a monitoring booth” (Thompson 320).
By the time Anderson began recording in earnest, the battle by the new acousticians
and civic societies dedicated to urban noise abatement had been won, and several
decades of architectural and electroacoustical practice had so influenced the critical
ear that he could proclaim of live readings, “[T]here is something mannered and
false about any public performance” (YS I 5). To combat this falseness, Anderson
recorded not in the auditorium but in places where people lived and worked.
Despite a wide range of venues, all of which might be expected to impart a unique
aural quality to the poets’ readings, his aim was to do more than eliminate the
differences in performance contexts, replacing the sound signatures of specific
times and places with apparently neutral qualities. In reviewing the Yale Series in
1961, William Meredith mentions that Anderson’s recording skills bring “the
voices close, individual and true” (473). Meaning: the clarity, the intimacy, of the
recording, such that the medium itself vanishes, helps create the authenticity of the
evidence of poetic essence. Just as an unintelligible wiretap tape has no standing in
77
a court of law, the highly mediated oral expression of literature casts suspicion on
the presumed immediacy of poetic experience.
50

The voice is not so much captured as engineered. The technologies of the
magnetic tape recorder allowed multiple takes to be spliced into a single unified
(but nonexistent) performance. Ex post facto application of electronic equalization
and reverberation to the sound signal allowed for the production of a wholly new
sound signature, one that could not exist in real life. In the musical world, the
outcry over enhancement techniques was initially violent but ultimately ineffectual:
“Listen to some recent opera recordings and ask yourself whether in any seat in any
known opera house you ever heard comparable tonal balances between soloists and
orchestra,” fumed E.T. Canby in The Saturday Review. The ability to construct
performances out of raw musical materials proved so valuable in the popular-music
world that the public quickly accustomed itself to the illusion of the live, embodied
performance that records by the 1950s presented.
The aesthetic sensibilities of those who did the recording and editing are part
of the aesthetic work itself, expressing values of reproduction which posit a
particular subject listener: listening attention and faith in para-audiotextual
evidence authorizes the vocal performance of a poem by its author as originary. As
Barbara Mantell, co-founder of Caedmon Records, says of her company’s literary

50
In a similar vein, consider how frequently historical recording archives of political
figures’ speeches are accompanied by written transcriptions: inter alia, Western Electric’s
Dialogues on Democracy, the CBS Legacy Collection, Word Records’ Yesterday’s Voices
(Roach 258-264). The graphical and the phonological provide evidence of each other.

78
recordings, “My purpose. . .was to capture another critical source, what the poet
heard inside his or her head” (Parry 254). It was assumed that authors heard this
inner voice during the process of creation and that reading the work aloud, even
after a lapse of years, perhaps decades, could capture this phenomenon. Such a
voice exists prior to the act of committing poetry to paper and occupies an
ontological position similar to the spoken voice. Given the number of poets who
have complained about the sound of their own recorded voices (Elizabeth Bishop
springs to mind; so does William Carlos Williams), one might conclude that the
poet’s understanding of the correspondence between the inspired inner voice and
the spoken voice is tenuous.
This myth of authorial essence matters not at all to an examination of the
ideological assumptions of those engaged in mid-century recording projects. Even
as they sought in the new forms of oral dissemination an originary event or
authorial essence that had been lost in the critical-academic-publishing network of
the New Criticism, the Consultants authorized a particular, and contradictory,
poetic regime. Bypassing this complex interpretative structure by exposing
listeners directly to the poet’s voice could recuperate a relationship between bard
and audience in which the listener rather more passively than not receives the work.
Kimball Flaccus, in arguing for the superiority of the poet’s recorded voice
over the actual presence of the poet reading before an audience, writes in 1940:
[W]hen a recording is played the audience enjoys all of the personality as
reflected in his voice, without being distracted by the physical appearance on
the platform. Many listeners shut their eyes when attending the opera or
symphony concert for precisely the same reason. (322)
79

Leaving aside the many assumptions about poetry listeners’ access to the cultural
capital implied by Flaccus’ last sentence, one wonders why, if the performance of a
symphony or an opera by professional (living) musicians is superior to hearing, say,
Wagner regale his listeners in person—by all accounts a painful experience—
poetry listeners would not prefer professional actors reciting verse. To which
Flaccus replies:
[T]he most effective reading is the most authoritative one, and the most
authoritative oral interpretation possible of any given poem is that of the poet
himself. The poet reading his own work is not only bound to be more
authoritative than any other conceivable interpreter, but also more sincere, for
no one else holds the work in such genuine high esteem as its creator. (322)

Again, this notion: the apparently embodied voicing of a graphical text by the
author not only carries evidentiary weight but dictates a particular reading, one
presumably independent of the circumstances in which it was read.
A 1949 press release from the government Information Office states that the
newly released “Twentieth-Century Poetry” recordings are “important in
interpreting and appreciating the meaning of individual poems,” although it does
not explain why this should be the case. According to William Meredith, “When
he reads [the poet] is performing a composition of which he alone has heard the
ideal version; and however inadequate to that ideal music he, or we, may feel his
performance to be, it has a unique authority” (470).
51
The most superficial

51
The notion that the poet is the best authority on the performance of his or her own work
has a history in standards of English elocution. See, for example, J.E. Carpenter’s The
Popular Elocutionist and Reciter, 1894.

80
consideration of experience suggests that our cognitive, emotional, and physical
states vary greatly from time to time and place to place. Which reading of
“Birches” has “unique authority”—the one Frost recorded for Flaccus in New York
City in 1938 on aluminum disc or the one he recorded at the Library of Congress
twenty years later on magnetic tape with better—i.e., more “natural”—frequency
response and a higher signal-to-noise ratio, allowing for greater vocal nuance?
Even in the era of full-spectrum sound that emerged with the rapid postwar
developments in recording technology, it took a great deal of effort to create the
spoken voice of the poet. In addition to the problems of recording, such as optimal
microphone placement to reduce aspirants and sibilants, the tapes had to be edited
to eliminate miscues, coughs, environmental sounds, poor enunciation and so on.
Flaccus, recording in the 1930s in New York City, sent a mimeograph to
prospective readers with “recording hints”:
In recording, it is important to preserve the same general “voice level”
and distance from the microphone, once these have been determined by
the Technical Director. Any casual contact of hand or foot with microphone
stand will ruin the record. . . .If the reader is forced to clear his throat or
cough, he should momentarily avert his face from the microphone.
Erect posture, relaxed muscles, deep breathing, and natural, unaffected
speech bring best results. (“Phonographic Library”)

Furthermore, technical obstacles prevented certain works—long ones—from
being recorded at all, and the raw performance had to be reduced to a feasible
length for vinyl reproduction.
52
A master recording from which LP copies were

52
In an earlier pre-tape era, length was even more constricted. For example, the 12-inch,
78-rpm discs Kimball Flaccus used at CCNY could hold only about four and a half minutes
of speech. Any poem that required a longer reading had to be split into sections, and on
81
stamped had to be prepared and carefully monitored for quality-control purposes.
This mother-disc was itself subject to degradation which, assuming it was playable
at all, thereby changed the nature of the recorded object.
Even the producers of the Caedmon recordings, committed to capturing a
“human” acoustical signature, operated within a limited range of accepted
recording practices. That many of these tapes were recorded at New York’s
Steinway Hall makes an ontological contribution to the work we hear by
constructing a reasonable approximation of a “live” recording. This contrivance
traces its history to the Edison Company’s “tone tests,” conducted from 1915-1925
in front of millions of listeners from coast to coast who were asked to commit their
faith (fid, as in fidelity) to a particular technology (a common desideratum in the
century’s first quarter), one that promised an experience existentially separate from
the subject’s willing participation. The tests served as an extension of the Edison
Company’s already extensive advertising campaign to persuade buyers that they
could not hear a difference between a live performance and an Edison
phonographic recording of one. Although to make such a claim already doubts its
own validity, the Edison Co. positioned listening to a recording as the superior
experience, as well as an alternative to the impossibility of getting oneself
physically in the presence of the performer, especially a dead one. Claims about

playback would require changing discs. Flaccus clearly instructed his readers before
arriving for the recording session that they should “select four poetry units. . .of no more
than 4 minutes each. . . .It is very important that the reader time his material exactly”
(“Phonographic Library”).

82
the authority of recorded performance required then, as they require now, a near
absolute investment by the listener in the technology of recording and reproduction.
If the Caedmon recordings sound more “human” than those of, say, Lee Anderson,
it is because listeners have learned to hear similar sound signatures thus. The
sound of sound itself, organized and reproduced, provides confirmation of the
authenticity of the recording event and the authority of the recorded subject, at least
as testimony to the value of the original printed text.
These concerns are both aesthetic and evidential. The greater the temporal
gap between reader and listener, the greater the shift toward the evidential. We
don’t treasure the four lines of “America” purportedly recorded by Walt Whitman
or the querulous voice of Tennyson groping his way out of the muddy past because
they contribute to the creation of the extended aesthetic object of the poem; rather,
we delight in the proof of life, of physical body, the recordings seem to offer.
Elizabeth Bishop’s voice, decades later but decades beyond the horizon of our own
immediate past, crackles and fades, and in the very noise of the recording demands
a consideration of her physical existence before the microphone, providing proof of
her otherness. Consider the gold standard of taped evidence in the twentieth
century: Richard Nixon’s recordings of himself in the Oval Office. These events,
paradoxically, are all the more real and available to the listener because of the
electrical interference, the occasional microphone failure, the wow and flutter of the
recordings themselves. They are history because they are not transparent.
83
Likewise, the readings of poets past, when the sound signatures are marred
by less-than-perfect fidelity, locate their works more fully in the realm of evidence
than in the realm of literature and assert the primacy of memory over imagination.
In this, the audiotext cannot be as aesthetically significant as the graphotext. Sound
recordings appear to represent shared mundane reality; poetry appears to represent
the imagination.
In marked contrast to beliefs about what constitutes authentic sound
recording, as well as what constitutes the mid-century poetic canon and how that
reality should be aurally represented, the Poetry Center at San Francisco State
University established its own archive of poets reading their work. Beginning in
1954, when W.H. Auden donated a small sum to found the Center, the archive
project was dedicated to recording (later, videotaping) live readings by poets who
represented an alternative stream of American letters. Although the Poetry Center
Archives contain tapes of mainstream voices such as Robert Lowell and Theodore
Roethke—who christened the reading series in 1954—the curators have gathered
some 3,000 works by writers who were at time of recording outside the mainstream,
such as Robert Mezey, Madeline Gleason, Louis Zukofsky, Philip Whalen, Gary
Snyder, Michael McClure, Robert Creeley, W.S. Merwin, and Allen Ginsberg,
whose first public presentation of “Kaddish” the Center recorded in 1959.
53
This
was a project dedicated to the authenticity of the individual rather than the

53
The Poetry Center recorded Ginsberg’s infamous October 1955 reading of “Howl” at the
Six Gallery in San Francisco, but the tape, at some point, went missing from the archive.

84
authenticity of the literary work—an important distinction. (One hesitates to
discern a difference between East Coast and West Coast recording ideology; still,
in the twenty-first century sound engineers can identify differences in procedure—
and in attitudes toward good sound—between, for example, New York and L.A.,
both historically and in contemporary practice.)
If the Library of Congress Poetry Archive can be characterized as the aural
manifestation of the Modern Library aesthetic, the San Francisco State Poetry
Center archive is that of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry 1945-1960. James
Dickey, failed diplomat, called the anthology “an enormous amount of low-grade
whale fat,” with too much encouragement given to “natural” poetry á là Ginsberg
(“In the Presence” 8). The Poetry Center archive tapes are typically raw, natural-
sounding recordings—live on-site, no second takes, no splicing, no edits.
54
This is
an aesthetic of spontaneity and authenticity, a different sort of myth-making than
that practiced in D.C. or New York, but still an American sort that could also
produce the self-invented romantic figures of the frontiersman, the drifter, the rebel,
and the prophet. This aesthetic privileges the performer by making little effort to
reduce the sonic world to the physical body itself. Instead, the poet is the nexus of
an acoustic world that, like the world the audience inhabits, feels improvised,
impinging, imperfect—in other words, not at all like a Modern Library text. What
matters is mystique. Peter Middleton calls this “the staging of authorship.” The

54
Some of the older, more fragile tapes have been more recently edited in compiling digital
submasters from which to duplicate recordings for sale to the public.

85
poet has been in this space at this time, reading something or other we can always
read on our own later if we miss a few words or even the whole thing. Like the
person who speaks in a whisper to force his auditors to lean into his sphere of
control, these recordings put us at the mercy not of the text but of the medium.
They focus our attention not on the poem but on the oracular poet, so that the
recording and playback technology produces not a representation of body-sound
but a kind of substitute for the physical body of the poet.
55
(“Howl” has no claims
apart from Ginsberg. Does it?) Peter Middleton theorizes the situation thus:
The temptation is to set these imperfections against an ideal, which is
imagined to be the aim of the event, even if it can only be adumbrated
by the flawed actuality. . . .[G]rating, nonsemiotic aural intrusions,
and other seemingly irrelevant signs of unwanted occupancies, are
antagonists in the dramatic appearance of poetry’s temporary rule
over the everyday world. . . . (31)

The contingencies of performance and failures of reproduction contribute to the
creation of the aesthetic object that is a “poem” based on a poem by the performer.
In this way the voice, ironically, becomes autonomous, and hermeneutic focus
shifts from the poem to the performance affect.
56
There is no reason to pretend
otherwise by passing around mimeographs.
But back to Washington, D.C., where the acoustically sealed Recording
Laboratory had gone figuratively quiet as well:

55
One is put in mind of very early, i.e., late nineteenth-century, recordings of orators, the
purpose of which was not to know the work but to know the man (Sterne).

56
Susan Stewart discusses this matter more cogently than I can.

86
In the four years following Aiken’s term, the Consultant in Poetry chair
remained unoccupied. In the fall of 1952, Lincoln scholar Roy P. Basler assumed
the position of Chief, General Reference and Bibliography Division, with a charge
to administer the Poetry Office and the Whitall Fund. Basler recounts that
“[Librarian Luther] Evans didn’t know what poetry was. He wanted somebody to
run it all for him” (McGuire 148). William Carlos Williams, already one of the
advisory Fellows, had been invited to assume the Consultancy for 1952-53 and had
even gone so far as to rent the departing Aiken’s apartment in Washington, when
poor physical health and “nervous instability” knocked him off course. To
compound Williams’s problems, in August the newsletter Counterattack: Facts to
Combat Communism accused Williams of a host of anti-American, pro-Communist
activities between 1937 and 1941. Although the charges proved spurious, they
generated fresh accusations and rebuttals from sources as various as The Lyric and
The New Republic. Williams was asked to fill out Standard Form 85, certifying
that he was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party.
57
The FBI
investigated and sent its report to the Library’s Loyalty Board. Williams’s Random
House editor rallied support. And so on and so forth, in the toxic atmosphere of Joe
McCarthy’s Washington.

57
Williams was not the first nominee to stir concern. When Robert Lowell, who had
served six months in federal prison as a conscientious objector during the war, came to
Washington in 1947, the personnel office at the Library expressed concern that there was
no formal security-clearance process. Because the Consultant in Poetry position was not
supported by congressionally appropriated funds, the matter never gained the traction it
would have a few years later when McCarthyism was in full flower.

87
This was the year of McCarthy’s investigations into the subversive literature
shelved at USIS libraries across the globe. As information-program officials tried
to determine how to apply security clearances to the myriad authors on the overseas
shelves, the fifty-thousand-book-a-month flood to overseas libraries dried up. With
the full legal authority of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which gave permanent
status to U.S. overseas cultural and informational endeavors, most ambassadors
backed their in-country librarians, who nonetheless removed literature to storage,
awaiting more hospitable times. Although the Great Book Scare was forgotten
more quickly than the nation could forget the moral squalor of McCarthyism, the
episode is indicative of the care with which material residing in—let alone
originating from—a government agency had to be chosen (Dizard 149-142).
58

In a way, it was fortunate that poetry received its usual scant attention; while
McCarthy went after the USIS, his fellow cultural fundamentalist George Dondero,
Congressman from Michigan, was attacking other forms of modern art, which he
proclaimed was universally “Communistic. . . .[U]ltramodern artists are
unconsciously tools of the Kremlin” (Hauptmann 49). As early as 1947, Dondero
had rallied his yahoos to attack the State Department’s exhibition “Advancing
American Art,” which was meant to travel the world as a cultural calling card for
the American politicos trailing behind. One colleague denounced the show this

58
It is worth noting the saner objections of men such as George Kennan to the notion that
presenting the world with America’s version of cultural universalism would contribute to
U.S. security or contain Soviet expansion. For a full exploration of these politics, see John
Lewis Gaddis’ Strategies of Containment.

88
way: “If there is a single individual in this Congress who believes this kind of tripe
is. . .bringing a better understanding of American life, then he should be sent to the
same nut house from which the people who drew this stuff originally came from”
(Saunders 256). It did not help that many of the artists represented in the show had
dabbled in left-wing causes in the 1930s. The show was cancelled, the artwork sold
off as government surplus. Dondero and his cohort failed to understand that the
kind of abstract paintings for which they reserved particular scorn was also the kind
of paintings the Soviets despised, as Dwight Macdonald, Emily Genauer, and other
defenders of the arts pointed out. It mattered not: the putative link between un-
American left-wing politics and innovative visual arts and literature had produced
something close to an official U.S. government policy of supporting only the safest
works, while unofficially patronizing through the CIA, which underwrote all
manner of avant-garde work as an antidote to socialist realism, High Modernist and
contemporary artwork.
59

(It is tempting to argue that the stark, plain-wrapper packaging of the
Twentieth Century Poetry in English records (san serif block letters, black on white)
resulted not from budgetary constraints but from the need to present an “official”
document that avoided anything too controversial, in keeping with USIA’s overseas
policies. The microgroove LP jackets from the second series bear the Library’s seal,
the words “The Library of Congress Recording Lab” and “Washington, D.C.” and

59
For a fuller and more fascinating account of the CIA’s involvement in art during the Cold
War, see Frances Stoner Saunders’s brilliant book The Cultural Cold War.

89
precious little else, save the names of the readers. Pamphlets from Health,
Education, and Welfare had more panache.)
When the dust settled in 1953, Williams’s health had further deteriorated, a
loyalty report had been submitted by the Civil Service Commission, Williams had
been fingerprinted by the local police, and Luther Evans had resigned his position
as Librarian to take up the position of General Director of yet another great culture-
building enterprise, UNESCO. It was more than a year before President
Eisenhower nominated L. Quincy Mumford of the Cleveland Public Library as
Evans’s successor. Mumford was disinclined to appoint anyone to the Poetry
Consultantship, especially since his relationship with Williams—or rather,
Williams’s attorney, James F. Murray, Jr.—remained vexed. This situation
stymied the poetry-recording project. Roy Basler and Phyllis Armstrong in 1954
went hat in hand to the Bollingen Foundation for more funding but were refused
because of the vacancy of the Consultant in Poetry chair (McGuire 167).
By the time Mumford relented in August 1955, the Fellows in American
Letters, the close cabal who had done so much to recommend one another both for
recording and for the Consultantship, were fading. Seven members’ terms had
expired; the rest were left without travel and meeting expenses when Congress
decided that public monies could no longer underwrite a body which had not been
90
authorized by law. Without the advice of the Fellows, Mumford decided on his
own to appoint Randall Jarrell to the Chair for 1956.
60

Jarrell’s appointment was the spark that reignited the recording project.
Aside from a handful of Coolidge Auditorium readings funded by the Whitall Fund,
eleven reels of tape from Lee Anderson, and additional copies from the Harvard
Vocarium, which closed shop in 1948, the Library in four years had added few
audiotexts to the Poetry Archive. The filling of the Chair encouraged the Bollingen
Foundation to loose its purse strings, granting $7,500 over the next three years to
record poets or, if the physical bodies were not available to the Recording
Laboratory, to buy tapes from Lee Anderson (21 reels in 1956).
Jarrell seemed the perfect candidate to reinvigorate the flagging recording
project. Robert Lowell praised him as “the only man I have ever met who could
make other writers feel that their work was more important to him than his own,” as
well as “the most readable and generous of critics of contemporary poetry”
(Collected Prose 93-94). Targets of Jarrell’s criticism—they were legion—might
disagree with Lowell’s characterization, but few could deny Jarrell’s fierce
commitment to the cause of American poetry. As Consultant in Poetry, he was
eager to move beyond the canonical writers who had already been added to the
Archive, suggesting a variety of poets not widely read either then or now: Byron

60
The ghosts of McCarthyism still roamed the corridors of power. When Roy Basler
received a report that Jarrell, by dint of his writing for The Nation and The New Republic
was a Communist, his appointment was nearly withdrawn. Jarrell, for his part, eagerly
signed a sworn oath disavowing such political leanings (McGuire 195-196).

91
Vazakas, Rosalie Moore, Reuel Denny, Kimon Friar, Parker Tyler, Louis Coxe (ltr.
to Basler). Ever the critic, Jarrell made his views clear. In “A Preliminary Report
on the Poetry Recording Program,” submitted to Henry Dubester in June 1957,
Jarrell attacks Jean Garrigue, Robinson Jeffers, Alfred Kreymborg, Kenneth
Rexroth, Babette Deutsch, and other “names” in the poetry world. Of Stephen
Vincent Benét’s recordings: “They are read so unattractively that they have become
a standard joke in the Recording Laboratory.” Of Robert Tristram Coffin: “A
genuinely original way of reading poetry badly. . .like a very bad and very
pretentious preacher reading in slow motion to an idiot grandchild” (ltr. to
Dubester).
Although Jarrell made no apologies for his idiosyncratic nominations to the
Recording Lab, he also expressed anxiety over the relatively successful poetry
recordings that had been released by commercial houses such as Caedmon and
Columbia Records. In order to compete, he suggested, the Library should compile
a Carl Sandburg disc, the flipside of which would showcase poems of “particular
patriotic interest,” e.g., Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s “Words for Leadville” and Horace
Gregory’s “Voices of Heroes” (ltr. to Dubester).
61

In the end, Jarrell could not overcome the institutional inertia of the previous
six years. He sent letters of invitation to a number of his contemporaries who were
unlikely to raise eyebrows. In 1958, he invited Donald Justice, Richard Lattimore,

61
Jarrell need not have worried; no one, apparently, was stealing the audience for poetry
readings. The Harvard Vocarium series, for example, only sold an average of 1384 records
annually between 1948 and 1955.

92
James Merrill, John Woods, Jean Farley, Ruth Stone, Adrienne Rich, and W.D.
Snodgrass to choose their favorite works for taping (ltr. to Justice, et al.).
62
By this
time, Jarrell had abandoned the policy of bringing his subjects to Washington for
studio sessions. As Anderson’s work had shown, advances in recording technology
made it feasible, even desirable, to record writers on their home grounds. Justice,
for instance, made his tapes at the WSUI radio studio in Iowa City; John Woods
recorded in Kalamazoo; Ruth Stone at Vassar College.
In mid-May 1958, Jarrell was succeeded by Robert Frost, whose reputation as
a living treasure owed much to Jarrell’s tireless championing of the older poet’s
work.
63
Unlike Jarrell, who was determined to advance the recording project, Frost
might best be remembered in his role as Poetry Consultant for the way he set about
ingratiating himself to those in the halls of power, meeting with members of the
State Department, the Army, and the Supreme Court, and lobbying for a Cabinet-
level office for the arts. He gave press conferences. He was consulted thrice by the
White House and figured he could slip books to politicians he asked to dinner.
Frost “was constantly in the spotlight, and the Consultantship acquired. . .a kind of
glamour” (McGuire 251).
64
This, all in the four weeks he spent in D.C. during his
term.

62
Not everyone responded to Jarrell’s invitation.

63
“Championing” for Jarrell means a skeptical appraisal, which does Frost a great service.
See Poetry and the Age, 36-70.

64
For fuller accounts of Frost’s term in Washington, D.C., consult Roy Basler’s The Muse
and the Librarian, Lawrence Thompson’s Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, and
Jay Parini’s Robert Frost: A Life, in which the author retails the patriotic poet’s travels to
93
While Frost was busy trying to “bring poets and presidents and things
together” (Basler 59) and wondering in the press why he was not being consulted
about poetry by members of Congress,
65
the recording project rolled on, sustained
by the residual energy of Jarrell’s incumbency. While Frost was out of town in late
February, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky presented
themselves for recording. On April 17, LeRoi Jones became the first African-
American poet to record for the archive, followed two weeks later by Langston
Hughes.
66
Roy Basler arranged and supervised all these readings in Frost’s absence.
The Consultant himself reappeared to record from his own work during his
final week in Washington. For this event, Jarrell traveled from Greensboro to lend
moral support. Frost read from his works and discussed the circumstances of some
of the poems’ composition. Two days later, he recorded over three dozen poems
for the “Talking Books for the Blind” series before he left town on a train for
Vermont.

the Soviet Union in 1962 as the crowning episode in his long quest to turn American poetry
into an instrument of political will (414).

65
A Senate Resolution in March did acknowledge that Frost deserved good wishes on his
eighty-fifth birthday.

66
Hughes, along with Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Margaret Walker,
and Gwendolyn Brooks, had been recorded for a 1954 release called Anthology of Negro
Poetry on Moses Asch’s Folkways label (Carlin 209-210). Although Asch’s body of
recordings, both musical and spoken word, were incorporated much later into the
Smithsonian, the poetry masters were not deposited into the Library of Congress. It should
also be noted that both Hughes and Cullen were included by Untermeyer in the 1950
version of The New Modern American Poetry, underpinning the poets’ status as canonical
American authors.

94
In the fall of 1959, after Richard Wilbur had declined the Consultantship,
Richard Eberhart arrived from Dartmouth College with a determination to push the
poetry-recording project full ahead.
67
Furthermore, he was eager to expand the
range of poetry to include newer voices, minority voices, and lesser-known
regional voices. Among other actions, Eberhart initiated a series of poetry seminars
in the Woodrow Wilson Room, one of which featured African American poets and
was recorded for the archive. The indefatigable Eberhart, editor of War and the
Poet (1945), clearly saw his new work at least partly in terms of the Cold War.
During his term as Consultant, he conducted a number of interviews for the Voice
of America and prepared a history of American poetry for the United States
Information Agency (Goodrum 166).
Eberhart also aggressively pursued independent recordings for the Poetry
Archive. These tapes, “secured through the Bollingen Gift Fund,” added fifteen
poets recorded at “private facilities,” six poets, including Wallace Stevens (“poor
recordings”), reading at the YMHA Poetry Center, eight poets recorded by Oscar
Williams,
68
and twenty-eight poets from KUSC-FM radio in Los Angeles (memo
Dubester to Eberhart). The KUSC tapes, each approximately fifteen minutes long,

67
As an example of how small was the circle of poets around the Library of Congress,
consider that Eberhart had once been Robert Lowell’s teacher at St. Marks School, where
he had also arranged for W.H. Auden to spend a month in residence in 1938. Looking
back to the first Consultancy, we find Allen Tate writing about Eberhart in Sixty American
Poets. The two men remained cordial anyway, and the Tates stayed with Eberhart in
Washington, D.C., during the Kennedy inauguration in January 1961.

68
Eberhart eventually saw to completion the production of Williams’s Album of American
Poetry, on which forty-six American and British poets read some seventy-eight poems.

95
had been prepared for broadcast by James Boyer May, editor of Trace and the U.S.
representative for Villiers Publications of London. “The Reading Rail” (later
“Poetry and Talk”) ran on Thursday evenings from 1957-1959 and was “voted by a
list of station subscribers the most popular program offered by the station” (ltr.
Yates to Armstrong). Co-host Peter Yates, a.k.a. William Long, offered copies of
the programs to the Poetry Archive, and Henry Dubester responded positively,
although in a letter to Yates he explained that for the time being the tapes would be
added to the “archive as a resource for study and research,” rather than issued as
part of the “Twentieth Century” series.
69
After recruiting USC graduate student
D.L. Kieffer to dub tapes at a rate of $3/hour (he earned $51 but failed to leave a
summer address and could not be paid), Yates sent to the Library recordings of
seventeen Los Angeles poets and ten out-of-towners (ltr. Yates to Dubester).
70

Additions to the Archive included Paul Raboff, Guy Daniels, Kenneth Patchen,
Don Gordon, Thomas McGrath, Gil Orlovitz, and Peter Yates himself, as well as
poets, such as Kenneth Rexroth, who had previously recorded for the Library.
The KUSC tapes were an important edition to the Eberhart-era archive,
which was expanding beyond the Modern Library ethos. Yates, who worked for

69
Robert Land, Chief of the General Reference and Bibliography Division, in late 1961
wrote to Robert Benson, Program Supervisor at WBAC-FM, in response to the latter’s
offer to send tapes of nine half-hour talks by poets at the Johns Hopkins Poetry Festival,
that “these recordings are primarily for research use.” Twenty years after the genesis of the
recorded-poetry archive, the Library had conceded that pedagogical and commercial
dreams for poetic audiotext had been rather diminished.

70
A written list from Yates on February 24, 1959, names 27 recorded poets. Dubester’s
report to Eberhart of September 15, 1959, shows that KUSC provided 28 rather than 27
recorded poets.

96
the California Department of Employment from 1937 to 1962, was the instrumental
figure in bringing together poets, composers, and performers in mid-century Los
Angeles. Many of these individuals were blacklisted in the 1950s and have been
largely ignored in the intervening years. In 1939, Yates and his wife, Frances,
began a chamber-music salon in the attic of their L.A. house (hence, the name
“Evenings on the Roof”).
71
By the time he had retired as the series director in 1954,
the concerts had moved to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and he had
begun, again in his home, poetry readings devoted to the group of locals who edited
and published in a pair of journals, California Quarterly and Coastlines. The first
was founded in 1951 by Philip Stevenson, a blacklisted screenwriter; Coastlines
was begun in 1955 by two former students of the poet Thomas McGrath, who had
been fired from his teaching post at Los Angeles State College in 1954.
72
Both
journals provided outlets for left-leaning—and downright radical—writers, many of
whom, like McGrath, had refused to testify before HUAC. McGrath, a magnetic
figure and old-school Marxist, attracted around him a group of politically like-
minded Los Angeles poets he dubbed the “Marsh Street Irregulars”: Naomi
Raplansky, Henri Coulette, Gene Frumkin, Mel Weisburd, Sid and Estelle
Gershgoren, Ed Rolfe, Stanley Kiesel.

71
For more on the Monday night concerts, see Dorothy Crawford’s Evenings On and Off
the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles 1939-1971.

72
For more on McGrath, see Frederick Stern’s The Revolutionary Poet in the United States:
The Poetry of Thomas McGrath.

97
Like the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the L.A. writers twisted and
frequently broke the academic line of mid-century American verse. But unlike
their Beat counterparts in the Bay Area, the SoCal poets cultivated decidedly less
bohemian personae.
73
Their commitment was not so much to the cult of romantic
personality as to class struggle, political action, and documentary witness. When
McGrath called his fellow Angeleno and blacklisted writer Don Gordon “one of the
very best of the revolutionary poets,” he meant the compliment to emphasize his
friend’s politics (14).
It is doubtful that a Consultant in Poetry would have welcomed tape
recordings of this politically engaged, even Marxist, poetry earlier in the decade.
The writers who met every Tuesday night at the Agnes Avenue home of Larry
Spingarn after he had been fired from UCLA (not exactly a conservative outpost,
the campus was known as the “little red schoolhouse” in the Fifties) were not the
sort of folks who had dominated the literary landscape during the previous decades.
Although Eberhart was a product of the earlier generation, by the time he assumed
the chair, his ecumenical spirit had felt the vibrations of the social revolution to
come.
In July 1959, Yates wrote to Dubester to announce that he was starting a
program with Boyer May and Don Gordon slated for a full hour on the new

73
The Marsh Street Irregular poets of L.A. engaged in open literary warfare through
Coastlines and California Quarterly with the San Francisco-styled Venice West group led
by Lawrence Lipton. The McGrath cadre saw Lipton’s claque as buffoonish bohemians;
the Venice West crowd complained that their rivals were slumming (Novak 5-9). This
latter charge was prompted by such testaments as Mel Weisburd’s “Lysergic Acid and the
Creative Experience” in a 1958 issue of Coastlines.

98
Pacifica Radio station in Los Angeles, KPFK, and its older sister station in
Berkeley, KPFA. The show, “Evenings on the Roof: Poetry Los Angeles,” briefly
ran on Wednesday nights at 9:30 p.m., but the only material that found its way into
the Poetry Archive was a February 18, 1960, reading by Thomas McGrath.
74

At this same time, the Library of Congress obtained a $15,000 grant from the
Ambrook Foundation of Norwich, Connecticut, to continue the “Twentieth Century
Poetry in English” series of LP record releases. The proposal sent to Dudley
Lathrop, the Ambrook treasurer, stated that the money was needed because,
contrary to evidence that Caedmon Records was turning a profit, “there was never a
possibility of poetry records enjoying commercial success” (LC to Ambrook).
75

In June 1961 the Library of Congress issued a press release announcing the
new LPs of eighty-seven poets, selected by Richard Eberhart, reading their own
works. The collection contained old standards like Stephen Vincent Benét, as well
as relatively new voices like John Ciardi, and garnered more positive reviews than
the previous series had, including one in The New York Times from Thomas Lask,
who had criticized the quality of the first series.
This same year the Library of Congress at last published Archive of
Recorded Poetry and Literature: A Checklist (price: $0.70), under the direction of

74
“Apparently”: KPFK radio in Los Angeles has been remarkably unaccommodating
when I have requested archival material. One archive worker brushed off my inquiries
with the claim that the station “burns all its records at the end of the year.” I doubt the
veracity of this statement.

75
As of May 31, 1958, the Library of Congress had sold 27,496 LPs of “Twentieth Century
Poetry in English,” Series I and Series II (ltr. Basler to Dubester).

99
Henry J. Dubester of the General Reference and Bibliography Division.
76
The
compilation, which provides authors’ names, titles of recorded poems, Library shelf
locations, disc formats, dates and locations of recordings, and cryptic notes on
content (e.g., “includes discussion”), achieves the goal of offering a researchable
archive for literary historians, critics, and enthusiasts, although Dubester notes in
his introduction that the Poetry Archive’s value “may not be realized until such
time as the Library of Congress develops further its facilities for listeners to make
use of these materials on the premises” (Archive).
This modest monument to the audiotext acquisitions of the previous two
decades marks a watershed. Changing times had led to a diminishing interest in
culture-building and greater attention to science, technology, and popular—i.e.,
youth—culture. When Eberhart left his post in 1961, he had his eyes not on the
archival past but on the unexplored future of American poetry. His valedictory
report called for an annual “week’s Poetry Festival. . . .This could be a cultural
item. . . .in line with this Administration’s awareness of our arts as vital to the
country” (McGuire 225).
77
During the campaign, J.F.K. had stressed the need for a

76
Internal memos indicate that as late as November 1959 the Library had not, after nearly
two decades, settled on a name for the recording project. Early LPs cite the “Archive of
Recorded Poetry.” Press releases throughout the Fifties refer to the “Archive of Poetry and
Literature.” “The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature” eventually became the
official designation (ltr. Basler to Dubester).

77
Eberhart’s vision was realized by the next Consultant, Louis Untermeyer, whose prestige
in the literary world helped him put together the funding for the first National Poetry
Festival in 1962. Note: Untermeyer had written for The New Masses and other
“subversive” magazines and had been named by the House Un-American Activities
Committee. By the time of his appointment such a history seemed a little ridiculous.

100
“new image” of America in the fight against global Communism—and, we might
add, a new way for the country to understand itself. The story the nation was
telling had shifted to the young, the fresh, the festive, the future.
101

Chapter Two: Famous Birds, A Collection of Poems

The Nightbird We Could Never Name

The nightbird we could never name
Who woke in full song at midnight
And stole us from our second sleep—

That happy idiot—has gone
With the turning of September

The stars at the perimeter
Of perfect night shine faintly still
And the dry aroma of grass

Drifts through the curtain but the bird
Who made such music in his time
Has taken the poetry out

Of the trees on his way down south

I’m not unhappy I am here
With you talking from room to room
Listening to the radio

I know you so well I could cry

102

Cabin Court in Arkansas

The sisters have dragged the flat-bottomed boat
Into the wild rye and pulled on their shirts
Beyond them the face of an early moon

Tobacco-colored trembles on the pond
Each day the two girls have gone on the boat
Standing noon to dusk in the still water

Their faces glow like elderberry bark
They lean on bamboo poles to keep themselves

In pools of leafy light where the algae
Thickens and biting flies climb up their legs

At a metal table in a kitchen
With metal cabinets fastened to the walls
(Not altogether clean somewhat dreary)

We have cups of crushed ice and lemonade
And windowscreens to look through while waiting

For the sun to slide along its steel track
And drop behind the hill like a nickel
Into a slot—a squadron of crickets

Insists that we cheer up cheer up cheer up

Now the cattle fall back and roll their eyes
Making loose dumb sounds as the sisters
Come stepping up bare-limbed and as watchful

As two young deer—they choose a careful path
Through the shadows on the pasture and spread
The evening air with hands outstretched for balance

103
They look to be swinging some kind of sacks
As they come or purses—no— two bullfrogs

Streaked with blood and beaten into jelly
Black with blood and swinging from broken legs

104

Not So Much Disappointment As

The rubber owls on the roofs and billboards
Indulge us with their nightly watchfulness

Our feeling is we’ve been up to no good

And for good reason—all along Crenshaw
Blvd we are brooded over—we
Can smell the rain minutes away (this winter

The rain is always only a minute. . .)

But without thrilling like we used to when
We could stand under a streetlight and buy

Tostadas from a steam cart on rollers
When the storefronts were dark and there was
Frankly danger in the air—not any more

Will we drip grease on our jackets and drink
Fruit punch through a straw—we have gone beyond

Our best intentions—nature’s childish dis-
Plays of grandeur the rainbows and sunsets—

I digress—we must discover some means of
Getting along without winning maybe

Put ourselves under house arrest until
The urge to wreck our endocrine systems

Passes or take up watercolor as
An alternative—in any event

The sexual overtones exhibit
Themselves like a lifestyle magazine for
The usual reasons—I digress again
105

But not only because I’m amazed
At how quickly one can flee through the de-
Tails into intoxication or self-

Recrimination—tonight is going
To be a lesson in making ourselves

Invisible to the world that wants us

106

Errata

Someone else knows how hummingbirds

Conceal their strings and how carbon
Turns into light instead of a
Diamond—in fact someone else knows

Everything that can be known at

This moment and will explain it
On scraps of bark and in the back

Of taxis given a flicker

Of interest—some people even
Know and will tell how God works and

No doubt everybody is right
Almost all the time and still there
Is no relief apparently

The cowboys who fell asleep a-
Cross the border had dreams in which

The air froze and shattered like black-
Birds and when they woke they did not
Awake but dreamed of two-lane high-

Ways that had not been built yet be-
Cause there were no cars to roar into

The gold doom of California

Most of the time most of the time—
And then sometimes a sadness so

107
Great that teeth fall out comes for no
Reason proving even the dirt
Wrong and everything starts over

From halfway back to the last time

It’s okay—the fear of living
For nothing is like an orphan

The sun lives in a cave at night

As everyone has always known

108

Gift Shop

The flies buzz around like dirty
Thoughts on the dust-rimed windowpane
The wind is as dry as can be

Apparent in the insulting
Tapping of the fronds on the glass

She fingers the little figures
On the counter—why do I feel

Happy? she says turning on a
Painted lamp—perhaps something has

Happened that you aren’t aware of

A close call—maybe you weren’t hit
By a truck in the parking lot

Maybe you escaped disaster
In the Philippines—it could be
She says absently peering in-

To the case of kachinas and
Lone Star State ashtrays but so what?
Go sit down with the old timers

How’s it going chief any luck
At the mudhole—it’s too late for

Second thoughts anyway—second
Thoughts are for the birds—listen to
Yourself she says under her breath

109

Dear Woman Who Feared for Her Life

Was that a whippoorwill you heard
An omen of delight among
The sparkling trees? the fireflies weave

Through leaf and fern—the bird cries her
Triple note of gold and along

The branches buds of darkness burst
Into the spring—no one knows how

The days arise from nothing—breath

Of God—and return to nothing

No one works out the pain—when you
Stand still the thinnest moon will light
Your bones dreamlike but not a dream

110

Hotel Razing

Snow falls—the tenants gather at the corner
Gone are their small poor lives we envy in
The lyrical vein—the snow falls as thick

As soap over the monuments over
The benches and the scratched branches the pile

Of tires in the median strip—the snow
Falls like excess paperwork on the street-
Lamps and the old-fashioned powerlines on

The discouraged lady singer heading
To work—the snow falls the way a species

Goes extinct slowly and thickly coating
The sky with the ten-million pieces of

Itself so beautiful you can forget

The police come to quell the disturbance
And the snow covers their coats and hats in

Great white bandages—the wrecking ball swings
Through the snow the one last candle’s little

Angel head glowing through the snow the shrieks

Of a little girl who doesn’t know how
To behave during moments of beauty
Only somewhat muffled by the snow and

Then as the building crashes down like a storm
On a hamlet the tenants drift away

Leaving their small poor footprints in the snow

111

Distinguishing Marks

Where I was living was nowhere
I wanted to just over the
Limits beside a gravel pit

Or maybe next to a noisy
School or up a cul-de-sac some-

Where in the old brewery district

The point is I was about as

Happy as and I didn’t like
Owing myself to whomever

Had hired me to walk around
Looking like someone but there you

Have it—I ate and breathed without
Mercy went trekking daily through

The collection and bought stuff to

Carry home slung across my neck
Like an antelope—it was cold

One day the sun came out of its
Shell and there you were a slender
Pronoun in the sentence sent to

Watch over the eventfulness
Which had been unfolding at such

A slow pace that it looked like life

112
Sly words unauthorized kisses
Were spoken and bestowed—the sky

Got back some scraped-off color and

Birds came into focus—after

Not long the whole episode turned
Less ugly and although I was
Still a pawn in somebody’s game

I didn’t resent it so much
Sometimes I even came home from

Being out there empty-handed

113

Rain After Long Without

I can find my way through the rain
Prefer to—sunshine is hard on

The senses like whisky the way
It cleans everything to the bone
It’s fine for white-washed walls and sails

For the bleachers but it’s no good
For going home or locating

The soul in the body—for years

I lived as though I belonged where
I was and now I really do

When I close my eyes and listen
I’m Theseus or a bluejay
The sound of rain on the jacaranda

Like narrow tongues on the terrace

On the window on the privet
It makes a kind of map—I found

My way for twenty-seven years
Under a tattered umbrella
I came to sadness in the sound

Of the ticking gutter—the earth-
Worm’s laughter guided me from spring

To spring I crushed crabapples
On the sidewalks—I walk blindly

114
So much of the time that it is
A relief to have rain again
Showing me where the corners are

115

Man with a Gun at the Palmer Club

The happy ones have all rushed off and now
Now they are back laughing like tambourines

It is right to be happy and to laugh with
A selfish disregard of others to
Put aside the need to be admired to

Work to walk on a mossy hillside to

Earn to purchase to dance the new dances

To need love and find love however brief
Who among us does not deserve to laugh?

The breeze blows off the desert even in
This room here cold dry flavored with moonlight
On some high mesa sifted through the streets

Of the cruel improbable towns that have
Emptied their people into the suburbs

So immense that even wrapped in someone’s

Body sharing air and smell voices nerves
We are nomads breaking the winter camp

Hoping that next year will be better than
This one with cash and new places to go

Or even that this one isn’t so bad

But it is it is—once love comes there is
No more laughter happiness yes perhaps

Once you have swallowed love into yourself
Once it sends its bright vines along your veins
116

Taking the shape it must take inside you
Replacing what you were killing your tongue

The woman dies or goes away the man
Goes away or dies before arriving

Goes the woman or dies the man away

My heart chimes against my ribs unrhyming
I understand nothing but that we all

Turn into something unlike anything

The happy ones will all rush off and then
Then they’ll come back laughing like radios

The music will play lust play on the lips
Beyond the ceiling the stars will come on
And somebody standing on a lone hill

Will form them into constellations while
Somebody else standing in a corner

Will imagine that person shaping stars

And both will wonder why they are laughing

117

Quo Labor?

Everything we have is orange
Juice or fresh wheat grass—we have fresh

Water and power booster so
Stay healthy it’s a hot morning
Fluids that’s what your body needs

Time as it is passing feels like
A voice heard through a megaphone
Unintelligible but near

Time as it is passing passes

Through our best thinking about it

Since partial knowledge is the best
That can be hoped for or desired
Even (although when it comes to

Surgery let’s hope he’s cut open
Several thousand practice patients)

I propose reading fourth chapters
And misinterpreting the light
Glancing off palm trees as threats from

A hostile universe—this makes

More sense in Washington D.C.

Even if it’s bad policy
I think we had better or it

Will be the end of endurance

118
Like waiting for a performance
Of the Kronos Quartet to start

And like waiting for it to end
As all things good or philippic
Eventually grind into bliss

119

The Private Self & the Public Sphere

One’s thoughts have a way of turning
Into landscape if you let them

The wicker-weave of royal palms
The scintillant air the green rain
Are made to suffer—everything

I think I am (everything) be-

Longs to this turning-into-land-
Scape potluck of whatever is

Of course and of course this is ex-
Actly the reason to say what-

Ever looks like the way a tree
Still fits into its wedding dress

The way clouds limp back to the farm

120

All Things Delivered

Maybe we shouldn’t have thrown the dog off
The bridge—maybe we shouldn’t have slept with

The bride and probably not sold that dope to
The undercover officer (or slept
With him beforehand) —there was maybe

An alternative to burning—any-
Way birthday wishes won’t protect us now

There are those who recommend the look of
Branches in November without leaves to

Interfere with the light—some need stones on
The path to the water jagged among
The cattails—in other words who are we

To judge—as soon as we get back uptown

We’ll handle the situation all right

They were supposed to provide food and drink

For everybody who came seeking
Amnesty but instead we got inter-
Rogators who took offense when mentioned

In the popular press our pants with steam
Holes in the winter street catch the rear wheels
Of cars we stole away down south in

Time after time has expired with a soft
Landing—we are taken over at some

Point by the stories of our lives and then
We realize that if everything cared
121
For us we would feel exactly the same
A harsh truth? We planned on visiting our
Parents between episodes but somehow

Given all the miscues and tearful prayers
We woke up in a southern state with a
Vague recollection of King James scripture

Whether or not we truly had any
Intentions the relief was just as sweet

122

Upon Revisiting the Birthplace of the Preacher Billy Sunday

If I have sinned the rain falls more blackly
On the corn fields—the river crests and floods

And the sparrow tucks under a wet wing
I must have believed it once when I came
Here to be hidden behind the treatment

Plant before the dealerships bought up all
The bottomland except this far corner

Even wet the acorns clack as they fall

From the yellow branches to the pavement
Stained with the tannins of half a century
Maybe more some shed some crib or storehouse

Stood here sheltering equipment records
Against the horde of winter sweeping down
From Canada—and there’s the rusted ruin

Of the old car a Chevrolet I think
Though it’s hard to see under the sumac
And huckleberries and saplings pushing

Through the rotted seats and sticking out through

The broken windows—what a mess of blood-
Root and cockleburrs—I kick through it

Crunching acorns looking for the old marks

I drag my bag of sins behind me pale
Ones the rotten crabs and dark ones the burned

Wings heavy heavier every year—
But I’m too selfish to give them away
123
The little dears and the scary mothers
Drag my bag through the city where I live

And stagger on through the beautiful world
Leaving a trail of black oil behind me

I’m lazy lazy all day and the next

I’ve hardly shaken off the night’s dander
Before it’s time to lean into the arms
Of afternoon—the years have hung the weight

Of luxury on me—I can’t bear it—
Here I am trying to live again with-

Out all the fat all the cheesy richness—
O stupid youth rooted in the wind—I

Know now why I sat on those hard pews when
All I believed in was sliced beef on rye
And a girl’s new hips flaring in the grass

And I know now why I went the long way

Through snow or stood in the rain on the steps
Of the library for hours I know why

My head ached with algebra and why I
Hungered for the sight of ice-hung branches
But refused to let my dreams inform me—

There’s hardly anyone alive today
Who remembers the wide use of manure

The smell of it on the fields or the smell

Of dung in the towns who knows what coffee
Smelled like at Wilshire & Vermont at eight

O’clock in the morning one-hundred years

Ago—hardly anyone remembers
The smell of the canvas tabernacles
Or fresh sawdust on floors and what about

124

The smell of kerosene which no one knows
Anymore and the smell of castile soap

The smell of the Bronze Age the goats and figs
Or the smell of Gettysburg with its ten
Thousand rotting horses and smoking trees

There’s no one alive who knows the smell of

Teepees by the Mississippi River
And no one who knows the smell of my own

History except me—the smell of the bed
The smell beneath the juniper the smell
Of pears of frog-water the smell inside

A trombone case and of the gray paint on
The bleachers the smell of wet newspaper

That belongs to only one life among
The many and keeps the gate of memory
Open the smell of the first day of it

Of a ditch of a wet red dog the mud—

Kneeling knees soaked ankles soaked hair dripping
I shake with the cold but not only that

Out here in the weeds in the greasy rain
Out here in the presbyterian autumn
Pouring down its dark flumes of clouds and flocks

Of migratory fowl—let the wind blow through

My bones and hollow me out like a shell
Tear down my pride and hide me in the grave

Of your love dear God—I don’t want to live
Another day without your fingers wrapped
Around my heart—save me from history

The fat-lipped ghost is resting his head on
My shoulder and muttering in my ear
He’s squeezing my neck and poking my ribs
125

With his big hands—he keeps insisting that
I understand about acorns—he thinks

There is a lesson listen he mutters
I know you don’t like me—he spits it out
I don’t like you—you don’t have to like me

To learn to serve to let a squirrel plant

You in the cold muck to be a kernel
Cut from the tree—you don’t have to like it

But I’m going to spit into your ear—you
Will be yourself in giving everything

To the world—it does not matter that you
Lose your goddamn sins—you know this is true—

Over the dealerships the floodlights bloom

Whitely and a tractor-trailer gears up

The incline on the highway into town
All across the Midwest the sober psalm
Of October repeats in the mouths of

Crows and the whispering grass winter
Has begun draining the blood from the land

126

No Opossums

The day growing colder under
A thin layer of winter sky

Blue a little blue with the crows
Bragging immensely in the trees

The evening spits up the moon
Like a wet seed and I come home
With my fishing rod and two perch

Wrapped in newspaper—I’m thirsty
But I can wait the ivy is

Still green and dark in the dusk it
Looks almost like some creature’s fur
Fringing the branches and the pole

The old hermit gleams in my eyes
For a minute greedy and cold

127

Provenance

Tell me about the others he
Told her—what others she said—he
Said all of them and he meant what

Qualities of theirs he lacked—in
Order? she said chopping onions

And turning up the heat under
The oil—that would be fine—he tossed
The garlic in—well—purity

An honest mouth tenderness and—

She laid in the strips of chicken
And looked out—fingers of twilight

Reached across the yard—and I guess
Loyalty—that one was from you

128

Seclusion at Seven O'Clock

I bring two red carnations three white ones
To the Cafe Esla and set them in a glass

They make a nice balance as beautiful
Together as five young women—soon I will lose
The white ones to the hot-headed old men

Playing dominoes with the waiter
For their meals the bone wafers the twisted
Bones of their hands bang on the counter

Outside a pyramid of melons rises from a cart
Melons on melons the dark stripes on lighter green

Dust on all surfaces on the crown a buzzard
Squats dry wings extended like a ragged ribbed fan

To air its bony torso slipping a little when
The buses gallop by—two children shout
And whip the dirt with rubber hoses

But the vendor lets it squat solitary and jubilant

As the evening emerges from the alleys
The bird suddenly thrashes into the air

I’m drinking moons in a cup of water
The blood pounds in my fingers I’m afraid to die

129

A Response to Trees

At first they seemed real with their green puffy
Tops and huge birds but later they were no

More than tendencies waiting for someone

To nudge them into shape—we had names for
Them maple hackberry juniper and

Maybe two dozen others all of which
Made demands—we swooned or gathered the fruit

Or quivering with excitement sharpened
Our axes—eventually the forest

Split into the remainder of its parts
Becoming what had been agreed upon

130

Thinking about Voltaire

After the first love the last love
After the wet trees the black square

After the last love the first love
Again but better like fresh grapes
Lately he walks around and thinks

After the iris the beauty
Of the leaves the stalk without blue

How in the world have I come to

This desire to be alone or
With one other at most with one
Other after piling myself

On the crowd? He walks around and

He thinks—after the romances
The sadness turning into birds

And then returning into trees

131

High There

I offer you an explanation—we
Started to fight over bits of meaning

Like old fruit skins like a losing ball game

Deep down we regretted nothing like this

Spreading wavelength over the chaparral
The sun loops under the muttering sky—
Friction possible breath spilling like hits

On a drum—how much dust scores the distance

Sometimes momentum carries the day through
The butterflies inextricable in
The star thistle and the creosote

Rain evaporating—creatures in the
Shade licking their lips for the fly making

Themselves a part of our experience

Our responsibility to set a-
Side for the sake of rainbows okay
Even double ones like jokes on the land-

Scape our petty pains and contradictions

Necessity defines the limits and
Outlines hitch us to the stories of life
We’re never grateful for our bed of sand

132

Sufficiently Imbued with Noise

It is said that one learns much by
Going to extremes but when I

Arrived it looked like Detroit if
Detroit had been Buenos Aires
Walls of fact had been built around

The climate of change and the huge

Understandings kept peeling off

As if one could ever escape
The sheer redness of the forest

The present moment is pounded

Into an infinitely thin
Disk of pointlessness—there is a
Comfortable settling down

To the lack of outcomes—no one

Suffers the old way—by wanting
Everything one wants nothing

Someone said in medio stat
Virtus—not I—in Hollywood
You take the credit when you can

The smog in the famous hills clears
And the whole city’s virtuous

Someone else said that the problem
Is that you sit down and when you

133
Stand up again it is twenty
Years later—and so and so and
So and I left town at night with

My money on my person in
Case I was attacked and murdered

134

The Worst Part

If you marry a dragon you
Will sleep with his pain or her pain
Always around you the skin of

His anger the skin of her grief
Peels off in long strips like paint from

A rail—you will never again
Bicycle along the river

In the unbelievable blue
Dusk of the first week of July
Or sit in your chair after work

And listen to the radio
Again and drink beer with salt in
It again you can never plunge

Off the lip of the porch into
The mighty ocean of summer

You can never abandon your
Clothes again on a hot gravel
Road and light up a sparkler or

A fat roman candle because

The dragon gets jealous about
The blue shower of fire and starts

Weeping and moaning for love for
Love wailing for the lost life

135

Later They Went Out

Later they went out with their umbrellas
After rain—the big signs over Main Street

Flickered on beneath walnut-colored clouds

The father stopped and said that reminds me
And shook his fist at the sky—the moment

Felt as uneaten as a piece of crust
136

Near Zuma

It’s terrible to have to eat
To be inhabited by clouds

That never gather into rain

All day one hears the good advice
But is empty as an after

I always seem to leave the house

I watch the sea slide off the mud
Little hoppers climb from the air-
Bubbles and are eaten by gulls

The mud sucks around the ankles

Get on home now and stay until
You know why words act like they do

Then look among the kalanchoes
Your grave is waiting in the pot

137

Years Ago the Magpie Journeyed

Years ago the magpie journeyed
To my window I didn’t know

She carried messages from Thor

I lived a rotten life confused
As many have lived it was all

Chatter to me and drab chatter
I remembered the lumberyards
That smelled of creosote and nails

And the smell of the library
On Monday nights gluepots and smoke

In the creases of the marble
I remember remembering

These things because a magpie came

Here yesterday though not from Thor
She came out of the winter with
A message I don’t understand

138

Some Days Other Days

She said here’s one for you—what if
Someone said write beautifully

Or you will die I will kill you

I would do it I said I would
Consider it a good lesson

That was when we talked endlessly

Until there was nothing beyond
To give shape to unruliness

Here’s what happened not long ago

A river slouched through surly fields

The air was oil it was a lid

The sorghum was knee-deep with dew
And thick with spinning clouds of moth

We’d been driving south through small towns
Clustered under watertowers

Heading who knows where—Mexico

Perhaps—probably—with high-beams
Chiseling the darkness open

We turned onto a rutted road
Which crossed a bridge and ended dead

In the field with only the stars
The moon and a gun for a map

139
The locusts choired immensely in
The star-smudged morning

140

Mother in Garden Thinking about Daughter

The edges of those clouds red like tulips
In the yard lip-red in the unlovely
Light in the yard red on branches the bones

Of the old oaks or beeches or maples

The black lettuce wants the spade—five years ten
Ago pumpkins rotting with a wine-like
Smell or squirrels dressing in the evening

Sun predicted the feeling of being
Five years ten ago the thought of digging

Out lettuce in the evening sun stirred joy
That pricked like thorns—time perishes wild earth

Is not enough heaven nor gardens quite

Enough heaven though sculpted—poetry

Houses bridges cannot suffice flowers
Cannot suffice memory is like a net
Cast into a vast night teeming with wind

141

After the Words the Thought the Deed

Henrietta—the last we saw her was

At September’s denouement she was mad
With leaving and dark laughter—when I say

We I mean of course I and I mean by
Henrietta both a girl on a sign
And the spirit of the womanly tree

And additionally someone whose eyes
I glimpsed in a Mustang’s rearview mirror

Henrietta—the obsolete sound of
It is novel to my ear promising
And sly—birds would say it—the last we saw

Her she was crossing through the rain at eight
A.M. to the coffee man’s kiosk to

Buy the news for her umbrella—she was
As dark and wet as an aloe vera

Already I can see what she will mean

Twenty-two years from now—we will call her
Henrietta meaning regret and we
Will regret those mornings that felt like skin

142

I Bide My Time

Music should start now––and indeed it does

A piano or a recording of
A piano or the sound through a closed
Second-floor window of a recording

Of a piano above a street that

Contributes sounds of its own thumping doors
And loud conversations beyond the bright
Façade of mist—a telephone buzzes

On and on in a shack down on the beach
People appear and disappear and here

I am feeling as though I have slept through

The moment of truth only to find that
It is just now occurring as nonde-
Script winter birds fly down from the roofs as

The sea-smell flashes in my lungs and from

The fog in gray now blue now green she comes

143

What It Meant

It meant not having everything—it meant
The supertankers sitting off the coast

In the morning mist were not marking a

Boundary—it meant that some requirements

Were the same as answering questions—there

Was an appointment with the gods at two
O’clock—they were going to reveal but
Turned out to be the UPS man with

A carpet rolled up in thick plastic and
A box from Amazon.com—the car-
Pet (gray with small squares of blue and yellow)

Smell would fade in a month or two but un-
Til then it meant sharing a peach or pear

And enjoying only the sharing—it
Meant forgetting the things that did not fit

Meant making a dark space around the room

Realizing that there is no vacation

That pain is not actually a feeling

144

I Must Be Dead

What else am I to think—what was none of
My business has been replaced by summer

At water’s edge the fireflies fidget in
The gloom—where once was thirst is infinite

Wakefulness like that hollow frog that star

Do you think I needed permission to
Take apart the fragrance of my country
Do you think I never felt the needles

Of heat that I never requested the

Prairie that I can’t unglue myself from
Saturday afternoon and its copper

Taste of flat beer from the horses

Moving together in the mist or the
Falling into her my last love—what else

Can I think when my pillow is a lake

145

What Philosophers Say about You

Eyes are whether or not you use
Them whether or not the clouds are
Your responsibility or

The trees result from your looking
At them—you are thinking this is

True whether anybody says
So and you are as right as rain

(For which you aren’t responsible)

Once you decide on something you
Can start to turn into yourself
I know something about life and

I remember poppies scattered

Along the interstate highway

Thousands like a smashed piñata
In the late summer the color

Of them splattered across the wind-
Shield and heat on my head and neck

Red and white belong to no one

146

Nota Bene

When I was a boy or a girl
First putting feelings together in-
To love the smell of fat summer

Grass and crabapples on the wet
Cement broke my heart because I
Did not know they weren’t supposed to

Even now there are poems that
Stagger into my life without

Permission and slap me around

Too bad? too bad? I don’t think so
The pity perfume was just a

Way for the mosquitoes to stop

Being the next thing after the
Last thing that does not require proof

Today a famous man was ac-
Quited of murder record rains
Fell asleep at the wheel and crashed

For the first time in a quarter
Century the team was upset
In the first round the Supreme Court

Struck down a series of jackpots

Do you want the forecast or do
You want to keep you know flirting?

On a more personal note
It turns out I’m not allergic

147

Thing the missing pieces are all
Day long around me I have learned

The body never ends it is
An un-resolved G-minor-ninth

The long echo of a last laugh

148

I’ll Put All My Grief in a Room

I’ll put all my grief in a room
In New Haven Connecticut

I know the place on Court & State

Facing east a room with blue walls

On the top floor on a white chair
Rests a water glass in which floats

A red paper rose all my grief

Turning slowly in the sunlight

It no longer matters what caused
December to drip from the eaves

The best part of life is not known

Will she pour over me like wheat?

How would it feel to die in jail?

A person I knew who died said
After you have lived long enough

One day is like a giant cup

The sounds are fewer so better

Mostly an onshore wind that blots
Out the best memories and the

Rain impressing its signature
On the title page of the year

149

This Time of Year

The big mammals are passing off
The coast but for us flags whipping

The air and skinny clouds skinny
Ducks on their way back resting in
The plaza fountain—I went out

For over an hour and saw a
Woman eat a bag of apples

When she left the park ants were

Already swarming the brown cores
Under the bench—when I came home
The ducks were gone but not the wind

150

How Funny Today

They never came as expected
Who used to sleep with swans never
Showed up to collect their prizes

In the muteness where three people
Are a crush the dream of love be-

Comes a kind of mania

To emerge intact takes a piece
Out of your future but it’s all

Right because this is a part of
The earthly experience
I was listening to

The unknown Peter Dembski and

Thinking this piano is just
What you need to overwhelm your

Ego balancing on a ball

151

Near Burbank

The honeybee’s suicidal with greed

Zipping in to lick her fingers and lips
While she eats an apple—she used to think

The venom would kill her but it felt as
Lively as a kiss she thought—and she thought
How can one live without this kind of pain?

I’m happy today—after a while clouds

Unroll from the hills and the sharp spatter
Of rain leaves quick-fading marks on the bricks

152

The Part We Could Skip

But the custodian pushing
A broom across the marble floor
Stops to watch the grasshoppers dis-

Mantling their kin with steely jaws

He has been looking forward all
Night to this not the cannibals

But a sandwich and he eats like
A man with no paint on his suit

Earlier in the day before
He pulled his face off while shooting

Dice in a Caribbean joint

Run by the owners of a great
Deal of hot property I was
Engaged in my own crapshooting

Problem namely how to erase

My tracks without wrecking my life

Alas it happens unnoticed

My decision to go to France
Was never made so I guess I
Like living here—with the police

Presence on our streets I feel safe
Enough to paint a bird in oils

The stubborn significance is
So much a part of missing you

153

Listening—Saturday

Upstairs his voice was raw with heat and then
Your mother crying there were loud doors

And then your little sister crying too
There was maybe the cry of a siren
Somewhere too there was the sound you waited

Eleven months to hear of dogs rueing
Their tiny yards at twilight and the boys

Pouring across the fence into the park
Shouting their freedom—someone calls two crates
The goals and names the boundaries—rocks—pines—

And suddenly they are charging white arcs

Through thunderheads of gnats—pitching themselves
At the soccer ball—the streetlamps come on

Far off the boys are running through the wind
They make by running playing more and more

By touch and feel than see and know plunging
Through the weeds and hedges living in you
Your own art before you knew what it was

154

Los Angeles Morning by David Hockney

It’s a windy day but the wind passes
Through the lemon trees without unhooking

A single shadow from its leaf—noonday
The hummingbird hour the hour of cut grass
A cat must be watching from a window

On the lawn the sprinklers rise with a sharp
Breath into the wide light of the sun

Spilling like chardonnay on the aloe
Veras and the white wall the air imparts
To all it touches a frightening brightness

A sense of joy there’s a striped rebozo

And a pair of sandals on the terrace

Arranged by a divine hand—uncertain
Flick-of-the-wrist flashes in the koi pond—
A koan—a psalm—spine-straight paintbrush palms—peace

155

Three Birdsongs Colliding in the Cedars

Three birdsongs colliding in the cedars
For a moment have a meaning almost

Composed and as elusive as a mood
Because one only nearly hears the chord

They’re like the bells of an abandoned town

We almost visited one April day
We nearly passed together stretched beneath

Giant trees that reminded us of ruins
Like ruins the branches scatter the notes
Chopin lived because the music says so

But the voices of three birds will vanish
And the meaning and the mood—absence makes

Other dreams like a song in the cedars
Or like you almost here to hear it play

156

Trainride Girl Night

How are you made to sit as quiet as
Winter behind your eyes—what father thought

You up—the moon does not interest you nor
Do birds crossing its glittering fences
An instant before us—looking out you

Can see an horizon as thin as a
Mirror black fields and black trees like people

A kind of audience for your sadness

Notice how shadows form even at night
Thin bars mostly deposited by the

Sky breaking through the clouds or the crossing-
Lights coming chatter-quick yet your features

Emerge smoothly and without change—the world
Is what changes around to form a new
Location for your mood—how a face turns

Into a silence that teaches the trees

157

Suggestions for the Story

It’s hard to imagine there is

Any place I would rather be
Than with these kind of people in

This kind of place eating the kind

Of food you imagine you would
Eat in this kind of place with these

Kind of unimaginable

People—the reason we need space

Is so that there is somewhere there

Lemons so suddenly yellow
Against the whiteness of the space
We have not yet gone into be-

Cause we are content where we are

Or the gash of a siren near-
By remind us that everything

Does not add up to anything
Except what it started out as

The long history of the effort
Shapes up into a brown cricket
Scraping out the end of summer

And with those words—the end—the end
Is an imaginable space

158

Suggestions for Revision

After ten or twelve minutes you
Capitulate and then come long

Periods of sleep as the rain

Rediscovers its place in myth
Filling up the drains and flower-
Beds with approximate meaning

It’s a kind of carnival of
Disappointment all these brilliant

Performances these hot stories

Will anybody ever know
How close we came to extinction

The rainswept city seems to glow

As clean as a ginger blossom

Yet the trash left when the trucks have
Gone washes all to the same place

In the Bay along with fifty
Million oil leaks and dog feces

The crisis should occur before
Daybreak on the Connecticut-
Massachusetts border and your

Hands in the papery yellow
Light of late winter should be not
Only a symptom but also

A symbol of this our sympto-
Matic age (which is not meant to
159

Minimize your pain)—it would be
Desirable to structure things
Around what we can observe out

The window but this in the act
Of observation loses its
Greatness—and grants us the freedom

Of cancelled reservations

160

Cicadas

Patient patient chewing the sap
Again the old men in the trees

Gather slowly to the chorus
Having been young so long and so
Long dwelling in the dark root-dirt

Faroo-faroo the cithara
Drone is all for the hot green weeks

They scrape off the dried cuticle
Of winter stirring the wet air

And knowing knowing the old men
Stand singing at tomorrow’s gate

161

A Leopard

A leopard’s hanging in a tree
Impossible this time of year

The tree’s a maple! but look there’s

The silhouette limned on the blue
Horizon like a big puppet

In the leaves the leopard’s weeping
For his prey the twilight subsides

Listen—those are kids on scooters
And a neighborly radio

Look—a wife is walking on air
The air is as sweet as butter

Oh do not go do not go out

162

The Bloody Man in the Scenery

Bad enough we say when we don’t
Want to discuss it—things weren’t de-
Signed to handle a lack of

But it is not goodbye the balm
And the excitement both that in

This experience confuses
The dirty winter night tumbles
Down around us black-and-whitely

Inside is what we need but don’t
Want to witness that ruins us

Beautifully perfectly like
Two carnations in a glass or
Returning to Harmonium

As current events unfold en-
Folding the meaning in waste the

Bloody man in the scenery

Stirs into something forgotten

In the middle of a great life
Or a pretty-good marriage to-
Night is never too late to get

And the persuasion of the air
In the window seems a kind of
Ending tragic or otherwise

163

The Unlimited Miscreant

It was interesting to be in town

Once more and not disagreeable to
Be recognized here and there—still

I was uncomfortable with
My position at the end of

Main Street where the pressure of sun-
Set and the stares of people who

Used to have names reminded me
That I had memories—for instance
The one about the trumpet in

The park—also the one about

Falling into the river that
Turned out to be a wine-soaked golf
Course—in the novel version the

Protagonist is made to pay
For his misbehavior with pangs

And destitution but in this

One the night creeps over the low
Buildings a diesel horn rushes

Ahead of the train someone laughs—

It is time to decide on a
Course of action beginning with
Stars and ending with a good cry—

There’s nothing wiring the story
So there’s no switch to throw—the plan
164

Is to sit on a bench under
A rickety mountain ash with-
Out food or drink or warm clothing

And wait for someone to sneak up

Be it an hour or be it a

Girl—what it really is this re-
Turn to what will happen any-

Way given time and attention

Is a symptom of romance like
The soot on the cathedral walls—

I’m putting on the open face

And if it doesn’t work this time
I can try again next summer

165

The Terrible Whispers of Our Elders

Surely we would never have forgotten
Such important matters if we had been

Attentive to the crocuses throbbing
Up in the warm batter of the air and
The swallows feeding on stars in the dusk

What sort of person doesn’t realize
That a moment is being served on white
China? The next insight was that dying

Should be performed—by seven would be best—

So that the grieving can with minimal
Ceremony begin and if we were

Going to have a shot at the pros if
We were going to attend if we were
Serious about the art thing the car

Thing the thing in South America even

Then we had better start being ourselves
But not too much—I had a beautiful

Gray one I used to color the morning
True I was not so savvy then but the
Geese were not so photogenic either

Some days I disliked the usual lack of
Sense but something was drumming on my heart

166

Pantoum for Breakfast

You can imagine how happy I was
With the apples and two kinds of people

Not to mention the stacks of manuscript
Proving that mornings were better than not

With the apples and two kinds of people
I felt there was sufficient support for
Proving that mornings were better though not

Because they are humbler than finales

Indeed there was sufficient support for
The alternative which on its face seemed

The cause of a far humbler finale
Knowing I would never get up again

The alternative which on its face seemed
Reasonable had one major drawback
Knowing I would never get up again

Somehow this made the apples and people

Reasons if not major ones to draw back
From the brink of wanting everything
Just how this makes apples and people

Better is the pleasure of mystery

On the brink of wanting everything
One lets the butter melt like a wristwatch

And this is the pleasure of mystery

Of sunshine that turns the room inside out
One lets the butter melt like a wristwatch
167

Not to mention the stacks of manuscript
And sunshine that turns the room inside out
You can imagine how happy I was

168

Cherries on the Branches

You could call it autumn the air
Having cooled so quickly almost

A disappointment—we have pain
Trapped up in the branches with the
Sunburnt cherries—there is a wren

Up in the tarnished leaves testing

The redness—we are sitting on
Wire chairs our feet scuffing the grass
I am looking for excuses

And you are helping—looking for
Excuses—we have learned to watch

The shadow of a tree shadow
Of cloud and the slow days passing

We have agreed never to lie
Or blame taught ourselves the order

Of a small country learned to hear

What one hears when every word
Is meant to answer for a life-

Time—we have pain trapped between us

Above us—it is a moment
In which color dominates—there
Is a blue dress a milk-colored

Sky and sky-colored lawn chairs black
Shoes red cherries and green leaves—we
Could stop speaking—we could watch as

169

The wren feeds on the cherries and
The cherries drop to the trim ground

We could say that each cherry is
A part of pain and that the wren

Is helping us—you could hum your
Mozart—you could make up lyrics
You could step out of your blue dress

And into the triangle of
Light the sun leaves under the tree

As it goes—it rained all after-
Noon—our fight was ordinary

Brief then you sat by the mirror

Watching yourself pare a lime in-
To a glass of soda and the
Bitter odor calmed us—but now

Pain cannot escape into an
Odor or a glass now we have

It trapped and it has us trapped—we

Do not look at each other the

Cherries are hypnotic swinging
A little when the wind decides

To move or the wren bounces on
The branch—the cherries are all things

Red the unhealed wound the stain on
A sleepless eye they are the pain

We cannot let go—the night-blue

Spreads behind the tree like a fan

We have only a few moments
We could let the dew that has more

170

Power than we start to settle
We could join the stuttering of

Insects we could end it right now
We could we could kick over the
Wire chairs and crawl over the grass

And shake the slender mossy trunk
Until the cherries shower down

Around us pelting our shoulders
And arms our forbidden faces

171

Picture with Two or More People In It

Greenness hardness coldness—the juice
That makes the leaf and stone and ice

And you—what is that part of you

Who is the ancestor of self
Begetting a swarm of others

You are not you like green is not
The leaf but like the leaf is green

The toad sitting in the cornfield
Knows no loneliness for others
But you—how do you know yourself

After living so much last night

Each day the shadows knot like rags
On the windows and in the trees

The husks of the ones we have loved
Occupy their yellow armchairs

Or chained from one moment to the

Next wander back and toward the back
Of the yard leaving our houses

The snails on the terrace at night
The wind the night-blooming jasmine

At least the squirrel in the palm
Uttering her anxiety
Wants nothing but nuts nuts nuts nuts

At least the clouds go on and on
You say won’t you stay you don’t have

172

To say too much you don’t have to
Stay but won’t you stay you don’t have

To but won’t you you don’t have to

Gradually everything is
Suddenly torn from the background

A gaggle of geese a guggle of green

Brook streaking through a furry field
From a farmhouse on the hill (white

Stucco a muddy little yard)

One boy one girl descend along

The sunburned groves of oranges
Purple clouds of jacaranda

Such was her oxygen all her
Little life long even later

The words the ones a bird would speak

Owk she said that’s the way the goose
Goes when she goes for you you fool

Of course the children are missing
From the family photograph
Which is also missing because

The family is missing as is

The homestead (so to speak) the school

Companions and the goldfish bowl
On the counter—life goes on in

One finds a missing child in Nice
With a spy for a surrogate
The majestic seascapes subsume

The past in a blast of beauty
The raw sand the biblical sky
173
Of which one is the missing child
Come hither closer next to me
You take the left hand I’ll the right

And then dive through hedges to find
Beasts and new knowledge to boast of

From a hilltop in Hollywood
A coyote comes to guide us

Follow the gray fellow my friends
In amazement into the missed
Of this valley of paradise

There are many—not too—of us
Paddling around the pond through bright

Red hyacinths and lily pads

The palm fronds like shutters flicker

Oh peace how do you find us here
After juleps and a hammock
We might have been satisfied—but

Now this including an egret

Too soft the air soft the water

The city recedes into mist
And all its criminal traffic

Retires to shadowy bedrooms

I am just sick with happiness

My eyes sting with the sight of you

What is it you think when you think

What is it you dream when you dream
That you dreamed that your body was

What is it you wish when you wish
That the broken-coated moon would
174
Not catch in your throat as it does
That is the life that is at last

175

Prisoners Training Dogs for the Blind

Sometimes something comes into you
A new hurt a new desire like

The winter vanishing like an
Aspirin tablet in a glass
Joy is its own moment—at nine

O’clock there is a joy that no
One knows except the one who knows

It—it sparkles in the bones and
When you look at the taco stand

Or the sycamores by the road

When you smell the creosote in
The drying air it comes whether

Or not—I mean after all the
Guesswork what a cymbal-crashing
Relief to toss your baseball cap

176

Becoming a Better

The practice is the goal is good or bad

Reality has not been designed so
Is the vocalist singing directly

To you? does the motorcycle feel like

Ten hours in the lab? secrets don’t share well

When you are sitting in the sweet spot—don’t
Be swayed by opinions—try to under-
Stand but don’t agree if parts are missing

The subtleties of rubato can make it

Easy to forget what you are hearing

Another way to describe perspective
Is that feeling of existing like the
Difference between speaking quietly and

Calmly and having a conversation

Let me give an example from my own
Experience—for minor aches and pains
Methyl salicylate works better than

The lotus blossom in a bowl of milk
Although this is more beautiful to most

People—anyway part of the practice

Is learning the difference between affect
And beauty as well as witching the test

I mean this literally even wist-
Fully since whatever identity
177
Of feeling and doing eludes almost
Everything except the waves unravelling
Gravity and tandem bikes on the board-

Walk like elegies to photography
There must be better ways of mistaking

One’s place in the world than vacationing
On Venice Beach but at least one can say

The falafel is the worst and not feel
That it’s an overgeneralization

178

An Argument between a Man and a Woman

Across the ceiling late at night
We heard him dragging his bag-of-

Sand body stopping to gnaw then
Dragging again over the lath

What is that? It must have come in

Through the soffit and pulled along
A big piece of the countryside

Aren’t you going to go up there
And do something? I could kill it
But then you’d have to sleep

With that going on and besides
The blood would get on me as well

As dirt and old rotten pieces

I’m still unsteady from the flu

Over the bed creaking and some-
Thing like a snore or a diesel
Engine idling at a truckstop

This is going to keep going
All night isn’t it isn’t it?

179

At Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles

1.

The cable of the pendulum

A plumb-line dropped into a pit
Around the edge of wooden pins
The orb describes our daily turn

The thing’s all swing steadily ticking
The velocities of the hours

To rise and fall and rise again
Through the stillness of the middle

It makes an unmodern motion
Around the mind this measurement
Of our descending nights and days––

Days and nights not yet as lonely

As they will be nor circumscribed
By summer sky and winter fields

(That is memory and false hope)

But nonetheless descending like

A spiral clockwise round a drain
To the single empty moment

2.

Christiaan Huygens—ill—bored— observed
The pendulums of two small clocks

180
Which set closely on the mantel
Through subtle movements in the air

Imperceptible vibrations
Exchanged along their common ground

Began to swing symmetrically
And symmetrically swinging paced

The rhythm of the room tuning
The watcher’s mind to new notions
Of ways to measure out the days

Than sun moon and stars had offered

In their complex Ptolemaic
Pinwheeling through remote heavens––

Many measures set together
Each honoring the others like
The players in an orchestra

3.

The principle that beats the heart
Resolves each breath and stimulates

The tongue to speech is that which makes
Cicadas hum in matched pulses
Of stricken sound and irritates

The muscles into forming gaits

(The gazelle’s pronk the elephant’s
Thumping procedure and the spring-

Taut leaping of the wallaby)

The cooperative nature
Of body-ness reflects a world

Itself—the world was not a world

Unseen and unbelieved until
The coals first burned on human tongues
181

And though beliefs evolve from grace
To grace through Newton Babbage Bohr

And Mandelbrot whose instruments
Were made to measure the music

Of the mathematical sky
The coupling of the sun and moon
Still breeds a sense of passage and

In the greyhound’s graceful canter
Or the quick flash of pigeon wings
Quick eyes find meaningful movement

4.

Into memory—I watched a moth

Maneuver through the rain on steps
Of air in and out of danger

Until one wingtip caught a drop
And she plunged to the black cement

What I will see this next moment
Cannot be seen without those things

I saw only moments ago
What I will know I will not know

Without the things that I have known
The pleasure in a woman’s breath

Against the neck is the pleasure
Of the orange peel’s sting and the green
Light of the palmetto in June

I know this because I knew those

5.

Outside the common accident
Of mover-moved doer-done-to
182

Is a meeting of bodies not
Of the quick-struck tuning-fork which
Touched to goblet makes it ring but

More as if the buzzing metal
Finds a sympathetic tremor

In the glass and both modulate

To mime a one-note melody
But what is the song? our unformed
Selves once struck begin their motion

Like two waves out of phase at first
Not harsh merely incoherent

Then discovering each other’s
Tempo might match the flowing self

Reflected in blood-haunted eyes
And the shifting mirrors of flesh
Until an emerging cadence

6.

Since Creation the earth has turned
A trillion times and if one could
Turn those cycling days to sound

Which note would ring our histories?

In the Archeozoic seas
Where molecules first joined as genes

Eurynome out of chaos

Sprang up as naked as a star

To dance the southern waves and coil
The northern wind into herself

In each act of understanding
In each act of attentive love

183
Her memory comes dancing forming
As rhythmic as mimosa tips
Opening to the pull of moon

7.

On the riverbanks of Thailand
And Malaysia dense instinctual

Congregations of fireflies swarm
Through branches in the darkening air

At the sunlight’s last moment one
Begins to blink then a second

A third and fourth take up the cues
The click of little lantern lights
From those a blue distance away

And match their tilt and timing

To the phosphoring frequency
Joined now by thousands turning round

The center of gathering light
Until as night draws deeper out

Of the random massive flashing

Comes unison a scintillant

Advertisement like stars against
The screen of night—bright synchrony

8.

The human form this wet vessel
Of memory and emotion

Is not so easy to discard

Despite the life-long yearning for
A heaven a far-flinging of mind

184

We are the unwritten history
Of the self among the many

Are the grapes we ate in childhood
Are what we know by doing things

And what we know by taking time
And what we know by thinking on

The echoes of the poorer dead
And every flashing ache of bones
Although through the life-long turning

Into different selves we suffer

We are still thus as London is

9.

A fountain clock of cesium
Keeps time in Colorado from
A tiny globe of element

Tossed through mirrors and laser light

An atomic scintillation
More perfect than our muddy spot

The spinning Earth our task master

We have no harvests nor pharaoh’s
Reign but when we mark the hour we

Hear the echo of Augustine
While we are measuring it where

Is it coming from what is it
Passing through where is it going?
On whose authority does dawn

Begin or workdays end? the crow’s?
The thundering sky’s? or is it

185
As in early China but one
Prerogative of rulership

To declare the hour as long as
Desire would have it? could it be
The hummingbird caught in weaving

Weaving the still present from rags

Of the flight? all I know is that
I live still in the shadow of
The steeple clock the factory clock

Those rulers over railroads and

As time created time measured,
And time distributed (clock-wise)

Made visible by the absence
Of time-qua-time (that regular
Click of refined machinery

Pouring time into purposes

And the physics of the seen world
Of latitude and longitude

Ephemerides and almanacs
Telegraphs and assembly lines)

Time realized in a way it
Would never be known again

Time changed and molded to the deep
Wonder of the discovered world

10.

My thoughts are as plain as sparrows
On a thin plain branch—my feelings

Are plain plain as an hour of clay
Propped at the railing of the pit

186

I am counting the pendulum
As it tugs—swing on! swing on! and
Pace the passing years—join my thoughts

To my tongue my sight to my heart
To meet tomorrow properly

187

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation consists of two distinct elements, one critical and the other creative. The critical element, “Chapter One: The Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1941-1961,” situates the Library of Congress poetry-recording project in the context of Cold War attempts to create and project a robust American literary culture. The author examines the historical relationship between the audiotext archive and the literary canon, the role of authorialperformance in audiotext production, and the significance of the archival and testimonial process of recording poets reading their own work. In tracing the evolution of the Library of Congress project, the author shows how early auditory archive-building, despite its ad hoc practices, endorsed the authority of the short lyric and posited the voice as the ultimate hermeneutic key, while simultaneously reinforcing the canonization of High Modernist authors and New Critics who in print expressed disdain for this sort of authority-building. As anxiety about producing documentary evidence of a national culture spurred the identification of an artist’s aural performance with official sanction, institutional discourse -- academic, governmental, and pedagogical -- collided with the aesthetic discourse and technological ideology of the mid-twentieth century. The author concludes that despite attempts to recuperate a lost oral tradition, magnetic sound recording of poets reading aloud serves mainly to reconfigure and affirm the graphical authority of literary work even as we move into a post-print era.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rawson, Eric (author)

Core Title The Library of Congress Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, 1941-1961, and Famous Birds, a collection of poems

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature

Publication Date 07/03/2009

Defense Date 04/21/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 20th century American poetry,archive of recorded poetry and literature,Library of Congress,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetry and technology,poetry recordings

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor St. John, David (committee chair), Irwin, Mark (committee member), Lazar, Moshe (committee member)

Creator Email erawson@gmail.com,erawson@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2323

Unique identifier UC1474760

Identifier etd-Rawson-2910 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-568825 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2323 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Rawson-2910.pdf

Dmrecord 568825

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Rawson, Eric

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu