American Poetic Voice in the Era of Global Broadcast

American Poetic Voice in the Era of Global Broadcast situates American poetry within a world of global media to reveal the broad institutional, technological, and cultural resonances of poetic voice. Reading work by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde, it traces how poetry intersects with both specific sound technologies, like the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, and the tape recorder, and a variety of vocal practices and institutions, including elocution instruction, poetry reading circuits, and radio-based forms of cultural diplomacy.

Forging a representative American poetic voice had long posed a conceptual obstacle in a country of competing accents and languages. However, new twentieth-century sound technologies and vocal institutions produced an American voice generated via mass circulation. In the process, American English transformed from the heterogenous, spoken counterpart of a standardized, literary British English to a network standard heard around the globe. This synthetic American voice sparked a parallel American poetic voice that was likewise globally and technologically mediated. Routing their poetry through modern circuits of communication, American poets created a paradoxically intimate and global “mass vernacular,” as they envisioned lyric voices circulating in ways similar to other official and mass voices. In this context, the formal poetic elements that we often associate with the lyric -not just voice, but also tone, apostrophe, address, and prosopopoeia-in fact reveal a complex history of American cultural consolidation and global distribution. By bridging the figurative and material dimensions of voice, this book ultimately highlights the competing cultural currents that underlie lyric address in an age of global English.