Lytle Shaw

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Poetry and Audio Research

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Through case studies of how mid-century American poetry used recording technologies to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the State, this book explores how New Left poets mobilized recording as a new form of sonic field research even while they were being subject to tape-based surveillance by the CIA and the FBI.

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Produktdetails

• Post 45
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. Juni 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 424g
• ISBN-13: 9781503606562
• ISBN-10: 1503606562
• Artikelnr.: 49396294

Autorenporträt

Lytle Shaw is Professor of English at New York University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Third Personism: The FBI's Poetics of Immediacy in the 1960s
chapter abstract
This chapter uses the reel-to-reel recordings Allen Ginsberg made on a
cross-country trip in 1966 to focalize the contested status of audio
research as it was then fought over by the New Left and the U.S. state.
Reframing Frank O'Hara's suggestion in "Personism" that greater immediacy
with his friends "Allen" (Ginsberg) and "Roi" (LeRoi Jones) might be
achieved by calling them, the chapter considers what it means for postwar
poetics that such New Left poets were often under state audio surveillance.
Bringing poets, literary critics and the state into unexpected proximity,
the chapter offers an account of the guiding assumptions and pitfalls
associated with the CIA and FBI's often Yale-trained literary critics,
demonstrating how all three confront the overwhelming of voice by its noisy
sonic environment and how the state's theory of totality might be compared
to that of famous literary theorists like Fredric Jameson.
2The Eigner Sanction: Keeping Time from the American Century
chapter abstract
Chapter two explores Larry Eigner's development of a counter-temporality in
relation to his dominant reception, the domestic mediascape he daily
negotiated, the surrounding cold war defense infrastructure, and the Luce
media empire's regulation of Americans' experience of time. Presenting
Eigner's reflexive daily neighborhood sound and sight monitoring as a
counterpoint to the Cold War surveillance jets that performed the same
function over his neighborhood, the chapter shows how the urgent events
that course through Eigner's airspace get recast by the poet's horizontal
model of time. Eigner's role as an alternate broadcasting system then gets
drawn out through an analysis of the ways that the Luce media (referenced
by Eigner) took on the roll of organizing national time at the level of the
week, month, year and even century.
3Olson's Sonic Walls: Citizenship and Surveillance from the OWI to the
Nixon Tapes
chapter abstract
Chapter three positions Charles Olson's education in American studies at
Harvard and his work for the OWI in relation to postwar area studies and
models of evidence, research and network building demonstrated on his
recordings, whose confrontational dynamics and insistence on the real time
of research are related to postwar sound and performance art. The chapter
then uses Henry Kissinger's Harvard education, including Paul de Man's
French tutoring, as a way to study the infrastructure of postwar area
studies that underlay Kissinger's later audio surveillance, including his
taping of Allen Ginsberg. Comparing Kissinger's understanding of tape to
Olson's, the chapter draws out the "avant-garde" nature of Kissinger's
audio research in which documentation transcends a hypothesis, a claim that
gets tested by considering a 1975 court case in which Hayden White brought
suit against the LAPD for planting officer pretending to be students in his
class at UCLA.
4"The Strategic Idea of North: Glenn Gould, Sergeant Jones and White Alice"
chapter abstract
Considering the sound documentaries of R. Murray Schafer and Glenn Gould,
this chapter first places the origins of sound studies within nationalist
Canadian conceptions of geography and culture before then outlining the
American Cold War technological infrastructure that preceded these
musicians' movements into Canadian space, especially the three lines of
radar stations erected to monitor Soviet incursions into the North American
continent. The chapter then considers the mechanics of this system via a
case study of one of its functionaries, sergeant LeRoi Jones, whose
practice missions of atomic reprisal aboard a B36 peacemaker were signaled
by a hellish siren particularly noted by the sergeant. The chapter
concludes by following this siren-sound into the poet and music critic's
later work, as Amiri Baraka, fashioning exemplary sounds of Black
Nationalism.