Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (review)

What does poetry sound like? Since the late 1990s, a growing field of scholarship on voice and performance in modern American and British poetry has attempted to answer this question. Two edited collections from the late 1990s, Adalaide Morris’s Sound States (1997) and Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening (1998) have been followed more recently by Laura Severin’s Poetry off the Page (2004) and Peter Middleton’s Distant Reading (2005). As Bernstein’s and Middleton’s titles suggests, these books try to wrest control of poetry’s meanings away from close readers and textualists by recovering the social and material history of modern poetry. In doing so, they continue the project initiated by earlier work on the printing, publishing and distribution of modern literature such as Jerome McGann’s Black Riders (1993), trying to recover its worldly milieu of printing presses, book prizes, and tape recordings, and the physical bodies of those who write, read, perform, and listen to it.

Lesley Wheeler’s new book joins this field, offering a historical account of the American poetry reading through a series of case studies. Voicing American Poetry registers the echoes of voice in an idiosyncratic selection of twentieth-century poetic texts and events, paying equal attention to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1930s radio addresses and lecture-hall gigs, the “visual voice” of Langston Hughes (63), James Merrill’s Ouija-haunted channelings in “The Book of Ephraim,” Maureen Seaton and Denise Duhamel’s Oulipian cartoon ventriloquism in Oyl (2000), and the contrasting accents of the contemporary academic reading by “tweedy experts” (163) and the exuberant, high-volume physicality of slam poetry.

The choice of subjects shows more concern for diversity than historical continuity, and the book is in no way an attempt to provide an alternative history of poetic strategies, although it is distinguished by its interest in popular (and populist) poetry at the expense of both avant-garde and academic traditions, and by its attachment to the metaphorical as well as literal meanings of “voice”. Wheeler revels in the term’s ambiguities, noting its shifting uses in the literal and metaphorical fields to mean originality, political power, and the “illusion of authorial presence” (2), but prefers not to attend to some of the trickier philosophical questions it raises. Where previous studies have typically worked to undermine the fiction of the generative author by showing how poetry is a social product dependent on material conditions, Wheeler is at pains to show that a crucial function of the postwar poetry reading has been to enforce the figure of the author as creator.

Nineteenth-century North America, in Wheeler’s account, had a broad popular culture of public elocution, in which poetry recitation was considered a specialized skill, not necessarily best practiced by poets themselves. She has interesting things to say about the way this culture favored African-American writers and speakers (considered “natural elocutionists”), and fostered a separate “canon of elocution,” which was distinct from the literary canon (5). This elocutionary culture gradually died out during the twentieth century, and was replaced by a new emphasis on textuality and a valorization of the authorial poetry reading as a “performance of presence”; a guarantee of authenticity and authority issuing from his or her master’s voice.

Wheeler’s detailed attention to her miscellaneous collection of poets is never less than illuminating, and she is a persuasive champion of some undervalued or unfamiliar writing—Seaton and Duhamel’s collaborations are particularly intriguing. However, by allowing “voice” such a wide possible signification, she is in danger of making the word do too much work, particularly in the chapter on Langston Hughes, which is largely concerned with elaborating Hughes’s experiments with a Dada-influenced expressive use of typography in the 1930s.

Besides a couple of minor slips—Eric Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989) crosses the Atlantic to become The Printed Voice...