Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place

In Phonographic Deep Song: Sounding Niedecker

Sounding Process In Phonographic Deep Song Sounding Niedecker I’ll begin by proposing a decorative chronology, a frieze of quotation. If perceptive organs vary, objects of perception seem to vary. (Blake) The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. (K. Marx) In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Blake constructed a most curious machine. A direct ancestor of the telephone and phonograph , it consisted of an excised human ear attached by thumbscrews to a wooden chassis. The ear/phonautograph produced tracings of sound on a sheet of smoked glass when sound entered the mouthpiece . One at a time, users would speak into the mouthpiece. The mouthpiece would channel the vibrations of the voices through the ear, and the ear would vibrate a small stylus. After speaking, users would immediately afterward see the tracings of their speech on the smoked glass. This machine . . . used the human ear as a mechanism to transduce sound: it turned audible vibrations into . . . a set of tracings . (Sterne 31) In 1888 Heinrich Hertz, professor of experimental physics . . . generated a string of sparks across the secondary winding of a transformer, Lisa Robertson 84 | sounding process radiated the resulting electromagnetic waves from an antenna, reflected them from a metal sheet suspended at the far end of his laboratory , and measured the distance between the crests with a simple receiver composed of a loop of wire, with a small gap across which sparks were visible. By doing so, Hertz became the first to measure the velocity of a radio wave, confirming in the process the predictions of James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation.” (Aitkens 31) In the early part of 1894, Marconi was holidaying in the Italian Alps and chanced to read an obituary and tribute to the German scientist Hertz. As he read the description of the experiments Hertz had conducted , Marconi was gripped with an insight which was to become his abiding passion for the next 40 or more years: perhaps the electromagnetic radiation that Hertz had demonstrated could be used as a means of achieving communication without wires. At that instant was born what we now call radio. (Jensen 10) In 1897 Oliver Lodge developed and patented the concept of syntony. The principal underlying the patent was this: “the antennae systems of both transmitter and receiver [were] made sharply resonant at the intended frequency . The two antennae had to form a syntonic system. Energy would be coupled into the antennae circuit in the case of the transmitter, and out of it in the case of the receiver, in such a way as to disturb its natural resonance as little as possible” (Aitkens 130). In brief, syntony was a constructed , resonant compatibility within a sending and receiving circuit. In 1919, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of his childhood experience of the early phonograph: “When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound waves onto the impressionable surface slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the zealous pointer was allowed to retrace its own path—trembling, wavering out of the paper cone, the sound that was just a moment ago still ours, unsteady now, indescribably soft and timid and at times fading out altogether, came back to us. This always had a most powerful effect. Our class wasn’t exactly disciplined, and there couldn’t have been many moments when it attained such a de- Lisa Robertson | 85 gree of silence . . . We children stood, as it were, opposite a new, infinitely sensitive place in reality, from which we were addressed by something that far surpassed us, yet that was, in some unsayable way, still a beginner and in need of our help” (299). Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903, the year after the first flat 78 rpm phonograph record was produced. In 1942, she briefly worked at the Madison radio station WHA, where she wrote scripts for a program of her own (LNWP 96). In her work, the electronic reproduction of sound inflects and complicates phonic experience. The sonic environmental context, sound technologies, the verbal shaping of sound, and their internalization in thought, are interdependent phenomena. Sound’s perception is itself part of an active shaping, and this shaping constitutes a cognitive feedback pattern . The mimetic subtraction of sound from its originating environmental matrix...