The Blown Definitions: Towards a Poetics of the Multi-Vocal Poetic
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Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis The Blown Definitions: Towards a Poetics of the Multi-Vocal Poetic Radio Play Kate Potts Royal Holloway, University of London Creative and Critical Writing (Poetry) PhD Thesis 1 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis Declaration of Authorship I Kate Potts hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: _____________________ 2 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis Abstract The introduction of radio broadcasting in the early twentieth century, at a time of rapid development in global communications and travel technologies, prompted a radical re- imagining of the poet – and poetry’s – role in this new public, communal space. This thesis seeks to explore and define, critically and creatively, the poetics of the multi-vocal poetic radio play, a sub-genre fundamentally shaped by this reconfiguration.1 The thesis examines the development, form, and functioning of the multi-vocal poetic radio play which, I argue, is a sub-genre distinct from both the prose radio play and single-voice works of radio poetry. This thesis proposes that the multi-vocal poetic radio play is a reworking of western oral poetry traditions – originating in the oral heroic epic as authoritative, mnemonic, pre- literate repository of collective cultural memory – in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first century’s increasingly globalised, pluralistic and documentary modes of representation. Through the simultaneous mechanical reproduction of multiple poetic voices – through the troubling and breaking down of boundaries regarding presence and absence, intimacy and distance, subjectivity, mortality, time, and space – the multi-vocal poetic radio play tends to evoke and refer to dialogic and polyphonic traditions grounded in the liminality of communal ritual and festival.2 My original multi-vocal poetic radio play script The Blown Definitions imagines a long- distance, elegiac dialogue between a man whose indigenous culture and land is disappearing and his second-generation English-speaking granddaughter. The play examines the potentials of the poetic radio voice, utilising telephone conversations, electronic 1 For the purposes of this thesis the ‘multi-vocal poetic radio play’ is defined as a radio play for more than one voice written expressly for radio broadcast by a poet and containing or consisting of poetry. In using the word ‘play’ I am purposefully avoiding confining myself to the Aristotelian structures commonly associated with the word ‘drama’, and urging a more open and flexible consideration of structural possibilities. I am drawing on Terry Eagleton’s definition of ‘poetry’: “A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end” (Eagleton 25). See introduction and chapter 1 for a more detailed explanation of this definition. 2 The thesis uses the terms ‘dialogic’ and ‘polyphonic’ in opposition to ‘monologic’ – as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin – to signify the incorporation of many voices, styles and references (Bakhtin 1981). 3 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis dictionary definitions, and (fictional) radio broadcasts. The Blown Definitions, and the multi- vocal poetic radio play more generally, through its form and function, exposes and interrogates poetry’s functioning in relation to social dynamics – the “social moorings”3 of the poetic utterance – underlining poetry’s capacity to celebrate, critique and reconfigure the imagined communities that shape it. 3 See Donald Wesling’s discussion of poetry and dialogism. 4 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis Contents 6. Introduction 33. Chapter I: Multi-Vocal Poetic Radio Works: Early Experiments and Explorations 64. Chapter II: The Multi-Vocal Poetic Radio Play as Polyphonic Epic 105. Chapter III: A Break in Continuity 130. Chapter IV: The Epic Reconfigured 169. Conclusion: The Blown Definitions 181. Works cited 197. Creative component: The Blown Definitions 261. Appendix: BBC Multi-Vocal Poetic Radio Plays 5 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis Critical Component Introduction The ear is the poet’s perfect audience, his only true audience. And it is radio and only radio which can give him access to this perfect audience. Archibald MacLeish [A poetics is] a question of technology as well as inspiration. Jerome Rothenberg 6 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis 1. A New Definition: The Multi-Vocal Poetic Radio Play As one of a series of technological advances in communication, from the advent of written text to the invention of the printing press, to the more recent development of internet and mobile phone technologies, radio fundamentally altered our conceptions of distance, physical and imaginative space, and interpersonal relationships. Like the internet, radio technology was initially attributed wildly utopian and dystopian potentials. In his 1921 essay ‘The Radio of the Future’, Russian poet and Futurist Velemir Khlebnikov predicted that radio would bring about improved health, wealth, equality and education, political stability and global peace (Khlebnikov 392-396). In Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics and the BBC Todd Avery argues that the BBC’s first Director-General, Lord Reith, achieved “a profound alteration of the psychocultural landscape” (Avery 13). Radio broadcast brought into being a new mode of public space, “a culture in common to whole populations and a shared public life of quite a new kind” (Scannell qtd. in Avery 6). John Reith saw broadcasting as an “instrument of democratic enlightenment” that could promote social unity, harmony, and stability by incorporating all social classes within the same “social and political order”, and enable citizens’ informed participation in the democratic process (Scannell and Cardiff 7,9). Reith aimed to use public broadcasting to make “the treasures of our culture” available to all, and to widely disseminate a particular, colonial model of ethics, culture, and imagined community, bringing “rural areas [. .] into direct contact with [. .] Empire institutions, the clock which beats over the Houses of Parliament, in the centre of the Empire, is heard echoing in the lowliest cottage in the land” (Reith qtd. in Avery 18). Since the founding of radio broadcasting companies and corporations in the early part of the 20th century, poetry – with its particular focus on sound, voice, and the less ‘informational’ and denotative aspects of language and communication – has maintained a presence on the airwaves. In Europe and North America, works for multiple voices which included or consisted of poetry emerged in the 1930s, reworking oral, reading and performance traditions and poetry 7 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis traditions polyphonically for the radio age. Through the mechanically reproduced radio voice experienced simultaneously across large geographical spaces, poets sought to draw attention to and reinvigorate the oral, pre-literate origins and “social moorings” of poetry (Wesling), as well as the broader social dynamics of the bodily voice. In the UK, poets attempted to maintain, create and explore shared cultures, and to fulfil the BBC’s professed determination to “inform, educate and entertain”. Early poetic radio works combined ‘verse’ with song and with prose dialogue in innovative structural arrangements. By working – through critical analysis and creative work – towards defining the poetics of one particular sub-genre, the multi-vocal poetic radio play, I intend to illuminate the interrelation between communications technologies, social dynamics, and the functioning and development of poetry traditions. In this way, I hope to contribute towards a broader understanding of poetry’s place in a world in the process of massive and unprecedented social and technological change – particularly in relation to global communications and travel technologies. I also hope, by working towards defining a model of the multi-vocal poetic radio play’s poetics, to contribute towards the opening up of space for further discussion and study of radio poetry, and of the multi-vocal poetic radio play in particular. Multi-vocal poetic works for radio have been categorised in many different ways. For example: ‘panorama in verse and song’, ‘verse drama’, ‘verse play’, ‘play for voices’, ‘poetic drama’. Multi-vocal poetic works written expressly for radio by poets have developed, as I will demonstrate, their own distinct poetics, shaped by their authors’ awareness of poetry traditions, by the demands of mass sound broadcast, and by the “secondary orality” – orality existing within the context of a literate culture – facilitated by radio broadcast technologies (Ong 1995: 70). In undertaking the work of exploring and defining the poetics of the multi-vocal poetic radio play, I intend my delineation to function not as a bordered and exclusionary territory but as a place name on a broader map that includes and charts other genres such as the radio drama, the radio feature, and verse drama for the stage – 8 Kate Potts: 100 605046 PhD Thesis acknowledging cross-genre influence as well as the existence of grey areas between forms, genres, and sub-genres. I intend to work towards a definition that celebrates influence and cross-fertilisation across genre and form, while at the same time providing a useful model of the multi-vocal poetic radio play’s particular development and functioning as a sub-genre. The