“THIS IS POETRY”: U.S. POETICS and RADIO, 1930-1960 by BROOK
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“THIS IS POETRY”: U.S. POETICS AND RADIO, 1930-1960 by BROOK LOUISE HOUGLUM B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1995 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1997 A THESIS SUBMITTED TN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) September 2008 © Brook Louise Houglum, 2008 ABSTRACT “This is Poetry”: U.S. Poetics and Radio, 1930-1960 examines the significance of radio broadcasting to the theorization and construction of American poetry and poetics in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Poets found in the pervasive and popular mass sound medium resources for poetic experiment, models of communication, and a means to intervene in poetic, cultural, and political debates. I demonstrate how poets generated poetic models of speaking and listening based on how they theorized the capacity of radio broadcasting to facilitate both mass (distal and simultaneous) circulation and the effect of intimate (proximate and personal) communication. Both radio broadcasting and second- generation modernist writing practices developed in an interwar and postwar period of anxiety about political affiliation and rhetoric, propaganda, the position of the United States in the global scene, and the role of literary work in cultural debates. By developing “critically communicative” poetic techniques and texts that proceeded from their ideas about how radio broadcasting functions, I argue, poets negotiated tensions attendant to the literary cultural moment and questions about the potential work of poetry among mass cultural channels. Through examining the poems, essays, radio dramatic scripts, broadcast recordings, and personal correspondence of second-generation modernists Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Archibald MacLeish, Ruth Lechlitner, and Kenneth Rexroth, this thesis demonstrates how radio enabled poets to investigate the possibilities and limits of mass sound communication for both poetic and public discourse. Chapter one articulates radio broadcasting as a model for intimate non-visual poetic reception that enabled attention to the sounding of regional and marginalized Depression-era voices. Chapters two and three demonstrate how broadcasting enabled interventions into interwar and wartime mass cultural configurations and facilitated critical cultural debate, but also examine how the temporal, commercial, and regulatory structures of broadcasting limited such public interventions. The final chapter addresses how radio broadcasting informed the development of postwar “personalist” oral poetics which engaged intimate, spontaneous strategies of written and oral communication to pose challenges to dominant literary and cultural modes and strictures. 11 TABLE OF.CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Acknowledgements iv INTRODUCTION: Radio Broadcasting and Poetics in the 1930s-1950s 1 The “social function of poetry”: Negotiating Literary Culture 11 Communicative Dynamics and the Intimate Mass Medium 21 “This is Poetry”: Poetics of Speaking and Listening 28 CHAPTER ONE: “Speech without practical locale”: Lorine Niedecker’s Aurality and Radio Intimacy 38 Voices Outside: Intimate Listening 46 Scripting Private Speech 57 Reading Aloud, Silently 66 CHAPTER TWO: Louis Zukofsky and Radio Mass Communication 70 On the Masses / On the Air: Zukofsky’s 1937 Radio Reading 75 Zukofsky’s Index of American Design Radio Scripts 83 Zukofsky’s Mass: “A”-10 92 CHAPTER THREE: Airtime: Archibald MacLeish’s and Ruth Lechlitner’s 1930s Radio Drama as Cultural and Media Critique 107 Real-Time News and MacLeish’ s Radio Verse Drama 117 Lechlitner’ s Elliptical Composition and Critique 141 Coda: Contemporary Historians 157 CHAPTER FOUR: Kenneth Rexroth and the Oral Presentation of Poetry 160 Orality and Mid-Century Poetics 163 “the living speech of person to person”: Rexroth’s Poetics and KPFA 170 Rexroth on Radio 184 CONCLUSION: Radio Poetry Communities 193 NOTES 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY 216 111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend genuine thanks to the outstanding faculty on my supervisory committee: Dr. John Cooper, Dr. Mary Chapman, and Dr. Adam Frank. I heartily thank Dr. Jenny Penberthy for perceptive criticism, loaned documents, and support of my research on Lorine Niedecker. I have immensely appreciated and benefited from conversations about poetry and poetics with Jen Currin, Meliz Ergin, Colette Gagnon, Helen Kuk, Kim Minkus, Emilie O’Brien, Christina Viviani, Travis Mason, Heather Arvidson, Jason Starnes, Tomasz Michalak, Jeanne Morel, Bhanu Kapil, Larissa Lai, and Christine Stewart. Thanks to Sarah Lehmann for her research and copying assistance in the Kenneth Rexroth Papers at UCLA. All errors and omissions are, of course, mine. I thank the University of British Columbia, the Department of English, and the Killam Trusts for supporting my graduate studies. Many thanks to my family Mark, Sue, and Luke Houglum for their enthusiasm and wisdom. I am grateful for the unflagging support of Sean Conway, whose thoughtful questions, encouragement, and good humor has enhanced this dissertation at every turn. iv INTRODUCTION: Radio Broadcasting and Poetics in the 1930s-1950s In his preface to the 1939 New Directions, editor James Laughlin writes that “[o]ne of the most important new directions of the present time is the use of the radio for literary expression” (Laughlin “Preface” xvii). The New Directions annual anthology of late modern innovative writing (founded in 1936) regularly considered the potential of radio for poetic experiment in the late 1930s: in 1937, it featured an essay on radio verse drama; in 1938 it included an example of a radio play; and in his 1939 editorial preface, Laughlin devoted a page and a half to discussing the possibilities that radio offers for poetic work. He suggests that writers and groups scattered across the country organize a “liaison service” to connect and coordinate artistic radio efforts, and even calls for a prominent poetry magazine to publish a “radio page” with schedules of new poetry broadcasts (Laughlin xvii).’ Such a page never materialized, but writers became widely interested in radio because of its potential to enlarge audiences and reinvigorate poetic experiment as well as its suitability as a site through which to address questions about poetic and public discourse in the emerging era of mass communications. Radio’s ubiquity in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s made it an impossible phenomenon to ignore. It emerged as the primary mass medium in the period, becoming a widely-available mode for the mass transmission of information beginning in the early 1920s “boom.”2 Newspapers and magazines (including new radio magazines) helped promote “radio fever,” a phrase that characterized the proliferation of new radio 3 and the purchase of radios. Radio receiver ownership steadily broadcasting stations increased: in 1922, 260,000 households owned radios; only five years later, that number had increased to 6.5 million (Balk 42). By 1937, over 80 percent of American 1 households owned a radio set, in contrast with 40 percent in 1930 (Loviglio 6). As broadcasting entered the 1930s and networks circulated programs nationwide, radios brought news, dramas, music, educational programs, sporting events, variety shows, weather reports, time signals, commercials, political forums, quiz shows, and poetry into all these homes on a daily basis. Radio’s expanding networks and roles, and technological improvements to sound quality by the mid-1930s, generated interest in how poets might take advantage of the medium. As Douglas Kahn writes, for example, “the mere promise of technology” recharged early modernist endeavors but that by the late 1920s artists “confronted changed conditions led by the technical possibilities of [implemented] audiophonic technologies,” such as sound film, microphony, electric phonography, amplification, and radio (12). The rise in radio news popularity beginning in the later 1930s, for example, when radio surpassed newspapers in popularity as a source for information, contributed to the medium being understood as the primary source of up-to-date cultural and political reports. In addition to providing new, widely available experiences of listening, radio in the 1930s and 1940s became increasingly available to writers, offering employment and a channel for the reading and distribution of their creative work. A cursory history of the dominant modes of radio broadcasting in the United States in its first four decades illustrates the multiple changes and configurations writers encountered as they listened to, wrote for, and theorized the medium. Radio broadcasting in the 1920s can be roughly characterized by a proliferation of regional and nationally affiliated stations with partial-day scheduling, nascent technology that often produced static and cross-talk, and an emerging network system. The later 1920s and 1930s saw 2 increased regulation, the implementation of advanced technology for better sound, and continuous, mainly network-based broadcasting of a wide variety of popular drama, documentary, music, and news programs. In the later 1930s, the “press / radio wars,” the conflict between network radio and newspaper conglomerates over the extent to which radio would broadcast news, resulted in radio news broadcasting surpassing the popularity of newspaper news reception. Radio in the early 1940s largely shifted into a forum for wartime news and programming, maintaining its network and advertising