Allison Neal

In a letter written on August 30, 1964, Marianne Moore recounts listening to an old recording of her poem, “Rigorists,” that was playing that night on the BBC. “We had dinner at a little Greek Casa Blanca (very near) but stayed up late to hear me on the BBC—on a borrowed transistor,” Moore writes to her friend Hildegard Watson. In the letter, Moore compares her recorded voice to the sound of a bird recently crushed by an automobile: “I sounded like a sparrow suddenly run over,” she wrote, “still able to make sounds.” By likening her poetic voice to that of an injured bird, Moore merges Philomela’s mythic trauma with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s portrait of the poet as a nightingale, who “sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds” and provides “his auditors” with “the melody of an unseen musician.” Modifying Shelley’s remark to offer a representation of the poet better suited to the conditions of modern mass culture, Moore demonstrates the potentially lethal effects of mechanized mass media on lyric poetry. The BBC radio broadcast, as both a figure for mass culture and a literal voice technology, has destroyed the vitality of lyric poetry in two ways: first, it has made lyric poetry into a minor part of majority culture; second, it has severed the poet’s voice from the poet’s living body—so that even the poet herself has become an estranged auditor, listening to an acousmatic voice separated from its source. However, this essay tunes into an alternate wavelength in order to register the elocutionary and phonographic past that underlies Moore’s mode of listening to her own recorded poem on the BBC. Moore’s remark reveals not only the uncanny experience of listening to a voice temporally and physically separated from the body via sound recording technology, but also a distinctly transnational listening practice, wherein her ear is separated from her poetic “voice” by the Atlantic Ocean. This transatlantic poetic circuit evokes Moore’s early twentieth-century elocutionary instruction at Bryn Mawr, where students were taught to speak according to British elocutionary standards and for international cultural and political purposes. Reading Moore’s essay on poetics, “The Accented Syllable,” and her poem, “England,” alongside two technologies of voicing, the phonograph recording and the elocution lesson, this essay traces not only how these technologies inform Moore’s own poetic practice, but also asserts that Moore’s poetry is itself a voice technology—a means of inscribing, altering, and producing the “tone” of American speech.