Irina Markina

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry. Like a number of fellow poets, Apollinaire believed that within one to two centuries the record would replace the book as the preferred method for the dissemination of poetic texts. However, for Apollinaire, the gramophone was not merely exterior or tangential to the poetic enterprise, a stance adopted by many Symbolist poets who nevertheless continued to view technology and lyric poetry as diametrically opposed. As Apollinaire’s theoretical writings illustrate, he also viewed the gramophone as a generative metaphor which encouraged him to take a fresh look at the concept of the voice at the heart of lyric poetry since its inception. The status of lyric voice in the era of sound recording is explored in Apollinaire’s very first calligram, the gramophone-inspired “Lettre-Océan.” The poem was published in the June 1914 issue of Les Soirées de Paris (fig. 1) on the heels of a series of articles, letters, and first-hand experiences Apollinaire had with the phonograph. However, “Lettre-Océan” has never been studied in this phonographic context. To document Apollinaire’s position vis-à-vis modern technology, scholars have been rightly turning to his lecture “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes” (1917) but have overlooked the tantalizing representation of the lyric voice as recording in “Lettre-Océan,” published three years prior. With the shape of a gramophone record embedded into its verbal-visual fabric, the calligram is an important precedent to the lecture and a key text for understanding how sound recording informed Apollinaire’s vision of the lyric voice as a site of tension between orality and the written word.