sound

For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”

The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry.

Marianne Moore’s Tone Technologies: Elocution, Poetry, Phonograph

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.

“But If You Listen You Can Hear”: War Experience, Modernist Noise, and the Soundscape of The Forbidden Zone

Interviewed by the BBC a half-century after his service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Robert Graves recalled the impossibility of relating his World War I experience to family in England

Graves: [T]he idea of being and staying at home was awful because you were with people who didn’t understand what this was all about.