I was talking last summer with a friend about the mass losses occurring across the globe, and she asked me whether I found it odd that there were no memorials to those lost to the Covid pandemic, nor forms of yearly remembrance in the United States. I was embarrassed to realize that I had not thought about that lack—I was so focused on the return to normalcy from Covid and the other cataclysmic events in the world that my amnesia mirrored that of the culture around me. There are no monuments to...

Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away. What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and distortions. As the British radio pioneer Peter Eckersley recalled in his memoirs, for the fleeting thrill of capturing a foreign broadcast one had to endure, in the early years at least, “long periods of virtual rigor mortis waiting for [an] identification signal” and much parasitic noise: “the wailing and the grunting, the shrieking and the crying,” the “bangs, crackles, hums, whistles,” and “the portentous booming” and “howling noise” carried by the airwaves. As Simon Potter observes, when we speak about radio, we assume a good degree of intelligibility, but the reality of distant listening consistently involved large amounts of “unwanted, excessive, aberrant” noise and incomprehensible content. What could be heard from distant locations largely depended on atmospheric conditions and other uncontrollable factors. Interferences between transmitters, between the frequencies used by radio stations, and between wireless sets and nearby machines as innocuous as trams, neon signs, or refrigerators remained common (Potter, Wireless Internationalism, 65). More is known about distant listening in relation to British broadcasting than in other contexts thanks to Potter’s work on the “wireless internationalism” that emerged within and around the BBC during the 1920s and 1930s. Through the BBC magazine World-Radio (whose longest-standing columns discussed tuning strategies and specialized in providing assistance to listeners wanting to identify distant radio stations), Potter traces the emergence of a particular kind of internationalism—elastic, sometimes unsteady, often wary, always tinged with hope. Distant listening, Potter shows, shaped the emergence of powerful worldviews around peacekeeping, the threat of another world war, and the preservation of empires, which manifested themselves in different arenas, including the BBC’s development of Empire broadcasting and initiatives taken by the International Broadcasting Union and the League of Nations.

As one of the paradigmatic literary genres of both the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, sound poetry should not merely be understood in terms of formal experimentation, but also as an intervention into the politics of language: to speak with John Cage, a kind of “demilitarization of language.” [1] Cage, however, understood this notion on a highly formal level, with influences from the philosophy of Zen, seeking to refrain from imposing expressions of the ego on his materials. In...

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.

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.

The narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu is exquisitely sensitive to noise. We know this in part through the testimony of his closest companions, some of whom express concern at different moments in the novel about their friend’s susceptibility to auditory disturbance. In Le Côté de Guermantes, for instance, Saint-Loup recommends a hotel at Doncières because it is “assez adapté à votre hyperesthésie auditive” (“more or less adapted to your over-sensitive ears”) and in La Prisonnière the chants of street hawkers prompt Albertine to ask, “Cela ne vous gêne pas, tous ces bruits du dehors? . . . vous qui avez déjà le sommeil si léger?” (“Don’t you mind all those noises from outside? . . . you sleep so lightly”). By this point in the novel, the reader has had numerous opportunities to verify the narrator’s sensitivity to “ces bruits du dehors” for herself, beginning with the whistle of distant steam-engines on the first page of Du côté de chez Swann. From the late-night revelers who keep the narrator awake after seeing La Berma for the first time in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, to the analysis of matutinal street sounds at the beginning of La Prisonnière, the text of À la recherche du temps perdu displays a marked interest in acousmatic sonic ephemera, each detailed description testifying to the narrator’s “hyperesthésie auditive.” This trait of phonosensitivity bears an obvious resemblance to one of Proust’s own most famous personal characteristics. The solicitude shown by Saint-Loup and Albertine, for instance, resembles the kind of concern that Proust himself inspired in friends like Reynaldo Hahn, who once described his anxiety, in a letter to Proust’s parents written while the pair were holidaying together in Normandy, that “le seul bruit de ma plume” (“the mere noise of my pen”) would disturb his companion’s sleep. With the interviews and articles that accompanied the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, this biographical detail became a prominent part of Proust’s public persona. André Levy’s promotional interview, published in Le Miroir on December 21, 1913, offered a detailed, picturesque rendering of the famous “chambre . . . toute tapissée de liège” (“bedroom . . . all carpeted with cork”), designed to prevent “les moindres bruits des appartements voisins et de la rue” (“the slightest noises of the neighbouring rooms and of the street”) from interrupting Proust’s creative reverie. For Levy, moreover, there was an obvious connection to be made between Proust’s sound proofed working conditions and the central conceit of his unfinished novel: ensconced in the “silence immense” of the reclusive author’s bedroom, Levy writes, “il semble bien qu’on soit hors du temps” (“it truly seems that one is outside of time”) (Lhomeau and Coelho, Marcel Proust, 295). Four decades after his death, Proust’s housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, added her recollections to the now well-established biographeme of Proust’s sensitivity to noise. Musing on the rationale behind her employer’s noise-cancelling domestic regime, she, too, posited a connection between silence and the search for lost time: “toute la recherche de M. Proust . . . a été de se mettre hors du temps pour le retrouver. Quand il n’y a plus de temps, c’est le silence. Il lui fallait ce silence, pour n’entendre que les voix qu’il voulait entendre, celles qui sont dans ses livres” (“M. Proust’s entire quest . . . was to put himself outside of time in order to find it again. When there is no more time, there’s silence. He needed this silence, so as to hear only the voices that he wanted to hear, those that are in his books”). Precisely echoing Levy’s formulation, Albaret concludes that the suppression of noise was a way for Proust to put himself “hors du temps.”

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.