sound
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.
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:
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.
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was for the record. Between 1913 and 1914, he wrote repeatedly about the impact of recording technology on lyric poetry.
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.
© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press
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.