American Poetic Voice in the Era of Global Broadcast Mass Vernacular

American Poetic Voice in the Era of Global Broadcast situates American poetry within a world of global media to reveal the broad institutional, technological, and cultural resonances of poetic voice. Reading work by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde, it traces how poetry intersects with both specific sound technologies, like the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, and the tape recorder, and a variety of vocal practices and institutions, including elocution instruction, poetry reading circuits, and radio-based forms of cultural diplomacy. Forging a representative American poetic voice had long posed a conceptual obstacle in a country of competing accents and languages. However, new twentieth-century sound technologies and vocal institutions produced an American voice generated via mass circulation. In the process, American English transformed from the heterogenous, spoken counterpart of a standardized, literary British English to a network standard heard around the globe. This synthetic American voice sparked a parallel American poetic voice that was likewise globally and technologically mediated. Routing their poetry through modern circuits of communication, American poets created a paradoxically intimate and global