Poetic Record

Chris Mustazza is Co-Director of the PennSound Archive, the world’s largest archives of recordings of poets, and he teaches in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of literary audio, sonic media archaeology, and digital analyses of poetry recordings.

A crackling good re-hearing of modern poetry as an acoustic event: Chris Mustazza shows that the history of twentieth-century poetry is also a tale of complex interactions among recordings, performances, and archives – where technology, accent, and form meet not on the page but in the mic. An unparalleled contribution to literary history, sound studies, poetics, and the history of media.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Speech Collectors1. ‘La parole au timbre juste’: Experimental Phonetics, Modernism and the Poetic Voice as Data2. ‘The Higher Vaudeville’: American Record Labels’ Relationship to the Spoken Word3. For ‘teachers, students, and other lovers of literature’: The Rise of the Academic Poetry Audio Archive4. The Phono-scriptural Economy: Monopolies of Knowledge, Oppositional Poetics and Medial DetournementConclusion: Tape to Tap and Vice VersaNotesBibliographyIndex