In 1936 Walter Benjamin observed in The Work Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that audio had a privileged place among the arts in that it allowed “the original to meet the beholder halfway,” meaning it elicited a kind of participation and engagement from an audience. However the history of radio theory and production technology is marked by a conspiracy against that very openness and a naturalized effort to eliminate opportunities for that kind of engagement. This condition has been especially unkind to the presentation of poetry on radio and now in webcasts; fortunately though, the new generation of digital audio production technology (in widespread use for the past several years) presents new media poets with a clear opportunity to realize Benjamin’s hope. Initially, this chapter analyzes how a dying means of radio production has, in effect, created a current radio theory incapable of comprehending the new radio/sound poetry aesthetic insisted upon by our new production technology.
More so than in any other venue poetic activity on radio (and now in webcast) is restrained rather than emancipated by production and dissemination technology and the forms of radio meaning making that technology has engendered. This chapter investigates how an thoroughly analog aesthetic has been assumed and absorbed by the majority of those presenting sound poetry with digital tools, and suggests that those very digital tools will shortly force a new aesthetic which evolves out of the particular way in which they manipulate sound and speech. The key to breaking the closed circuit of analog theory and production is one of the buzz words of the new media: “non-linearity.” While the notion of the non-linear has marked all new media poetry (on the page as well as on the screen) on radio and webcast it has heretofore failed to make even the slightest impression. I argue that the transposition of linear semantics from analog production to digital production is the result of a long-held maxim that radio is expressive in only one dimension: time. Such thinking has lead the most widely read radio theorist of the English speaking world, Andrew Crisell, to suggest an exclusively narrative system of radio signs thoroughly unsuited to new media poetry. The presentation of poetry on radio has traditionally been dogged by the watchwords “flow,” “continuity,” “narrative” and “linear.” But given the history of poetic innovators enthralled by the possibilities of radio broadcast and audio technology, and given the expanding consciousness of digital aesthetics across fields, Crisell’s linearity appears to be on the verge of obsolescence. Even before Benjamin, F. T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata wrote in their manifesto La Radia that radio should begin where narration ends. Indeed much poetry and even more poetics scholarship has already and significantly developed the ideas of Marinetti, Masnata and Benjamin. Adalaide Morris, in her introduction to the indispensable anthology Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, rightly characterized much of poetry culture and even sound poetry culture as constipated on the printed page—her goal being to “unstop” it, to sound it, both in terms of giving it voice and in terms of plumbing its depths. Extending this effort, this chapter also contains a call to action: given that the criticism and review of sounded poetry has been considerably “unstopped” in recent years (in addition to Sound States see also Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening, Douglas Kahn’s Noise Water Meat and Allen Wiess’s Experimental Sound and Radio) our production and presentation of sounded poetry, especially in the digital environment of the web, should not continue to work in and reproduce the “stopped-up” presentational modes familiar to a radio tradition, presentational modes even straighter than the longest-lived forms of print communication.
While the chapter extends the suggestion that poetry is (or is at least inseparable from) its technology, it more importantly encourages a harnessing of this critical momentum and an extension of the tradition of innovative presentation of innovative poetry by independent presses onto the way we present sounded poetry on the web. To this end it offers a vocabulary and a method for poetic digital audio editing which makes thorough use of the technology’s potential and which implies a complete rethinking of the audio edit. The analog edit, the edit born out of the reel-to-reel technology dominant for fifty years, the edit of Crisell’s linearity and narrative expression, is promoted and celebrated as a “seamless” edit. Taking cues from a century of avant-garde practitioner/theorists from Apollinaire to Cobbing, this chapter posits the “spangled” edit against the seamless one as an underdeveloped field for sound poetry opened up by contemporary digital audio editing technologies. Whereas the seamless edit develops only in time, the spangled one instigates a spatial quality of listening. With a debt to the concrete poetry of the page and screen as well as to musique concrète, the poetry and presentation of poetry offered through the spangled edit expands space far beyond the stereo field. Other dimensions are added to the unfolding of poetry in time through overlap, interjection, the sounding of several lines simultaneously and other methods facilitated by the new technology. The radio poetry experience can be turned into something akin hypertext without a “Back” arrow as options for listening and meaning making do not “flow” by but race by competing for attention. This chapter provides a vocabulary for appreciating the spangled edit and its implications for poetry which deviates from the aesthetics of other new media poetries only significantly around the point of “connectivity.” I will argue that the most interesting potential of digital audio editing is the “disconnectivity” it invites, an electrification of the (narrative) line that forces it to divide and divide again without return.