Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies

Engaging with and amending the terms of debates about poetry performance, I locate the origins of the default, neutral style of contemporary academic poetry readings in secular performance and religious ritual, exploring the influence of the beat poets, the black arts movement, and the African American church. Line graphs of intonation patterns demonstrate what I call monotonous incantation, a version of the neutral style that is characterized by three qualities: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence and slow, steady pace. This style is popularly known as “poet voice.” Recordings of four contemporary poets—Natasha Trethewey, Louise Glück, Michael Ryan, and Juliana Spahr—demonstrate this style, which contrasts with more expressive, idiosyncratic readings by poets as distinct as Frank Bidart and Kenneth Goldsmith.

POSTHUMAN REVISIONS OF ORGANIC FORM IN POETRY

What does the posthuman have to do with contemporary revisions of organic form in poetry? Do these revisions of organic form have anything to offer to posthumanist theory? Given that literary organicism, in its most familiar Romantic and New Critical forms, evokes holism, aesthetic closure, and the humanizing function of poetry, this pairing seems an unlikely one. Donna Haraway, in the well-known “Cyborg Manifesto” that launched one strand of posthumanism, sees political promise in the cyborg precisely because it escapes the naturalizing logic of organic tropes: “The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature . . . The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (Haraway1991, 51). But can decay figure otherwise than as a reactionary reinscription of origins? I argue that Jed Rasula and Frank Bidart, from two disparate poetic lineages, both use figures of decay—even posthumous decay—to revise literary organicism.