Department of English

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-poetic-record.html

Tracks the unlikely collaboration between experimental poets and experimental linguists that gave rise to the earliest collections of poets’ voices

• Introduces and makes available recordings from the largest Prewar American poetry audio archive and situates it in a transatlantic network of linguistic speech labs all interested in recordings of poets
• Tracks the unlikely collaboration between experimental poets and experimental linguists that gave rise to the earliest collections of poets’ voices
• Situates understandings of the relationship between speech and meaning within the history of the development of modernism and experimental phonetics
• Engages with inherited notions of genre by comparing and contrasting the ways of listening used to approach and create these early archives

In the period immediately following the invention of sound recording, who first had the idea to record, collect and study the voices of poets? The Poetic Record tells the story of voice collectors and poets working together to preserve this important dimension of sonic, musical and literary history. The book examines the varying relationships between recordists of sound (early record labels, linguists) and performed poetry and historicises the contemporary practice of collecting, archiving and interpreting literary audio.