Abstract
From the New American Poetry to New Formalism, publishing networks such as literary magazines and social scenes such as poetry reading series have served as a capacious mod-el for understanding the varied poetic formations in the postwar period. As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein has suggested that open access to digital archives allows readers of American poetry to create mixtapes in different configurations. Digital archives of poetry readings “offer an intriguing and powerful alternative” to organizing practices such as networks and scenes. Placing Bern-stein’s definition of the digital audio archive into contact with more conventional under-standings of poetic community gives us a composite vision of organizing principles in postwar American poetry. To accomplish this, we compared poetry reading venues as well as audio archives — alongside more familiar print networks constituted by poetry an-thologies and magazines — as important and distinct sites of reception for American poet-ry. We used network analysis to visualize the relationships of individual poets to venues where they have read, archives where their readings are stored, and text anthologies where their poetry has been printed. Examining several types of poetic archives offers us a new perspective in how we perceive the relationships between poets and their “networks and scenes,” understood both in terms of print and audio culture, as well as trends and chang-es in the formation of these poetic communities and affiliations. We suggest that this ap-proach may offer new ways of imagining the multiple dimensions contributing to the so-cial formation of contemporary American poetry.
Highlights
Writing in 1981, Ron Silliman could not have been more astute in characterizing networks and scenes as the two governing modes of social organization in postwar American poetry.[1]
As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein, codirector of PennSound, has provocatively identified the novel modes of organization these archives offer: I believe that access to compressed sound files of individual poems, freely available via the internet, offers an intriguing and powerful alternative to the book format in collecting a poet’s work and to anthology and magazine formats in organizing constellations of poems
Before we look at these organizing practices in our contemporary moment, we will begin by looking at how anthologies and audio archives collaborate in periodizing postwar American poetry
Summary
Our network diagram shows a high degree of interconnectivity among the densely clustered poetic movements of the last seventy years, poetic communities in the beginning decades of the period were divided into two separate factions during the “anthology wars” of the 1950s (figure 3). According to Halpern, the poets in his anthology represent the growth of graduate programs in creative writing: “There has never been such wide-ranging interest in poetry — creative writing workshops have sprung up overnight around the country; thousands of new magazines are in existence, with as many poets supplying their material.”[42] Likewise, Smith and Bottoms’s poets were part of a large body of poetprofessors with “one or more graduate degrees in literature or writing and [taught] both in a college.”[43] Poets in these two anthologies do not represent a fixed school or movement, and as Halpern asserts, “unlike the period from 1950 to 1965, when one could recognize with little trouble the groups mentioned above, the past ten years has produced a poetry that takes nourishment from a variety of camps.”[44] These poets came to Elliston and Voca mostly during 1970 to 2000, and as many as half of them came to Elliston in the 1980s and to Voca in the 1970s (figure 9) Because of this alliance with loosely formed poetic communities, Elliston and Voca have remained sensitive to subtle changes in postwar poetry culture, and acted as the social “scenes” for various textual communities. They are especially important in light of the fact that they are barely connected to the Program Era anthologies of the twenty-first century
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