Listen closely: the poetics of listening in mid-century U.S. poetry

Thesis

‘Listen! Let me tell you how’, enjoins Langston Hughes’s album The Rhythms of the World (1955). For forty minutes, Hughes spells out a concern central to this period: that listening is a skill which must be both taught and mastered. But where silence was seen as the solution to writer’s block, this thesis contends that many mid-twentieth-century U.S. poets were, like Hughes, hooked by the pleasures and possibilities of listening—of allowing their minds to wander and their thoughts to be interrupted by various forms of sound. Zooming in on moments when poets find themselves diverted by radio jingles, earworms or street noise, ‘Listen Closely’ tells the story of how mid-century U.S. poets tackled the question of acoustic attention, investing in distraction as a compositional principle.

Where A.R. Ammons casts ‘the rational critical mind’ as ‘essential to making poems’, this thesis tracks disorderly and disruptive brain activity in U.S. poetry from roughly 1945 to 1975. Its four chapters focus on key poets from the period—Marianne Moore’s mnemonics, Elizabeth Bishop’s prosthetics, Langston Hughes’s earworms and the hums of Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka—cataloguing how each ascribes new importance to states of distraction, thus complicating the relationship between inspiration, interruption and poiesis. From Bishop to Baraka, the discourse of sonic distraction offered poets a vital space to problematise the prevailing attentional pieties bound up in the act of reading and writing poetry, framing inattention as a vital mode of aesthetic engagement and compositional practice.

The broader point of this thesis is simple: how and what we listen to has profound political and aesthetic consequences. In tracing the orchestration of our attention spans, this thesis chronicles a collection of poets increasingly aware of the political stakes of attentional distortion. What—or who—is muted in the quest for productivity?

Authors: Bradburn, R

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-7ryqe5d9p
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Amiri Baraka; listening; twentieth-century poetry; Elizabeth Bishop; distraction; Langston Hughes; Frank O'Hara; poetry; Allen Ginsberg; Marianne Moore
• Subjects: Literature; Lyric poetry; Twentieth century