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Anexact Form and Modernist Culture
James Reath
£24.99Jan 2027
Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing
The Poetic RecordCollecting Poets’ Voices During the Period of Early Sound Recording
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Published 31 October 2026
About this book
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.
Reviews
A crackling good re-hearing of modern poetry as an acoustic event: Chris Mustazza shows that the history of twentieth-century poetry is also a tale of complex interactions among recordings, performances, and archives – where technology, accent, and form meet not on the page but in the mic. An unparalleled contribution to literary history, sound studies, poetics, and the history of media.
Chris Mustazza's The Poetic Record adds an important new episode to our emerging understanding of the relationship between literary and sound cultures. From Ezra Pound's visit to the lab of experimental phonetician Abbé Jean-Pierre Rousselot, to the first major electrical recordings of modernist poets made in the makeshift speech lab of Barnard College professor and linguist William Cabell Greet, Mustazza's study offers illuminating accounts of the technical and methodological contexts that informed the production of the earliest modernist and avant-garde poetry recordings ever made. The Poetic Record brings us right into the sound studio of modernist poesis and lets us hear the material and performative foundations of modernist poetry in ways we haven't heard before.
Table of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Speech Collectors
1. ‘La parole au timbre juste’: Experimental Phonetics, Modernism and the Poetic Voice as Data
2. ‘The Higher Vaudeville’: American Record Labels’ Relationship to the Spoken Word
3. For ‘teachers, students, and other lovers of literature’: The Rise of the Academic Poetry Audio Archive
4. The Phono-scriptural Economy: Monopolies of Knowledge, Oppositional Poetics and Medial Detournement
Conclusion: Tape to Tap and Vice Versa
Notes
Bibliography
Index