The Voice in Literature

A Coil of Words: The Lyric Poem, Sound and Telephony

Tyne Daile Sumner

This paper takes the lyric poem, a mode long associated with overhearing, to explore the relationship between poetry, sound and telephony in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century in America. It examines a range of poems to demonstrate how American lyric poets found a productive site of analysis and imaginative possibility in the arrival of the telephone, with many constructing elaborate metaphors that compared the phone’s cord, mouthpiece, and wires to uncanny or natural phenomena. Many poets of the period, such as Robert Frost, Florence Ripley Mastin, Frank O’Hara, Carl Sandburg, Allen Ginsberg, and Sylvia Plath, also poeticise the soundscape of telephony through distant and mysterious voices, call-and-response effects, and complex evocations of the intimacy of voices over the phone. These poets use the lyric to convey a sense of the abstract animation of speech in relation to new sound technologies; the ways that speech can be disrupted, disembodied, fragmented, and changed. At the same time, many poets became increasingly interested in the ways that telephony interrupts, distorts and mediates the realm of the home during the twentieth century by bringing external voices and sounds inside the intimate domestic spaces of the American suburbs. In poems such as Ginsberg’s “I Am a Victim of Telephone” and
Plath’s “Eavesdropper,” the domestic space is intruded upon and distorted by the sounds of the telephone, with voices over the line becoming indistinguishable from internal speech rhythms and monologues. As the site upon which individual, private expressions are made public, the lyric poem therefore becomes a crucial site through which to examine issues of consent, privacy, listening-in and subjectivity relating to the telephone and sound.

“Clarity in the sense of silence”: Sight, Silence, and Witness in the Poetical Works of George Oppen

Hunter Lewinski

Reading the poetry of George Oppen, one is continually struck by the recurrence of sight and silence throughout his slim oeuvre. Oppen emerged in the late 1920s as a student of Imagism and the poetry of Ezra Pound, who would seek a greater clarity in poetic expression than their romantic predecessors by eliminating superfluous language and presenting the poetic object with precise and direct imagery. Oppen often conveyed this expressive clarity in terms of silence, believing that the removal of unnecessary noise from the construction of the poem could reveal the poem’s objective historical truth. But in addition to being poems of immense craft and detail, Oppen’s poetry also exhibits a deep social awareness that manifests a silence of an entirely different order. Shortly after releasing his first volume of poetry, Oppen notably experienced a 25 year hiatus from writing due to his participation in the major historical events of his era: political organizing during the Great Depression; suffering grievous injury while serving in the Second World War; and going into hiding in Mexico after his political activities in the 30s would come into question under the rise of McCarthyism. Despite the silence of these decades, Oppen was seriously impacted by what he had experienced, and grappled with poetry’s ability to express the unspeakable and catastrophic. In his daybooks—a collection of theoretical and prose writings written in the years following his return to poetry—Oppen envisioned an adequate art that could employ the techniques of Imagism to properly respond to the disasters of the 20th century. In examining the tension between sight and silence in the aftermath of catastrophe, Oppen’s work stages a powerful critique of literary modernity by exploring the very limits of poetic expression.

‘I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs’: The Common Sense of Race in Li-Young Lee’s Selected Poems

Ngoi Hui Chien

This paper aims to examine the dilemma in the acoustic potential of Li-Young Lee’s selected poems in depicting race via an abstract common-sense sentiment rather than a factual justification. ‘I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs’ (line 34), laments Lee in ‘Immigrant Blues’ (2008) which refers to Indonesia, his place of birth, where the anti-Chinese sentiment caused his family to flee to America in 1964. Such a lack of belonging among the Chinese diaspora is an intuitive belief whose difficulty to be externally anchored is also reflected in Lee’s ‘The Cleaving’ (1990) that struggles to vocalise the ‘syllables [that] sing the soul’ (line 151) in the West.
Since the absence of metaphorical songs, in my reading, alludes to an absence of critical tools to confront racial discrimination, I argue that a common sense of race is needed to examine Lee’s emotions of being marginalised. Therefore, I will draw upon George Edward Moore’s metaphysical grammars of common sense: the possession of a belief that ‘we can possibly know … to be true’ (1953, p. 152) which then proves an external world independent of experience. By undermining philosophical scepticism, Moore gives credit to the plain man’s intuition without relying on any sophisticated theoretical construct. This conceptual apparatus enables us to explore the ungraspable poetic affect of race that Lee struggles to organise into a song—a common-sense consciousness of race which resists being made transparent in his poems.
Silenced by ‘the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation’ (2008, line 9), Lee’s acoustic intervention problematises any attempt to normalise race that risks relegating the diasporic figures to objects of knowledge. We cannot hear how exactly Lee has been discriminated, but through a common-sense prism, we will be able to listen to how his mind is psychologically disturbed by horror lurking in silence.

The Many Olive Fremstads in Twentieth-Century Auto/biografiction

Tsung-Han Tsai

In Mary Watkins Cushing’s memoir, The Rainbow Bridge (1954), the soprano Olive Fremstad is recorded to claim that Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), whose main character Thea Kronborg is modelled on Fremstad, does not really capture her experience: ‘My poor Willa’, Fremstad laments, ‘it wasn’t really much like that. But after all, what can you know about me?’ In Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer (1936), another novel inspired by Fremstad, the first-person narrator is told by the soprano only to look for biographical details from those around her because she herself would not and could not tell the truth. 

This paper asks why these texts highlight such unknowability. Is it a strategy to present the resulting book as a heroic deed which, despite the areas of aporia, still unveils much about its subject? Or, is it a way to establish the credibility of one’s work as the exclusive insight into a worldly renowned singer’s private self, something previous accounts are thought to have failed to deliver? Reading these Fremstad-inspired texts as intertexts, the paper focuses on the ways in which they represent Fremstad’s famous role as Sieglinde in Die Walküre, showing how their different approaches to representation are in fact underpinned by a shared concern with the boundary between life and fiction. The paper thus argues that these texts are what Max Saunders calls auto/biografiction. Whether published as a novel or as a biography, these texts are complex examples of such generic fusions in their attempt to evoke Fremstad – her performance, her look, and her voice – in written words.