Charles Legere Application for 2013-14 Houghton Fellowship

1/18/13 cdlegere@pitt.edu

Student Was Out; They often Get that Way: A Secret and Living History of American Poetry via its Accidents and The Woodberry Poetry Room Asked attendant if I would disturb student if I listened to Robert Frost. Student had songbook in lap, earphones over head, was obliviously reciting words aloud. Attendant said student was out; they often get that way. R.L. Strout, reporting for The Christian Science Monitor, 1949 Along one wall [of the Woodberry Poetry Room] some of the books from Amy Lowells library were kept until their transfer to Houghton Library in 1949. They were a fascinating mixture of literary essences and accidents. John L. Sweeney, A Place for Poetry: The Woodberry Poetry Room in Widener and Lamont, 1954 [The Woodberry Poetry Room] contains not only the voices of the greatest poets, but constitutes a living history of modern poetry. Seamus Heaney, 2003 When I visited the Woodberry Poetry Room for the first time in January 2013, I came upon something I had not expected: four handsome and imposing record players, and the worlds pre-eminent collection of vinyl recordings of American poetry. I was fascinated to learn that in the late 1940s and 1950s, the Woodberrys turntables had been in such demand that students would have to wait to listen to vinyl recordings, and that among the records in heavy rotation were those released through the Harvard Vocarium Series, which began in the 1930s, with the first known recording of T.S. Eliot. In my work, I study contemporary poems that are about reading, which I argue grow out of an impulse among poets to press readers to do more with reading. In the project I propose to undertake, I want to trace that present-day impulse back to mid-century, and the opportunities the Woodberry provided for readers to engage with poetry outside of the classroom and off the page. In other words, I want to undertake a kind of metaarchival project about the Woodberry itself to unearth a secret history of mid-century American poetrys proliferations via its accidents (as opposed to its essences): publications, media, performances, collections, and readers. I see the Woodberry as a contact zone between poetrys theories and applications, institutions and poets, texts and consumers, and I specifically want to research instances of poets entering this contact zonethat is, traces of poets attending readings at the Room, going there to explore the audio archives, or writing about the audio technology available. I believe the Woodberry poetry room was (and is) an unusually stimulating place for poets to encounter poetry in theory in life. In her astute 2011 article Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place, Shannon Mattern characterizes Alvar Aaltos 1949 design of the Woodberry in Lamontwith its comfortable modern furnishings, open stacks, and listening stationsas having been built to provide an experience of poetry in opposition to that of the academic New Critical tradition, which held that poetry as poetry should be isolated from its materials and contexts. It seems strange, however, that such a

seemingly anti-academic engagement with poetry would be located right in the middle of the American poetry mainstream: I.A. Richards, the progenitor of New Criticism, came to teach at Harvard from Cambridge in the 1930s, and even gave a talk called An Ideal Poetry Room on the eve of the Woodberrys opening; the first issue of Professor Frederick C. Packards Vocarium Series was T.S. Eliot, who would go on to become the archetypal high modern American Poet; and, as former curator John L. Sweeney writes, There was a period during the war when a group of students concerned with contemporary poetry held monthly meetings in the room. A few poems, usually difficult but discussible ones, were agreed upon as topics for talk and mimeographed copies of the poems were provided for the meeting. By special dispensation smoking was permitted on these occasions. Port was passed, and the talk and thought were good. On one argumentative evening the poems scrutinized were Empsons On a Line from Rochester and Wallace Stevens Les Plus Belles Pages. Stevens generously provided his interpretation of his poem for that meeting. (67) Here, I want to suggest fine-tuning of Matterns point, which I think is important for poetrys history: that Woodberry and its architecture do not exactly refute New Criticism, but extend it that the room was built to make it possible to branch out from the New Critical ideal. For that reason, the rooms physical space, the scope and range of its collections, the records of the events it hosted, and so on, are all legible as a conjuncture of New Critical theory and the way it was refracted and/or inverted in American Poetry of the 20th Century. Indeed, Aaltos Woodberry Poetry Room at Lamont is both contrary to a New Critical mode of reading that tends to downplay poetrys historicity, and somehow consonant with it. What is remarkable is that it was built around the Vocarium series, and therefore made it possible for readers not to read poetry at all, but listen to it. This entailed being very up-todate: students could listen to Beowulf on vinyl, and then even buy the record from the desk, which now seems out-of-date. On the other hand, this obsolescence was already built into the Room. For example, in Figure 1, we see a student seated at a phonograph, listening to poetry on headphones, and [going] out, an expression that R.L. Strout, a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, takes from one of the Woodberrys attendants. The technology made it possible for readers of poetry to become unaware of the Rooms appurtenances. At the same time, notice the student standing close by: since there were only 4 turntables, but 36 jacks, multiple students could listen to the same record at the same time, and even join in and eavesdrop on a listeners record. Thus, the listeners private experience was also a social one: it unfolded in a public place, alongside other people having a similar experience. So, here, datedness and timelessness, privacy and sociability, idealization and materialism all come up against each other in the Woodberry. The poets Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and Frank OHara all graduated around the time of Aaltos redesign of the Woodberry Poetry Room. Throughout the 20th century, critics have read these three poets workwhich is flippant and seriously engaged with aestheticsas either part of a New Critical and high modern lineage, or, alternately, as representing a break with New Criticism. I suspect the Room may itself provide an unexpected way of understanding Kochs, Ashberys, and OHaras comportment towards such figures as Eliot, Stevens, and I.A. Richards, and hint towards new and enriching possibilities for reading their poems.

Figure 1. Image from John L. Sweeneys A Place for Poetry, 1954.

These insights are not to be confined to the 1940s and 1950s: the 21st-century poets I study have exhaustively read Eliot, Stevens, Koch, Ashbery, and OHara. Indeed, in the booklength manuscript I am currently working on (entitled Reading for Living), I argue that contemporary poets anticipate and out-think the very reading that their readers attempt bring to their work. In simple terms, this means that contemporary poets often write about reading. For one example, I can point to the title of a 2012 book of poems by Srikanth Reddy: Readings in World Literature. Reddy himself has passed through the Woodberry Poetry Room: he got a PhD from the Harvard English Department, wrote a dissertation on digression, and, in 2010, took part in a roundtable on contemporary American poetry with Robert Casper, David Orr, and Rebecca Wolff. The Roundtable has been digitized, and is now available for listening through the Woodberry Poetry Rooms website. We can wonder, imagineeven hopethat listeners are even at this moment [going] out as they listen. The particulars of the media and format have changed; what is interesting, from the historical perspective, is how the essence and accident builds on those which came before.