Two years after Cros died, the Edison Factory produced talking dolls, with tiny wax cylinders in them.1
The Defender newspaper, Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr, 27 January 1900:
Read The Defender
IT IS AMERICAN IN ALL THINGS
News in Brief
Photography of sounds has reached a point said to establish the fact that there is no such thing as absolute silence. The machine used is so sensitive that it records the lightest current of air passing through a room and distant noises the air cannot detect.
Moore did not like hearing poetry on phonographs – although, she said, it instructed her in errors.
But Recordings of poems are instructive. They have really convinced me that maximum force should (somehow) be attained without the intellectually indispensable word; I mean the additional baroque word that ingeniously emphasises what has already been said …
One may feel that naturalness outweighs every other consideration but after hearing
the conglomerate hissing and
muffled consonants (are unavoidable)
of a bad recording (it’s impossible not to) you immediately crave to be articulate, to set down words in such a way that similar effects One can be careful that can’t be mistaken for other effects (words) and difficult words don’t clash
(some and sun) s o m e and s u n (for instance)
injustice (one word) with the 2 words and justice
a n d justice
And the musical balance is almost harrowingly exposed explicit.
The in a recording, some poems really seem – in a recording – to be written in pauses.
a merit of course when the pauses are right.
– Marianne Moore, First draft of ‘Humility, Concentration, and Gusto’: “Humility,” I, 8r,, 9r)2
To be natural, yes. Equally, to be articulate, to have each sound sound by itself, not conglomerate in onrush. Why ‘harrowing’, the poetry’s too-explicit music? Like watching someone cheat in a game played against themselves, and boast of victory? For form, I think, she wanted the more awkward and subtle music that could be found in speech –inside the sounds of speech.
December 1941: Marianne Moore made her first phonograph recording. She read ‘Rigorists’, ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and ‘Virginia Britannia’ for Frederick J Packard, Harvard Professor of Public Speech. Packard had Moore repeat a tongue-twister before she started recording. She wrote, ‘I ought not to give it away, but Harvard was devastating, from the time I arrived until the last touch when Professor Packard said, “These things have to be rehearsed.”’ He told her, she wrote, ‘that a-n-d is not pronounced “ant” and “blackening” is not “blackning” and soon is not “sue-en”’.
She wrote a note of thanks. ‘Technically – if I may say so – the recording is a triumph; there is no swish –’ In her part of the making she had noticed, she said, ‘lack of flexibility (i.e. a slight effect of panic) and a fading conclusion to phrases, as in the words “humility” and “pedestal”’. Perhaps the conjoining of those two words reconciled her to the work of writing the letter. Often her allusions are tactful, even recessive, critiques. The two words come from ‘Virginia Britannia’: the pedestal is of ‘lead cupids grouped’; the region, ‘not / noted for humility’ – leaden love shapes and arrogance. She ended: ‘I could not have imagined that caricature could have been redeemed into plausibility’.3
Rudolph Koenig, who helped Scott build his phonautograph, made a recording machine with a human ear cut from a cadaver. A plausible caricature –
30 August 1964: Marianne Moore wrote to Hildegarde Watson, remarking that the BBC had played the Packard recording of ‘Rigorist’. ‘I sounded like a sparrow suddenly run over,’ she wrote, ‘still able to make sounds’.4
Apollinaire – ‘poète phonographiste’ – said, ‘Après l’enregistrement, on fit redire mes poèmes à l’appareil et je ne reconnus nullement ma voix’. After the recording, they had the machine repeat my poems and I could not recognise my voice at all.5 Against performance, there is that inward experience of how words sound – a voice that the poet can recognise.
- The Library of Congress: Digital Collections: History of the Cylinder Phonograph, online ↩
- Draft contained in folder II:02:26, Marianne Moore Colletion, Rosenabach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, PA. Cited in James Jiang, ‘Curious Self-Evidence: Graphology and Gusto in Marianne Moore’s Critical Prose’ in Modernism / modernity, volume twenty six, number 2 (John Hopkins University Press; 2019) 375–398, pp. 392 -393 ↩
- Marianne Moore to Professor (Frederick) Packard, May 8, 1944, quoted in Linda Leavell, “Marianne Moore: Poet and Performer.” (presentation, Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, November 13, 2014). See also, Josephine Packard “A Discography of the Harvard Vocarium,” Harvard Library Bulletin 15, vols. 3–4 (2004): 5–138, 76. Both cited in Allison Neal, ‘Marianne Moore’s Tone Technologies: Elocution, Poetry, Phonograph; “Still Able to Make Sounds’’: American Poetry on Record’ in Modernism / modernity Volume 6, Cycle 2 (John Hopkins University Press; 2021), online ↩
- Marianne Moore to Hildegarde Watson, December 13, 1941, in “Marianne Moore, Letters to Hildegarde Watson (1933–1964),” ed. Cyrus Hoy, University of Rochester Library Bulletin 29, no. 2 (1976): n.p. ↩
- Pascal Cordereix, ‘Chronique d’une matinée poétique. Guillaume Apollinaire aux Archives de la parole’, Revue de la BNF, 2017/2 no.55 pp. 114-125, online ↩
