1.

Over the last three decades, the accelerating digitization of literary audio collections in institutions around the world has made possible for communities of poetic practice and scholarship a range of new objects and innovating methods of analysis. Bending their ear to recordings readily accessible on repositories like UbuWeb (1996), PennSound (2005), and SpokenWeb (2010), or in the digitized collections of university libraries and other heritage institutions, critics can now open the sonorous performance of poets and performers to digital tools that permit us to listen differently, raising and answering new questions about the history of modern and contemporary poetry.

In happy league with these unfolding developments, the set of annotations linked at the bottom of the page invites readers to listen in detail to one artifact from the SpokenWeb project via a crucially enabling platform, AudiAnnotate, recently developed by Tanya Clement and Brumfield Labs. Among the various dispensations of AudiAnnotate to which this anthology testifies, I take up one in particular: the reading of voice. As digital sonic archives snatch the literary concept “voice” from the realm of metaphor and render it conspicuously concrete, pluralizations ensure. It becomes possible to apprehend dimensions of the performing voice otherwise spirited away by what I’ll term, for reasons evolved below, the “isolation tank” model of poetic performance. The isolation tank model presumes that when we hear the performance of a poet’s work we are overhearing, first of all, the sonorous publication of a preexisting artwork whose primary mode of access is private print reading—and not a new and complex literary-historical event with its own pressing claims on our attention. To be clear: close listeners to poetry’s audio archives have grasped for a while now that sonic media turn up the volume, as it were, on the fact of any iterable poetic text’s “fundamentally plural existence” (Bernstein 9). But it hasn’t always been clear what can be done with that plurality. A flexible annotation tool like AudiAnnotate allows for multilayered readings capable of doing justice, and making critical hay, of the many voices one hears in the audio record.

I would also like to use this opportunity to reflect in a more speculative mood on poetry’s larger “digital lyric archive,” my name for the tendentious sum total of these new tools, platforms, and virtual collections. In this case, the contested word “lyric” serves not as a generic term, but instead as a strategy for foregrounding poetry’s rather peculiar media condition. “Lyric,” with its vestigial etymological gesture toward a now-absent lyre, points toward the historical fact that the reading and writing of poetry are practices structured in tension between writing (or print), on the one hand, and sundry sonic media, on the other, from the fine patterns of metrical schemes to the vibrating vocal chords and resonating body. To foreground this unruly and unstable media condition in our study of poetry’s formal and social history is necessarily to expand the poetic archive—to arrange printed poems alongside the variously mediated performances of those poems, and alongside other “lyric” objects even less familiar to literary critics: pop songs, libretti, phonograph records, tape reels, radio broadcasts, YouTube videos, etc. Because digital platforms like AudiAnnotate make possible the co-presentation of text, sound, and image, these emerging tools and the digital collections to which they’re applied enable exploration of artifacts and practices that because they are “lyric”—because they are generatively riven by a tension between sound and writing—have never been fully at home in print.

But what does it mean to study older media artifacts, from the printed poem to the tape-recorded poetry performance, via digital interfaces? What transformative possibilities and what latent, deforming incompatibilities emerge in the confrontation between the longer intermedial history of poetry—a history we can flag with the word “lyric”—and the digital technologies that allow us to read (and see, and hear) that history like never before? The harder one looks at the digital lyric archive, the harder it is to theorize. But one way of defining its contours is to confirm what it’s not. And that, it turns out, is instructively easy. It is not an isolation tank.

2.

In the annotated recording below, listeners will hear the American poet Michael McClure (1932-2020) read from his book Ghost Tantras (1964) at the Naropa Institute on June 16, 1976. This recording is held in both the Naropa Archives and the Michael McClure fonds at Simon Frasier University, a SpokenWeb partner. The poems in Ghost Tantras dip in and out of what McClure calls “beast language,” an ecstatic register of leonine nonsense that mimics the guttural growls and roars of large mammals. Rather infamously, McClure read a selection of these poems to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo, an escapade captured in a 1966 episode of the documentary series USA Poetry, developed by poet and Beat associate Richard O. Moore:

Michael McClure on Poetry USA (1966)

If the Beat movement reached a first apogee in 1955, at the Six Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted “Howl” and left the audience of rowdy San Francisco hipsters “knowing,” in McClure’s words, that “at the deepest level…a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America,” then perhaps McClure’s reading to lions a decade later marks one kind of farcical conclusion. There was nothing farcical about McClure’s intentions, though. Beast Language was an attempt to activate “the biological bases of poetry” (Scratching 43), a practical application of what he called “Meat Science.” “For McClure, humans are meat, and one’s expression—in its ideal state—is an incarnation of one’s mammal nature” (Davidson 87). Indeed, thanks in large part to McClure’s own essays, the critics who address themselves to his work have no trouble elaborating the ecological implications of beast language, this “mammalian communication based on a commonality of meat” (Kahn 339). Tracing beast language to its inspirations in the work of Antonin Artaud, the “biological language” of Reich, and Kundalini yoga, Douglas Kahn, for instance, has detailed how McClure’s poems are “animated by an organismic poetics under the auspices of biology, genetics, ecology, and mammalianism, rooted in a bioself concomitant with other creatures and elaborated by an antipolitics of biological activism” (32).

For our purposes, McClure’s own words may be just as illuminating. I quote at some length from “A Mammal Gallery,” in which the poet describes a face-to-face encounter with a snow leopard at the Zoo:

No part of her can reach through the mesh of the cyclone wire. I put my face almost to the wire and nearly to her face….She puts her face within an inch of the wire and SPEAKS to me. The growl begins instantly and almost without musical attack. It begins gutturally. It grows in volume and it expands till I can feel the interior of her body from whence the energy of the growl extends itself as it gains full volume of fury…It is a language that I understand more clearly than any other. I hear range, anger, anguish, warning, pain, even humor, fury—all bound into one statement.

I am surrounded by the physicality of her speech. It is a real thing in the air. It absorbs me and I can hear and feel and see nothing else. Her face and features disappear, becoming one entity with her speech. The speech is the purest, most perfect music I have ever heard, and I know that I am touched by the divine, on my cheeks, and on my brow, and on the tympanums of my ears, and the vibrations on my chest, and on the inner organs of my perception.

It is music-speech. It is like the music one hears when he places his head on the stomach of his beloved. The gurglings, the drips, the rumblings, the heart, and the pulsebeats in the interior of the body are perfect music. It is the meat speaking and moving… (Scratching 155-56)

This vivid account of one origin point for beast language sets a high bar for its performance: it’s difficult indeed to compete with a snow leopard! Perhaps this explains why, ten years later, during a whistle-stop retrospective of Beat history with Ginsberg at Naropa, McClure makes a show of his hesitance to read “Ghost Tantra 49,” one of the very same poems he had triumphantly declaimed to a cage of lions the decade prior.

I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop. It’s very mantric. And I thought I’d be giving a reading and they’ll carry me away at the end. I’ll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr! (1:00:30-1:00:47)

McClure explains his newfound resolution to read the poem by pointing to a recent experience of meditative isolation:

Recently I was in one of John Lilly’s isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I’ve always been afraid to do. What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I’ll read it here anyway. (1:00:48-1:01:01)

The reference to John Lilly, the neurophysicist-turned-cetologist-cum-“cosmonaut of heightened consciousness,” is curiously overdetermined (Burnett 14). Emerging from the same incipient “culture of feedback” that would come to characterize ecological thought in the 1970s, McClure’s beast language parallels, in an eccentric key, the experimental work Lilly had begun in the late 1950s on the intelligence of bottlenose dolphins and possibilities for interspecies communication, as documented in Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) (see Belgrad 138-73). And yet at the same time that he was researching dolphins, Lilly was also responsible for major contributions to the field of sensory-deprivation research, including the invention of the water-immersion isolation tank. As D. Graham Burnett has detailed, such work had its roots military intelligence and efforts to experimentally bolster “the imperviousness and durability of the Cold War human agent” (23). And yet by the late sixties, his cetological research largely discredited, “Lilly [had] left the world that made him—the world of the Cold War biosciences—behind” for newfound prominence as “a major-minor figure of the pacifist, drug-friendly, ecosensitized counterculture” (39). This is the Lilly by McClure—the Lilly of Epsom-salt “floatation” therapy, LSD, and workshops at Esalen.

Cover of John Lilly’s The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique (1977)

Lilly’s The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique (1977) was published the year after McClure’s reading. It includes the logs of “scores of men and women volunteers,” from Gregory Bateson to Burgess Meredith, “who have recorded their extraordinary experiences” in a Malibu facility with five isolation tanks. Though McClure is not featured in the book, it seems likely he made the trek, and this presumption entails an irony worth pausing over. For Lilly, the isolated flotation tank is a therapeutic means of probing interior experience by cleaving mind from body: “For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The method allows one to become free within a few minutes” (22). Meanwhile, the zoological expression of McClure’s beast language precisely refuses any distinction between the mind and body. “I knew that consciousness was part of the physiological body,” writes McClure, “and not separate from the rest of nature—that it was wound through, woven in, bursting out from, and pouring through all nature” (Scratching 28). In the Ghost Tantras, the unprepared passage from English to beastly nonsense and back performs the extreme dissolution of the Cartesian subject. And given that beast language so exuberantly infuses body, meat, and muscle with capacities for expression, we have to ask: why should the experience of floating in Lilly’s tank, designed to banish the body, license McClure’s reading in beast language before the Naropa audience in 1976?

Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Dick Gallup, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure at Naropa Institute, 1976

McClure supposes that reciting the poem, “by heart” (page-less), isolated (audience-less), and floating in the tank (bodiless) will make no “difference” (“what difference would it make here?”) as if the poem’s efficaciousness were somehow a matter of pages, audiences, and bodies. Perhaps this particular scene of reading/listening inspired McClure to read the poem because it recalled the “perfect time” spent listening to the snow leopard’s growl, that moment he found himself “surrounded by the physicality of her speech… a real thing in the air…the purest, most perfect music I have ever heard,” unable to “hear and feel and see [anything] else.” I have never recited a poem in a sensory deprivation tank, but I suspect that one hears one’s voice as if from the inside, by means of what the poet calls “the inner organs of perception.” So interiorized is this mode of listening that McClure demurs at any suggestion of materialization. In “A Mammal Gallery,” he describes listening to a tape recording of the snow leopard’s performance—“more beautiful than any composition of Mozart”—and studiously declining to privilege its preservation (Scratching 156). “The tape is a work of art as we listen. But we have no desire to add it to the universe of media and plastic artifacts. We see, hear, feel through the veil. WE are translated.”

3.

The digitized recording linked below belongs to that slice of the “universe of media and plastic artifacts” I’m calling the digital lyric archive. I’ve seized on this bit of paratextual patter from McClure’s reading because the idea of reciting beast language in Lilly’s isolation tank, the supposed spur to McClure’s performance of “Ghost Tantra 49,” offers an illuminating counter-image of what is interpretatively salient in what actually happened at Naropa on June 6, 1976. The isolation tank, in other words, is a foil for that set of difference-making material contexts to which readings of the audio archive might attend—and all the more successfully so when equipped with tools like AudiAnnotate. The keyed annotations on the next page pursue this suggestion along three observational axes, each of them central to the digital lyric archive: that of the reading voice, the situated voice, and the social voice. Attention to the reading voice strives to restore the difference made by the dynamic relationship between the performative voice and the printed page. The situated voice, meanwhile, attunes us to the institutionally mediated relation between the performer and the audience. Finally, listening for the social voice requires tarrying with the grain of address and its expressive physiological textures–the “unique voice that signifies nothing but itself,” in Adriana Cavarero’s phrase–as much as the compacted social histories those textures index (7).

Just as he feared, online collections like SpokenWeb entail the permanent possibility that McClure will be “carr[ied] away” from the irenic plentitude of a lost moment in time—on digitized tape, he’ll “still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!” as long as we care to listen. At the same time, by bursting the isolation tank of the poetry reading, we can give speech a measure of its body back, the gurglings, drips, rumblings, heart, and pulsebeats. In the process, as listeners at the remove of the present “WE are translated” indeed, precisely into the sonorous language of differences that history makes.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Tony Power at Simon Frasier University’s Bennett Library for his help navigating McClure’s audio record.

Works Cited

Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Bernstein, Charles. “Introduction.” In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bernstein, 3-26. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Burnett, D. Graham. “Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958-1968.” In Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation & American Counterculture, edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, 13-50. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Phenomenology of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul Kottman. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. MIT Press, 2001.

Lilly, John C. The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank. Gateway Books and Tapes, 2007.

McClure, Michael. Ghost Tantras. City Lights Publishers, 2013.

—. Scratching the Beat Surface. North Point Press, 1982.