Essays by Prithvi Varatharajan
Peril Magazine, 2020
A long-form essay exploring identity. The essay is grounded in memoir, cultural theory, and my fo... more A long-form essay exploring identity. The essay is grounded in memoir, cultural theory, and my formative engagements with fiction and poetry.
Sydney Review of Books, 2020
A long essay reflecting on a soundwalk I led in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, while re... more A long essay reflecting on a soundwalk I led in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, while reading poems along the route by Kevin Brophy, Ella O'Keefe, Bonny Cassidy, Lisa Bellear, Tim Wright, Gig Ryan, and myself. The essay presents the Canadian tradition of soundwalking, as well as related literary histories, and thinks about the transposition of this activity to a city in Australia. It probes the relationships between urban and poetic sound, and between poetry and land (or Country)--especially the colonial and Aboriginal land histories pertinent to the location of the soundwalk.
Cordite Poetry Review, 2018
In this essay I offer an aural definition of the 'poetic', and use this to explore poetic sound d... more In this essay I offer an aural definition of the 'poetic', and use this to explore poetic sound design in radio and podcast programs. Using this scheme of the poetic I then examine some contemporary poetic radio productions, including 'Mostar' (2010) by Robyn Ravlich and 'Poetry, Tx' (2012) by Pejk Malinovski.
Journal Articles by Prithvi Varatharajan
JASAL, 2018
This article seeks to illuminate the entwined aesthetics of Vicki Viidikas’s poetry. Viidikas was... more This article seeks to illuminate the entwined aesthetics of Vicki Viidikas’s poetry. Viidikas was a Sydney poet: she lived in Balmain, and spent long periods of time in India later in life. She was part of the generation of ‘68, which revelled in the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and 70s. Viidikas published three books of poetry in her lifetime: Condition Red (1973), Knäbel (1978), and India Ink (1984), as well as a book of short stories and prose poems, Wrappings (1974). Between 1985 and 1998 she published only a handful of poems in journals; India Ink would be her last book.
The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.
Cultural Studies Review, 2017
'Ouyang Yu' was an episode that aired on ABC Radio National's Poetica, a weekly program broadcast... more 'Ouyang Yu' was an episode that aired on ABC Radio National's Poetica, a weekly program broadcast across Australia from 1997 to 2014. The episode featured readings of poetry by the contemporary Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, read by the poet and by the actor Brant Eustace. These readings were embedded in rich soundscapes, and framed by interviews with the poet on the thematic contexts for the poems. In this article I treat 'Ouyang Yu' as an adaptation of Ouyang's work, in Linda Hutcheon's sense of the term. I examine how Ouyang's poetry has been adapted for a national audience, and pay particular attention to how contemporary political discourses of nationhood have influenced the episode's adaptations. For Poetica existed within an institution—the ABC—whose culture had a bearing on its programming, and the ABC was in turn influenced by, and sought to influence, the wider social and political culture in Australia.
Adaptation, 2016
John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called ‘gene... more John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called ‘generation of 68’ who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes’s life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation A Layered Event. This article analyses representations of national identity in A Layered Event, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the ‘arboreal’ or unified versus the ‘rhizomic’ or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes’s poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity—arboreal and rhizomic—and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes’s work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of A Layered Event to reflect on the ABC’s role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that A Layered Event’s handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC’s negotiation of its Charter aim to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’, in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.
Books by Prithvi Varatharajan
Cordite Books, 2020
My debut collection of poems and prose, published in Melbourne by Cordite Books.
Bonny Cassid... more My debut collection of poems and prose, published in Melbourne by Cordite Books.
Bonny Cassidy's introduction to the book: http://cordite.org.au/introductions/cassidy-varatharajan/
My preface:
The writing that follows arose from states of joy, anguish, ambivalence and contemplation. The poems come from a period of ten years, while other poetic, essayistic and diaristic pieces were produced with intensity over a shorter duration.
Not long ago we humans began to share typed and contained expressions – whimsical, crass, artful, profound, wounded – instantly and with a large audience, through an expanding web of fibre optics. The poems straddle the rise of networked and relatively indiscriminate platforms for communication: some were produced before their rise, and fed by silence, while others were produced after, and fed by the ghost crackle of digitised speech.
The prose poems and prose all come from after, but from a period within the after when I’d left the main conduits. At the outset of my asceticism, I found I had a compulsion to communicate to a wide audience. I sought to satisfy this compulsion, which I’d never felt so strongly, and began sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients. As I wrote I felt I was consciously or unconsciously blending an older, poetic address – Eliot’s ‘I’ talking to itself or to nobody in particular – with recent communicative impulses. This seemed to create new possibilities for what the poem could be, and what it could enter into, as a form of mediated performance.
Book Chapters by Prithvi Varatharajan
Voice/Presence/Absence, 2014
This chapter moves from the recognition that there is a lack of scholarship on subjectivity, as i... more This chapter moves from the recognition that there is a lack of scholarship on subjectivity, as it is manifested in the radio voice reading lyric poetry, towards a theoretical framework that may enable such thinking. I review approaches to subjectivity in the written lyric poem, as well as to subjectivity in the radio voice, and argue that in the latter, the dominant concepts of authenticity and (dis)embodiment are inadequate to theorising subjectivity in the radio voice reading lyric poetry. I argue that Foucault's concept of the author function could, instead, be used to frame the radio voice reading lyric poetry; this is an extension of Foucault's concept, which originally referred to textual voice. In this chapter I use it to frame voiced text, and the way that voiced text manifests subjectivity in lyric poetry on the radio.
Pockets of Change: Adaptation and Cultural Transition, edited by Tricia Hopton, Adam Atkinson, Jane Stadler, and Peta Mitchell, 2011
This chapter focuses on a period of cultural transition in Indian English poetry. In the mid- to ... more This chapter focuses on a period of cultural transition in Indian English poetry. In the mid- to late-twentieth century, Indian poets writing in English sought to adapt the English language to India in their work. They sought to ‘Indian-ise’ English, claiming it as their own poetic language. This chapter also examines the impact of that adaptation on contemporary Indian English poetry, where colonisation is no longer the dominant concern. I argue that we ought to broaden our reading of contemporary Indian English poetry beyond the coloniser/colonised binary, through the concepts of vernacularism (being rooted in the local) and cosmopolitanism (engaging with culture trans-nationally). The use of these concepts, as critical frameworks, reveals in the poetry new attitudes towards English, and to the notion of authenticity: while place continues to be an important cultural identifier in contemporary Indian English poetry, poetic expressions of ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ cultures are becoming increasingly complex.
Book Reviews by Prithvi Varatharajan
Sydney Review of Books, 2020
My review of a new anthology of Australian essays on the Anthropocene titled Living with the Anth... more My review of a new anthology of Australian essays on the Anthropocene titled Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis (2020). This is the third of three reviews in my 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books.
Sydney Review of Books, 2020
My review of John Kinsella's new memoir, Displaced: A Rural Life (2020). This is the second of th... more My review of John Kinsella's new memoir, Displaced: A Rural Life (2020). This is the second of three reviews in my 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books.
Sydney Review of Books, 2020
My review of Western Australian poet Caitlin Maling's collection Fish Song (2019). This is the fi... more My review of Western Australian poet Caitlin Maling's collection Fish Song (2019). This is the first of three reviews in my 2020 Emerging Critics Fellowship with the Sydney Review of Books.
Text, 2019
A review of an audio adaptation of Jessica Wilkinson's biographical collection of poetry, 'marion... more A review of an audio adaptation of Jessica Wilkinson's biographical collection of poetry, 'marionette: a biography of Miss Marion Davies,' published in Text Journal, May 2019.
Plumwood Mountain, 2019
A review of Jill Jones' eleventh book of poetry, Viva the Real (2018), in Plumwood Mountain, an A... more A review of Jill Jones' eleventh book of poetry, Viva the Real (2018), in Plumwood Mountain, an Australian journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.
Cordite Poetry Review, 2017
A feature review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Collected Poems 1969-2015, published in Australia b... more A feature review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Collected Poems 1969-2015, published in Australia by Giramondo (2016).
Cordite Poetry Review, 2016
A feature review of Peter Boyle's Ghostspeaking (Vagabond Press, 2016) which contextualises Boyle... more A feature review of Peter Boyle's Ghostspeaking (Vagabond Press, 2016) which contextualises Boyle's use of heteronyms among other poets - particularly Fernando Pessoa - who have used heteronyms in their work.
Rabbit Poetry Journal, 2014
Review of Maria Takolander's book of poems 'The End of the World' (2014), in Rabbit 13 (2014), pp... more Review of Maria Takolander's book of poems 'The End of the World' (2014), in Rabbit 13 (2014), pp. 88-94.
Mascara Literary Review, Jun 2014
Published Interviews by Prithvi Varatharajan
Cordite Poetry Review, 2018
The subject of my interview with Cahill is her second book of poems, Vishvarūpa, which is a highl... more The subject of my interview with Cahill is her second book of poems, Vishvarūpa, which is a highly unusual book by a contemporary Australian poet. In Vishvarūpa Cahill reanimates figures from ancient Hindu mythology. Cahill takes Hindu gods and goddesses and drops them into suburban Sydney, and into various Indian cities. The poet adopts the voices of Hindu gods in the first person, in poems such as ‘Pārvatī in Darlinghurst’ and ‘Laksmi Under Oath,’ and writes them into poems in the third (‘Hanuman,’ ‘Sita’). Vishvarūpa is an experimental rendering of myth that is well known, in its conventional form, to Hindus, but would be relatively unknown to the Australian or Western reader; it contains a comprehensive glossary for this reason. The book draws on the Mahābhārataand the Rāmāyaṇa – Hindu narrative epics – and philosophy and scriptures in the Vedas. Cahill’s own background is Christian, as she tells me, although her ancestors were Hindus before India was colonised. As such, Vishvarūpa is the poet’s attempt to reconnect to a Hindu tradition that is in fact part of her heritage. Cahill has Goan-Anglo-Indian – or Eurasian – ancestry, and cultural identity is a prominent theme in her work.
I wanted to speak to Cahill about Vishvarūpa in particular because it is rare for an Australian poet, not to mention an Anglo-Indian, to engage deeply with Hindu mythology and philosophy in their work. While the artistic practice of adapting Hindu mythology is common in India, particularly among Hindus, it is uncommon in other countries and among other peoples. The contemporary Australian poet Susan Hawthorne embarks on a slightly different mythological quest in her 2011 collection Cow – which focuses on mythology around the figure of the cow in India and in ancient Greece, and is told through the perspective of a cow named Queenie. In our interview Cahill also mentions a few contemporary diasporic Indians who have reworked the Hindu narrative epics. We spoke about a range of subjects in relation to Vishvarūpa, including cultural identity, feminism, and travel, but with a particular focus on Cahill’s poetic adaptations of Hindu mythology in the book.
Southerly (Long Paddock), 2017
Poetica was a weekly poetry program broadcast on ABC Radio National from 1997 to 2014. The progra... more Poetica was a weekly poetry program broadcast on ABC Radio National from 1997 to 2014. The program was founded and hosted by the poet and broadcaster Mike Ladd. While there has been a long history of poetry on ABC radio since the 1930s (see Poetica’s program for the 75th anniversary of ABC Radio, broadcast on 30 June 2007 – the transcript is available online), Poetica was different to most other radio poetry programs, not just in Australia but in the world. It was a sonically complex program, featuring readings of poems – sometimes by actors, and sometimes by poets – embedded in rich soundscapes, typically made up of nature recordings, music from commercially released albums (or sometimes commissioned specifically for a show), digital sound effects, and framing commentary from poets and their peers. Other English-language radio and podcast poetry shows tend to focus on voice exclusively – readings by the poet, with discussion – so Poetica was unusual in its aesthetic make-up.
The program had a wide reach: at its peak it was heard by 90,000 listeners each week, as Ladd tells me in this interview. It made poetry accessible to the general public in Australia (in fact one of the aims set out in its program brief is to “take poetry to parts of Australia where there is no access to poetry performance and events”). All of this makes Poetica a fascinating cultural product. I’ve just completed a PhD thesis which looks specifically at Poetica’s representations of Australian identity in its episodes on Australian poets, but in this interview with Mike Ladd I took a broader look at the program. Mike and I discussed many aspects of Poetica, including its founding, its sonic composition, their use of actors, how they selected Australian poetry, and the program’s contributions to Australian literary culture.
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Essays by Prithvi Varatharajan
Journal Articles by Prithvi Varatharajan
The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.
Books by Prithvi Varatharajan
Bonny Cassidy's introduction to the book: http://cordite.org.au/introductions/cassidy-varatharajan/
My preface:
The writing that follows arose from states of joy, anguish, ambivalence and contemplation. The poems come from a period of ten years, while other poetic, essayistic and diaristic pieces were produced with intensity over a shorter duration.
Not long ago we humans began to share typed and contained expressions – whimsical, crass, artful, profound, wounded – instantly and with a large audience, through an expanding web of fibre optics. The poems straddle the rise of networked and relatively indiscriminate platforms for communication: some were produced before their rise, and fed by silence, while others were produced after, and fed by the ghost crackle of digitised speech.
The prose poems and prose all come from after, but from a period within the after when I’d left the main conduits. At the outset of my asceticism, I found I had a compulsion to communicate to a wide audience. I sought to satisfy this compulsion, which I’d never felt so strongly, and began sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients. As I wrote I felt I was consciously or unconsciously blending an older, poetic address – Eliot’s ‘I’ talking to itself or to nobody in particular – with recent communicative impulses. This seemed to create new possibilities for what the poem could be, and what it could enter into, as a form of mediated performance.
Book Chapters by Prithvi Varatharajan
Book Reviews by Prithvi Varatharajan
Published Interviews by Prithvi Varatharajan
I wanted to speak to Cahill about Vishvarūpa in particular because it is rare for an Australian poet, not to mention an Anglo-Indian, to engage deeply with Hindu mythology and philosophy in their work. While the artistic practice of adapting Hindu mythology is common in India, particularly among Hindus, it is uncommon in other countries and among other peoples. The contemporary Australian poet Susan Hawthorne embarks on a slightly different mythological quest in her 2011 collection Cow – which focuses on mythology around the figure of the cow in India and in ancient Greece, and is told through the perspective of a cow named Queenie. In our interview Cahill also mentions a few contemporary diasporic Indians who have reworked the Hindu narrative epics. We spoke about a range of subjects in relation to Vishvarūpa, including cultural identity, feminism, and travel, but with a particular focus on Cahill’s poetic adaptations of Hindu mythology in the book.
The program had a wide reach: at its peak it was heard by 90,000 listeners each week, as Ladd tells me in this interview. It made poetry accessible to the general public in Australia (in fact one of the aims set out in its program brief is to “take poetry to parts of Australia where there is no access to poetry performance and events”). All of this makes Poetica a fascinating cultural product. I’ve just completed a PhD thesis which looks specifically at Poetica’s representations of Australian identity in its episodes on Australian poets, but in this interview with Mike Ladd I took a broader look at the program. Mike and I discussed many aspects of Poetica, including its founding, its sonic composition, their use of actors, how they selected Australian poetry, and the program’s contributions to Australian literary culture.
The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.
Bonny Cassidy's introduction to the book: http://cordite.org.au/introductions/cassidy-varatharajan/
My preface:
The writing that follows arose from states of joy, anguish, ambivalence and contemplation. The poems come from a period of ten years, while other poetic, essayistic and diaristic pieces were produced with intensity over a shorter duration.
Not long ago we humans began to share typed and contained expressions – whimsical, crass, artful, profound, wounded – instantly and with a large audience, through an expanding web of fibre optics. The poems straddle the rise of networked and relatively indiscriminate platforms for communication: some were produced before their rise, and fed by silence, while others were produced after, and fed by the ghost crackle of digitised speech.
The prose poems and prose all come from after, but from a period within the after when I’d left the main conduits. At the outset of my asceticism, I found I had a compulsion to communicate to a wide audience. I sought to satisfy this compulsion, which I’d never felt so strongly, and began sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients. As I wrote I felt I was consciously or unconsciously blending an older, poetic address – Eliot’s ‘I’ talking to itself or to nobody in particular – with recent communicative impulses. This seemed to create new possibilities for what the poem could be, and what it could enter into, as a form of mediated performance.
I wanted to speak to Cahill about Vishvarūpa in particular because it is rare for an Australian poet, not to mention an Anglo-Indian, to engage deeply with Hindu mythology and philosophy in their work. While the artistic practice of adapting Hindu mythology is common in India, particularly among Hindus, it is uncommon in other countries and among other peoples. The contemporary Australian poet Susan Hawthorne embarks on a slightly different mythological quest in her 2011 collection Cow – which focuses on mythology around the figure of the cow in India and in ancient Greece, and is told through the perspective of a cow named Queenie. In our interview Cahill also mentions a few contemporary diasporic Indians who have reworked the Hindu narrative epics. We spoke about a range of subjects in relation to Vishvarūpa, including cultural identity, feminism, and travel, but with a particular focus on Cahill’s poetic adaptations of Hindu mythology in the book.
The program had a wide reach: at its peak it was heard by 90,000 listeners each week, as Ladd tells me in this interview. It made poetry accessible to the general public in Australia (in fact one of the aims set out in its program brief is to “take poetry to parts of Australia where there is no access to poetry performance and events”). All of this makes Poetica a fascinating cultural product. I’ve just completed a PhD thesis which looks specifically at Poetica’s representations of Australian identity in its episodes on Australian poets, but in this interview with Mike Ladd I took a broader look at the program. Mike and I discussed many aspects of Poetica, including its founding, its sonic composition, their use of actors, how they selected Australian poetry, and the program’s contributions to Australian literary culture.
Poetica was a weekly program broadcast on the ABC Radio National network from 1997 to 2014 in Australia. It presented artful programs on (mainly contemporary Australian) lyric poetry. These programs were often on a single poet—with the occasional anthology program on a theme—and featured sonic adaptations of the poems framed by commentary from the poet or their peers. The poems were sometimes read by the poet, sometimes by an actor, and were embedded in rich soundscapes that helped to set the poems in space, and/or to suggest a mood for the poems. As such, the poems were interpreted for the listener, not only through commentary (focused on biographical, literary, and political contexts), but also through music and sound effects.
In this paper I treat Poetica as having had the potential to change the comprehension of poetry in Australia, through its sonic adaptations: the program had an audience of approximately 60,000 people each Saturday, so its reach was significant. I first examine Poetica’s aesthetic differences from poetry on the page, drawing on Walter Ong’s notion of secondary orality in broadcasting media such as radio and television, and on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation. Did Poetica seek to return lyric poetry to its oral roots, or to make new versions of it in radio sound, or both? Having framed the paper with this question, I then examine Poetica’s formal and thematic contributions to Australian poetics, through its use of digital audio technologies in the radio studio.
This paper focuses on a radio program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s Radio National network, called Poetica. Poetica was a publically funded program that ran from 1997 to 2014 in Australia. It was Australia’s only weekly radio program dedicated to poetry, and reached up to 60,000 listeners per week. Poetica operated under the aegis of the ABC Charter, which stipulates that its programs should “contribute to a sense of national identity.” National public radio has historically been used for banal nationalist projects, to create a sense of national consciousness in its listeners, as a first step towards shaping national identity. However, scholars such as Maureen Burns have problematised the space-bound images of the nation that the ABC, and other public service broadcasters that advertise their “national” reach, have tended to subscribe to, and consequently to promote.
In this paper I examine the categories of national space into which Ouyang Yu, a contemporary Chinese-Australian lyric poet, is placed by a Poetica program on his work. The program was broadcast in 1997, and was called “Ouyang Yu.” The program makes a selection of Ouyang’s poetry, and adapts it into radio sound—through voice, music and sound effects—in ways that engage with spatially-informed images of the nation. It also uses interviews with the poet to frame his identity in terms of space and place: Ouyang is represented as being physically between two national cultures, with a foot in each, but without belonging to either.
The paper sheds light on how lyric poetry, notable for its one-to-one, confessional aesthetic (sometimes unbound to a particular space or place), is mobilised by a radio network conscious of a mass listenership in a so-called national space. Moreover, the lyric is little-used for nationalist agendas, when compared to the epic: in this regard, the paper will shed light on how lyric poetry may be mobilised “against the grain” for nation-building projects informed by space. While “Ouyang Yu” is my primary case study, I also make reference to Poetica programs from later years to deepen my analysis.
The paper will consider both the role of the text and the role of the program’s producer in guiding the listener’s affective responses. It will also consider how attitudes toward affect in Viidikas’ poetry align or fail to align with its performance, and what effect this may have on the poetry’s remediated meaning. I will argue that Vicki’s Voice mediates affective response, and in so doing provides a template of response for the listener. This is perhaps another way of saying that the radio program is an interpretation or adaptation of the work, analogous to theatre “productions” of texts which present the audience with a performance of affect in response to a text. The audience’s engagement with the production may then be seen to contain a second-level affective response: an affective response to the performance of affect/affective response.
Formalism is implicit in this approach, as I am considering Vicki’s Voice as an object which guides or shapes the listener’s responses. In this view, listeners may have different responses to each other, but—due to properties of the text itself—some responses are more likely than others, within a particular cultural context for reception. I am thinking here of Western-educated listeners, who largely constitute ABC Radio National’s target audience, and theoretical/critical texts on reader-response that consider structural constraints for reception, such as Jonathan Culler’s “Literary Competence” and Patricia Smith’s “Icons in the Canyon.”
I have so far gestured toward the text(s) and the listener, but what about the author? Does the “author” of Vicki’s Voice influence the affective responses of the listener? To this end, I will consider Vicki’s Voice as a performance authored or curated by the producer of the program, using voice and sound. I will entertain the idea that the curated performance could be seen to mimic the producer’s own responses, as the producer would presumably not present a performance which is at odds with their own affective responses to the source text. The program’s listeners are then invited to participate in this performance of response, and perhaps to replicate it as the preferred one. This does not perpetuate the intentional fallacy, but rather considers whether intermediary “authors” or “curators” may shape affective responses, in the way that a theatre director may be seen to shape an audience’s affective responses, without however dictating meaning.
I will argue that poetic radio soundscapes have been a historical contemporary of poetry on the radio, with reference to traditions of avant-garde radio art (such as in Germany in the 1960s), some of which may be considered poetic. Moreover, I will argue that poetic devices such as rhyme, alliteration and assonance do not necessarily require the voice to carry them—and that radio ought to be conceptualised more rigorously as a sonic medium for poetry, rather than as merely a platform for its transmission (if, indeed, it is possible for a medium to “transmit” poetry without shaping or being shaped by it), in the way that the page or the live voice are mediums for poetry.
Seán Street’s The Poetry of Radio: The Colour of Sound and Michael Ladd’s “Notes Towards a Radio Poetics” will inspire my investigation of the boundaries between poetry and sound, and between poetry and the radio soundscape. Part of this investigation will comprise an examination of non-verbal sound as a historical antonym to verbal sound, and of the relationship between sound and verbally-signified meaning. I will make a comparative analysis of non-verbal and verbal sound as signifiers, and interrogate in particular Street’s idea that “there is a poetry of pure sound, something that sings on beyond the words, like music, but subtly different” (xii), as well as concepts such as “sound rhyme,” coined by Michael Ladd to describe a radio soundscape’s coupling of two similar sounds which signify entirely different objects, and “sound metaphor,” to describe a sound which, in a particular programmatic context, is part of a chain of significations (167).
I argue that expressions of subjectivity in lyrical poems can be embodied by the spoken voice, and given full shape and weight when read aloud or performed to an audience. I argue in particular that the recorded and broadcast voice can intensify, and make present, subjectivities expressed in lyrical poetry. I take the ABC Radio National’s Poetica, a weekly program of poetry, as my case study when referring to the vocal performance of lyrical poetry on the radio.
I refer to recent theories of acoustics, such as those which emphasize the role of sound in literature, describing certain literary works in print as “phono-texts” (texts for the ear) as much as “grapho-texts” (texts for the eye). Using these theories, I argue that hearing a vocal performance of a poem, in a recording or a broadcast, ought to be understood as being linked to a so-called “silent reading” of a poem to oneself, in one’s own mind. I argue that these ought to be considered as interconnected, even interdependent processes of reception.
In closing I consider the implications of recorded literature for reading and for hearing. In an era of radio, loudspeakers, iPods and podcasting, hearing is important as a mode of reception. If more poetry were recorded, broadcast and podcast, how would this affect the way we comprehend poetic texts, both in print and on record? Could it engender a shift from reading to hearing, from a “close reading” of texts to a “close listening” of them?