A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives

Abstract

From the New American Poetry to New Formalism, publishing networks such as literary magazines and social scenes such as poetry reading series have served as a capacious mod-el for understanding the varied poetic formations in the postwar period. As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein has suggested that open access to digital archives allows readers of American poetry to create mixtapes in different configurations. Digital archives of poetry readings “offer an intriguing and powerful alternative” to organizing practices such as networks and scenes. Placing Bern-stein’s definition of the digital audio archive into contact with more conventional under-standings of poetic community gives us a composite vision of organizing principles in postwar American poetry. To accomplish this, we compared poetry reading venues as well as audio archives — alongside more familiar print networks constituted by poetry an-thologies and magazines — as important and distinct sites of reception for American poet-ry. We used network analysis to visualize the relationships of individual poets to venues where they have read, archives where their readings are stored, and text anthologies where their poetry has been printed. Examining several types of poetic archives offers us a new perspective in how we perceive the relationships between poets and their “networks and scenes,” understood both in terms of print and audio culture, as well as trends and chang-es in the formation of these poetic communities and affiliations. We suggest that this ap-proach may offer new ways of imagining the multiple dimensions contributing to the so-cial formation of contemporary American poetry.