If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

Jazz is a music that did not merely inspire works of literature; in many cases it aspired toward the literary. Drawing from Ralph Ellison’s impulse to praise the jazz rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as containing a “range of allusion [that] was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong,” this chapter offers an overview of the aesthetic, thematic, and political motivations of jazz and modernist literature from blues and ragtime to the emergence of bebop. In exploring jazz as one of the “forms” of American modernism, I attend to the experimental formal variations in the poetry and prose of a wide range of authors, including Sterling Brown, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and others, but also to the radical form of the blues by Louis Armstrong, W. C. Handy, and Bessie Smith.

Perhaps no writer was more attuned to the shape-shifting nature of sound recording technology than John Dos Passos, whose fascination with modern mass media inflected his early writing and shaped the form of his multimodal novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1934, 1936). By the mid-1920s, the phonograph was no longer new and was, in fact, threatened with obsolescence by the emergence of the radio. And yet, at the same moment that radio began to encroach on the consumer market for phonographs, rapid changes were taking place in sound reproduction -- including the introduction of the condenser microphone and electrical recording -- that were reshaping the ways people would hear recorded sound. As I show, Dos Passos’s innovation was to make use of readers’ ears as highly tuned instruments for listening. But now these novels require a recuperative act of resonant reading to resurface the sonic logic of Dos Passos’s noisy prose.

In the Postscript, I turn to Anne Washburn’s 2012 Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play. Set in a postapocalyptic near-future after the electrical grid has collapsed, Mr. Burns offers a meditation on the persistence of storytelling in a postdigital age. Although the premise is simple, even comical -- a band of survivors try to recall and restage episodes of the The Simpsons -- the play’s remix of the detritus of contemporary popular culture offers a more serious appraisal of the digital era and the nature of art. However, my own reading reveals surprising ironies about even the most digitally resistant genre (theatre) and the embeddedness of sound recording in present-day writing practices. The questions posited about the relationships between new and old media, and between sound recording, writing, and performance, are ones that reverberate across this book.

My third chapter investigates the use of tape recording as a mode of composition for late-modernists Jack Kerouac (Visions of Cody) and William S. Burroughs (The Ticket That Exploded). For Kerouac, the impulse was toward improvisatory transcription, but for Burroughs, tape was an integral part of his notorious “cut-up method.” I focus on the emergence of commercially available tape recording technologies in the 1950s and 1960s, which enabled amateurs to record as well as edit, loop, and manipulate recordings in other imaginative ways. In both novels that I explore, tapes play a key role within the plot; but they were also employed in the construction of the texts. As friends and collaborators with largely different approaches to tape, Kerouac and Burroughs demonstrate how the transformation of agency from consumer to producer of recordings shifted the ways writers imagined their literary projects.

Given the increasingly important role that music, especially jazz, played in the American literary soundscape, my second chapter explores two instances of jazz autobiography: Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1950) and Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle (1960). Through my analysis, I reveal the critical intervention of Zora Neale Hurston in shaping the practices of transcription so that the voices represented on the page adhere to the “laws of sound.” While the tendency has been to read Lomax and Bechet’s books in the context of popular jazz autobiography, I argue that the avant-garde nature of their transcription practices warrant their consideration alongside more canonical works of modernist prose. These books are not oral histories but rather aural histories that require readers to think critically about the sonic identities of musicians who themselves experimented with recording technology.

The fifth chapter reads contemporary remix culture against the long history of literary engagement with technologies of sound. While the literary remixes of poet Kevin Young (To Repel Ghosts: The Remix [2005]) and novelist Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters Remix [2012]) serve as case studies of the ways writers have adapted the practice of remix to the medium of print, the scope of this chapter is more wide ranging, investigating remix as a cross-disciplinary aesthetic mode. I explore the origins of remix in the dance hall but also in the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs; I examine how remix inflects more traditional literary publications but also its impact on digital spaces for iterative writing (such as fan fiction). This chapter reveals that remix’s inherently textual bent has been embedded in the practice since the beginning.

In Chapter 4, I consider how poets reconfigured the long-play stereo album and challenged the spatial limits of the printed book. In particular, I turn to Langston Hughes’s LP book Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) and Amiri Baraka’s poetry album It’s Nation Time (1972), recorded for Motown’s Black Forum label, in order to discuss how the stereo LP opened new black sonic spaces at a contentious moment in history. While many poets made recordings during the 1960s, what distinguishes these works is their ongoing dialogue with the specificities of stereo sound, the LP, and sound in its spatial dimensions. Part of what is radical about a stereophonic poetic is the way that it opens a space within a space -- one that sits neither inside nor outside history.

When Gertrude Stein published Three Lives, her first book-length work, in 1909, readers were struck by her peculiar, repetitive style. As one dust jacket review put it, Stein’s prose was like a “stubborn phonograph.” Taken in passing, the comparison might seem unremarkable, but in 1909, when the phonograph was still a relatively new technology, the dust jacket remark penned by Georgiana Goddard King (a Reader in English at Bryn Mawr College) reveals how at least one early reader heard Gertrude Stein. According to King, Stein had “pushed the method of realism as far as it would go,” and “the patient iteration, the odd style, with all its stops and starts, like a stubborn phonograph, are a part of the incantation. The reader must take it or leave it, – but always, taken or left, it remains astonishing.”