• Contents and Abstracts1Third Personism: The FBI's Poetics of Immediacy in the 1960s chapter abstractThis chapter uses the reel-to-reel recordings Allen Ginsberg made on a cross-country trip in 1966 to focalize the contested status of audio research as it was then fought over by the New Left and the U.S. state. Reframing Frank O'Hara's suggestion in "Personism" that greater immediacy with his friends "Allen" (Ginsberg) and "Roi" (LeRoi Jones) might be achieved by calling them, the chapter considers what it means for postwar poetics that such New Left poets were often under state audio surveillance. Bringing poets, literary critics and the state into unexpected proximity, the chapter offers an account of the guiding assumptions and pitfalls associated with the CIA and FBI's often Yale-trained literary critics, demonstrating how all three confront the overwhelming of voice by its noisy sonic environment and how the state's theory of totality might be compared to that of famous literary theorists like Fredric Jameson.
• 2The Eigner Sanction: Keeping Time from the American Century chapter abstractChapter two explores Larry Eigner's development of a counter-temporality in relation to his dominant reception, the domestic mediascape he daily negotiated, the surrounding cold war defense infrastructure, and the Luce media empire's regulation of Americans' experience of time. Presenting Eigner's reflexive daily neighborhood sound and sight monitoring as a counterpoint to the Cold War surveillance jets that performed the same function over his neighborhood, the chapter shows how the urgent events that course through Eigner's airspace get recast by the poet's horizontal model of time. Eigner's role as an alternate broadcasting system then gets drawn out through an analysis of the ways that the Luce media (referenced by Eigner) took on the roll of organizing national time at the level of the week, month, year and even century.
• 3Olson's Sonic Walls: Citizenship and Surveillance from the OWI to the Nixon Tapes chapter abstractChapter three positions Charles Olson's education in American studies at Harvard and his work for the OWI in relation to postwar area studies and models of evidence, research and network building demonstrated on his recordings, whose confrontational dynamics and insistence on the real time of research are related to postwar sound and performance art. The chapter then uses Henry Kissinger's Harvard education, including Paul de Man's French tutoring, as a way to study the infrastructure of postwar area studies that underlay Kissinger's later audio surveillance, including his taping of Allen Ginsberg. Comparing Kissinger's understanding of tape to Olson's, the chapter draws out the "avant-garde" nature of Kissinger's audio research in which documentation transcends a hypothesis, a claim that gets tested by considering a 1975 court case in which Hayden White brought suit against the LAPD for planting officer pretending to be students in his class at UCLA.
• 4"The Strategic Idea of North: Glenn Gould, Sergeant Jones and White Alice" chapter abstractConsidering the sound documentaries of R. Murray Schafer and Glenn Gould, this chapter first places the origins of sound studies within nationalist Canadian conceptions of geography and culture before then outlining the American Cold War technological infrastructure that preceded these musicians' movements into Canadian space, especially the three lines of radar stations erected to monitor Soviet incursions into the North American continent. The chapter then considers the mechanics of this system via a case study of one of its functionaries, sergeant LeRoi Jones, whose practice missions of atomic reprisal aboard a B36 peacemaker were signaled by a hellish siren particularly noted by the sergeant. The chapter concludes by following this siren-sound into the poet and music critic's later work, as Amiri Baraka, fashioning exemplary sounds of Black Nationalism.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: the penning of the field
• Boring location: from place to site in Williams and Smithson
• Olson's archives: fieldwork in new American poetry
• Everyday archaic: the space of ethnopoetics
• Baraka's Newark: performing the black arts
• Nonsite Bolinas: presence in the poets' polis
• Smithson's "Judd": androids in the expanded field
• Smithson's prose: the grounds of genre
• Faulting description: Mayer, Coolidge, and the site of scientific authority
• Docents of discourse: the logic of dispersed sites
• Afterword: measuring sites, unbinding measures.

Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site. Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent poets sought to ground such inquiries in concrete social formations - to in effect live the poetics of place: Gary Snyder in his back-to-the-land familial compound, Kitkitdizze; Amiri Baraka in a black nationalist community in Newark; Robert Creeley and the poets of Bolinas, California, in the capacious 'now' of their poet-run town. Turning to the work of Robert Smithson - who called one of his essays an 'appendix to Paterson, ' and who in turn has exerted a major influence on poets since the 1970s - Shaw then traces the emergence of site-specific art in relation both to the poetics of place and to the larger linguistic turn in the humanities, considering poets including Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and Lisa Robertson. By putting the poetics of place into dialog with site-specificity in art, Shaw demonstrates how poets and artists became experimental explicators not just of concrete locations and their histories, but of the discourses used to interpret sites more broadly. It is this dual sense of fieldwork that organizes Shaw's groundbreaking history of site-specific poetry.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: the penning of the field
• Boring location: from place to site in Williams and Smithson
• Olson's archives: fieldwork in new American poetry
• Everyday archaic: the space of ethnopoetics
• Baraka's Newark: performing the black arts
• Nonsite Bolinas: presence in the poets' polis
• Smithson's "Judd": androids in the expanded field
• Smithson's prose: the grounds of genre
• Faulting description: Mayer, Coolidge, and the site of scientific authority
• Docents of discourse: the logic of dispersed sites
• Afterword: measuring sites, unbinding measures.

Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site. Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent poets sought to ground such inquiries in concrete social formations - to in effect live the poetics of place: Gary Snyder in his back-to-the-land familial compound, Kitkitdizze; Amiri Baraka in a black nationalist community in Newark; Robert Creeley and the poets of Bolinas, California, in the capacious 'now' of their poet-run town. Turning to the work of Robert Smithson - who called one of his essays an 'appendix to Paterson, ' and who in turn has exerted a major influence on poets since the 1970s - Shaw then traces the emergence of site-specific art in relation both to the poetics of place and to the larger linguistic turn in the humanities, considering poets including Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and Lisa Robertson. By putting the poetics of place into dialog with site-specificity in art, Shaw demonstrates how poets and artists became experimental explicators not just of concrete locations and their histories, but of the discourses used to interpret sites more broadly. It is this dual sense of fieldwork that organizes Shaw's groundbreaking history of site-specific poetry.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

In this stimulating and innovative synthesis of New York's artistic and literary worlds, Lytle Shaw uses the social and philosophical problems involved in "reading" a coterie to propose a new language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). O'Hara's poems are famously filled with proper names - from those of his immediate friends and colleagues in the New York writing and art worlds (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Grace Hartigan, Willem de Kooning, and many musicians, dancers, and filmmakers) to a broad range of popular cultural and literary heroes (Apollinaire to Jackie O). But rather than understand O'Hara's most commonly referenced names as a fixed and insular audience, Shaw argues that he uses the ambiguities of reference associated with the names to invent a fluid and shifting kinship structure - one that opened up radical possibilities for a gay writer operating outside the structure of the family. As Shaw demonstrates, this commitment to an experimental model of association also guides O'Hara's art writing. Like his poetry, O'Hara's art writing too has been condemned as insular, coterie writing. In fact, though, he was alone among 1950s critics in his willingness to consider abstract expressionism not only within the dominant languages of existentialism and formalism but also within the cold war political and popular cultural frameworks that anticipate many of the concerns of contemporary art historians. Situating O'Hara within a range of debates about art's possible relations to its audience, Shaw demonstrates that his interest in coterie is less a symptomatic offshoot of his biography than a radical literary and artistic invention.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)