Poetry in Stereo

I am looking forward to speaking about the poetry of tape as part of the 2019 symposium of the New Zealand Modernist Studies Consortium. My paper for the symposium, “Poetry in Stereo: Towards a World Literature of Tape,” builds on my work on Kamau Brathwaite’s innovative use of the medium in the 1960s. As I show in Make It the Same, Brathwaite’s influential account of “nation language” in History of the Voice stems from his earlier use of the then new medium of tape. Since writing Make It the Same, I’ve had a chance to visit the wonderful George Padmore Institute in London and to listen to some of the extraordinary tape recordings made by Kamau Brathwaite and others, such as Doris Brathwaite and John La Rose, during their involvement in the Caribbean Artists Movement. I’ll be drawing on some of the fruits of that listening when I speak at the Univeristy of Waikato in Hamilton at the end of next week.