Drawn from Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (Stanford, 2018), this talk relates Larry Eigner’s poetics of daily neighborhood sound and sight monitoring to surrounding infrastructures of Cold War defense and domestic media, from nearby surveillance planes to his his parents’ indiscriminate television and radio consumption. While military surveillance flights, commercial airline crashes, potential nuclear explosions, network TV, and mainstream radio all course through Einger’s airspace, their eventful urgency gets recast by the poet’s horizontal model of time. This talk draws out the implications of Eigner’s self-assigned task of turning himself into a kind of alternate broadcasting system by framing his poetics of ongoingness in relation to Luce media’s careful organization national time at the level of the week, month, year and even century.

Lytle Shaw is professor of English at New York University and a founding contributing editor for Cabinet magazine. His books include Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), The Moiré Effect (2012), Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (2013), and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018).