ROBERT SHEPPARD Critical Tuning
Radio Interference & Interruption as a Poetics for Writing Mayakovsky dreamt of a radio station for poets. —Viktor Shklovsky
62 |
When I appeared on Rob Holloway’s radio show Up for Air in November 2003, the engineer at Resonance FM noticed how many references to radio there were in my poems. While one of my chosen records was playing, we set up a microphone for him to repeat these remarks on air. It was true, I admitted, there were references to radio (or wireless) in a number of my poems. For example, Book 2 of The Lores is a narrative of a fascist traitor who broadcasts for the Nazis, a fictional analogue of the real Lord Haw-Haw, the man I mention elsewhere for having broadcast the news that my father—Bomber Command rear air gunner—was a POW in 1944. Perhaps—deeper than this—there was a serious analogy to be teased out. I spoke a little of the importance of mass communications in the twentieth century, but that was only half the story. I said that I’d always been fascinated by radio, that I was a DX-er as a teenager. DX is code for (long-)distance. In other words, I listened to radio broadcasts from around the world. The log I kept contains entries such as these: Quite a few weaker hams. Radio Nordsee International doing old Caroline thing of flashing headlamps from shore. Radio Denmark’s last broadcast badly jammed on 19 mts. Radio Kiev (from Russia’s Ukraine) answering questions and playing music from the USSR. Radio Prague from hidden base at 113—fairly clear. Radio Pyongyang—or DX prog on 9—not in English—very bad reception—the 41metre band unusually workable. Radio Tirana: the people who bend the news. This points to another (dual) thematic focus of my work: war aviation and prison camps, which met in the long poem ‘Schräge Musik,’ Complete Twentieth Century Blues (Cambridge: Salt, 2008) 20-36. (The Lores may also be found in this volume: 168-217, with Book Two located at 172-177.) Recently reading Ian Patterson’s concise book Guernica (London: Profile, 2007) I suspect that this material is not exhausted.
S.B.C. Call sign. Sun Radio, a pirate broadcaster playing last hours of Radio London and the going illegal of Radio Caroline.
From amateur radio, which didn’t interest me at all, since there was no content—the operators were expressly forbidden to discuss politics—to medium wave pirate stations playing rock. In some cases these were offshore, in others, Sun Radio for example, it broadcast from a house round the corner every Sunday afternoon, louder than any other station on air! From short wave liberal democratic soft-propaganda to Soviet and Chinese hardpropaganda. Radio Tirana was the (literally) loudest Maoist mouthpiece on air. Such was the Babel I frequented. The log shows that I listened intently between 1968 and 1970. Occasionally, I caught world events. The covert operations of Radio Free Prague (an incident from the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia that turns up in my short story “The Selected Bibliographies of František Tropp”). Or Radio Moscow rather solemnly announcing that Apollo 11 had landed on the Moon, the Russians throwing in the towel in the Space Race. This is preserved still on the hours of media source plus independent commentary that I recorded for myself on cassette tape on the moon-landings, my own private radio documentary. In short, radio was ubiquitous, and was suffused with ideology and historical questions of its own legitimacy, and sometimes legality. A whole history is encoded in my bland log entry on Radio Kiev. Amid the whistles, static and distortion of the short wave bands (25, 32, etc.) a plurality of voices spoke to me. If I wanted music, on the other hand, that required a more consistent reception, not one that made all songs sound like the In Short Fiction 1 (2007): 136-163.