Broadcasting Dialect: Sterling Brown, Norman Corwin, and Latent Remediation

In 1939, the radio-dramatist Norman Corwin broadcast two poems by Sterling Brown on a special episode of CBS's Words Without Music dedicated to 'Negro poetry.' The circumstances of Corwin's radio adaptation reveal a specific dimension of Brown's achievement as a poet of black, dialect that is difficult to apprehend on the printed page: the poetry's own constitutive relation to the media-ecological conditions of its making. Brown's poems can be said to resist the exclusionary terms of midcentury network broadcasting precisely insofar as they bear the latent traces of prior encounters with mass media. Formulated with regard to Brown and Corwin, the concept of latent remediation offers a means ofgrasping how a technologizedsoundscape can materially transform the formal protocols even of poems never destined for the airwaves. Keywords: Sterling Brown / radio / poetry / dialect / media
At 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 15, 1939, radio listeners tuning in to their local CBS affiliates enjoyed the seventh installment of Norman Corwin's Words Without Music, a new sustaining [...]