CLASSIFICATION
Swallow ID:
1298
Partner Institution:
Concordia University
Source Collection Label:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
Series:
The Poetry Series
Sub Series:
SGWU Reading Series-Concordia University Department of English fonds
ITEM DESCRIPTION
Title:
Maxine Gadd and Andreas Schroeder at Sir George Williams University, The Poetry Series, 18 February 1972
Title Source:
Cataloguer
Title Note:
"SCHROEDER & GADD 1/4 I006-11-109.1" written on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. "I006-11-109.1" written on sticker on the reel. "POETRY 6 TAPE #1 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER" written on the front of the tape's box.
"SCHROEDER & GADD 2/4 I006-11-109.2" written on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. "I006-11-109.2" written on sticker on the reel. "POETRY 6 TAPE #2 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER #2" written on the front of the tape's box.
'SCHROEDER & GADD 3/4 I006-11-109.3" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. "I006-11-109.3" written on sticker on the reel. "POETRY 6 TAPE #3 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER #3" written on the front of the tape's box.
"SCHROEDER & GADD 4/4 I006-11-109.4" written on sticker on the spine of the tape's box. SCHROEDER & GADD refers to Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd. "I006-11-109.4" written on sticker on the reel. "POETRY 6 TAPE #4 OF 4 SCHROEDER & GADD 2-72-012-6 3 3/4 ips MASTER #4" written on the front of the tape's box.
Language:
English
Production Context:
Documentary recording
Genre:
Reading: Poetry
Identifiers:
[I006-11-109.1, I006-11-109.2, I006-11-109.3, I006-11-109.4]
Rights
CREATORS
Name:
Gadd, Maxine
Dates:
1940-
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
Canadian poet Maxine Gadd was born in London, England in 1940, but moved to the West Coast as a young child in 1946. Gadd attended the University of British Columbia and published her poetry with the UBC journal The Raven. Gadd was married and had a baby by the time she graduated with her B.A. She spent some time in California with her child, then she returned to Vancouver. Gadd reunited with the poetry scene and met bill bissett. Her first collection of poetry, Guns of the West was published by bill bissett’s blewointment press in 1967, and was followed by Practical Knowledge (Intermedia, 1969). Gadd was a founding member of Vancouver’s Intermedia as well as being involved with the Poetry Front. She then published a series of chapbooks, hochelaga (blewointment press, 1970), air two (Air Press, 1971), Westerns (Air Press, 1975), and Fire in the Cove (mother tongue Press, 2001). Gadd lived in a commune on Galiano Island until 1984, when she moved back to Vancouver and was associated with the Kootenay School of Writing. In 1982, Daphne Marlatt and Ingrid Klassen published through Coach House Press Gadd’s Lost language: selected poems. Most recently, Gadd published Backup to Babylon: poems, 1972-1987 (New Star Books, 2006), which was nominated by the BC Book Prize and Subway Under Byzantium: Poems, 1988-1996 (New Star Books, 2008). An excerpt from “Mazine Meets Proteus in Gastown” from Backup to Babylon was part of Vancouver’s ‘Poetry in Transit’ project in 2007, and was shown on Vancouver busses.
Name:
Schroeder, Andreas
Dates:
1946-
Role:
"Author",
"Performer"
Notes:
Andreas Schroeder was born in 1946 in Hoheneggelsen, Germany before his family immigrated to Canada in 1951. Schroeder grew up on a farm in the Fraser Valley in B.C., until he was fifteen when his family moved to Vancouver. He enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program where he studied under Michael Bullock and J. Michael Yates and received his B.A. in 1969. He founded and edited The Journal of Contemporary Literature in Translation (1968-80) and worked as a columnist for the Vancouver Province (1968-73). Schroeder’s first collections of poetry were The ozone minotaur (Sono Nis Press, 1969) and File of uncertainties (Sono Nis Press, 1971), a collection of concrete poetry UNIverse (MassAge Press, 1971) and a collection of short stories, The late man (Sono Nis Press, 1972). Schroeder completed his M.A. in 1972 from the University of British Columbia, and began teaching creative writing at the University of Victoria from 1974-1975. Schroeder was the chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada between 1976-1977. His most popular book was Shaking it rough (Doubleday, 1976), and he has published over twenty books in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, radio drama, journalism, translation and criticism. Schroeder then taught at the University of British Columbia (1985-7) and at Simon Fraser University (1989-90), publishing The Mennonites: a pictorial history of their lives in Canada (Douglas & McIntyre, 1990), Carved from wood: Mission, B.C. 1891-1992 (Mission Foundation, 1991) and Scams, scandals and scullduggery (M & S, 1996). Schroeder worked as the “resident crookologist” or “resident Scam-meister” on the CBC Radio show Basic Black, which produced a few collections of history’s greatest scams, including a children’s book, Scams! (Annick Press, 2004). His most recent publication is Renovating Heaven (Ooolichan, 2008), and he continues to teach and write in B.C.
CONTRIBUTORS
Name:
Sommer, Richard
Dates:
1934-2012
Role:
"Presenter",
"Series organizer"
MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Mono
Generations:
Master
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
Recording Type:
Analogue
AV Type:
Audio
Material Designation:
Reel to Reel
Physical Composition:
Magnetic Tape
Extent:
1/4 inch
Playing Speed:
3 3/4 ips
Playback Mode:
Mono
Tape Brand:
Scotch
Sound Quality:
Good
DIGITAL FILE DESCRIPTION
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:21:09
Size:
50.8 MB
Content:
maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-1.mp3 [File 1 of 4]
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:00:00
I'd like to introduce you to two poets who are Vancouver
friends of mine. Their poetry is quite different, as you'll discover. But from my own point of view, they...I owe both of them a debt that is similar in both cases though neither probably knows it. They've made me, in their own ways, rethink my own feelings about what ought to constitute poetry and poems. And in the case of Maxine Gadd, this thinking went into a review which was then sent to the Firepoint which then folded. So you may never see that. And in the case of Andy Schroeder
, found its way into a long tape harangue between the two of us on the subject of form in poetry. Which I think is now in the Sir George Williams Library
, where any of you can endure it if you wish to. At any rate, the first of these poets to read will be Maxine Gadd. There will be a fifteen minute break, and then Andreas Schroeder will read. Maxine.
Audience
00:01:32
Applause.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:02:01
You're plugged in.
Maxine Gadd
00:02:03
Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do. I don't know how much to talk about the poetry. My connection is very loose to the mainstream I guess, because, I don't know, I'm just not socially related to what's going on maybe in the poetry reading. I guess my identifications with words are somewhat with a West Coast hippie trip. And between the country and the city, the first feeling being, you know, the desire for purity, you know when you're seventeen or eighteen years old and you've figured the country life is it. And later coming to realize the necessity of the communal life and the city. So I think that's a task I'm going to try to set myself right here. I...this...I'm going to read first of all the second "well" poem, which I did, experienced in the country, living in the country. I remember the first "well" poem, I don't remember where it's gone, because it didn't get published. I disregarded its importance, you know. I tended to take the judgment of editors, and you know, people that set themselves up as authorities, and that's why I'm here, you know. I've kept close enough to them, I guess. I remember the first one went something like, "Wanting pure water I went to the well/too wonderful"...and there was something about the oracle as the bucket clacked. This is the “Second Well Poem”.
Maxine Gadd
00:03:57
Reads "Second Well Poem" [published later as “Well poem” in Lost Language].
Maxine Gadd
00:04:41
Which is about where I feel right now. But that's about where my connection to poetry is right now. I wonder if that...I wonder if that one's around. I don't think it is. I guess I'll just take it as it comes. There's some scheme in this. I guess, I got published by a cat, by bill bissett
you might have heard, who did the thing, did the guru thing, the super-energy thing of getting a lot of work done, and getting a lot of people's work out, and a lot of his work out, a lot of it was real shit but he got it out, you know, and some of it worked and some of it didn't, but there was so much of it, you know...I'd like to have had that confidence, you know, I guess almost, most people write poetry, they've got it all in their trunk, you know, they don't get it out. But I guess that's what it takes. This is from one of his first, really cheap magazines. He put, he...it's typed, you know. Pretty good typing. His typing got worse, I get very angry, he makes lots of mistakes. But he did a lot of drawings and things, if anybody wants to look at it, you know. I mean, he did it minimum, you know, he was living really poor. And a lot of people still read his stuff, so, I mean, to me he was a folk poet in that sense, a lot of people still read his stuff because he got the stuff out cheap, you know. "Trip".
Maxine Gadd
00:06:05
Reads "Trip".
Maxine Gadd
00:07:47
I'm going to go over there. This one is to a poet who is in the, is in another world, okay? He looks like a silver lizard, and he's very beautiful, and he knows all about the Greek trip, and Eleusis, which is one's talking about in the first poem, okay, the oracles from under the ground, that belief you must start out with. It's called...and it's admiration, as well as a bit of terror.
Maxine Gadd
00:08:22
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:10:19
Leary, I should have mentioned, was Timothy Leary. Oh, I should have explained that before, yeah. Oh yeah, this is where I met...now I don't like it okay? And it's probably not a good poem. But that's, that's...you know, that's...the kind of art form I'd like to have seen as a collective art form, was what I yearned and hoped for. Poetry is what people write in rooms alone, and I don't like...I don't, you know, that's what I was stuck with. And I worked for a while with a group in Vancouver called, named, we called it "Intermedia". And I had the experience of working with a group, at one point there were five of us poets, you know, or what we called poets. And we'd go around to various places, we went to Edmonton
one time, and we tried things, we tried chanting and wailing, like, was it...who was that crazy old lady. Sitwell, Edith Sitwell
, remember her? And if you ever heard the sort of sing, the song, sing sing she used to do, you know, we tried that. And it really worked, you know, but you'd go around and you'd say, "Do you dig the poems?" and they'd say, "I can't hear them, but we really like your voice." You know. [Audience laughter]. So, you know, left that, you got an ache in the gut or something.
Maxine Gadd
00:11:37
Reads "Ratio".
Maxine Gadd
00:12:48
I don't like it. I don't want to be there. Here's one from last year. I got into printing stuff myself, you know, and I do that--I wish, oh, you can't see it, can you? It was mimeograph, it was real cheap, you know? And you could take images, you could take newspaper articles, you could take scraps of anything you saw that you dug, you know, put 'em together, and to me that was a, that was a form of concrete poetry. Can't, of course, I don't know, you couldn't really say that one or any number of them. This one is half-said, okay. Behind it I put a map, I found a map of B.C.
and Minster Island
was a map, was an island I found once when I was working on a ship as a mess girl, on a freighter.
Maxine Gadd
00:13:46
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:15:33
And where that ended up was just over the name Bella Coola
, which is sort of where they do, can fish. There's no escape, though, you know? And...so then I want to read about Kitsilano
, where most of...I happened, you know, I grew up. Kitsilano's a sort of slum district of Vancouver. And it's disintegrating, and you probably all experienced this, you know, being city people, you know, they're bulldozing the places, there's no more cheap places to live, and so your friends, you know, you can't live there anymore, your friends can't live there anymore, so whatever you had, which was sometimes very heavy, you know, community's really beautiful, you know? I used to go over and play music with my friends. We had to move out, you know, because the city's being destroyed, and only the people who are well-to-do, who have some sort of stake in the city, you know, who are supporting the structure can stay. And this poem is about somebody who I met one day on the street, you know, and her story, she's sort of sick, just on the street, everything's falling to pieces.
Maxine Gadd
00:16:55
Reads “bee-people on 4th avenue” [published later in Lost Language].
Maxine Gadd
00:18:32
Who's singing out there? But here, on the next street, you know, I ran into a friend of mine. Her name's Martina. And, you know, we're about the same age, and we've been through a lot of things, and, we've been through some bad things, you know, lots of rejections and refusal, no, there's no food now, you can't have any, go away, you know, fighting over somebody or other.
Maxine Gadd
00:18:58
Reads “4th ave” [published later in Lost Language].
Maxine Gadd
00:20:49
Us old ladies. Okay, but that's not entirely true. I got involved into all that magic stuff, you know, the Sufis, and into politics, and like this summer I hope I'm going to start some sort of woman's centre, back where I live, you know.
END
00:21:09
[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].
Notes:
Maxine Gadd reads several poems that were later collected in Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1982), one poem from air two (Air, 1971), but it is likely that many other poems went unpublished.
00:00- Unknown Introducer (George Bowering?) introduces Andreas Schroeder and Maxine Gadd [INDEX: Vancouver poets, Firepoint magazine, tape interview between Schroeder and Introducer found in the Sir George Williams Library (not there anymore).]
02:03- Maxine Gadd introduces “The Second Well Poem”. [INDEX: mainstream poetry, poetry scene (being outside of), country vs. city life, role of editors; perhaps published as “Well Poem” in Lost Language (1982).]
03:57- Reads “The Second Well Poem”.
04:41- Introduces “Trip”. [INDEX: Gadd’s connection to poetry, bill bissett publishing her book, publishing poetry; from unknown source.]
06:05- Reads “Trip”.
07:47- Introduces unknown poem, first line “Robin has the horse in hand...”. [INDEX: Greek trip, Eleusis, oracles; from unknown source.]
08:22- Reads unknown poem, first line “Robin has the horse in hand...”.
10:19- Introduces “Ratio”. [INDEX: explains “Leary” from previous poem is Timothy Leary, collective art forms, working with Intermedia in Vancouver, poetry group traveled to Edmonton, Edith Sitwell.]
11:37- Reads “Ratio”.
12:48- Introduces unknown poem, first line “Heading up to Minster Island”. [INDEX: self publishing poems, collages, form of concrete poetry, map of B.C., worked as a mess girl on a freighter.]
13:46- Reads unknown poem, first line “Heading up to Minster Island”.
15:33- Introduces “bee-people on 4th avenue”. [INDEX: Bella Coola, fishing, Kitsilano where she grew up, poverty and destruction of Vancouver; from Lost Language]
16:55- Reads “bee-people on 4th avenue”.
18:32- Introduces “4th ave.” [INDEX: friend of Gadd’s named Martina; from air two and Lost Language.]
18:58- Reads “4th ave.”
20:49- Begins to introduce another poem, unknown. [INDEX: Sufism, politics, hopes to start a women’s centre.]
21:09.94- END OF RECORDING
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:38:37
Size:
92.7 MB
Content:
maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-2.mp3 [File 2 of 4]
Maxine Gadd
00:00:00
Reads unnamed poem [recording begins abruptly].
Maxine Gadd
00:02:20
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:11:10
This is the thing that the guy that held onto the raft for fourteen days knew. This is what Armstrong
, Collins
and Reilley
out there, those astronauts, this is what they saved up for. It had to be good.
Maxine Gadd
00:11:29
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:23:31
That's the end of that one.
Audience
00:23:33
Applause.
Maxine Gadd
00:23:40
I think I made enough noise for a while, huh? My voice is getting sort of sore, or, you know, like that was a trip, so. I got a lot of poems, but...Did you feel like reading now or should we have a break or what? Do you think...do you think we should read some more or what? I got...You want to read some more?
Unknown
00:23:59
Ambient Sound [voices].
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:03
Do you want to read some more?
Maxine Gadd
00:24:04
I don't know. I've not nothing in particular form, just bits, that's the problem.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:12
You can't do the one on the Goat-god....
Maxine Gadd
00:24:13
Okay, I'll do the Goat-god. Well okay, do you want to try improvising to a trip that's here? I'll let you read it.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:22
Seriously, I'll do that?
Maxine Gadd
00:24:23
Yeah. It's just going to be some sounds.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:24
Okay. I don't know if I can…[unintelligible].
Maxine Gadd
00:24:27
I gotta find it first. What's that? Are we on? Oh, sorry. God.
Unknown
00:24:38
Ambient Sound [voices].
Maxine Gadd
00:24:39
What? The flute? I think it's over there. For fun...the same message...I'm asking...Richard's going to make some noise with my flute.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:55
I'll make some noise if you'll give me a microphone.
Maxine Gadd
00:24:57
Okay. Which one do you want? Let's share it.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:01
Give me the [unintelligible].
Maxine Gadd
00:25:02
It goes with the poem.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:05
When'd you do that?
Maxine Gadd
00:25:06
What?
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:07
This, this knot.
Maxine Gadd
00:25:08
I tied myself into it.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:11
Oh, here we go.
Maxine Gadd
00:25:12
I don't even know if I can find it. All these little pieces, pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is. Now how it goes, you have to keep quiet until...let's see now. He's never done this before.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:40
What did, yeah, what do you want me to do with it?
Maxine Gadd
00:25:42
Okay, this is called "Shore Animals" and it's a speech piece with flute, and the flute has to listen. It can speak too. [Laughter]. You have to listen to it. You never heard it
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:57
I think it's learning how to speak.
Maxine Gadd
00:26:01
It's called "Shore Animals," it's a speech piece with flute.
Maxine Gadd
00:26:07
Reads "Shore Animals" accompanied by Richard Sommer on flute.
Audience
00:30:13
Audience.
Maxine Gadd
00:30:15
Maybe I'll try to try that one…[audience applause continues throughout].
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:30:24
I'll give you your microphone back.
Maxine Gadd
00:30:25
Yes. How many minutes we got?
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:30:29
I don't know. [Unintelligible].
Maxine Gadd
00:30:35
Okay, I'm going to read, I'm going to do, this one's totally mindless, okay? It's dedicated to my friend Gerry Gilbert
who used to like to do those trips. And you can go to sleep or something, because that's what I want you to do.
Maxine Gadd
00:30:51
Reads "Cantaloup, 29 cents".
Audience
00:38:33
Applause.
END
00:38:37
[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].
Notes:
Maxine Gadd reads several poems that were later collected in Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1982), one poem from air two (Air, 1971), but it is likely that many other poems went unpublished.
00:00- Maxine Gadd reads, recording starts immediately, possible first line “Big there lady all come together...” [INDEX: from unknown source.]
02:20- Potential first line or continuation of last poem: “I promised to Hackett, though the memory’s gone, of all I thought worthy to tell you, the person”.
02:29- Reads unknown poem, first line “The glistening tower in the ozone...”
11:10- Introduces unknown poem, first line “I am obedient to every sign...” [INDEX: Armstrong, Collins, Riley, astronauts; from unknown source.]
11:29- Reads first line “I am obedient to every sign...”
15:48- Continues with “At this point there’s a maniac treading the stairs above my head...”
19:49- Continues with “No burn- the doctor promised this won’t hurt...”
24:12- Richard (Sommer?) asks for poem to be read, they sort out a collaboration with Richard and a flute [INDEX: God-goat poem, improvisation: music and poetry]
25:42- Gadd introduces “Shore Animals” [INDEX: from unknown source]
26:07- Reads “Shore Animals”, flute played by Richard
30:13- Sorting out of microphones, etc.
30:35- Introduces “Cantaloup, 29 cents” [INDEX: Gerry Gilbert; from unknown source]
30:51- Reads “Cantaloup, 29 cents”
38:37.60- END OF RECORDING.
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:31:32
Size:
75.7 MB
Content:
andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-3.mp3 [File 3 of 4]
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:00:01
Okay, we won't be using a flute this time, I think it's a bass trombone but I'm not sure. It'll be up to Andy. I'd like to introduce to you Andy Schroeder.
Audience
00:00:15
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:00:40
Right. Normally they hang you after a reading. Jesus. I'm going to read from, oh, just kind of a merry jaunt through various books. I think what I'll do is I'll read some of the, some poetry first, and then I'll slip over into fiction. I've just, two days ago, published a book called The Late Man of short fictions and extended prose poems and so on. The work that I've done is gone cyclic in terms of form. I started out with prose poems and went into much more of a linear poetry, and then went back to a fiction which was kind of a half prose poem, half short story, half God knows, film script. And right now I'm working hard at both styles. First book I published was called The Ozone Minotaur, and it was more surreal than anything I'm doing now. I really get very excited about illusions, and I guess that's probably what most of my work is all about. At first I was very interested in surreal illusions; now I'm very interested in real illusions, and I'm not sure there's any difference. Here's a prose poem from way back called "Introduction".
Andreas Schroeder
00:02:10
Reads "Introduction" from The Ozone Minotaur.
Andreas Schroeder
00:03:15
After I found out that you couldn't live by writing poetry, I took a job with CPAir
. That doesn't really sound like a very logical progression, but anyway, it was a teletype machine that they put me on, I think I lasted about four days, but I got a poem out of it, and it's entitled "Cables".
Andreas Schroeder
00:03:35
Reads "Cables" [from The Ozone Minotaur].
Andreas Schroeder
00:05:29
This next book, File of Uncertainties, I supposed was kind of created when I woke up one morning and was overwhelmed with my own ignorance, so I decided to write a book about it. [Audience laughter]. And then I figured the best way to do it was to go up north and I did that, and I spent a winter up in Alaska
. And that was where I really got into this illusion thing, because, you know, all the different, very very strange things that happen there, like white-outs, which you probably are familiar with here, as well, where a man suddenly loses all sense of up and down and forward and backward. They have better ones than that, though. They have, until the snowmobile rolls around, when people used to mush with dogs, they'd continually have this happening: a man would set off from one village for another, with his dogs, and he'd be perfectly well-dressed and perfectly well-fed, and apparently perfectly sane, and the dogs would arrive, and the sled would arrive but the man wouldn't, and they possibly found him and possibly not. But no one could ever understand what would make a man suddenly step off his sleigh and walk off in an entirely different direction to die. When he certainly didn't have it on his list of things to do when he left. They still haven't figured that out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that man's body is made up of such an incredible percentage of water, and very strange things happen to water up there. [Audience laughter]. Anyway, I almost got caught by an avalanche, so I thought I'd check into it and I'd find out what you do if you do get caught by one, cause I figured by that time that survival was probably a good thing. So, they said, one of the things you do is, if you get caught by an avalanche, you make swimming motions with your hands. I guess the idea is that kind of tends to keep you close to the surface, which is a good place to be. Now...[audience laughter] the lovely illusion part, which really intrigued me, was that a man can survive under the snow up to a depth of approximately six feet, but only for a certain period of time, and apparently the closer you are to the surface, the better your chances are, and the way they dig for, well, it's not necessarily logical up there, at least it didn't seem like it, but the way they dig for a man like this is they use sounding rods, and these are very sensitive rods, like, almost like tuning forks, and they walk along, in a very definite rhythm, it's almost like a musical score, and they ram these poles in, one foot deep, about a foot at a time, and attempt to hit somebody that's buried underneath it. And then they go back again and they do it at two feet, and then at three feet and four feet to six feet, they don't go any deeper. Now the peculiar part of it is that they of course can't hear anyone, but the poor bugger that's under the snow can hear very, very clearly. And, you know, and he'll hear people saying, like I wonder where, I think there's a place he might be, and he'll be shouting in there, saying, "I'm here," you know, "I'm here!" and they can't hear him, and it's really quite terrifying. Sound only travels one way through an avalanche, I don't...[Audience laughter]. Anyway, I'll, let me read some poems about it, I'll...File of Uncertainties was written in a very short time and mostly about the same thing, and you'll find recurring images all the way through, stylistic things that are similar all the way through, and the poems, because they match together fairly tightly, I didn't even bother naming them, I just numbered them, because they're all part of the same sequence. This is number four.
Andreas Schroeder
00:09:27
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #4" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:10:25
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #3" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:12:13
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #5" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:12:54
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #8" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:13:50
I took up sky-diving after I came back and, because...yeah, believe it or not, it had very similar illusions going for it again. When...it's much like the white-out. When you jump off an aircraft, and it banks away, generally to your left, then you suddenly lose all points of reference. And because the earth below you is much too far away to really mean anything, and your parachute is still on your back, in other words not opened, so you can't, you haven't got anything above you either, you suddenly get hit with this incredibly stony silence, and absolutely nothing happens. I mean, you don't fall, you're not moving, you're not even really thinking because it's so suddenly quiet. It seems like everything just freezes. And in fact you're falling at about three hundred feet a second, but you have no sense of it whatsoever. And you just stand there in the sky, and kind of look around, and nothing is going on. Which is why you're not supposed to be stoned when you skydive because, [audience laughter] sometimes people tend to forget, you know. So I wrote a poem about it, and, actually it's not...well anything. It's “#9”, is what it is.
Andreas Schroeder
00:15:18
Reads "#9" [from File of Uncertainties].
Andreas Schroeder
00:17:31
Alright, here's another poem from the north--"#12".
Andreas Schroeder
00:17:38
Reads "# 12".
Andreas Schroeder
00:18:29
I think I'll just let that go for a minute there and go into some prose and then I'll just read some unpublished poems. This first story that I'm going to read is entitled "The Tree", and I wrote it after I met a very lovely old man down in Australia
. Very old. He was an aborigine, and we tried to communicate; he didn't know my language and I didn't know his, which is maybe why we got along so well, but anyway, I built a story up on him. This was on a coral island...of course all islands down there are coral islands.
AnnotationAndreas Schroeder
00:19:19
Reads "The Tree" [from The Late Man].
Audience
00:25:45
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:25:54
Here's another short one, entitled "The Pub", sort of a frenzied affair. They don't--it's sort of illegal to have fights in pubs, and in Vancouver I was the very happy observer of one, finally. Pub fights have sort of a beautiful ritualistic thing as long as you're not involved, like if you're just kind of watching, and the Cecil Hotel staged one one night and after that I wrote this, although it has nothing to do with that.
Andreas Schroeder
00:26:23
Reads "The Pub" [from The Late Man].
Audience
00:31:28
Applause.
END
00:31:32
[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].
Notes:
Andreas Schroeder reads from The Late Man (SonoNis Press, 1971), The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969) and File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971).
00:01- Introducer (George Bowering?) introduces Andreas Schroeder. (As Andy).
00:40- Andreas Schroeder introduces reading and “Introduction”. [INDEX: The Late Man, prose poetry, form, short fiction, linear poetry, film script (genres melding together), first book The Ozone Minotaur, surreal illusions; from The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969).]
02:10- Reads “Introduction”.
03:15- Introduces “Cables”. [INDEX: CPAir job, teletype machine; from The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969).]
03:35- Reads “Cables”.
05:29- Introduces “File of Uncertainties: IV” and his next book, File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971). [INDEX: creation of File of Uncertainties, ignorance, spent a winter in Alaska, illusions, avalanche, survival of man in an avalanche, sounding rods; from File of Uncertainties, (SoNoNis Press, 1971).]
09:27- Reads “File of Uncertainties: IV”.
10:25- Reads “File of Uncertainties: III”.
12:13- Reads “File of Uncertainties: V”.
12:54- Reads “File of Uncertainties: VIII”.
13:50- Introduces “Number IX”. [INDEX: Sky-diving experiences.]
15:18- Reads “Number IX”.
17:42- Introduces “Number XII”. [INDEX: poem from the North.]
17:38- Reads “Number XII”.
18:29- Introduces “The Tree”. [INDEX: prose, Australia, aborigine, coral island; from The Late Man (SoNoNis Press, 1971).]
19:19- Reads “The Tree”.
25:54- Introduces “The Pub”. [INDEX: Vancouver: illegal pub fights, Cecil Hotel; from The Late Man (SoNoNis Press, 1971).]
26:23- Reads “The Pub”.
31:32.07- END OF RECORDING
Content Type:
Sound Recording
File Path:
files.spokenweb.ca>concordia>sgw>audio>all_mp3
Duration:
00:15:24
Size:
37 MB
Content:
andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-4.mp3 [File 4 of 4]
Andreas Schroeder
00:00:00
Reads [“The Theft” from The Late Man].
Audience
00:05:03
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:05:09
Right, just one more. This one is, is quite different. Quite different. In fact, if there is such a thing as a manifesto, I guess that's what it is. Or let's say it's a map or something about roughly where I'm at. It's called "The Cage".
Andreas Schroeder
00:05:32
Reads "The Cage" [from The Late Man].
Andreas Schroeder
00:15:11
That's all.
Audience
00:15:12
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:15:19
I don't know how to get that off.
END
00:15:24
Notes:
Andreas Schroeder reads from The Late Man (SonoNis Press, 1971), The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969) and File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971).
00:00- Recording begins suddenly with Andreas Schroeder, potential first line “The living room was littered with papers, pens, bottles...” (short story).
05:09- Introduces “The Cage”. [INDEX: manifesto, map.]
05:32- Reads “The Cage”.
15:24.10- END OF RECORDING.
Content Type:
Sound Recording
Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 1 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
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Drew Bernet
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 2 - Back
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Drew Bernet
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Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 2 - Front
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Drew Bernet
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Drew Bernet
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Drew Bernet
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 3 - Back
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Drew Bernet
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 3 - Front
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Drew Bernet
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Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 3 - Spine
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Drew Bernet
Content Type:
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 3 - Reel
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Drew Bernet
Content Type:
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 4 - Back
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 4 - Front
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Drew Bernet
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Title:
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Drew Bernet
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Title:
Gadd and Schroeder Tape Box 4 - Reel
Credit:
Drew Bernet
Content Type:
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Dates
Date:
1972 2 18
Type:
Performance Date
Source:
Supplemental Material
Notes:
Date specified in written announcement "Georgian Happenings"
LOCATION
Address:
1455, Boul de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Venue:
Hall Building Room H-651
Latitude:
45.4972758
Longitude:
-73.57893043
Notes:
Location specified in written announcement "Georgian Happenings"
CONTENT
Contents:
maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-1.mp3 [File 1 of 4]
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:00:00
I'd like to introduce you to two poets who are Vancouver
friends of mine. Their poetry is quite different, as you'll discover. But from my own point of view, they...I owe both of them a debt that is similar in both cases though neither probably knows it. They've made me, in their own ways, rethink my own feelings about what ought to constitute poetry and poems. And in the case of Maxine Gadd, this thinking went into a review which was then sent to the Firepoint which then folded. So you may never see that. And in the case of Andy Schroeder
, found its way into a long tape harangue between the two of us on the subject of form in poetry. Which I think is now in the Sir George Williams Library
, where any of you can endure it if you wish to. At any rate, the first of these poets to read will be Maxine Gadd. There will be a fifteen minute break, and then Andreas Schroeder will read. Maxine.
Audience
00:01:32
Applause.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:02:01
You're plugged in.
Maxine Gadd
00:02:03
Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do. I don't know how much to talk about the poetry. My connection is very loose to the mainstream I guess, because, I don't know, I'm just not socially related to what's going on maybe in the poetry reading. I guess my identifications with words are somewhat with a West Coast hippie trip. And between the country and the city, the first feeling being, you know, the desire for purity, you know when you're seventeen or eighteen years old and you've figured the country life is it. And later coming to realize the necessity of the communal life and the city. So I think that's a task I'm going to try to set myself right here. I...this...I'm going to read first of all the second "well" poem, which I did, experienced in the country, living in the country. I remember the first "well" poem, I don't remember where it's gone, because it didn't get published. I disregarded its importance, you know. I tended to take the judgment of editors, and you know, people that set themselves up as authorities, and that's why I'm here, you know. I've kept close enough to them, I guess. I remember the first one went something like, "Wanting pure water I went to the well/too wonderful"...and there was something about the oracle as the bucket clacked. This is the “Second Well Poem”.
Maxine Gadd
00:03:57
Reads "Second Well Poem" [published later as “Well poem” in Lost Language].
Maxine Gadd
00:04:41
Which is about where I feel right now. But that's about where my connection to poetry is right now. I wonder if that...I wonder if that one's around. I don't think it is. I guess I'll just take it as it comes. There's some scheme in this. I guess, I got published by a cat, by bill bissett
you might have heard, who did the thing, did the guru thing, the super-energy thing of getting a lot of work done, and getting a lot of people's work out, and a lot of his work out, a lot of it was real shit but he got it out, you know, and some of it worked and some of it didn't, but there was so much of it, you know...I'd like to have had that confidence, you know, I guess almost, most people write poetry, they've got it all in their trunk, you know, they don't get it out. But I guess that's what it takes. This is from one of his first, really cheap magazines. He put, he...it's typed, you know. Pretty good typing. His typing got worse, I get very angry, he makes lots of mistakes. But he did a lot of drawings and things, if anybody wants to look at it, you know. I mean, he did it minimum, you know, he was living really poor. And a lot of people still read his stuff, so, I mean, to me he was a folk poet in that sense, a lot of people still read his stuff because he got the stuff out cheap, you know. "Trip".
Maxine Gadd
00:06:05
Reads "Trip".
Maxine Gadd
00:07:47
I'm going to go over there. This one is to a poet who is in the, is in another world, okay? He looks like a silver lizard, and he's very beautiful, and he knows all about the Greek trip, and Eleusis, which is one's talking about in the first poem, okay, the oracles from under the ground, that belief you must start out with. It's called...and it's admiration, as well as a bit of terror.
Maxine Gadd
00:08:22
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:10:19
Leary, I should have mentioned, was Timothy Leary. Oh, I should have explained that before, yeah. Oh yeah, this is where I met...now I don't like it okay? And it's probably not a good poem. But that's, that's...you know, that's...the kind of art form I'd like to have seen as a collective art form, was what I yearned and hoped for. Poetry is what people write in rooms alone, and I don't like...I don't, you know, that's what I was stuck with. And I worked for a while with a group in Vancouver called, named, we called it "Intermedia". And I had the experience of working with a group, at one point there were five of us poets, you know, or what we called poets. And we'd go around to various places, we went to Edmonton
one time, and we tried things, we tried chanting and wailing, like, was it...who was that crazy old lady. Sitwell, Edith Sitwell
, remember her? And if you ever heard the sort of sing, the song, sing sing she used to do, you know, we tried that. And it really worked, you know, but you'd go around and you'd say, "Do you dig the poems?" and they'd say, "I can't hear them, but we really like your voice." You know. [Audience laughter]. So, you know, left that, you got an ache in the gut or something.
Maxine Gadd
00:11:37
Reads "Ratio".
Maxine Gadd
00:12:48
I don't like it. I don't want to be there. Here's one from last year. I got into printing stuff myself, you know, and I do that--I wish, oh, you can't see it, can you? It was mimeograph, it was real cheap, you know? And you could take images, you could take newspaper articles, you could take scraps of anything you saw that you dug, you know, put 'em together, and to me that was a, that was a form of concrete poetry. Can't, of course, I don't know, you couldn't really say that one or any number of them. This one is half-said, okay. Behind it I put a map, I found a map of B.C.
and Minster Island
was a map, was an island I found once when I was working on a ship as a mess girl, on a freighter.
Maxine Gadd
00:13:46
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:15:33
And where that ended up was just over the name Bella Coola
, which is sort of where they do, can fish. There's no escape, though, you know? And...so then I want to read about Kitsilano
, where most of...I happened, you know, I grew up. Kitsilano's a sort of slum district of Vancouver. And it's disintegrating, and you probably all experienced this, you know, being city people, you know, they're bulldozing the places, there's no more cheap places to live, and so your friends, you know, you can't live there anymore, your friends can't live there anymore, so whatever you had, which was sometimes very heavy, you know, community's really beautiful, you know? I used to go over and play music with my friends. We had to move out, you know, because the city's being destroyed, and only the people who are well-to-do, who have some sort of stake in the city, you know, who are supporting the structure can stay. And this poem is about somebody who I met one day on the street, you know, and her story, she's sort of sick, just on the street, everything's falling to pieces.
Maxine Gadd
00:16:55
Reads “bee-people on 4th avenue” [published later in Lost Language].
Maxine Gadd
00:18:32
Who's singing out there? But here, on the next street, you know, I ran into a friend of mine. Her name's Martina. And, you know, we're about the same age, and we've been through a lot of things, and, we've been through some bad things, you know, lots of rejections and refusal, no, there's no food now, you can't have any, go away, you know, fighting over somebody or other.
Maxine Gadd
00:18:58
Reads “4th ave” [published later in Lost Language].
Maxine Gadd
00:20:49
Us old ladies. Okay, but that's not entirely true. I got involved into all that magic stuff, you know, the Sufis, and into politics, and like this summer I hope I'm going to start some sort of woman's centre, back where I live, you know.
END
00:21:09
[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].
maxine_gadd_i006-11-109-2.mp3 [File 2 of 4]
Maxine Gadd
00:00:00
Reads unnamed poem [recording begins abruptly].
Maxine Gadd
00:02:20
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:11:10
This is the thing that the guy that held onto the raft for fourteen days knew. This is what Armstrong
, Collins
and Reilley
out there, those astronauts, this is what they saved up for. It had to be good.
Maxine Gadd
00:11:29
Reads unnamed poem.
Maxine Gadd
00:23:31
That's the end of that one.
Audience
00:23:33
Applause.
Maxine Gadd
00:23:40
I think I made enough noise for a while, huh? My voice is getting sort of sore, or, you know, like that was a trip, so. I got a lot of poems, but...Did you feel like reading now or should we have a break or what? Do you think...do you think we should read some more or what? I got...You want to read some more?
Unknown
00:23:59
Ambient Sound [voices].
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:03
Do you want to read some more?
Maxine Gadd
00:24:04
I don't know. I've not nothing in particular form, just bits, that's the problem.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:12
You can't do the one on the Goat-god....
Maxine Gadd
00:24:13
Okay, I'll do the Goat-god. Well okay, do you want to try improvising to a trip that's here? I'll let you read it.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:22
Seriously, I'll do that?
Maxine Gadd
00:24:23
Yeah. It's just going to be some sounds.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:24
Okay. I don't know if I can…[unintelligible].
Maxine Gadd
00:24:27
I gotta find it first. What's that? Are we on? Oh, sorry. God.
Unknown
00:24:38
Ambient Sound [voices].
Maxine Gadd
00:24:39
What? The flute? I think it's over there. For fun...the same message...I'm asking...Richard's going to make some noise with my flute.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:24:55
I'll make some noise if you'll give me a microphone.
Maxine Gadd
00:24:57
Okay. Which one do you want? Let's share it.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:01
Give me the [unintelligible].
Maxine Gadd
00:25:02
It goes with the poem.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:05
When'd you do that?
Maxine Gadd
00:25:06
What?
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:07
This, this knot.
Maxine Gadd
00:25:08
I tied myself into it.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:11
Oh, here we go.
Maxine Gadd
00:25:12
I don't even know if I can find it. All these little pieces, pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is. Now how it goes, you have to keep quiet until...let's see now. He's never done this before.
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:40
What did, yeah, what do you want me to do with it?
Maxine Gadd
00:25:42
Okay, this is called "Shore Animals" and it's a speech piece with flute, and the flute has to listen. It can speak too. [Laughter]. You have to listen to it. You never heard it
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:25:57
I think it's learning how to speak.
Maxine Gadd
00:26:01
It's called "Shore Animals," it's a speech piece with flute.
Maxine Gadd
00:26:07
Reads "Shore Animals" accompanied by Richard Sommer on flute.
Audience
00:30:13
Audience.
Maxine Gadd
00:30:15
Maybe I'll try to try that one…[audience applause continues throughout].
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:30:24
I'll give you your microphone back.
Maxine Gadd
00:30:25
Yes. How many minutes we got?
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:30:29
I don't know. [Unintelligible].
Maxine Gadd
00:30:35
Okay, I'm going to read, I'm going to do, this one's totally mindless, okay? It's dedicated to my friend Gerry Gilbert
who used to like to do those trips. And you can go to sleep or something, because that's what I want you to do.
Maxine Gadd
00:30:51
Reads "Cantaloup, 29 cents".
Audience
00:38:33
Applause.
END
00:38:37
[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].
andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-3.mp3 [File 3 of 4]
Richard (Dick) Sommer
00:00:01
Okay, we won't be using a flute this time, I think it's a bass trombone but I'm not sure. It'll be up to Andy. I'd like to introduce to you Andy Schroeder.
Audience
00:00:15
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:00:40
Right. Normally they hang you after a reading. Jesus. I'm going to read from, oh, just kind of a merry jaunt through various books. I think what I'll do is I'll read some of the, some poetry first, and then I'll slip over into fiction. I've just, two days ago, published a book called The Late Man of short fictions and extended prose poems and so on. The work that I've done is gone cyclic in terms of form. I started out with prose poems and went into much more of a linear poetry, and then went back to a fiction which was kind of a half prose poem, half short story, half God knows, film script. And right now I'm working hard at both styles. First book I published was called The Ozone Minotaur, and it was more surreal than anything I'm doing now. I really get very excited about illusions, and I guess that's probably what most of my work is all about. At first I was very interested in surreal illusions; now I'm very interested in real illusions, and I'm not sure there's any difference. Here's a prose poem from way back called "Introduction".
Andreas Schroeder
00:02:10
Reads "Introduction" from The Ozone Minotaur.
Andreas Schroeder
00:03:15
After I found out that you couldn't live by writing poetry, I took a job with CPAir
. That doesn't really sound like a very logical progression, but anyway, it was a teletype machine that they put me on, I think I lasted about four days, but I got a poem out of it, and it's entitled "Cables".
Andreas Schroeder
00:03:35
Reads "Cables" [from The Ozone Minotaur].
Andreas Schroeder
00:05:29
This next book, File of Uncertainties, I supposed was kind of created when I woke up one morning and was overwhelmed with my own ignorance, so I decided to write a book about it. [Audience laughter]. And then I figured the best way to do it was to go up north and I did that, and I spent a winter up in Alaska
. And that was where I really got into this illusion thing, because, you know, all the different, very very strange things that happen there, like white-outs, which you probably are familiar with here, as well, where a man suddenly loses all sense of up and down and forward and backward. They have better ones than that, though. They have, until the snowmobile rolls around, when people used to mush with dogs, they'd continually have this happening: a man would set off from one village for another, with his dogs, and he'd be perfectly well-dressed and perfectly well-fed, and apparently perfectly sane, and the dogs would arrive, and the sled would arrive but the man wouldn't, and they possibly found him and possibly not. But no one could ever understand what would make a man suddenly step off his sleigh and walk off in an entirely different direction to die. When he certainly didn't have it on his list of things to do when he left. They still haven't figured that out. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that man's body is made up of such an incredible percentage of water, and very strange things happen to water up there. [Audience laughter]. Anyway, I almost got caught by an avalanche, so I thought I'd check into it and I'd find out what you do if you do get caught by one, cause I figured by that time that survival was probably a good thing. So, they said, one of the things you do is, if you get caught by an avalanche, you make swimming motions with your hands. I guess the idea is that kind of tends to keep you close to the surface, which is a good place to be. Now...[audience laughter] the lovely illusion part, which really intrigued me, was that a man can survive under the snow up to a depth of approximately six feet, but only for a certain period of time, and apparently the closer you are to the surface, the better your chances are, and the way they dig for, well, it's not necessarily logical up there, at least it didn't seem like it, but the way they dig for a man like this is they use sounding rods, and these are very sensitive rods, like, almost like tuning forks, and they walk along, in a very definite rhythm, it's almost like a musical score, and they ram these poles in, one foot deep, about a foot at a time, and attempt to hit somebody that's buried underneath it. And then they go back again and they do it at two feet, and then at three feet and four feet to six feet, they don't go any deeper. Now the peculiar part of it is that they of course can't hear anyone, but the poor bugger that's under the snow can hear very, very clearly. And, you know, and he'll hear people saying, like I wonder where, I think there's a place he might be, and he'll be shouting in there, saying, "I'm here," you know, "I'm here!" and they can't hear him, and it's really quite terrifying. Sound only travels one way through an avalanche, I don't...[Audience laughter]. Anyway, I'll, let me read some poems about it, I'll...File of Uncertainties was written in a very short time and mostly about the same thing, and you'll find recurring images all the way through, stylistic things that are similar all the way through, and the poems, because they match together fairly tightly, I didn't even bother naming them, I just numbered them, because they're all part of the same sequence. This is number four.
Andreas Schroeder
00:09:27
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #4" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:10:25
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #3" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:12:13
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #5" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:12:54
Reads "File of Uncertainties: #8" from File of Uncertainties.
Andreas Schroeder
00:13:50
I took up sky-diving after I came back and, because...yeah, believe it or not, it had very similar illusions going for it again. When...it's much like the white-out. When you jump off an aircraft, and it banks away, generally to your left, then you suddenly lose all points of reference. And because the earth below you is much too far away to really mean anything, and your parachute is still on your back, in other words not opened, so you can't, you haven't got anything above you either, you suddenly get hit with this incredibly stony silence, and absolutely nothing happens. I mean, you don't fall, you're not moving, you're not even really thinking because it's so suddenly quiet. It seems like everything just freezes. And in fact you're falling at about three hundred feet a second, but you have no sense of it whatsoever. And you just stand there in the sky, and kind of look around, and nothing is going on. Which is why you're not supposed to be stoned when you skydive because, [audience laughter] sometimes people tend to forget, you know. So I wrote a poem about it, and, actually it's not...well anything. It's “#9”, is what it is.
Andreas Schroeder
00:15:18
Reads "#9" [from File of Uncertainties].
Andreas Schroeder
00:17:31
Alright, here's another poem from the north--"#12".
Andreas Schroeder
00:17:38
Reads "# 12".
Andreas Schroeder
00:18:29
I think I'll just let that go for a minute there and go into some prose and then I'll just read some unpublished poems. This first story that I'm going to read is entitled "The Tree", and I wrote it after I met a very lovely old man down in Australia
. Very old. He was an aborigine, and we tried to communicate; he didn't know my language and I didn't know his, which is maybe why we got along so well, but anyway, I built a story up on him. This was on a coral island...of course all islands down there are coral islands.
AnnotationAndreas Schroeder
00:19:19
Reads "The Tree" [from The Late Man].
Audience
00:25:45
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:25:54
Here's another short one, entitled "The Pub", sort of a frenzied affair. They don't--it's sort of illegal to have fights in pubs, and in Vancouver I was the very happy observer of one, finally. Pub fights have sort of a beautiful ritualistic thing as long as you're not involved, like if you're just kind of watching, and the Cecil Hotel staged one one night and after that I wrote this, although it has nothing to do with that.
Andreas Schroeder
00:26:23
Reads "The Pub" [from The Late Man].
Audience
00:31:28
Applause.
END
00:31:32
[Unknown amount of time elapsed before start of next recording].
andreas_schroeder_i006-11-109-4.mp3 [File 4 of 4]
Andreas Schroeder
00:00:00
Reads [“The Theft” from The Late Man].
Audience
00:05:03
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:05:09
Right, just one more. This one is, is quite different. Quite different. In fact, if there is such a thing as a manifesto, I guess that's what it is. Or let's say it's a map or something about roughly where I'm at. It's called "The Cage".
Andreas Schroeder
00:05:32
Reads "The Cage" [from The Late Man].
Andreas Schroeder
00:15:11
That's all.
Audience
00:15:12
Applause.
Andreas Schroeder
00:15:19
I don't know how to get that off.
END
00:15:24
Notes:
Maxine Gadd reads several poems that were later collected in Lost Language (Coach House Press, 1982), one poem from air two (Air, 1971), but it is likely that many other poems went unpublished. Andreas Schroeder reads from The Late Man (SonoNis Press, 1971), The Ozone Minotaur (SoNoNis Press, 1969) and File of Uncertainties (SoNoNis Press, 1971).
NOTES
Type:
General
Note:
Year-Specific Information:
Maxine Gadd had published air two the previous year (1971), and was living in a commune on Galiano Island. Backup to Babylon: poems 1972-1987 collects poems Gadd wrote in 1972.
In 1972, Schroeder had just finished publishing The late man and File of Uncertainties, was editing The Journal of Contemporary Literature in Translation, writing for the Vancouver Province, and was completing his M.A. from UBC.
Type:
General
Note:
Local Connections:
While shying away from mainstream poetic circles and public life, Gadd’s work and life has been deeply rooted in Canadian artistic discourse, creating a community and social activism. A Vancouver poet, Gadd was associated with other writers like Gerry Gilbert, Roy Kiyooka, bill bissett, and Daphne Marlatt. She met George Bowering, David Bromige and Lionel Kearns in Earle Birney’s UBC creative writing classes in the early 60’s.
Also a Vancouver writer, Schroeder has contributed over a dozen publications to Canadian literature, in poetry, prose, non-fiction, fiction, young adult non-fiction as well as contributing to CBC radio shows and Vancouver newspapers. A professor in Creative Non-fiction at the University of British Columbia, Schroeder has also represented writers in political positions and unions.
Type:
Preservation
Note:
4 reel-to-reel tapes>4 CDs>4 digital files
Type:
Cataloguer
Note:
Original transcript by Rachel Kyne
Original print catalogue, introduction, research and edits by Celyn Harding-Jones
Additional research and edits by Ali Barillaro
RELATED WORKS
Citation:
“Andreas Schroeder”. Story Tellers. Think City: Ideas for the 21st Century Vancouver. Think City Society, Vancouver, B.C.
Citation:
“Andreas Schroder”. Authors. Annick Press: Excellence & Innovation in Children’s Literature.
Citation:
“Andreas Schroeder”. Members’ Pages. The Writers’ Union of Canada. 2009.
Citation:
Davey, Frank. "Schroeder, Andreas". The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Eugene Benson and William Toye (eds). Oxford University Press 2001.
Citation:
Gadd, Maxine. air two. Vancouver: Air, 1971.
Citation:
Gadd, Maxine. Lost Language: Selected Poems. Daphne Marlatt and Ingrid Klassen (eds). Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982.
Citation:
“Intermedia”. The Intermedia Catalogue. The Michael de Courcy Archive, 2009.
Citation:
(Maxine Gadd) “Maxine Gadd”. One Zero Zero: A Virtual Library of English Canadian Small Presses 1945-2044. Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art: York University, Toronto, 1997.
Citation:
“Maxine Gadd”. New Star Books website. Vancouver, British Columbia.
Citation:
McLennan, Rob. “12 or 20 Questions: with Maxine Gadd”. Rob McLennan’s Blog. January 11, 2008.
Citation:
“People: Maxine Gadd”. Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Digital Archive of Artwork, Ephemera and Film.
Citation:
Schroeder, Andreas. The Ozone Minotaur. Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1969.
Citation:
Schroeder, Andreas. File of Uncertainties: Poems. Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1971.
Citation:
Schroeder, Andreas. The Late Man. Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1972.