[{"id":"9267","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Cheryl Gladu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Cheryl Gladu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549348155393,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9268","cataloger_name":["Jason,Camlot"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E1, Stories of SpokenWeb, 7 October 2019, McLeod and Gladu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_notes":["Check the Rights and License Category"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/dafaa46d-8602-4296-8aa7-0a66ba8253f2/ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"46:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,524,400 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ep-1-stories-of-spokenweb_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nCamlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007).\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, “Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts,” No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/\\n\\nMcKinnon, Donna. “A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage.” https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement\\n\\nMorris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.\\n\\nMurray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. “Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive.” First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection” http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/\\n\\nToppings, Earle. “Gwendolyn MacEwen.” Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).\\n\\nUrbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549450915840,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard?\n\nFor this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes…\n\n00:07\tTheme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. I’m so excited to introduce our inaugural episode Stories of SpokenWeb, an introduction to this very podcast and the project it stems from. SpokenWeb is first and foremost a literary research network dedicated to studying literature through sound, but how did it all begin and how did these audio archives make their way from basements and car trunks to university libraries? In this episode SpokenWeb contributor Katherine McLeod takes us into the lives and archives of some of the founding spoken web members to uncover the origins and future of the project.\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tHere is “Stories of SpokenWeb”\n01:39\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat is SpokenWeb? SpokenWeb is a research program, a network of scholars, students and artists all studying literature through sound. But how did it all begin? What does the story of SpokenWeb sound like? My name is Katherine McLeod and I asked SpokenWeb collaborators at universities across Canada how they got involved in the project. Needless to say, each story is different and there are many more than are told here, but their stories do have a few things in common that tell us something about the project. All of their stories begin with an interest in audio well before SpokenWeb assumed its current form, and all of their stories, or nearly all, involve a box of tapes. In 2014 I joined SpokenWeb as a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University in Montreal. I met Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. At that point SpokenWeb was based out of one university, but I remember him saying that there was an interest in widening the network. So how did SpokenWeb become what it is today? To answer this question, I spoke with a number of SpokenWeb scholars from across Canada. We’ll start the conversation with one story of how it all began.\n03:22\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. I am the author of several books about literature and sound recording and I’m the director of the partnership grant of SSHRC Social Science, Humanities Research Council of Canada, called SpokenWeb. I was going to say it began when I was a graduate student and became, in earnest, interested in the history of early sound recordings of literary performance. But I was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach, and the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class played to me by my professor, John Miller, who later became a colleague of mine for a spell. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” And that really piqued my interest and, well, really just what it was that we were listening to and what it meant and what its significance was. So I think the interest in sound recordings of literary works or of something that identified with literature really began when I was an undergraduate. When I went to grad school, I became interested in really thinking about this as a research project. It wasn’t my dissertation project, but it became my second project that you always have to be able to talk about when you go to job interviews and things like that. And at Stanford University they had a pretty good sound archive with a lot of historical recordings. So I was able to look into the longer history of spoken recordings and began to research that topic. I’ve always been interested in sound recording because I play music, and I’ve recorded myself writing songs and playing my own songs or playing in bands with friends since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been saving up for the latest recording device.\n05:41\tJason Camlot:\tWhen I came to Concordia – it’s almost like in this sort of fortuitous moment – I was asked to have a meeting with the department chair in the first week that I was installed in the department, just to go over very practical things. And sitting in his office I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bunch of tape boxes – boxes that held reel to reel tapes. And I remember asking him what those boxes contained. And he said to me, “Oh, that’s just some poetry reading series that took place here in the 60s.” And I remembered that, although I didn’t do anything about it at the time. I went about my business of teaching and publishing and getting tenure here at Concordia. And then maybe a decade later I thought about those recordings again and I went back to him and asked, “Do you still have those recordings?”\n06:47\tJason Camlot:\tThe department had moved floors and I remember we threw out a lot of stuff during the move. So I kind of feared that maybe those reel to reel tapes didn’t make it during the move, but he told me that he had deposited them in the university archives that held the English department fonds, the records of the English department. So knowing that the tapes were still accessible, I started looking into them and found a bunch of boxes again that I couldn’t listen to. So it was a bit of a stumbling block, not being able to actually hear what was on them and I set about trying to rectify that problem, and to figure out whether this collection of tapes might be of interest from a literary point of view.\n07:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, the principal investigator or project lead of SpokenWeb. As SpokenWeb grew, researchers began working across disciplines. In addition to working across disciplines in one university SpokenWeb has built collaborative connections across different universities. We’ll hear from researchers at a few of those universities in a moment, but we’ll start first with someone who has been part of the project since the beginning.\n08:07\tAnnie Murray:\tMy name is Annie Murray. I’m Associate University Librarian for archives and special collections. At the University of Calgary. What we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets, were going on reading tours. And so the Sir George Williams section was just one slice of literary life in a given year.\n08:32\tAudio Recording:\tWelcome to the fourth, third, week of the fourth series of our readings here at Sir George. And this one is a special one partly in that it was, it is being presented… [Overlapping audio recordings, exact words not audible]\n08:57\tAnnie Murray:\tAnd we were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings or not leaving behind. And wouldn’t it be great to understand where did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read to kind of sonically recreate those years of very active poetry reading performances?\n09:24\tAudio Recording:\tGets hard to read your own stuff after a while, you forget what it sounded like the last time.\n09:29\tAnnie Murray:\tCause we knew different archives across the country would have some audio record of these events. And we thought: this should all be brought together. This should be a massive aggregation of recordings so that you could listen to a poet across the country and kind of, just as bands tour, see how a poet toured and how they intersected with other poets. So I think we saw the meaning in the individual readings for sure for literary history and analysis. But that the sort of possibilities opened up by knowing what all readings were preserved and bringing those archives together. And I will say in most cases, these are hidden collections that hadn’t been digitized before. So with a partnership grant, it allows us to bring all of these collections out, focus on them in a different and concerted way and try to create that sort of national recording of all of these performances that had taken place.\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe project continued to grow. Now it is in over 13 universities right across the country.\n10:44\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how incredibly grateful I am to be able to work with these materials and with the multidisciplinary scholars that are a part of this project. This is honestly, as I came to recognize during our days together in Vancouver this past summer, this is one of the great research and intellectual opportunities of my career and I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of this.\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Michael O’Driscoll, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.\n11:18\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve been here for the last 22 years and my work ranges across into the areas of critical and cultural theory. Various kinds of media studies. I’m interested in American literature, poetry and poetics. And I spend a lot of my time thinking a lot about archives and thinking about digital media as well too. You know, the lessons of the world’s great archives theorists – I’m thinking about Arjun Appadurai, I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida – is that archives are oriented not towards the past, but towards the future. Archives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. We only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them. And the true focus of an archive is its own futurity, not the history that it records.\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tMichael shared with us some background as to how the recordings were made.\n12:13\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWhen personal recording became available, when somebody could pick up a portable or reasonably portable reel to reel recorder and show up at a reading with it, folks just simply started recording everything that moved. There was so much enthusiasm about the new technology. Many, many of the readings that happened in the late sixties and through the 70s and the eighties, eighties, were recorded on reel-to-reel and then subsequently on cassette tape. But one of the realities of that enthusiasm as well as while there’s lots of enthusiasm for the recording, more often than not, those recordings were put in boxes, stored away and never listened to again. And they have as a result, sat inert for the last 50 years or so at this incredible cultural and scholarly resource, untapped.\n13:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn fact, many of the people we spoke with for today’s episode shared with us a story that, at some point mentioned a box of tapes. Just like that story that Jason described earlier of finding a box of tapes and eventually listening to them.\n13:21\tAnnie Murray:\tI think that’s an origin story in a lot of people’s involvement with SpokenWeb; “Hey! What are those tapes?”\n13:28\tDeanna Fong:\tGoing to SFU, Simon Fraser University, and just by happenstance came across this box of tapes as we all do.\n13:35\tRoma Kail:\tOur research assistant was so excited about the project that she went to our chief librarian with the archivist and they found us unprocessed box.\n13:45\tKaris Shearer:\tHe went to get a cardboard box at one point and brought it back to her and said, “You know, I want to give this to you and someday you’re going to know what to do with it.” And she said to me, “I think, I think this is it. I think this is what I’m supposed to do with this box.”\n14:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’ll introduce you to each of those voices in a moment. But for now, let’s go back to Michael who shared with us the process of working with this kind of material.\n14:14\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo the process that we are working by is, first of all, the materials are digitized and we create the digital records of them. Then we produce the metadata that will be associated with those records. At the same time, once those materials have been digitized, they will be made available to the library for formal accession\n14:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhile that seems easy enough, there are in fact many challenges in working with these found recordings, which are often made with older technology such as reel to reel or cassette tapes. The challenges aren’t just technical, they are also legal. Let’s go back to our conversation with Annie Murray.\n14:56\tAnnie Murray:\tIt can be expensive to do digitization. It’s very time consuming. If you don’t have ready equipment or infrastructure in your organization, you need to contract out an expert to make the recordings. With archival audio recordings, you don’t always know what’s on tapes that an author gives you with their archive. So you could be investing resources in something that might not even be a performance. It could be somebody’s voice answering machine tape, which is also interesting. But, if a collection is kind of under-processed, because it’s an audio item it does take resources to get the content out and usable. The other thing is that copyright can be a barrier. So if people don’t know who made the recording or what the status is of the audio work, it can be an impediment to digitizing it because the library or archive might not know how widely it can be shared. So those are some of the things that libraries and archives grapple with. But I also think we’ve just got to work through those problems to make sure that this content gets preserved.\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tPart of the reason it can be challenging to sort out the rights around these recordings is that they were not always straight-forward recitations or performances. Sometimes recordings include informal conversations, off the record interviews and discussions around a presentation of a work.\n16:29\tRoma Kail:\tSo my name is Roma Kail. I’m a librarian at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. I have done some work with the Earle Toppings fonds here at our special collections at Vic Library.\n16:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tEarle Toppings was an editor at Ryerson Press and worked for CBC Radio. He interviewed many Canadian writers such as poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and Al Purdy. The archival collection for Toppings includes correspondence with writers along with audio recordings of readings and interviews and background notes compiled by Toppings himself.\n17:10\tRoma Kail:\tSo here he is talking about – he wrote this in his notes, he wrote about his recording of Gwendolyn MacEwen – he writes that a standard microphone was used. It was a standard RCA Victor 44 – he called it the radio workhorse – and it recorded her voice softly and beautifully. Gwen was a gentle caressing reader, a sort of Billie Holiday reciting poems as she did at creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as, the creative hangouts of the 1960s, such as the Bohemian Embassy. There was a musical feeling in all her work and she almost, saying her poems, which had their own melodies. So it’s just an extra, as my research assistant pointed out, all of that accompanying material brings in an extra bit of narrative, or a different narrative to the actual sound recordings. And it was the sound recordings which really correlate with the initial goal of SpokenWeb as it was presented to us.\n18:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s Karis Shearer, the director of the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab and Associate Professor of English in the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies who has been working with the SoundBox collection, sharing another example of the rich but curious sounds found in these archives.\n18:39\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we recently acquired a new set of tapes, a gift from George Bowering and Jean Baird, which include 19 tapes that George Bowering made, going back to the 1960s. One of them that I particularly like is a tape that was made in July of 1969 and it’s labeled ‘Warren, Roy, Moon, etcetera.’ And so I was just too curious not to give this a listen before we started digitizing it, and it is on the occasion of the moon landing…\n19:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beep] Now selection [Beep]\n19:18\tKaris Shearer:\t…in 1969, and what you hear on this tape is George Bowering, Angela Bowering, Roy Kiyooka and Warren Tallman. All of whom were in Montreal at the time, Warren was passing through, Roy Kiyooka was teaching at Sir George Williams, now Concordia, and George Bowering was teaching there as well. And they’re all just hanging out in their living room, at George and Angela’s living room on Grosvenor Avenue in Montreal, and they’re listening to the broadcast of the moon landing.\n19:50\tAudio Recording:\tWell, we had a picture with the earth right in the centre of the screen, over.\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tSo again, it’s a very messy, interesting tape because there’s lots of, people talking over each other. There’s a broadcast going on in the background. But what’s interesting to me is they’re not recording just the broadcast. Right? It’s not like, “Shh, everybody, we’re gonna record the broadcast of this historical moment.” What the recording is, this kind of very social dynamic moment of them talking about poetics, talking about poetry. Fred was on his way back from Albuquerque to Canada. Did you know, they’re talking about writing, they’re also at various moments, you know, looking at the astronauts on TV and in some cases, you know, making some great jokes. And so it’s a moment of recording their interaction with this historical moment, their interaction with each. So it’s a wonderful tape and I’m excited for people to be able to listen to it.\n20:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s one of Karis’ collaborators across the SpokenWeb network explaining why this sort of recording can be so interesting to study.\n21:00\tDeanna Fong:\tSo my name is Deanna Fong. I’m a postdoctoral fellow working with SpokenWeb. My work with Karis has been so indispensable for my thinking. We’ve worked together on numerous occasions, but thinking about that question of what it is we’re listening to when we listen to this certain kind of artifact, or I suppose what, what are we listening for? And I think one of the things that we’ve found ourselves listening for is that, in any sort of informal or speech-y accounts that we have, we get a sense of the labour that goes on behind the scenes in the production of literature. And a lot of that labour is unevenly divided along gendered lines. So, you know, thinking about women’s contributions to building communities and to maintaining community spaces, acting as public historians, maintaining community archives, taking care of community members when they’re ill or when they need help, providing feedback, being auditors for work in progress, all these sorts of things that you hear, that don’t necessarily make it to the page. So I think that’s been a really crucial concept for the work that she and I have been doing. I don’t know if this is some continuation of my past or something, but I remember when I was a kid and going to hall shows and stuff like that, oftentimes I was way more interested in just sitting outside and talking to people about the bands, like, just as interested in that as I was in actually listening to the bands. So I think there’s a great interest, for me, in listening around rather than listening to, and I find conversations about literature vastly more interesting than a lot of literature itself.\n22:55\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI’ve learned along the way to appreciate the virtues of close listening in the sense that one can learn a lot about the cultural moment of the reading by paying close attention, not just to the words that come from the speaker, but to everything else that is happening in the room. So I think, for example, about Margaret Atwood reading in 1970 and a now defunct gallery of a hub mall on the University of Alberta campus. [Audio, from the 1970 recording: Please come in and sit down, there’s lots of room at the front.] And you can hear during the recording, [Audio: He will be very unhappy if you stand up during all this. So please sit down.] Her coming in and trying to wend her way through the audience and get herself settled down in a hubbub of things, and an introduction starts, and then stops, and then there’s a moment where people have to direct people into the room to find space ’cause it’s so crowed. [Audio: The people standing up at the back can, you not sit down?] And you just get this incredible sense of the energy of that moment and what it meant to have this really fantastic young emerging writer [Audio: There’s lots of room, does everybody, everybody just shuffle forward] show up to do her thing. And the kind of excitement that that could generate along the way [Audio: That’s more like it.]\n24:15\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tLet me give you one other one, and that has to do with when Phyllis Webb is performing at the student union building art gallery in 1972. It’s March 9th, 1972 and she comes into the room, the recording’s already going and she’s completely breathless. She’s breathing hard and she’s clearly rushed over to get to this moment and she’s there late and she says.[I have to catch my breath.] And you can hear her say that, and just that moment of that physical presence and embodiment of this poet, again, with all of that energy that gets pulled into that archival moment into that event of the archive, it’s a really exciting thing. These are real people doing real things and real situations and the audio is a rich medium for capturing that if you’ve only listened closely enough.\n25:24\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n25:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with Deanna I thought about how important it was for her to be involved in the SpokenWeb project early on in her graduate education. After speaking with Roma and her work with student research assistant, Eva Lu, I thought even more about how student training through SpokenWeb is changing what it means to study literature. At UBC Okanagan [UBCO], Karis has taught and mentored many students who have gotten involved with the SpokenWeb project. I asked her more about student training and she had a terrific story.\n25:59\tKaris Shearer:\tFor me, pedagogy is central to what we do here at UBCO on the SpokenWeb team, and it always has been. So the example that you brought up of Lee Hannigan: first student to work on the project back when it was just in its very early stages. Lee came on as a work study student and we trained him in digitization, and so I reached out to a colleague, Stephen Foster, who very kindly invited us into the media centre that he was running at that time. Mike Berger, who’s a technician trained both me and Lee in the digitization process and gave us space in the lab to do that. So it’s always been a very collective process and SpokenWeb has always been such an interdisciplinary project that has required me to reach out to and do some of that community building with other experts in the area, in order to train students and bring them onto the project. That has stayed true all the way through to the current iteration of the team. We have students who are, again, central to the project and bringing their own expertise. And, at the same time, we are training them. We’re training them in the digitization process. We’re training them in design work. We’re training them in cataloguing and producing metadata. But their expertise as they’re learning that is, again, central, so in our team meetings we always come back to having the students talk about – do a bit of a round – and talk about what they’re learning and what they’re doing, and also what directions they see the project needing to go in or areas that need to be developed. And so the pedagogy is something that is student driven. It’s also, I guess for me, it’s also something that comes right out of our archive – it comes out of the cardboard box, which is at the pedagogy of the archive itself. The collection is very pedagogical. It records Warren Tallman in the classroom. It records Tallman inviting students to his living room to talk about poetry with his wife, Ellen Tallman; they bring up Robert Duncan and record Robert Duncan giving lectures and talking with students. So within the archive and the collection itself, students are central to that. And so, for me, the pedagogy we’re enacting now is very much in dialogue with, or taking a card from that, from the collection.\n28:47\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tFrom a cultural and scholarly point of view, well, audio is, almost and surprisingly so, a kind of unknown frontier. One of the ways I like to think about it is texts are never stable entities: they sit on the page surely, but as they go through various forms of socialization and cultural mediation, they change and shift over time. We deal with versions, we deal with variants, we deal with different contexts of reading and circulation and so forth – so they’re certainly not inert. But I would say if you take a poem by a particular mid century Canadian author that has sat on that same page for the last 50 years, and then you add to that archive, you add to that corpus 6 or 8 or 10 recordings of that author reading the poem, performing the poem, describing it to audiences, responding to audience questions, to hearing the audience itself respond to that poem.\n29:44\tAudio Recording:\tFairly recent poem, which isn’t a political poem. I told them, but a human poem and one that I wrote as a result of watching on television, the debates in the United Nations on the Middle East crisis. And one of the horrible things I felt as I watched it was how completely dehumanized it all was, that the real human issues had been lost sight of and sort of round in an ocean of resolutions and memos from embassies and all this sort of thing.\n30:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tWell then that thing suddenly leaps off to the page to an nth dimension of variability and versioning, And suddenly the scholarly opportunities to work with those poems as cultural objects, as objects subject to scholarly comparison and critical analysis becomes all the more richer, all the more lively, all the more vibrant. And that’s a really exciting thing from my perspective.\n30:59\tJason Camlot:\tThere’s still a lot of work to be done before the field recognizes archives of sound as really significant or relevant, even still to the study of literature. Part of the, I wouldn’t call it resistance, but just sort lack of a sense of how to go about engaging with these materials is a result of changes in the way literature had been taught over the course of the 20th century. I think that recitation or oral interpretation was a very important part of the way literature was taught. The way interpretation was understood so that, when we thought of interpretation, it wasn’t critical analysis done silently in an essay about a poem on the printed page, but it was actually an oral performance in which one’s understanding of the poem was communicated through the intonations and vocal actions that one took in order to literally interpret, you know, deliver in sound their version of the poem. Students would be, in a sense, graded on their oral interpretations that would be part of the exam. Exams in the 19th century were called recitations and a lot of the performance of knowledge in the 19th century – Catherine Robson has written about this – was delivered orally, right? But I think during the course of the 20th century, Especially from the 30s on when methods, identified with what was called the New Criticism came into being, certain ideas of oral performance dropped out of the critical analysis of literature. And it became in a sense, silenced or replaced by more abstract concepts of the voice of the poem or in the poem, but not one that one expects to actually hear. But one voice that one expects to find, to give a sense of unity to the poem, and to describe, but the noisy classroom filled with recitation sort of became silenced. And students were asked to scan poems on the page and the sounds of voices were replaced by the sounds of pencils, scribbling paper on the printed poem. So I think that long tradition in pedagogy related to the teaching of literature has created a kind of barrier to our sense of even how to begin engaging with this kind of archive in relation to the development of sort of literary history, the analysis of a different kind of prosody that one can hear in performance, et cetera. So things were already being done in the late nineties, or some initial thinking was being done around this, but I think the archives themselves weren’t prepared, and still to a large extent haven’t been yet prepared for us to engage with this material in the same way, with the same facility, or with a facility that’s even close to that of the printed archive.\n34:26\tDeanna Fong:\tI will say, I’ll begin by saying that I wasn’t that interested in audio at the time. So I remember feeling a great deal of apprehension when I started working on the project in that I had no idea what these artifacts were or why they were, why they would be of interest to anybody or, you know, who would possibly want to listen to them. But when I dove into them and listened to, I found myself particularly drawn to the kind of extra-poetic speech, which is something that I’ve become very interested in, in my own research. But I was really interested in the liveness of these events. And so I remembered one of my first tasks as an RA on that project was to develop just a sort of lit survey around the research that had been done around audio poetry, like audio recordings of poetry. So I dove into Charles Bernstein’s close listening, and had this major revelation where I was like, “Whoa, a live reading of a poem is totally different than the reading of a poem on a page,” which is something that had really never occurred to me before. Like, I just, that it was a simple recitation and I really got a sense of the difference between a performed poem versus a poem on the page. And that difference became immediately very interesting to me.\n35:49\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, Karis – and really everyone we’ve heard from today – are all asking us to consider: what can these archives teach us? And it seems that sometimes these lessons can come from unexpected places. For example, what can this cross-disciplinary and deeply collaborative project teach us about academic collaboration more generally?\n36:14\tJason Camlot:\tI’ve been very interested this past year, throughout the past year, in having intensive conversations with Yuliya Kondratenko, the Project Manager of SpokenWeb on project management methods. And which ones are best suited to a research program of this kind. And really to begin to map out what project management for humanities-based research might look like. So I think what we’ve been doing to a large extent has been listening and watching to see how activities have unfolded, what approaches have worked, which ones haven’t been picked up as successfully as a way to then reflect upon and describe, and then ultimately, I wouldn’t say codified, but, you know, abstract in a way so that we could perhaps learn from our methods that are initially just sort of iterative experiments. So that’s another thing that I’m really interested in from that sort of more distant perspective. And it’s been great having Yuliya as a kind of sounding board so that we can actually begin writing this up a little bit and sort of maybe map out a whole new project management approach based on the disciplinary messiness of our project.\n37:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Jason Camlot, who we met at the top of the show. So what pulls all of these stories together? Well, at the heart of this project is an ethos of sharing. And as we’ve heard, it often starts with a box of tapes that a community member shares with a member of the team. But that is not all.\n38:06\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things that we see in the archive, vis-à-vis copies, is the circulation and gifting of recordings and tapes within members of the poetry community. Our current SpokenWeb project at UBCO is very much founded on gifting and sharing. And so when I look around the AMP Lab, which is where our collection is housed, so much of what we do is made possible through gifts, and so I’m thinking particularly of Stephen Foster, who is my colleague in visual arts. Our hardware, and even the early, the very first time that we digitized the reels, again, made possible by Stephen’s inviting us into his own lab and sharing his resources with us. And that’s been true all the way through for us, that that idea of the work on the SoundBox project is made possible through the sharing of things, the donation of tapes, and the gifting of hardware. So we really appreciate that.\n39:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn many ways, the web of SpokenWeb is not only the collaborative network of researchers, but it is also this web of archival recordings held together by a desire to make these available to more listeners. And this plays into what we’re trying to do here with this podcast. Provide a platform not only for researchers to share with the wider public the outcomes of their work, but a place where people might access the recordings, reflections, and sounds that have inspired so many of us and that continue to inspire us as the SpokenWeb partnership moves into its next year.\n39:57\tJason Camlot:\tOne thing I’m looking forward to in the coming year is beginning to see our metadata ingest system, which we call SWALLOW, which is sort of swallowing up or capturing all of the metadata that’s being typed in to that system, to see it build up and then to see what kinds of questions we can start asking as a result of having all of this metadata built up about the collections.\n40:26\tRoma Kail:\tOnce we have our records in and other institutions have theirs in, it will be interesting to see how they overlap or how they compliment each other. So we certainly have material that would maybe fill gaps in other institutions collections or vice versa. So I’m very excited to see when we are able to search it, for example, who has what and how that how that represents sort of all the institutions across Canada in terms of a collection.\n41:04\tKaris Shearer:\tSo we are, at UBCO with our SpokenWeb team, we’re actively building a website, so there’ll be a landing page very soon, and there’ll be a selection of tapes from a much larger collection that will feature – once we’ve cleared permissions and created some contextualisation for them – a number of recordings that’ll be featured on that site for people to listen in while we’re actively processing the rest of the collection. And so we can stay tuned for that, in fall 2019.\n41:35\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tSo one of the things I’m also really excited about is having some conversations with some of the individuals who were involved with these moments of recording in their day. And learning a little bit more, not only about the events and the authors and the atmosphere of that moment, but also learning a little bit more about their motivations for recording; what they were doing and how they understood, they were producing an archive and for whom and for what kind of future. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of the collection that we have. But I’d also like to learn a little bit more about the heart of the collection that we have.\n42:14\tJason Camlot:\tPart of the reason that this past year has been so successful has been just because of the people who are involved. That they’re very open minded, courteous and interested, and also extremely hard working, and so we have a bunch of people who share the desire to make things happen, but also a shared desire to have a great time while doing it. You know, I think that’s been a winning combination for our project and has really allowed us to get a lot done, and has allowed for that kind of flexibility and reflectiveness without panicking about whether we’re getting to where we want to go even before we might know where we want to go. And the other thing has been that I didn’t mention yet but that I think is very important in the development of this project has been the role of graduate students and even undergraduates. I mentioned that they were at the beginning of the project in terms of describing that first collection, but I think the network was in great part built because of students who moved from here to go on to study at other universities. Simon Fraser and Alberta and UBCO in particular come to mind where those students came from here, where they’d been working with sound collections and then arrived there and said, “Where are your sound collections? I want to work with them.” And that required those universities to sort of think about, “Oh yeah, we do have huge holdings in this area that we haven’t really looked at or listened to or touched in years.” And it’s really through the students in great part that a lot of the connections with some of these great people I’ve been describing are made possible. I think there’s a lot to learn. And this became very clear from our first institute, from the students and their approaches and the methods that they’re experimenting with in making sense of these kinds of materials. I think the highlight for everyone were the two and a half hours where we heard short talks from all the students across the network on what they had been doing and what they had learned over the past year. And I think that’s a sound that I think we’re going to be amplifying really over the next year or two.\n45:01\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n45:07\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much for listening to the first episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Cheryl Gladu and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Jason Camlot, Deanna Fong, Roma Kail, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, and Karis Shearer for their candid interviews and continued contributions to SpokenWeb. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb podcast. 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Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford Universiy Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23893\\n\\n—. “Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015). https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/\\n\\nConnor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.\\n\\nErnst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording.”\\nFolklore Forum 32 (2001): 57-102.\\n\\nGitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.\\n\\nStanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.\\n\\nNaremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke\\nUP, 2003.\\n\\nUCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549461401600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In “Sound Recordings are Weird: Stories and thoughts about early spoken recordings”, SpokenWeb research Jason Camlot interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb Network to uncover the stories behind the making of Early Literature Recordings. Drawing from his recent book “Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings”, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological and personal meaning of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we are interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them? What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world? And What do they mean now?\n\n00:00:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental]\n00:00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As we dive into episode two in the SpokenWeb series, I want you to picture the oldest recording technology you can think of. Oh, what are you picturing? Is it a cassette player? You can tell me if it’s a cassette player. Is it a phonograph and maybe a wax cylinder? In this episode spoken web researcher Jason Camlot, interviews collaborators in the SpokenWeb network to uncover the stories behind the making of early literature recordings. Drawn from his recent book Phonopoetics, Jason invites guests Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller and Matthew Rubery to question the cultural, technological, and personal meanings of early sound recordings. Together they consider how and why we’re interested in these early recordings and what motivates scholars to research them and collectors to collect them. What did these recordings mean when they first appeared in the world and what do they mean now? Here is Jason Camlot with episode two: Sound Recordings are Weird: stories and thoughts at the earliest spoken recordings.\n00:02:08\tMusic:\t[Instrumental]\n00:02:19\tJason Camlot:\tPart one. Old Sound Recordings are Weird.\n00:02:44\tJason Camlot:\tNo, there’s nothing wrong with your device. Do not adjust your radio dial so to speak. What you are listening to is an early sound recording.\n00:03:06\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. A Victorian scholar, that’s someone who studies 19th century literature and culture, and a researcher who is interested in the relationships that exist between sound and literature.\n00:03:29\tJason Camlot:\tIf you listened to the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, you might recall that the sound you’ve just heard is what first got me interested in research about the history of sound recording and how people have read literature out loud since the 19th century. I was an undergraduate student taking a full year of Victorian literature class. We were studying the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson. And then one morning, my professor, John Miller,\n00:03:56\tJohn Miller:\tI’m John Miller, and I’ve retired from teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University in Montreal,\n00:04:02\tJason Camlot:\tWalked in with a boombox.\n00:04:04\tJohn Miller:\tThe classrooms weren’t equipped, so I had to get a boombox and trundle into the class and fiddle with the dials and so on.\n00:04:18\tJason Camlot:\tAnd played us that recording you just heard. I have to say the first time I heard the piece, I found it to be a bit off-putting and scary because of the way it sounded, but also kind of strange and wonderful, sort of magical.\n00:04:35\tJohn Miller:\tI think there was some fairly stunned silence because, of course, none of us ever expected anything like this.\n00:04:44\tJason Camlot:\tIt was exciting to know that this long dead poet we were studying was, all of a sudden, transported to us in our classroom through a boombox. Many years later, I asked John Miller if he remembered the first time that he had heard the recording.\n00:05:01\tJohn Miller:\tI first heard the recording when I was a graduate student in a full-year Tennyson and Browning course, and John Pettigrew who was teaching the course had a copy of it and wowed us one day.\n00:05:19\tJason Camlot:\tI asked him if he remembers what it sounded like to him when he first heard it.\n00:05:22\tJohn Miller:\tIncomprehensible.\n00:05:24\tJason Camlot:\tAfter a while, as you listen to an old recording repeatedly, you can get past the strangeness of the sound and begin to decipher the words and tune into the way the reader is delivering or performing the poem. You come to hear the reading as a form of interpretation, a manner of actually performing the meaning of the poem through the use of different kinds of intonation and other vocal techniques that shaped the sound of the text with and through the reader’s voice. There are lots of different interpretations of this same poem recorded by Victorian actors and elocutionists around the turn of the 19th century.\n00:06:05\tAudio Recording:\tHalf a league, half a league, / Half a league onward, / All in the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred. / “Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” he said. / Into the valley of Death\n00:06:24\tJason Camlot:\tThe recording we have of Tennyson reading his own poem is the first such recorded oral interpretation of this poem. It gets us thinking about how Tennyson interpreted his own poetry with his voice.\n00:06:37\tJohn Miller:\tIt’s, I think the term that we came up with was elegiac rather than heroic. Tennyson recites the poem so slowly, that any heroism is evaporated. And, really, I think his performance reverses much of the conventional wisdom about the poem at the time.\n00:07:13\tAudio Recording:\t“Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!” He said. / Into the valley of Death”\n00:07:21\tJason Camlot:\tThe heroic sound of the poem that John Miller refers to is clearly audible in this torrential rendition of the poem by Victorian stage actor Lewis Waller known for what James Naremore has described as his ‘phallic performing skill.’ The interpretation that John Miller hears in Tennyson’s reading goes against that standard accepted idea about the meaning of the charge\n00:07:45\tJohn Miller:\tthat it was a kind of newspaper, a poet Laureate glorification of British foolhardy gallantry. Rather than a lament for the disaster that it was\n00:08:10\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:08:11\tJason Camlot:\tHalf a league, half a league, half a league onward. In the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Forward, the Light Brigade. Charge for the guns, he said. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Ellipsis. Dot, dot dot. When can their glory fade? O, the wild charge they made. All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble six hundred. This translation of an unintelligible old recording into clear or at least clearer words that I have just performed, represents an act of demystification, an unweirding of this old recording. Old sound recordings like the one we just heard are weird, not just because we can’t always decipher what the actual sounds are, but because, well, firstly the recording has preserved the voice of a famous person from another century whose voice we may have thought was lost for all time. So it’s weird to have an emanation from that body assumed eternally absent, resonate again, vibrate through the air for us to hear. It creates a kind of vocalic body, evoking the physical body that’s no longer there. That idea of the vocalic body comes from Steven Connor’s book about ventriloquism. Secondly, the recording itself doesn’t sound normal to us. This is because we are listening to a digitized version of a different material medium; a late-Victorian brown wax cylinder. The particular cylinder behind this recording wasn’t preserved according to best archival practices. It lost some of its shape over time, distorting the voice of the poet, making it kind of warped or erie or creepy sounding to our modern ears and adding other sounds that are derived from the material medium itselfT from the wax. Those sounds become even stranger as the sound is migrated from one media format to another. In the case of this early Tennyson wax cylinder recording, it went from brown wax cylinder to a small flat disc record that was sold to the public by the Tennyson society. John Miller purchased that record and then transferred that to a cassette tape and played it through a boombox. Hearing odd cylinder noises through a 1980s boombox estranges the original sound from its source. Same goes for when we turn it into an mp3 file and listen to it through a computer or iPhone. There are a lot of additional sounds beyond the voice that we cannot identify in this recording. For example, starting from about one minute and 33 seconds into the recording, we hear a loud banging sound.\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\tWe can’t know if this is a feature of the recording technology or if Tennyson himself was simply getting carried away with his recitation, banging a lectern or a table as he performed the poem. This is what John Miller assumed the banging sound to be.\n00:11:55\tJohn Miller:\tI think there are points at which he is pounding his cane on the floor, points which he runs out of breath, and that does give an extraordinary sense of the life, I think.\n00:12:08\tJason Camlot:\tAn extraordinary sense of Tennyson’s sonic presence, of his vocalic body. There’s also the issue of context. We can’t always hear context in a sound recording, although there are sometimes clues that can be heard. In this case, it’s hard for us to understand what was going on at the time. Why was he even making this recording? What would that have been like for him? Where was he exactly? What time was it? Was he reading or reciting his poem by heart? These old sound recordings are like escaped fugitives from their original media and historical contexts. And yet, despite all this strangeness, even with all this missing information, when we hear a historical voice recording, when we listen to Tennyson read The Charge of the Light Brigade again, over 100 years after he recited it into a phonograph, there’s something very real about it. This sense of the realness of recorded sound seems to have been felt by listeners even at the earliest exhibitions of the tinfoil phonograph.\n00:13:17\tLisa Gitelman:\tI think there is something to that, that this was an experience of temporal continuity, that there was a slice of time that was being inscribed onto these sheets of tinfoil, in a way that when you write down what somebody said, you’re not putting down – you’re putting down the words, but you’re not putting down a slice of time. My name is Lisa Gitelman. I’m a professor at New York University where I teach in the departments of English and the department of Media, Culture and Communication. There were several ways I guess we could say that these recordings and these exhibitions became experiences of temporality, right? The, the kind of preservative nature of the tinfoil but also the kind of the temporal duration of the recording itself.\n00:14:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe realtime quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what philosopher Wolfgang Ernst has called the ‘drama of time critical media.’ I like the idea that something dramatic happens when we play with time by playing sound recordings. An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing. It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one is hearing is living in the present, replicating the live event of which it is apparently a real time reproduction. Sound recording works on human perception itself and on our perception of time in particular. So Ernst’s argument about the strange drama of sound recording is based on his idea that we’re not cognitively equipped to process events from two temporal dimensions at the same time. When we immerse ourselves in real time sound, we perceive it as live and this jars our awareness of time. So that’s another weird quality of early sound recordings: they give us the experience of feeling time as multi-dimensional. In that way, a phonograph is like a time machine and we’re the time travellers. As an aside, HG Wells published his story, The Time Machine in 1895 soon after the invention of sound recording and film media technologies. Maybe he was inspired by this weird drama of time critical media that Wolfgang Ernst just talking about\n00:15:51\tJason Camlot:\tPart two, what is an early sound recorder? How did recording sounds become possible and how did those early technologies work?\n00:16:05\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:16:06\tJason Camlot:\tMaybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. As we just heard from Lisa Gitelman, wax cylinders weren’t even the first recording technology, just my personal entry into the world of recorded sound. Like a lot of innovations, in hindsight, it seems almost obvious that humans would record sound, including the human voice, and play this back for all the reasons we’ve come to expect. However, like a lot of human inventions, there was a certain degree of serendipity involved in the development of recording technologies and also some inventive talent. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, that one name kept coming up.\n00:16:52\tAudio Recording:\tThomas Edison, Thomas Edison, Edison, Thomas Edison.\n00:16:57\tLisa Gitelman:\tI have doctorate in literature, so I’m a person who’s interested in texts, interested in reading and writing. And after I went to graduate school, I got a job at Rutgers University in New Jersey, working with a team of scholars that have, for a long time, have been researching and publishing the papers of the American inventor, Thomas Edison.\n00:17:19\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:17:21\tLisa Gitelman:\tAnd I spent many years working with that team of scholars to educate ourselves and educate the public about this archive and what was it. One of the things in it was a lot of material about the invention of recorded sound and I just was kind of bitten by the buck and became fascinated. In particular with the kind of earliest moments in 1877 and 1878, when the idea recorded sound itself didn’t really exist. One of the most precious things there, were experimental notebooks. So we have the original experimental notebooks in which Edison and his team of inventors were playing around in the 1870s – let’s say, in the fall of 1877 or the summer of 1877 – with lots of telephone devices, basically trying to invent a better telephone. And there was a lot of work in this period by Edison and by many others on telephone and Telegraph work, and there were lots of telegraph systems that did involve paper tapes. Either a telegraphic messages printed on paper tape or paper tape used as a kind of repeating device for telegraph communication, to make telegraphy a little bit more automatic. So using paper was something they had around and it also locked into expectations about inscription. And we have documents that more or less show us a certain moment when Edison realized, ‘Look, the way we’re doing this, we could actually use this technology to not just, you know, sort of transmit sound, but actually save it up.’ So you can actually see this in the manuscript notebooks. And then of course there are lots and lots of pieces of correspondence and business papers, then some promotional materials, so the archive is just a kind of many-splendored collection of oddities in a way. But it’s filled with these stories that can be pieced back together by historians who go through the papers.\n00:19:44\tJason Camlot:\tI’m going to try to take you through a history of acoustic recording technologies from the pre-recording phonautograph of the 1860s to the invention of the tinfoil phonograph in 1877 to the perfected wax cylinder phonograph in 1888. And then, eventually, To the introduction of flat disc gramophone records and beyond. To give this early historical account of sound recording technologies. I’d like to introduce you to:\n00:20:14\tPatrick Feaster:\tMy name’s Patrick Feaster. I’m media preservation specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University and I study the cultural, social, and technological history of sound recording with a particular emphasis on very, very early sound recordings. When we talk about sound recordings today, we generally think of them as something that is intended mainly to be listened to. You record speech music…\n00:20:40\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:42\tPatrick Feaster:\t…some kind of sound, then you play it back again as sound.\n00:20:46\tAudio Recording:\tTesting one, two, three.\n00:20:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tThe first person to record a sound out of the air and then play it back was Thomas Edison in 1877, But he was not the first person to record a sound out of the air. The first person to record a sound out of the air was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He was a scientific proofreader who, In about 1850 to 1853, was given a treatise on physiology, which included a section describing how the human ear and eardrum work. As he read this, he began imagining to himself an artificial eardrum that would vibrate in the same way that human eardrum does, but then instead of passing those vibrations along to the auditory nerve and the brain so that we could hear them, it would write them down so that, as he imagined, any sound that the human ear was capable of hearing could be written down in this way. The invention he came up with consisted first of all of a big funnel with the membrane at one end of it. And the idea was you’d direct sounds of speech, song, whatever it was, into this funnel, they would cause the membrane to vibrate, then a stylus attached to the other side of the membrane would move back and forth with the vibrations. Now underneath the stylus would be a sheet of paper covered with the soot of an oil lamp and wrapped around a cylinder, and as sounds were directed into the funnel, you’d rotate the cylinder and as the stylus moved back and forth, it would draw a wavy line in the soot. After you’d made your recording, you’d take the sheet of paper off the drum, you’d fix it in an alcohol bath, kind of like fixing a charcoal drawing, and then you’d have this visual record of sound. Now the wavy line on that sheet of paper contains the same kind of information as the wavy groove on an LP. In both cases, we’re dealing with a graph of sound vibrations, the amplitude of sound vibrations over time, but Scott’s phonautograms were not intended for playback, which hadn’t yet occurred to anybody as a possibility at this point. Instead, he thought of the phonautograph as recording sounds in the same sense that a seismograph records earthquakes, you would not expect to be able to take a seismograph record of an earthquake and use it to create another earthquake. In fact, if you could do that, seismographs would probably be a lot more tightly controlled. But at the same time, we don’t think of seismographs as not really recording earthquakes. They really do, they graph out the vibrations of the, uh, the earth tremors and so forth. And similarly, these records were records of sound. But they were intended to be looked at visually, not listened to. Scott wasn’t sure exactly what people would be able to make of these records. He had rather ambitious thoughts that people would learn to decipher recorded words from them. You could perhaps sit and look at a recording of a performance of dramatic oratory or an operatic aria sitting in your chair at home, and maybe if you learned to read these things well enough, you could imagine in your mind’s ear what their performance had sounded like. But again, it was to be strictly a visual record. That’s not to say that we can’t play them back today. In fact, we can, what we need to do is make a high resolution scan of the phonautogram use an algorithm to detect the position of the wavy line and then convert that information into samples in a digital sound file. Once we do that, we can listen to the recordings Scott made, even though at the time they were made, there was no mechanism available to turn them back into sound. There are a few more things we need to do to get intelligible sound out of a phonautogram. The cylinder on which sounds were recorded was turned by hand, so the recording speed was very irregular. If we were to play the sound waves straight off the paper as the appear there would be extreme speed fluctuations, so severe that you wouldn’t be able to recognize the melody of a tune – something like that. Fortunately, Scott recorded the vibrations of a tuning fork next to the trace of the voice, and the nice thing about that is that the tuning fork always has the same number of vibrations in a given amount of time. And so if we adjust the tuning fork so that it’s at a constant frequency, then we bring the voice in along with it, we can correct for the speed fluctuations from the hand cranking of the cylinder. When we do this, we can hear songs, recitations, very much as they sounded back in the day. The, the tambour was not recorded so successfully, but the pitch very much was\n00:26:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tScott’s recordings were all test recordings to one degree or another. He was really still trying to figure out whether his invention worked and what it could be used to do, so he didn’t go out and record the voices of famous people or famous singers, he pretty much just recorded himself, his own voice. But there was some variety in his recordings. Sometimes he is clearly conducting a dry scientific experiment. Maybe he’s pronouncing words very slowly and deliberately or, or singing a song like ‘O Clair de la Lune’, but holding each note for an uncomfortably long amount of time. The idea here was to see whether, looking at the trace afterwards, you could understand what was going on, you could tell one note from another, maybe different vowel sounds, different consonants would look different from one another. In these cases that’s the sort of thing he was trying to figure out. But sometimes he lets loose with something that really is a full fledged performance. A piece of impassioned, dramatic oratory, a lively rendition of a song from the opera. Here Scott is experimenting with another of his goals for the phonautograph, which is that it could record virtuosic performances. That is, you could have the celebrated figures of the theater and the music hall stand in front of the phonautograph, perform the works for which they were best known, once they were recorded as phonautograms perhaps the, the genius of these people wouldn’t die with them, but future generations could experience it. They could look at those phonautograms, they could hear the performances again in their mind’s ear.\n00:28:29\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, the real breakthrough I think was when they released themselves in a sense from the idea that paper was a recording medium, and started to try experiments with sheets of tinfoil. Um, so the first successful recording surface was sheets of tinfoil, which sounds weird. They are paper-like, right? They certainly come in sheets. But it was a slightly more durable material and it sort of proved useful for what they were trying to do, which is a very kind of crude acoustic recording. The original device was not electronic in any way, it was just mechanical, and in a sense the tinfoil was part of the machine. So in 1877, and then moreso in 1878, the tinfoil phonograph started to gain a lot of popular attention in newspapers, and eventually there were kind of worldwide demonstrations of this, then miraculous, device.\n00:29:36\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo what this machine looked like, it was basically a long cylinder with a handle or a crank at the end that you could sort of spin to make the machine revolve. It had a funnel attached to it that the speaker would speak into, and then the sound of their voice, the vibrations in the air, would create indentations on the tinfoil. And then those indentations on the sheet of tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder, that was sort of the first sound recording. My name is Matthew Rubery, I am a professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Theoretically, that sheet of tinfoil could be replayed again and again, taken off the machine and put back on another machine and played again. But in reality, it did not go so smoothly. Often these sheets of tinfoil tore, they were quite delicate. It was very difficult to rewrap a sheet of tinfoil around a cylinder again, once you’ve taken it off. And then you had to sort of get the rotation speed just right, so you had to have a real skilled operator to turn that handle at just the right speed to recapture the pitch of the original voice. But these tinfoil photographs were the first ones that were made and sort of scraps of tinfoil that were given out at the end of these exhibitions, I mean, what a souvenir, those would be incredibly valuable today.\n00:30:55\tLisa Gitelman:\tWell, I mean, if I were to imitate this recording for a classroom it would be easy for me to, I mean, these sounded just terrible. I’m gonna, you know, fake it, but I think they would have sounded like this, [inaudible,] you know just lots of scrapey surface noise. So the real question there is not so much ‘What did we listen to?’ But the real question becomes, ‘How are people so excited about this new recording technology?’ That question takes you back again to this threshold, when things are really new and you need a way to think about them. Apparently available in 1878 was an intuitive sense of fidelity, that ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, that’s you!’ on the recording, because there was nothing to compare it to.\n00:31:58\tDavid Seubert:\tMy name is David Seubert and I’m the Curator of the Performing Arts Collection at the University of California Santa Barbara. And part of my responsibilities here are the management of the historical sound recordings collection, which notably includes one of the world’s largest collections of early cylinder recordings: about 19,000 titles at this point. And we also have the discography of American historical recordings, which is a large database project to document the output of the early North American sound recording industry. A wax cylinder is really the commercial product that resulted from Thomas Edison’s invention of sound recording in the 1870s, where he initially recorded onto a roll of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical mandrel in order to use it for mass production of audio content, whether that’s spoken or music or whatever else it might be. They developed a wax cylinder which is a hard metallic soap that allowed for people to both record onto it and then to play it back as well. So unlike flat disks, a wax cylinders are really a read-write medium like cassette tapes or like an mp3 file where people, individuals could buy commercially produced recordings or make their own. So we have some early interesting content there on cylinders.\n00:33:26\tJason Camlot:\tThe history of early sound recording technologies reveals a close connection between sound and visual text or script. As Patrick Feaster explained the original idea for sound recording, the phonautograph didn’t even imagine playing it back, but conceived of sound recording as a kind of sound to printed script technology. The sound goes in and produces a squiggly line that we might perhaps be able to read. Léon Scott wasn’t able to read the squiggles with his own eyes, but Patrick and his colleagues who work on the first sounds project were able to get a computer to read them as digital data and to make that play t`he sounds that were originally recorded in the 1860s. Pretty amazing. Amazing in part because acoustic recording technologies are so very basic. A simple mechanical approach to capturing the air pressure produced by sound producing events like a person speaking. There’s no electrical transduction of the air pressure in this acoustic process, just a horn or tube to direct the sounds toward a thin diaphragm that is sensitive to the changes in air pressure and a stylus or needle that records those changes in air pressure onto something paper – tinfoil, wax – for safekeeping, and then a reversal of just the same process in this case from recorded bumps or squiggles on a material surface, via a stylus, to make the diaphragm shiver and stir the air again and a horn to make us hear those air pressure movements as the sound that had stirred the air in the past. The connection between sound recording and writing was strong from the beginning. Thinking of sound as a kind of printed text may distort or limit our understanding, our apprehension, our hearing of what is spoken recording really is. What if we try to think of these recordings not as visual scripts to be played, not as spoken or sounded versions of print works, but as audio texts, as generic forms in sound.\n00:35:45\tJason Camlot:\tPart three what are the formal and generic features of early sound recordings? What does it mean to think of a recorded speech as a formal entity? What are the elements that constitute the shape and significance of the audio text? The sound of early speech recordings can help us think about how to answer these kinds of questions. They help us hear how the nature of the recording technology itself had an impact on the Sonic qualities of the audio text that could be produced. As we now know, the technological and material underpinnings of an audio text have a hand in shaping how it was produced, used, and consequently the social and cultural meanings it might come to have. This is a pretty typical argument of design theory, which suggests that the material substratum of an artifact informs the possible courses of action that can be taken with it and frames the practices and meanings that surround it. Now, I don’t mean to say that the capacities and limits of the phonograph as a recording and sound playing device, or the material affordances of a wax cylinder as a storage media format, completely determined the use and meaning of all of the sounds that were accorded in preserved with phonograph cylinder technology, but they did play a role in deciding what kinds of sounds could be captured and in the case of speech recordings, what kinds of spoken audio text could be produced. Two quick examples of this. One: acoustic sound recording required the speaker to speak loudly. You practically had to shout to make that diaphragm vibrate enough so the stylus would dig into the wax deeply enough for the recording to the audible when it was played back. This affordance of phonograph recording technology meant that you couldn’t be all that subtle in your recitation of a literary work. You couldn’t whisper a poem into a phonograph. It wouldn’t stick. So early speech recordings couldn’t rely on wide ranges in amplitude, that’s volume or loudness, to communicate the feelings of the speaker. Here’s a second example: cylinders could hold no more than a few minutes of sound. So the storage capacity of the wax cylinder as a preservation medium had some serious implications for what kinds of texts and speeches could be recorded.\n00:38:33\tDavid Seubert:\tYou know the format was short. I mean, it’s a cylinder up until 1908 or so, only held two minutes of content. And after then, after 1908, they introduced four minute cylinders.\n00:38:45\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s David Seubert again.\n00:38:47\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo Edison, when he invented his phonograph, the first sort of prototype made in December of 1877,\n00:38:55\tJason Camlot:\tDr Matthew Rubery.\n00:38:56\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo, going all the way back to the 19th century here he tested it out by reading or reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb. And I think that’s an interesting choice, although there’s been a lot of speculation about, you know, why start recorded sound history with this particular example. A few reasons come to mind, one is it’s a very short verse, and the first recordings could only record, you know, I think this one was under 10 seconds, which was perfect for a test case. It’s also something that sort of sticks in the mind quite easily, so you don’t have to think about the words, they just sort of come effortlessly to you as many nursery rhymes still do. It’s also helpful for an audience when listening to these early recordings because even though at the time the recording quality was talked about as being incredibly lifelike, when you hear this today, they sound practically inaudible.\n00:39:51\tAudio Recording:\tMarry had a little lamb, his fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.\n00:40:00\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it helped to have a recording that was familiar, the Lord’s prayer, for instance, was another recording that was often used to sort of demonstrate the phonograph.\n00:40:13\tAudio Recording:\tIn the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. Hallowed Father who art in Heaven…\n00:40:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tBut that was when people heard these verses read aloud, they could recognize them clearly. Whereas if they heard something unfamiliar, it’d be a lot more difficult for them to actually hear what was being said. So some of the earliest recordings then started out with just snippets of nursery rhymes, a verse or two of poetry, maybe a short speech from a play, and these all sort of fit the earliest sound recording devices, which could only record up to two or three minutes. But they work great, too, for public demonstrations where the phonographic knowledge had been taken around to places and debuted in different cities. And let’s say a scrap of verse might be read, a speech might be recorded as well, some funny noises by the exhibitor might be made, a little bit of music too, to get the sense of the variety of things that could be done with these, these phonographs. That was what happened in 1878 when the photograph first came out, and it wasn’t until about 10 years later that we get to send in the more literary recordings or serious exhibitions. So the phonographs sort of disappears for 10 years after that.\n00:41:24\tJason Camlot:\tYou weren’t wonna make a recording of paradise lost or a full length play or novel because it would have required many hundreds of wax cylinders to do so. Early on when he first introduced the phonograph, Edison had bragged in some newspaper articles about soon having Charles Dickens’ novel, Nicholas Nickleby, on a single audio record.\n00:41:48\tMatthew Rubery:\tThe main thing holding back audio books or full length audio books is what we talked about earlier. The fact that records could only hold two or three minutes of sound up until the 1930s. And it’s not until 1934 that the technology is capable of recording an entire full length book on a set of discs, let’s say nine or 10 records for an average novel. So that’s a big change from a few decades earlier when, you know, Mark Twain once tried to record one of his novels using these wax cylinders that could only hold a few minutes of speech, and he got up to I think about 40 or so and then just gave up because it just wasn’t going to work. There were way too many cylinders needed to make a literary recording. But in the 1930s radio, the radio industry and organizations representing blind people start collaborating to come up with a way to make the record record as much as 20 minutes of speech on each side of a disc. And once that breakthrough is made, that enables the first full length recorded books to be made. And interestingly enough, they’re not made for sighted people, the first recorded books are made for blind people beginning in 1934.\n00:43:04\tAudio Recording:\tTyphoons by Joseph Conrad written in 1903, recorded for the Talking Book Library for the blind by kind permission of the trustees to the estate of the late Joseph Conrad. Chapter one.\n00:43:18\tMatthew Rubery:\tSo it’s a rare example of people with disabilities receiving a technology in advance of everyone else. And it’s not until about 10 years later, until 1948, that those LP records, long playing records, go on the commercial market.\n00:43:32\tJason Camlot:\tSo the forms of early spoken recordings were necessarily short and the audio texts produced were either abridged versions of longer works or ingeniously condensed synecdotal instances or scenes that evoked a larger work from which they came. What actual genres of spoken recording did these media constraints make possible? You couldn’t hear a whole Dickens novel on a cylinder, but you might hear a minor character addressing you as if you are a character yourself in such a novel, giving you the feeling that you were listening to a Dickens character as if he were a real person and as if you were a fictional character.\n00:44:08\tAudio Recording:\tAh, my dear [inaudible] come in come in. I am rejoiced to see you at this [inaudible] moment. Oh and my dear regal friend, [inaudible], now, welcome to this–\n00:44:25\tJason Camlot:\tOr you might get a key transformation scene taken from the play adaptation of a novel to stand in for the novel as a whole, as if somehow Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could be boiled down to the moment when the professional and respectable Jekyll or Jeekul, as the recording puts it, loses control and transforms into the atavistic monster Hyde.\n00:44:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Chiming bells.] … that terrible night when, transformed as I was into that fiend incarnate Hyde, I murdered the father of the woman I loved. [Organ music.] Ah, I must pray—Pray God to keep away the demons. Ah, God, look into my heart and forgive my sins. You were right. I was wrong. Ah, ah the fiend is coming. Yes. Hyde is here! [Shrill throaty noises.] Stop that damned organ! The noise offends me ears! [Cackling laughter.] [Knocking.] They come for me! They’re going to take me to the gallows! [High tempo organ music.] But I don’t die on the gallows…\n00:45:28\tJason Camlot:\tOr George du Maurier’s best-selling late Victorian novel, Trilby, could be summed up by the scene in which the treacherous and antisemitically-rendered musical genius and mesmerist Svengali mesmerises the innocent Trilby.\n00:45:46\tAudio Recording:\tThe day will come when I shall be the famous Svengali, and hundreds of beautiful women shall fall in love with me — Prinzessin and Contessen and Serene English Altessen. But Svengali will not look at them. He will look inward at his own dream. And that dream shall be all about Trilby — to lay his heart, his genius, his thousand francs at her beautiful white feet. And you shall see nothing, hear nothing, thinking nothing but Svengali, Svengali…\n00:46:20\tJason Camlot:\tWhile no sound recording offers a transparent or unmediated record of a performance event, early sound recordings demanded greater accommodation of the affordances of the recording technology and preservation media than those made after the widespread use of tape recording. So we can’t separate a discussion of the kinds of recordings made in the first decades of sound recording from the technologies and media formats that were used to make them. That said, there were a great variety of genres of recordings made during the acoustic era of sound recording. Looking back to the beginning and the kinds of recordings that were made can help us try to understand why people were interested in these recordings, why they bought them, when they became commercially available, and what they may have meant to the people who listened to them.\n00:47:07\tLisa Gitelman:\tWhen a recorded sound first came into existence. The way people had to understand it was on its merits, in a sense, in relation to older technology, right? When a new technology comes along and the only way you can grapple with it is to look backward., and looking backward from recorded sound in the 1870s was really to think about text, was really to think about reading and writing and what we now think of as all the alternatives to recorded sound.\n00:47:38\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Lisa Gitelman again.\n00:47:39\tLisa Gitelman:\tA bunch of people signed up with this company, this exhibition company. A lot of them were journalists. Again, going back to the idea that this was somehow about writing and reading. But they were entertainers too, and in my research I just became kind of fascinated with newspaper accounts of these demonstrations. And they all, I mean, weirdly, they all seem to take something of a similar form. When people were faced with this recording device in small audiences or even large concert halls they tended to mimic to the machine to recite nursery rhymes, little scraps of Shakespeare, little tidbits of things they already had memorized, lots of kind of mimicry and animal noises and, I won’t say farting into the machine, but so that kind of mentality, it was a kind of, you know, low brow bonding, if you will, over the potential of this machine\n00:48:39\tPatrick Feaster:\tHistories of the commercial recording industry tend to focus on music, but really the spoken word was a very important part of what it had to offer from the very beginning.\n00:48:47\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s Patrick Feaster again.\n00:48:49\tPatrick Feaster:\tMoreover, there were a few different types of recordings that featured spoken language very, very prominently. Some recordings were relatively straightforward recitations of existing, often well-known literary works, somewhat more common than this where recordings in which a performer would take on some particular persona, often an ethnic character, and perform a monologue in that character, usually humorous. A number of different ethnicities were represented. A performer, Will N. Steel specialized in a Jewish character named Einstein.\n00:49:28\tAudio Recording:\t[inaudible] my boy Ikie is a bright boy. Some day he shall set the moon on fire [inaudible]\n00:49:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tFrank Kennedy had a German character named Schultz.\n00:49:38\tAudio Recording:\tChildren are a necessary evil. There’s many different kinds of children. For instance, there’s the good boy, who goes to Sunday school when it grows up he becomes cashier in a bank and he finally skips to Canada with all the money he can get a hold of.\n00:49:53\tPatrick Feaster:\tBest known example of this type was a performer named Cal Stewart whose character Uncle Josh Weathersby was enormously popular for about 20 years.\n00:50:06\tAudio Recording:\tWell sure, we’ve just had our annual camp meeting at Punkin Center.\n00:50:11\tPatrick Feaster:\tThis was a character from rural New England who would tell about his naive blunders visiting New York city. Or sometimes he’d talk about things that happened back home in Punkin Center.\n00:50:26\tAudio Recording:\tIt was a great affair. Wow. For several days we was pretty busy baking and cooking and making preparations.\n00:50:35\tPatrick Feaster:\tThen there’s a third category of more elaborate productions in much the same spirit as later radio drama or radio comedy where you have multiple characters performing sound effects, music, all fitting together to convey some story through sound.\n00:50:53\tAudio Recording:\tMorning [inaudible]. Morning [inaudible] Don’t you know me? Wait ’til I take off my whiskers. We’ll i’ll be darned if it ain’t the constable. What be ya doin’ up outside? Doin’ up? Detectivin’! That’s what I’m doin’ up.\n00:51:08\tPatrick Feaster:\tBut this was done with the phonograph, much earlier examples of this stating back well into the 1890s. Not all early phonographic audio theater was humorous. There were serious examples including a dramatization of the San Francisco earthquake, reenactments of battles in the Spanish American war, one piece by Ada Jones and Len Spencer called House Cleaning Time\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording:\tLet me in. [inaudible] don’t you dare come in without drying your feet on the mat. Why, woman my feet are so wet you couldn’t dry them on the stove! Well, come in then.\n00:51:41\tPatrick Feaster:\tIs really more of a sentimental piece, an old couple reminiscing about their lives together, but a majority of it is humorous and a very large proportion of it involves ethnic humour.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording:\tGood morning Miss Riley, how are ya this morning?\n00:52:02\tPatrick Feaster:\tThere were practical reasons for this, much the same as the practical reasons that made ethnic humour so popular in other venues on the Vaudeville Stage in high dialect pieces published as filler in newspapers. Invoking an ethnic stereotype meant you didn’t have to spend any time on character development.\n00:52:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Inaudible] for you Mrs Riley, my husband and I have been married for two long years.\n00:52:34\tPatrick Feaster:\tBy taking on an Irish stage dialect, a black stage dialect, a German or so-called Dutch stage dialect, any one of a number of different conventionalised ways of speaking, but as soon as you adopt one of these conventionalised dialects, you can take for granted that your audience will make certain assumptions about the character you’re representing and will understand what’s going on based on them. And if all you have to work with is a short slot on a Vaudeville schedule, a few lines of space in a newspaper or two to three minutes of sound recording, then this type of efficiency can be very valuable.\n00:53:22\tJason Camlot:\tPart four: why early spoken recordings are important for understanding of the longer history of audio books, sound recording, and performance today. When I say that early sound recordings are weird, maybe what I’m really saying is that recordings from the early period of the technology can teach us a lot about those of subsequent periods. The fact that we are estranged from the content media and methods of performance in early sound recordings help us see and hear the elements that are less obvious to us in the case of recordings and media that we take for granted today. When we think about literary history by engaging with sound archives, it requires us to think about how the recordings that document the performance of literary texts, conversations, and activities were made and used and how the media and methods of production shaped the audio documents we can hear today. When tape recording became widely accessible in the 1960s with people carrying portable Wollensak and Uher reel-to-reel tape recorders around, they still weighed like 20 pounds, so not quite so portable as an audio cassette Walkman, a mini disc recorder, or an iPhone still when they were carrying these Wollensak and Uhers around, suddenly live readings that lasted an hour or more could be captured and listened to in another time and place.\n00:54:55\tAudio Recording:\tIt’s the sort of thing we do in Vancouver, like we sit down and read the whole book and this was published the same day as Dan Persky’s The Day, a book called The Day and uh it’s about the same length, about a hundred pages and he read The Day and then we took a break and I read Autobiology and then we took a break of a couple of hours and then he read The Day again.\n00:55:17\tJason Camlot:\tWe know that literary readings lasting hours did take place in the 19th century too, there are newspaper reports about that. But there were no reel-to-reel tape recorders back then. Our audible history of the literary past is shaped, in part, by the material nature of the media and archives we have today. Early recordings help us understand that about all subsequent media recordings, even the seemingly invisible digital formats like MP3 files. The difference between digital audio media and the analog and acoustic media technologies is pretty significant. For one thing, analog media capture sound in one continuous stream, and in that sense represent a kind of material index of the original sound event, it records. Digital media, on the other hand, capture microcosmic slices, samples according to a bit rate or frequency data that allows us to rehear the past events, rehear the past events, the past events. They certainly sound as clear or clear to us than all previous analog media and they can record sound events for than any previous material medium, just depends on how much hard drive storage space you have. But there are missing spaces in the documented temporal event in digital audio files that aren’t there in analog recordings. Maybe that makes a difference. Born digital recordings or digitized recordings of the past, turn literary sound into a new kind of data with its own remarkable affordances. We can control, analyze and listen to such audible data in a greater variety of ways than we could with earlier audio media technologies. It’s now very easy to record, store, entire novels on portable devices and to replay them in a variety of places, in the kitchen, walking the dog at the gym, driving to work, and to replay them in different ways. For example, the difference in speeds without changing pitch of the reader’s voice. Speed listening has been around since the 1930s at least recent work by Matthew Rubery, Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills has shown this. But digital media make possibilities for the manipulation of the human voice, virtually infinite.\n00:57:33\tAudio Recording:\tA set of drum rondos from synth loops in the cyborg opera. [beatboxing]\n00:57:42\tJason Camlot:\tMe may admire an avant garde poet’s performance of synthetic sounds, like Christian Bök vocalizing drum loops in a movement from a cyborg opera, as evidence of ingenuity and virtuosity in performance\n00:57:56\tAudio Recording:\t[beatboxing]\n00:57:58\tJason Camlot:\tBut really, with digital media plugins, what can’t the human voice sound like or do? Since the end of the 19th century, each phase of media history, performance history, literary history, and socio-cultural history has come with audible recordings of the human voice for us to decipher. By Listening to these recorded voices and all their sonic historicity. We can begin to understand the meaning of human expression as an auditory phenomenon, which is to say as a relational human phenomenon.\n00:58:37\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n00:58:39\tJason Camlot:\tWhat methods of listening, what audile techniques – to use a phrase from Jonathan Sterne’s book, The Audible Past – have we developed to help us decipher this remarkable audible archive? That’s a big and important question that I’m going to save for a future Spoken Web podcast. In the meanwhile, why not hop onto LibriVox or Audible and have a listen to the complete works of Charles Dickens.\n00:59:13\tAudio Recording:\tA tale of two cities by Charles Dickens. Book one, ‘recalled to life.’ Book one, chapter one, ‘the period.’ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.\n00:59:46\tTheme Music:\t[instrumental]\n01:00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Cheryl Gladu and Jason Camlot. Our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Lisa Gitelman, Patrick Feaster, David Seubert, John Miller, and Matthew Rubery for their candid interviews and continued contributions to Spoken Web. An extra special thank you to everyone who joined us for last months’ #spokenwebpod listening party in celebration of our inaugural episode. Add your voice to the mix on Twitter with #spokenwebpod. To find out more about Spoken Web visits, spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the spoken web podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know. Please rate and leave a comment on iTunes or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9277","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S2E1, Deep Curation – Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice, 5 October 2020, du Plessis and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/ "],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Klara du Plessis","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2e2272f2-55cd-4126-9504-959fca8bda69/audio/ea743428-b8dd-4aa5-b204-c8d72da6416b/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:56:13\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,035,897 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e1-deep-curation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/deep-curation-experimenting-with-the-poetry-reading-as-practice/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print Recordings:\\n\\nBernstein, Charles. ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.\\n\\nBourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009.\\n\\nBrown, Lee Ann. In the Laurels, Caught. Albany: Fence Books, 2013.\\n\\nChristakos, Margaret. charger. Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2020.\\n\\ndu Plessis, Klara. “Santa Cova Muscles.” Unpublished.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019.\\n\\nLongair, Sarah. “Cultures of Curating: the Limits of Authority.” Museum History Journal 8.1 (2015): 1-7.\\n\\nMiddleton, Peter. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (March 2005): 7-34. Web. 25 December 2016.\\n\\nNakayasu, Sawako. Texture Notes. Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.\\n\\nObrist, Hans Ulrich and Asad Raza. Ways of Curating. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.\\n\\nRadford, Deanna. Poems. Unpublished.\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. Rag Cosmology. Toronto: Book*Hug, 2017.\\n\\nRogoff, Irit. “Curating/Curatorial.” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 19-38.\\n\\nVidokle, Anton. “Art without Artists?” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 216-226.\\n\\nWheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.\\n\\nPoetry Recordings:\\n\\nDeep Curation 4th Space. Feat. Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Deanna Radford. 7 November 2019. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Boston University. Feat. Lee Ann Brown, Fanny Howe, Sawako Nakayasu. 30 January 2020. Personal archive.\\n\\nDeep Curation Mile End Poets’ Festival. Feat. Aaron Boothby, Klara du Plessis, Canisia Lubrin, Erin Robinsong. 24 November 2018. Personal archive.\\n\\nSir George Williams Reading Series. Feat. Jackson Mac Low. 26 March 1971. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1\\n\\nFour Horsemen. Two Nights. 9 and 10 October 1987. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/4-\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549464547328,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Who chooses what words will be heard at a poetry reading, in what order, and why? Since 2018, Montreal-based poet and researcher Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation.\n\nThis episode – the “Season Two” premiere of The SpokenWeb Podcast – chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form, with excerpted and intertwined works creating a thematic, cohesive arc. The eventual collaborative, choral, and sometimes improvisational nature of this project raises questions about authority and authorship. As such, this episode conceptualizes shifting degrees of responsibility between curator and authors, and the dynamic space created as a result of this shared and mobile agency. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio, include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong.\n\n00:03\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitch Voice Ends] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Picture yourself at your local arts cafe for a poetry reading with some of your favourite artists and writers. You settle into a nearby seat and the hum of idle chatter around you begins to fade as the poet’s ready to take the stage. Now ask yourself: who chooses which artist reads first? Who chooses what words will be heard at the poetry reading and in what order and why? Since 2018 Montreal based poet and researcher, Klara du Plessis has been developing her own practice of poetry reading organization by heightening the curator’s role in its production. She calls this experimental practice Deep Curation. This podcast episode chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form with excerpted and intertwined works, creating a thematic cohesive arc. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong. Here is Klara du Plessis with season two episode one of the SpokenWeb Podcast “Deep Curation: Experiments with the Poetry Reading as Practice.” [Theme Music].\n02:18\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m Klara du Plessis. A poet and PhD student in English at Concordia University. I’m doing research on the history and practice of the curation of poetry and performance. [Instrumental Strings] About three years ago, I saw a friend in Toronto and we sat on a terrace with our drinks. Our conversation felt energetic and I shared a new idea that I was excited about. So excited about that I continued not only thinking about it, but doing it. I call this doing Deep Curation.\n03:00\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation is a practice of experimental poetry reading organization that I developed and theorized over the past few years. Through it, I deliberately heightened the curator’s role while questioning assumptions of who gets to shape the poetry reading, why, and what the implications of those choices are.\n03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices as sample of Deep Curation performance]\n03:29\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the initial phase of experimentation and in my role as a Deep Curation curator, I would choose the poems read by the authors and the order of the presentation.\n03:41\tAudio Recording:\t[overlapping voices]\n03:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the later phases and in Deep Curation’s more robust form, I worked to create a thematic arc, to re-contextualize the poet’s work, to place poems in conversation with each other through proximity, but also excerpting and formal experimentation.\n04:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Voices]\n04:06\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Strings] The idea for Deep Curation hit me after almost six years of field work organizing the monthly Montreal-based Résonance Reading Series. [Music: Strings increases volume, includes overlapping audio of background event chatter] While this series precedes Deep Curation, it forms the foundation of my experience in thinking about curation. It was a big deal for me to wrap up that series. [End Music: Strings] It was such an ongoing, almost durational part of my curational life. I’ll never forget the final closing event of the series, held on 7, August 2018. [Audio Recording: Background Chatter]\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Klara du Plessis] Can everyone hear me? Amazing. It’s a really huge turnout, which is amazing and I’m so, so happy to see all of you. There are some extra fold up chairs kind of by the front door, on the right-hand side, opposite the counter. So, if anyone wants one, they’re there. Please help yourself. Or ask me to help you. Yeah, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, welcome to the final Résonance reading! [Cheering and Clapping] Yeah, it’s been six years of plus minus 10 readings per year, which makes that give or take 60 meetings right here on this stage. So, I’m gonna allow myself to be nostalgic for a moment because Résonance kind of started by accident in a way, like I just finished my Master’s and decided that I was going to take some time to do my own writing. And that led to me actually working here at Résonance Cafe in different capacities. But then of course I noticed the stage. I was like, okay, well it’s a perfect venue, let’s organize one reading. And so, I invited some friends to read and it was a huge success. It was super fun. And it kind of, then we decided that, “Oh, well, we can just as well start doing it again and again.” And I started organizing events on a monthly basis, but like one month by one month. And if I can give any aspiring curator advice, never organize month to month because it’s incredibly stressful. Like every couple of weeks, “Oh my gosh, I still need three readers, where am I going to find them.” And it just feels like you’re constantly organizing. [Mechanical Sound]. So, there was a point that I realized I needed to step up. And I started organizing the readings way in advance, like up to a year in advance. And this shift in attitude also kind of became a shift in who it was booking. So, I started inviting people who I thought wouldn’t say yes, you know, so I can be like, “who do I want to see on stage?” “Who do I really, really admire?” And then I’ll just reach out. And like the amazing thing was that pretty much everyone I’ve ever invited has said yes. With a few exceptions, with very legitimate reasons that they can’t come. And yeah, so I just realized that people [Metal Clanging] need a platform, people want to share their work. And yeah, that felt like a major kind of shift in what Résonance became. [Mechanical Sound] And then people started asking me to read people —agents and publicists started contacting me — and Résonance became larger, kind of like national in scope. It felt more serious and it felt like  way more responsibility. This is maybe like three, four years in. And then I very slowly started thinking that Résonance had become a form of authority in the sense of being able to offer or withhold opportunity. Those high standards are one of the reasons that I ended up deciding after six years that this kind of like the end of an era, in a sense that if Résonance were to continue, I would want to keep doing better and doing more. And as like one woman doing this, I don’t have the time or the resources to do that. But I do want to say that curating Résonance has been an absolute joy. It has been fun. It has been fulfilling. It has been challenging, energizing, and I’ve learned so much and I’ve met such great people [Audience Member: Woo!] So, thank you. [Clapping] That’s like the longest speech I’ve ever given here. [Instrumental Strings]\n09:01\tKlara du Plessis:\tI had heaps of experience organizing and hosting literary events, but Deep Curation was somehow different. I wanted to curate a poetry reading. I wanted to really curate a poetry reading. I wanted to invite poets whose work I love to read. And then I wanted to tell those poets which poems to read and in what order. “Oh”, my friend said, “yes”, my friend said. “That is a good idea.” [Instrumental Strings with Percussion]\n09:33\tKlara du Plessis:\tWhenever I chat with art historians or exhibition curators about the research that I’m doing, they always have one of two reactions. They either insist that curation in the visual arts is grossly under theorized and not thought about critically at all, or that the word curatorial has been overused and they couldn’t stand hearing it one more time. Coming from a literary perspective, though, it seems to me that the visual arts has done a tremendous job of sussing out critical vocabulary surrounding the presentation, dissemination, and structures of collaboration inherent to curating. For starters, practitioners of the visual arts and museum studies have theorized a very useful division between the terms of curating and curatorial. I’d like to quote scholar and curator Irit Rogoff on this rift. Rogoff suggests quote: [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “the distinction is of curating as professional practice, which involves a whole set of skills and practices, materials, and institutional and infrastructural conditions. Developing the concept of the curatorial has been about getting away from representation and trying to see within this activity, a set of possibilities for much larger agendas in the art world. The curatorial then defines the larger frame” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumental] When I think of most poetry readings that I have been involved in, and especially those that precede Deep Curation, I interpret curating versus the curatorial as a division of labour. Often the poetry reading organizer takes on the work of curating. I mean that the organizer invites the poets, they book a venue, promote the event on social media, they check the microphone and adopt a responsibility of care towards presenters and audience. They ensure that everyone is having a good time. In contrast the poets themselves enact the curatorial role. The poets choose which poems they will share, how these poems will be framed by anecdote and preamble, and in which order they will be performed. As critic Peter Middleton says, choosing which poems to read is quote, [Click] [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] “a fiercely held prerogative of the poet.” End quote. [End Music: Upbeat Instrumentals] [Click] All of this implies that the organizer of the event has little to no input into the work performed at the poetry reading. They don’t know whether they will like the specific works chosen by the poet. They also don’t know whether the works by different poets will enter into relevant dialogue with each other, [Audio Recording: Echoes of chatter at an event] or whether there will be a thematic or conceptual arc to the event as a whole. Differently put the literary curator has little agency to shape or mediate the event as a cohesive relational platform for the presentation of art. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this division of curating and curatorial and how it impacts the organization of literary events. I became obsessed with trying to shift this dynamic, to play with it, and to get material answers to theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s pivotal question: [Begin Music: Intermittent Strings] what does a form become when it is plunged into a dimension of dialogue? This isn’t a new question. As Bourriaud historicizes in terms of the visual arts, a paradigm shift occurred after cubism resulting in a radical turn away from human deity and human object dialectics and a turn towards human to human relationality. Starting mid-century and swelling through the ‘70s, into the ‘90s, happenings, gatherings and participation-focused art, place sociability and the relationships between human experience center stage. [End Music: Intermittent Strings] At the same time, collaboration and interactivity became a source for exploration in the literary world.\n13:19\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\t[Inaudible/Multiple voices reciting poetry over one another] Opening quotations number. Open quotations. [Inaudible] Closed quotations. Semi-colon. [Inaudible]\n13:30\tKlara du Plessis:\tA good example [Audio Recording from above continues faintly] is Jackson Mac Low’s communal readings using volunteers from the audience to perform elaborate scriptings of his poems.\n13:37\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tSemi-colon. Evan. [Inaudible]\n13:43\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Audio Recording continues faintly] These readings often resulted in cacophonous chaos. This audio clip is from Mac Low’s appearance at the Sir George Williams reading series on 26, March 1971.\n13:54\tAudio Recording, Jackson Mac Low:\tX [inaudible] capital E. A. V [Inaudible] R.Q. comma. semi-colon. period. K. N. Apostrophe. P. 6. D. [Inaudible] Dash. Dash. Dash. Dash. Semi-colon.\n14:14\tKlara du Plessis:\tAnother relevant example is the so called Four Horseman: BP Nichol, Steve McCaffrey, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera. [Begin: Audio recording, inaudible] These four poets exploded the potential of sound in their polyvocall joint compositions. This audio clip is taken from the 1988 record, Two Nights.\n14:51\tAudio Recording, Four Hourseman\t[Various Vocal Sounds, inaudible]\n14:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation clearly stems from a rich tradition of experimental collaborative poetry performance. It is also engaging though with contemporary vocabulary from the visual arts and importing it to explore literary potentials. I want to listen to some audio clips from three Deep Curation poetry readings curated between late 2018 and early 2020. But I also want to linger on the shift that is activated when some of these theoretical questions come into play. The division of labor between curating and curatorial with poets themselves often deciding how to present their work upholds the familiar concept that poets perform their own roles as authors on stage. Contemporary authors voice their own work as a display of authority and authenticity. [Sound Effect: Box Opening] As scholar Leslie Wheeler suggests [Sound Effect: Box Closing] poetry readings are manifestations [Begin Music: Instrumental] of authentic authorial presence. There is of course also the opposite danger of tipping the scale of authority away from the author to the curator. This is something that curator Anton Vidokle relevantly critiques in terms of the visual arts. He says, curators have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics. Vidokle warns that curators can easily usurp credit from the artists or poets and rob the voice of their creative work. [End Music: Instrumental] One of Deep Curation’s key points of investigation is to trouble the notion of static authorial authority by distributing curatorial agency between author and curator alike. The curator of a Deep Curation poetry reading aims to direct the presentation of poetry by facilitating polyvocal dialogues between poets and between the works of those poets. Yet poets always retain authorship over the poetic output. Poems and excerpts of poems are placed deliberately alongside each other to create thematic narrative and conceptual arcs and arguments. The poetry reading is no longer a series of random poems placed side by side. Rather, the poetry reading presents a cohesive entity of combined poems that collaborate towards a larger sonic event. By directing, scripting, but also working together to design the poetry reading in this way, agency circulates from the poets to the curator, and back to the poets. Poets and curator constantly navigate a dynamic balance between control and freedom, individual authorship and collaboration.\n17:07\tKlara du Plessis:\tI’m going to share audio clips from three phases of my Deep Curation experiments, narrating the project’s development, and illustrating shifting approaches in my practice. [Begin Music: Instrumental] The audio clips will further inspire a discussion on this relationship between control and freedom. [Music Intensifies] Deep Curation: Phase One: Resonance. [Music Continues] One of the first Deep Curation experiments I curated, I invited poets Aaron Boothby, Canisia Lubrin, and Erin Robinsong to participate. I knew that their poetry would form a relevant conversation and I could imagine a reading that centered ecology, language, and loss. In hindsight, my tentative curatorial strategy was just a buffed-up version of a normal poetry reading. And of course, I realized how fraught the word ‘normal’ sounds. For the most part, I scripted the order and interlay of poems by the different authors, but I rarely excerpted or initiated any kind of material intervention into the structure of the poems and their coexistence. I also included some of my own writing. And so, the four of us read together at the vegan jazz bar Résonance Café during the Mile End Poets Festival on 24, November 2018. Here is a short audio clip from this reading. Erin’s poem “Cortes” is deliberately positioned beside a section from an early version of my long poem, “Santa Cova Muscles”.\n18:49\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong\tThe mountain told my eye / its sparkling name / and in return, I answered / from the ashes/ and green /gathered round/ and echoed /along the windy heights/ O my friends/ if you are alone / stretch out both brains / and lash together a middle one/ thus three-way / we waited for the dawn/ fresh and rosy fingered / as the backs of animals/ when evening falls / nobody / yet saved his skin/ so we ourselves untie / the ship took places at the oars/ and seek again / an island where /with burning clouds / and loyal dark / we soon rouse\n19:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis\tDespite density a kind of stupidity crushing words/ into a pulp of intelligence /no /air /allowance/ Instead, a breakage into sight /breakwater from words, hieroglyphic impotence / gathering light through the eyes, tearing it out/ salt, water, ocean writing, / organic prismatic/ I stumble over my love for the sea and rest my head on mountains/ I’d like to posit a theory that we’re all descendants of headstones/ The soft jagged edge of the mountain range / where I walk daily for three weeks, then leave/ encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder/ This mountain intelligence, reasoning beyond the usual kind. I reject truth, but fixate on beauty/This might imply a material privilege, visual impulse, / but this banal state of mind is reversed to a vibration, the vibratory / relation exceeds the eye, yet enters everything through the surface of the eye/  to inoculate everything/ Heading towards the garden, which is the museum, / this ontological greenness…\n21:13\tKlara du Plessis:\tI love how green and eyes weave a connecting thread. When Erin says [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Stretch out both brains and lash together a middle one] I respond [Audio, from Mile End Poets Festival: Encumbered by the definitive brains inhabiting every boulder, this mountain intelligence reasoning beyond the usual kind] thematic coherence and a similar affective register bind these independent poems together. They become perceived as a unit, or at least as a conversation. Despite Erin and myself each composing our poem separately at different times and with different intents. They merge here in this reading through adjacency to create a temporarily shared authorship. In this case, I am both an author sharing my writing beside other authors, and I am the curator of the event as a whole. This implies that my authorship oscillates between a kind of directive stance towards the event as a combined performative entity and the embodiment of intimate listening in proximity to other poets while collectively sharing our poetry. I returned to Résonance Café, the venue for this Deep Curation event in order to jog my memory about the reading, but also to record myself in a less formal, more journal-like way. One could say that I’m [Begin: Echo Effect] Deep Curating my voice through time [End: Echo Effect] as I collage archival material from 2018, formal narration for this podcast, and soundscape audio from the field.\n22:36\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\t[Background Noise] So here I am in Résonance Café, the venue of many, a poetry reading over the course of six years. All kinds of background noises: [Microwave Beep] cleaning the fridge, pots [Coffee Grinder] the coffee machine. Many readings were ambiently disrupted by the coffee grinder. [Background Noise] With me is Isis Giraldo. She’s one of the co-owners of Résonance Café.\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHello!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDo you want to say hi?\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Isis Giraldo:\tHi!\n23:27\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tAs already mentioned the second Deep Curation event with Canisia, Erin, and Aaron, also happened here in Résonance Café. And, this is really one of the spaces where I’ve listened the most deeply I’ve ever listened on the stage being in such close proximity to the people around me on stage. Because we hadn’t rehearsed very much and because we had such minimal scripting for the reading we were very attuned to what the other readers were doing to make sure that we didn’t miss a cue or forget where and when to start reading. And so just the degree of listening between the four of us on stage was very acute. I remember in particular that Canisia was reading a lot slower than me and that as the event progressed I kind of matched my pace to hers  — it was an element of kind of like empathetic performance where we really tried to listen and adapt to what was happening sonically and collaboratively.\n24:41\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe four of us were in this together. We were on the stage together. But perhaps counter-intuitively, our togetherness came at the cost of remaining separate. Each poet’s reading is extremely clear and articulated in solitude. Each poet’s words remain their own words and as fellow performers we each respect the sonic space needed for another poet to project their work into the room. The images of Erin’s poem make eye contact with the images in my poem, but they don’t overlap or resolve into chaos.\n25:15\tAudio Recording, Erin Robinsong:\t[Inaudible]…and seek again an island where with burning clouds and loyal dark, we soon rouse\n25:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tPoems touch, but don’t merge.\n25:31\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tDespite density, a kind of stupidity/ Crushing words into a pulp of intelligence /No air allowance.\n25:36\tKlara du Plessis:\tAs the curator of this event, my intention was to create a dialogue between the different poetries presented, but I was also clearly hesitant to overstep my own adopted authority. I felt strange to excerpt poems that I had not authored or to demand borders between poems to be blurred. This is of course symptomatic of the fact that this reading was only the second experiment in a series of Deep Curation poetry readings. I was still figuring out my own project of taking control of the poetry reading’s form. I was trying to strike a balance between directing the reading and maintaining the authorial integrity of the authors and of their works. Here is another excerpt from my audio journal, now seated on Resonance’s patio.\n26:17\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tI’m sitting on the patio outside now. And I’m still thinking about this Deep Curation event that I did with Aaron, Erin, and Canisia. And I’m thinking back and reflecting on the extreme release of energy that happened directly after we performed together that night. And just this like real recognition of the potential of what the project held and what we could feel it, the project could still develop into. And I remember kind of talking to Aaron, Erin and Canisia and, you know, asking how that felt about the very small instances of excerpting, you know, whether they felt comfortable with that after the fact. And they really made it clear to me that while I was being very tentative about excerpting and intertwining, those are really the moments that were the most valuable. And that going, moving forward with the project what I really needed to do was to be less careful, be less tentative and be more dramatic with the process of putting poems in conversation with each other and that this approach would really define, should really define what Deep Curation was and how it made it different from other poetry reading events.\n27:35\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] Our conversation excited me and I felt inspired to design stranger, more exploratory Deep Curation scripts. Deep Curation: Phase Two: Fourth Space. [End Music: Instrumental] With a green light go ahead from Erin Robinsong, Aaron Boothby, and Canisia Lubrin, I started formally experimenting with what I now call refrains. These are longer, highly excerpted sections that combine lines and a theme from different poets and different poems into a new whole. Conversations with friends occasionally introduce the words, remix, or cento in relation to these refrains. Borrowed, poetic language repurposed as a new creative body of work. I often fantasize about creating an entire Deep Curation poetry reading using this technique. The following audio clip illustrates this refrain style. It is taken from a Deep Curation poetry reading featuring poets, Kaie Kellough [Audio Recording, Kai Kellough: The author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.], Margaret Christakos [Audio Recording, Margaret Christakos: Listen, they’re not listening], and Deanna Radford [Audio Recording, Deanna Radford: Voices everywhere, talk talk]. Most of the text is from Kaie’s book Magnetic Equator, Margaret’s Charger, and Deanna’s still unpublished work. The event took place on 7, November 2019 at Concordia University’s Fourth Space, a venue dedicated to the sharing of new scholarly research.\n29:05\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:08\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tListen, you’’re not listening.\n29:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tTongu, words. Sibilant chorus.\n29:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:26\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n29:29\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n29:44\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n29:50\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n29:53\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n29:57\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am listening\n30:02\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back, is this a beginning? Is it preferable to be erased, to have a voice that does not know the chorus\n30:10\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tvoices mime rooms\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry to listen.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n30:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us, ears\n30:27\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country and ear facing upward and listening,  listening, receiving signals from the world.\n30:37\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whisper. Lip to ear. Through glass. Walls. Plastic. Light scope.\n30:44\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice drones, harmonizes with the room’s ambient hum.\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tP- p- p- plosives and t- k- p- voiceless and d- g- b- voiced\n31:03\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThe author’s voice fuses with the electric zzzzz amplified by a ventilation shaft.\n31:10\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWords as traces.\n31:12\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tI am. Listening.\n31:14\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tTurning back. Is this a listening? Is it preferable to be beginning? To have a voice that does not know the chorus?\n31:22\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tRooms mime voices.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA room holds sounds unfolding.\n31:28\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tTry. To listen.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tVoices airborne. Talk talk.\n31:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tAll of us. Ears.\n31:35\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear, facing upward and listening/ listening, receiving signals from the world.\n31:47\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tA speech act for ears / speech acts for ears.\n31:50\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tEars would be like metal or dreams of hallucinatoria.\n31:58\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tWe whispered lip to ear through glass, walls, plastic, light scope.\n32:04\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tVaricose, inner ear exorcism.\n32:09\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tThis entire country an ear facing upward and listening/ Listening, receiving signals from the world.\n32:16\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tSignal whistling for us chorally / come into my arms, darlings / come soft into this cloud.\n32:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tComposing these excerpted refrains on shared topics of listening and poetic articulation clearly took a high degree of familiarity with the author’s work. I needed to recall relevant lines in order to place them in thematic conversations. At first, my process was to mark up hard copies of authors’ books, but in time I realized that searchable PDFs hugely facilitated the process. A PDF allows quicker access to lines and the ability to copy paste excerpts into the refrain. Creating these refrains took a poet’s mind and an eye for composition. Lines were extracted from the original works. They were recombined into a new context and new conversation with lines from other poems and from the minds of other poets. This is a good example of the curator adopting the role of the author. As a curator, I was doing more than mediating the creative performance. I was also molding, creating and literally authoring a new script. Although I always worked with the consent of the invited poets, I was possibly also overstepping my role. My role as directive curator was productively challenged working with [Begin: Background Chatter] Kaie, Margaret, and Deanna, skilled performers and formal experimenters themselves. Kaie had graciously welcomed us into his home serving coffee and warm croissants as we settled into work on the script of our design. We discussed the arc of the event, performance cues and logistics. My memory of our discussion has Margaret questioning the possibility [End: Background Chatter] of opening up the script. She was curious about more organic instances of interjecting into another poet’s words, supporting them with echoes, or drowning them out with overlay. Margaret, Kaie, Deanna and I were all excited about this possibility of opening up the script and worked to integrate new strategies into the performance outline. Some poems needed to be read solo, to maintain the impact of the words’ meaning. But some sections were begging to be choral, to maximize the potential of three voices in performance. In the following audio clip, the three poets’ voices are organically interspersed. The poets borrow each other’s words and insert them into their own poems to create a dynamic and playful conversation.\n34:34\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tI never cared to be a pastoral poet wrote poetry, a small flatland  longings, a poet of evangelical strictures\n34:43\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors.\n34:45\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tRevolutions, oceanic futures written in the veins of the vegetal/ Tenements of Babel dense with voices/ Languages spilling out the summer windows.\n34:56\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors, nor errs/ Nor ers /Nor ors. But ore\n35:08\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough\tEarthen oar. Earthen tongue. [inaudible] speechless under death. Oar. Air. Weightless volume of big sky.\n35:12\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tNo memory errors /nor errors, not ers, nor ors but ore /for roses, for eros in decision making/ if edgewise among tongue that propriety.\n35:27\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tErrors, airs, URS, oars, or roses/ name or summon arrows/ muse or crave savour moan or receive conceive arise or arouse.\n35:41\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLike her name was inland/ a corpus yours/ Tongue yours and corp yours.\n35:51\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tEarthen tongues ripple speechless under yours/ Air weightless volume of big sky.\n35:57\tAudio Recording, Deanna Radford:\tLaps and licks and skirmishes.\n36:00\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tWriters circumnavigate the question with smiles and gestures that dismiss/They write from everywhere at once.\n36:07\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tThe a-ha of poetic inspiration.\n36:12\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough:\tThe only places the a-ha/ The immediate port at which the next letter a-ha.\n36:18\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\t— a-ha!.\n36:19\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t— is detained, arrives, or vanishes. [Overlapping Voices] Thank God it exists. A-ha! The ah-a exists either here nor there/ Is every weather, where? / Which is here, which is nowhere.\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Margaret Christakos:\tA-ha. A-ha. The a-ha a poetic inspiration, shifted to an a-ha reflex of thank God it exists a-ha more is a-ha now I can have this and this to this a-ha this works.\n36:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tA-ha! The poets are taking a-ha! authorship directing the a-ha! performance, developing it and initiating exchange. They’re also leaving audile space for the semantic soundscape of different voices to be heard alongside each other. This is not always the case.\n37:11\tAudio Recording, Kaie, Deanna, and Margaret:\t[inaudible, voices reciting poetry overlapping one another] Press down to form home print that scattered over future service, entrusted. disclosed. incidental behavioural derived body unsettled my reaches organic my past and now my scaped spread evenly over my spaces my means of speech my body my body my personal info invisible presence a proxy my body my body is measured is measured is filled with water scattered future interested disclosed incidental my reach is organic my past image spread evenly over my face [inaudible] stretch. [inaudible]\n38:32\tKlara du Plessis:\tHarmony transgresses into cacophony. Deanna and Kaie read briskly over each other, while Margaret doubles words standing out to her and adds a third layer to the mashup. This is a true merging of voices. Separate strands are no longer clearly audible. Rather, an assembly of voices, tones, and timbres swell chaotically into a shared ownership of poetry.\n38:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis:\tHere I am, again, reminiscing on my audio journal almost a year after the Deep Curation event. I traveled down to Fourth Space, the venue of this Deep Curation event and imagined that I could see the event replaying itself through the glass walls almost photographically. So, today has been quite an odyssey. I’m now down by Concordia University’s Fourth Space, which, is of course closed. And I can — the most I can do is peer through the big glass windows and try and imagine again how this Deep Curation event happened with Kaie, Margaret and Deanna. And so, I’m kind of envisioning again the large screen that had a PowerPoint presentation projected onto it and the chairs that I had reconfigured into a circle so that the three poets and I kind of sat at the four cardinal points of the circle with the audience members interspersed in between. This really created the sense that audience was part of the performance, that they were inside the sound and you know that the sound was emanating from three different directions. Also, that the three poets could really make eye contact with each other. They weren’t standing in a line on a stage.\n40:15\tKlara du Plessis:\t[Begin: Instrumental Strings] There was strength in collaboration. Working with Margaret, Kaie, and Deanna on the design of this Deep Curation poetry reading developed it into an expansive, dynamic, and engaged performance. It also generated methods that I continue to use for Deep Curation as an ongoing project. [Instrumental Strings increase].\n40:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tDeep Curation: Phase Three: Boston University. [End: Instrumental String] Preparing for my first PhD field exam I stress-dreamed that I had to create a Deep Curation script in 10 minutes. “Oh no!”, I thought. “This is an impossible task.” “I haven’t spent months reading. In fact, I’m not familiar with the poetry at all!” Luckily in a happy turn of the nightmare variety, I solved the conundrum. In my dream, I created a set of performative cues for improvisation. In my dream, the poets had to choose their own poems, but they had to read them according to my design. The real life, non-dream Deep Curation event that took place at Boston University on 30 January 2020, definitely wasn’t limited to 10 minutes of preparation. But it did function as a broad structure with signals for the authors to move more freely. In other words, my authorship of the outline demanded reauthorship from the poets as they played and reworked their words collectively on stage. This reading included prerecorded audio of Fanny Howe’s poetry and the following audio clip features live performance by Sawako Nakayasu —\n42:22\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tSo, where’s my werewolf pillow.\n42:24\tKlara du Plessis:\t— and Lee Ann Brown.\n42:27\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tBlockade.\n42:27\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis clip extracts poetry from Sawako’s book, Texture Notes, and Lee Ann’s In the Laurels Caught.\n42:36\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Blockade is pink lemonade made from strawberry library books. The Totoro house hums a deep song in yonder glen. You’re a fragment of my imagination. Experience wafts its checkered travelers in with a thumbprint. Vexed then fixed. Seeing signs shaped like huge shoes Fox church road sprang up on her left. Bright blue-green beetle vale under a rock. Keats’ favourite letter was V. She spins it like a tiny DJ on her alphabet box. Wendy Mandy over the wall straggles in with beeping shoes, lit up like a kite.  The leaves are out of pollen or soon will be. Who are you calling a verdant lush. Here, mommy, hold this moss. Hold this mess. Don’t say to me. I don’t like to. Blap is my friend. He’s a boy. He’s a ghost who lives in New York. He painted with me. His hair is yellow.\n43:46\tKlara du Plessis:\tThis section of the Deep Curation script is constructed as a series of wave formations. Lee Ann begins by reading a poem up until the word yellow. Yellow serves as a cue for Sawako to begin reading her poem, “Texture of Needing Yellow”, in the background.\n44:09\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] Yellow! He painted. He painted pink hair. His hair is red. I am blap. Here are some pieces of puzzles for you. I will make some more for you. Are you a cat bus? We’re getting married. I married this train. We’re getting married. Cheeky Dickie married a Chickadee. You’re dead, Chuck with yourself. Scraping together, scraping away at a bleeding book and you should be too. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. So, where’s my werewolf pillow. Where is my werewolf pillow? Sawako.\n44:39\tKlara du Plessis:\tLee Ann improvises. She fixates on the weirdness of the werewolf pillow and transforms this poetic image into a direct question, addressing Sawako head on.\n44:51\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tSawako. Where is it?\n44:53\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tWhere is your werewolf pillow?\n45:02\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tWhere’s my Totoro house that I want on the hill so I can go up there and see all those little puffballs.\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tIt’s down the old [inaudible] stomping in the Ramsey cemetery?\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t[inaudible].\n45:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s where you’re gonna find your werewolf pillow.\n45:22\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tIt’s up in the house. I love my pillow. That deep pillow song. That deep pillow collaboration and curation.\n45:22\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat deep pillow collaboration and curation? Ha! Reality is ousting any kind of script.\n45:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices, Improvisation] That deep pillow collaboration and curation. [Inaudible]. These mountains are old mountains. Rockies. Where are we now. 5 million years old. What happens to the yellow you had here? Appalachians. 500 million. The texture of yellow. [Inaudible]. Which are plentiful here, like overgrown version of some families, private [Inaudible]. And the position.\n45:59\tKlara du Plessis:\tThe positions have reversed. The poets have exchanged words so that Sawako performs Lee Ann’s words, and vice versa.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Voices Overlapping] The positions reverse. Raised from [inaudible]. Yellow is a light that contains a friendly sort of heat. I am drawn to a newer [inaudible]. Maybe yellow is light which massages. [Inaudible] Carved. Straight path. Thus transmitting. Bumpy road to heaven. And then at a later moment. Existence for a straight arrow. Transposed. It’s an altogether different, similar. The way your friends are different, similar. That way. Here. The point of meeting yellow and it’s specific geography. Down on the bypass where someone wept. Maybe yellow as a geography that grows and shifts. Otherwise, known as now. The now of needing yellow. I need more yellow. That comes lower forth like an angel, the angel needing yellow. Needing yellow without needing yellow. Missing without being missed. Being close to needing yellow is close to not needing yellow. Needing yellow is all —it shows up becomes less being yellow becomes more needing yellow. Near being yellow from the distance or after or close at hand. More, more needing yellow. And more and more and more and more and more needing yellow in result of an explosion, which is yellow and is not needed. That’s enough.\n47:43\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThat’s enough.\n47:44\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako interjects. Self-reflectivity of both Sawako and Lee Ann’s performance amplifies their authority over the poetry reading at hand. By commenting on what they’re doing while they’re doing it, they showcase their awareness of their words. They actively take authorship of their poetic presentation by manipulating and reworking the words at their disposal. This is no passive replay of a script, but an engaged and playful [Audio Recording, Overlapping Voices] public display of fluid and fun authorial control.\n48:28\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu and Lee Ann Brown\t[Overlapping Voices] [Inaudible] Five. Million. Years. Old. Yellow that you had here. The texture of being yellow. The permutation of being yellow.\n48:28\tKlara du Plessis:\tDuring the Q&A discussion after the Deep Curation performance, Kate Lilley, poet and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney queried the relationship between improvisation and script.\n48:40\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tThe script [inaudible] opened some doors and then we opened some more doors in the moment.\n48:50\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Sawako.\n48:53\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\tYeah, we just read through it a little bit yesterday. We had the script before, but we didn’t really do any of this yesterday at all.\n48:58\tKlara du Plessis:\tThat was Lee Ann.\n49:04\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\tYeah it was very — but I think we were just interested in listening to each other and —\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Lee Ann Brown:\t— Playing.\n49:11\tAudio Recording, Sawako Nakayasu:\t— Playing. Yeah. And Lee Ann and I have known each other for many, many years, which I don’t think Klara knew when she curated us. But there is a feeling of friendship that also contributed to the way it felt to be in conversation through our poetry in this particular moment. That was like a gift that Klara gave us.\n49:27\tAudio Recording, Kate Lilley:\tThat certainly came across.\n49:35\tKlara du Plessis:\tSawako’s metaphor of the door is apt. As the curator, I initiated gestures that opened doors between the writing of Sawako, Lee Ann, and Fanny Howe. But gestures are never static. The doors kept swinging open and shut as the poets themselves move through doorways and opened other entries and exits that I didn’t even know existed. I’d like the sense of play and improvisation as impetus for the poets to author their own work again, recurrently. I want to extend Charles Bernstein’s claim that each performance of a poem adds to its “fundamentally plural existence”. Not only is the poem multiplying into variant forms, but each performance allows the author to rewrite that poem in performance. By restructuring the conditions in which a poem was being presented and by placing that poem in new proximities to other poems, Deep Curation instigates a radical potential for dynamic and organic re-authorship. [Begin: Instrumental Strings] As the curator of a Deep Curation poetry event, I author the possibility for the poets to re-author their own poetry. [Instrumental Strings continues]\n50:56\tKlara du Plessis:\tDifferent curators have different approaches to curating and to the curatorial. Whether they’re working in visual arts or literary fields. Critic, Sarah Longair’s notion of curatorial authority, [End: Instrumental Strings] for example, imagines the curator’s role as that of resident scholar. The curator is someone who dedicates her life to the preservation and dissemination of a body of work. For her, the curator embodies expertise about a certain collection and thereby gains authority to define and control its public representation. Thinking along very different lines, celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist supports an organic model, providing a space in which experiences are generated according to the individuals displaying or interacting with artworks. Obrist is more interested in connections that may form when a curator comes temporarily into contact with a set of art or literary works. The curator never defines the work, never becomes a spokesperson for the work, but rather supports the audience in creating their own experience and understanding of the work. I want to quote Obrist on his curatorial practice. He says, quote, [Begin Music: Upbeat Instrumental] “curating is simply about connecting cultures, bringing their elements into proximity with each other. The task of curating is to make junctions, to allow different elements, to touch.” End quote. Deep Curation allows different elements to touch. I like that. Thinking back to the performative work of Jackson Mac Low, and the Four Horsemen, their experiments also allowed elements to touch, even to merge. But I wonder if they would have liked the term curation. [End: Upbeat Instrumental] I doubt it. Thinking of Deep Curation in terms of curation, as the name, obviously underscores, initiates a methodology at odds with past modes of collaborative poetry performance. Curation has a hipness to it, which some find off-putting. Curation also derives its concepts of collectivity, proximity, and relationality from the exhibition, the gallery space, rather than from performance practice. Curation projects the visual onto the literary, and then waits to see what kind of performance will erupt. Yet, Deep Curation is still in flux [Begin: Instrumental Strings] as a curatorial practice it keeps developing and transforming as my own interests as a curator change. But also as the work comes into contact with various poets and audiences and the world of expertise these individuals bring to the project.\n53:23\tKlara du Plessis:\tDue to COVID-19 Deep Curation has been on a break for six months and once life reconfigures itself, who knows how the project will have changed. I can see Deep Curation taking on gentler forms that are less labour intensive while still embodying the core tenet of creating conversations between poets and poems. I’ve also fantasized about ways of expanding the project, having more time and resources to work with poets for more extended periods of time to progress past the first draft of a performance and to create a truly integrated and rehearsed experimental poetry reading experience. In contrast, I’ve considered ways of creating a solo show. This might be limited to my own poetry, or it might be a way to include other poet’s work, but without their physical presence and performance. It might also be a re-curation of archival audio material from past Deep Curation poetry readings. Hang on to that thought. [Echo effect] Hang on to that thought. [Theme Music]\n54:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Klara du Plessis and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. For more work from Klara du Plessis check out their freshly released second book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh from Palimpsest Press, available now. A special thank you to Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Isis Giraldo, Kaie Kellough, Kate Lilley, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin: Overlapping Choral Voices] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand-new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, bringing us mini-stories about how literature sounds. [End Overlapping Choral Voices]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9278","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E2, Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening, 2 November 2020, Tayler, Aubin, and Girouard"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lesbian-liberation-across-media-a-sonic-screening/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Felicity Tayler","Mathieu Aubin","Scott Girouard"],"creator_names_search":["Felicity Tayler","Mathieu Aubin","Scott Girouard"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/135137837\",\"name\":\"Felicity Tayler\",\"dates\":\"1977-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Scott Girouard\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/64f51444-cc3f-4556-93d0-59fbbe9bb06e/audio/b2b367e4-113c-462c-a30d-aa1822303fd9/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e2-lesbian-liberation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:11\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"55,928,416 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e2-lesbian-liberation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lesbian-liberation-across-media-a-sonic-screening/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-11-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Ottawa Hamelin Hall\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"70 Laurier Avenue E, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5\",\"latitude\":\"45.42380315\",\"longitude\":\"-75.68588224885067\"}]"],"Address":["70 Laurier Avenue E, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5"],"Venue":["University of Ottawa Hamelin Hall"],"City":["Ottawa, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Anger, Kenneth, director. Scorpio Rising. Ruban VHS, 1964.\\n\\nButler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge, 1993.\\n\\nGodard, Baraba. Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing. ECW P, 1987.\\n\\nMedia Mothers, directors. A Working Women’s Collective. 1974.\\n\\nMoores, Margaret, director. Labyris Rising. V Tape, 1980.\\n\\nNavas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Ambra Verlag, 2014.\\n\\nNicol, Nancy, director. Proud Lives: Chris Bearchell. V Tape, 2007.\\n\\nRoss, Becki. The House that Jill Built. U of Toronto P, 1995.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549473984512,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different than episodes you’ve heard from us before. It is a kind of “feminist memory-work” – An audio collage, a method, an approach to community building which aims to honor lesbian-feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture.\n\nSpokenWeb network members Felicity Tayler and Mathieu Aubin originally guided a SpokenWeb listening practice session in which they led a discussion of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds in clips from three queer films: A Working Women’s Collective (1974), Labyris Rising (1980), and Scorpio Rising (1963). After the event, participants in the Listening Practice enthusiastically desired an expanded event where we would collectively watch, listen to, and discuss these films in their entirety. This led to the organization of a second event “Lesbian Liberation Across Media” sponsored by multiple institutions of queer cultural history and community, such as Labo de données en sciences humaines/The Humanities Data Lab, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, and the ArQuives.\n\nEpisode producers – Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin and Scott Girouard – cordially invite you into their feminist sonic memory world: A three-part audio collage of “Lesbian Liberation Across Media”. A virtual film screening and discussion held Summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb, and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: “A Working Women’s Collective” (1974), “Labyris Rising” (1980), and “Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell”(2007). Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips and more – we ask, how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic-related time of crisis.\n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different from episodes you’ve heard from us before. What you’re about to hear is a kind of feminist memory work, an audio collage, a method, an approach to community building that aims to honor lesbian feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture. In this episode, producers Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin, and Scott Girouard cordially invite you into their sonic memory world: a three-part audio collage of lesbian liberation across media, a virtual film screening and discussion held in summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: A Working Women’s Collective, Labyris Rising, and Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell. Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips, and more we ask: how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film, or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic related time of crisis. Here is Felicity, Mathieu, and Scott with Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening.\n02:35\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tOn June 10th, 2020, following the extreme social isolation of the first pandemic winter, over 70 people gathered over Zoom to watch three lesbian liberation films: A Working Women’s Collective, Labyris Rising, and Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell. In this podcast, we’ve created an audio collage record of the sounds of watching these films together.\n03:04\tMay Ning:\t[Zoom Entry Chime] I’m excited to see like what it’s going to look like with a hundred people.\n03:07\tUnknown speaker:\tI know. Yeah. [Instrumental Music] So when we were watching Bound and there was one person who hadn’t seen the movie before and she had her camera on, so everybody was like getting more, like they’re more excited about watching her reactions. I mean, they were excited about the movie too. But it was like her reactions for like the best version of the show.\n03:28\tRachel E. Beattie:\tAnd it’s so different when you’re doing an online thing, because if you’re at a talk or something, like you can see people smiling at you and like responding to stuff that you’d say. And I just feel like doing Zoom stuff is like speaking into the void. For the trivia night that I’ve been doing for the archives we had to turn off the comments and also video, like the people’s videos, because we had like, Zoom bombing and people doing offensive stuff. So, it’s like, I’m literally speaking into the void. I have no idea if people are enjoying the material that like, if they’re laughing at my jokes or like anything.\n04:03\tMichelle Schwartz:\tWhat time is it?\n04:06\tRachel E. Beattie:\t8:26.\n04:06\tMichelle Schwartz:\tWhen should I start letting people in? [Instrumental, Drums] I just let them in at 8:30 or earlier?\n04:12\tFelicity Tayler:\tI’d let them at 8:30.\n04:14\tMichelle Schwartz:\tYeah.\n04:15\tRachel E. Beattie:\tHow many people are in the waiting room?\n04:17\tMichelle Schwartz:\t17.\n04:20\tRachel E Beattie:\tCool. How’s it going May?\n04:24\tMay Ning:\tGood. I’m excited. I haven’t seen the films yet.\n04:27\tRachel E Beattie:\tYeah. I saw Mathieu sent me the Press Gang one, but I haven’t seen the other two. So, I’m really looking forward to watching.\n04:34\tMay Ning:\tI know, I wanted to save them to watch it with everyone.\n04:36\tRachel E Beattie:\tYeah.\n04:36\tFelicity Tayler:\tIt’s 8:30. I guess we can —\n04:41\tFelicity Tayler:\tYay.\n04:42\tVarious voices.\t— open the doors. (in unison)\n04:44\tMathieu Aubin:\tIt’s funny because I imagine when you would open the door and in a real office and then 36 people coming in at once, it’d be like —.\n04:52\tMichelle Schwartz:\tMuch louder.\n04:58\tUnknown speaker (masc voice):\tYeah. \n04:58\tFelicity Tayler:\tAnd also like more visually obvious [laughs].\n05:01\tMathieu Aubin:\tAll the bodies.\n05:05\tConstance Crompton:\tOh, it is sort of wonderful watching like everyone arrive and role in —\n05:08\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah.\n05:08\tConstance Crompton:\t— I haven’t [inaudible] a lot of Zoom meetings, so I don’t get the waiting room feature very often. It’s just a very nice.\n05:15\tElspeth Brown:\tNice to see many friendly faces and the names in the list of participants, even if a lot of people don’t have their video on or their audio.\n05:25\tConstance Crompton:\tIt’s so true. Yes. Hi, to everyone who is sort of disembodied at the moment.\n05:29\tVarious voices:\t[collective laughter]\n05:31\tMichelle Schwartz:\tHi, to everyone who we might’ve usually seen in the summer conference season that we’ve missed.\n05:37\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n05:37\tMichelle Schwartz:\tOur annual hangouts canceled.\n05:42\tConstance Crompton:\tAnd now with the combination of theaters being closed and bars being closed, I think this would be the kind of event that could blend both of those things, even if everyone’s in their own living room.\n05:51\tRachel E Beattie:\tYeah, totally.\n05:52\tConstance Crompton:\tThat’s great. Also, too. I think we had been expecting a much sort of smaller event and we can be like, “Oh, we can like, go around”.\n06:00\tConstance Crompton:\tWell, shall we dive in with official programming?\n06:06\tFelicity Tayler:\tZoom says you’re the host so I guess you got to make the decisions.\n06:09\tConstance Crompton:\tYes indeed. In which case I would say, take it away Michelle.\n06:17\tMichelle Schwartz:\tOh no, you’re first Connie. You’re supposed to welcome everybody.\n06:20\tConstance Crompton:\tAh! Welcome everybody. We are definitely touched by how many people have taken up the screening and just from the last week and a half. It was put together by several organizations, the Humanities Data Lab at Ottawa U, The SpokenWeb, the University of Toronto Media Archives, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project which Michelle and I co-direct together, and the ArQuives.\n06:46\tMichelle Schwartz:\tWe as the organizers of this event are participating from Toronto. So, we have the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, from the University of Ottawa and from Concordia in Montreal. And we acknowledge that our respective institutions are located on the traditional lands of many Indigenous nations, including the Algonquian, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Just as Toronto has been a gathering place for many people for thousands of years, we are grateful to be able to provide a space for people to gather together tonight. And we ask you to think about the land that you are on and how you can show solidarity with the Indigenous caretakers of that land, by talking about what traditional people are from the land that they are on. So, if anyone wants to share their traditional land with us, we would love to know where you’re all coming in from.\n07:38\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tThis screening of 1970s, lesbian liberation films was organized in response to a clamorous demand to watch these films from the audience of an earlier event. We wanted to ask an intergenerational question: are we doomed to have these same fights forever?\n07:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat I would love to do is to stop — me stop talking and if anyone, like Connie’s suggesting and trying to get people to that we’ve been wanting to hear from to chat then go ahead.\n08:06\tUnknown speaker:\tYeah.\n08:07\tRachel E. Beattie:\tHey, did you see that Ontario had a plan about like students going back to school today, but I couldn’t find anything in it about libraries. Like we’re not important. Nobody gives a shit about us. So, like the press release for the Ontario government said nothing about university libraries, like…\n08:29\tFelicity Tayler:\tUh, talk a little bit, just go back to the listening session that Mathieu and I led with these films about — well in April for a kind of an audience of around 30 people. So, we kind of knew more or less who was going to be there that we’re able to put on this other event that is reaching a much wider audience. So, for me, this kind of comes back to this question of gaining access to media that was seen in the first film, and that we’ll see continuing through in the, in the other films.\n08:59\tMichelle Schwartz:\tThe screening was based on an event that Matthew and Felicity hosted. A SpokenWeb event and where, where they showed clips of Labyris Rising, which is a film that we’re going to watch tonight. And I’ve never seen a sort of 1970 lesbian, a short film that I haven’t wanted to see the entirety of. So, there was a great sort of clamor in the chat of that Zoom asking to see the whole movie instead of just the short clips. And that was sort of the birth of this, of this screening tonight where we get to watch the whole movie as well as two other movies. So, we have three short films to watch and we have a few panelists who will take turns introducing each one. And we’ll have a time for discussion and questions at the end. So, you can use the chat at any time. But at the end, we’ll hold for the questions.\n09:56\tBaylee Woodley:\tI just have read an email from Connie from earlier. I would love to hear about Michelle’s experience visiting the installation, Killjoys Kastle, if you’re willing to talk about it and your thoughts on how it engages with this lesbian feminist history. And also, maybe it’s another way to facilitate these sort of intergenerational conversations.\n10:15\tMichelle Schwartz:\tI just went as an attendee and it was a huge amount of fun. You, you went into this house, there was the graveyard of lesbian organizations past, which were like all these kinds of gravestones painted with all these kinds of like lesbian organizations that had sort of broken up due to in fighting or the cause getting, well, I don’t know, you know, potentially they solved the cause. They had, I believe there was like a menstrual cup reading with, you know, like, kind of a diviner of menstrual blood. And there was, smashing truck nuts — [Sound Effect: Campfire Crackling]\n10:50\tRachel E. Beattie:\tThere was a lesbian sing along in that campfire room with all the little wood stools.\n10:55\tMichelle Schwartz:\t— Yeah. And it was, it was, it was a really wonderful experience and it sort of did kind of provide another version of, of sort of watching these films for me as, as, someone who didn’t live through the time period of sort of having a nostalgia for something that I missed, but also, you know, like feeling, not really like fully part of it and, and just having a lot of – being able to experience the history, the history in a certain way, and also feeling very strongly the gaps between the, between the generations. So, I loved Killjoys Kastle. I don’t know if anyone else was there.\n11:30\tRachel E. Beattie:\tAnd cause I went on opening night, actually it was with Michelle and a bunch of other people —\n11:34\tRachel E. Beattie:\t[Inaudible] and some other people.\n11:37\tRachel E. Beattie:\t— yeah, some other people on this call. Like Stark [Inaudible]. But so for opening night they had all of these lesbian feminists theorists, or I don’t know how everyone identified, but and so cause it’s the last room in Killjoy’s Kastle was the processing room. So, like after you’ve gone through this whole experience, of course lesbians have to process so they had like, literally you could not leave without talking to like famous feminist theorists. It was amazing.\n12:09\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut what I do remember is that there was kind of this like double narrative of like, oh that’s just like white feminism.\n12:15\tUnknown speaker:\tYeah.\n12:15\tFelicity Tayler:\tAnd then there was actually like an inside the Killjoy Kastle there was kind of this like trying to atone or come to terms with it or like, you know, critique, critique whiteness at the same time as like having this intergenerational kind of like smorgasbord experience. And so, I think though that that’s just, it’s part of what of what comes with this.\n12:44\tRachel E. Beattie:\tYeah. I remember cause they had, it might’ve been the lesbian singalong room. There was all these quotes on the wall from various lesbian feminists. And then that there was an accusation made that they were sort of appropriating without like bringing in more diverse voices into like the making of, so it was like essentially these white feminists that are using the voices of feminists of colour, and that kind of thing.\n13:11\tFelicity Tayler:\tAnd it doesn’t mean that the history that we have access to has less value. It just means that there are other histories that we can now look to as well.\n13:26\tMichelle Schwartz:\tI wanted to say how odd it was to watch that Press Gang film, and then hear people sort of restating debates that, that we hear so much now in, in like the, in the movement. You know, like that woman who was ranting about how she doesn’t know what’s politically correct and so she doesn’t know whether I can, but what she can say because now everything she says is wrong, and so she’s not going to say anything. And it’s just so frustrating to hear the same things sort of eternally return, within sort of these kinds of communities. And it was, it was just really, you know, fascinating to hear that particular, kind of iteration of political correctness sort of from, from so far, in the path. And I just, like, I always wonder whether we’re just like doomed to have the same fights forever. Is that too dark?\n14:23\tFelicity Tayler:\tNo, but I do think it’s like worthwhile kind of embracing it, or I don’t know, like learning to live with the discomfort, like, you know, like learning to live with that affect. Right. So, like the, this question of, you know, nuancing, intergenerational conversations and like tempering your fandom for, you know, something like the, the Killjoy Kastle, right. Like, cause I was just kind of like googling quickly cause like my, so I, I always kind of had this like FOMO relationship to the Killjoy Kastle, cause it was always like not in the city that I was in.\n14:55\tRachel E. Beattie:\tYeah. And I think it’s a very important point that you raise and I think that sort of come out before, is that like, all of these movements they’re never just it’s there’s never just like one thought it’s, you know, people have fights like have really big, like, you know, really serious fights about very specific points of ideology and very specific things like, where are we going? That’s – movements have always been like that, they’re always going to be like that. And so, you know, kind of like looking back that you can look at both of those things like that, there was this wonderful thing that was achieved by the movement and this like great togetherness, but then also like, you know, you argue like day and night, but then you, you know, you love the people at the end of the day, but like, “Oh my God, they made me so mad when we had the big argument” kind of thing. And I think —\n15:40\tUnknown speaker:\tYeah.\n15:40\tRachel E. Beattie:\t— that seems like a thing that sort of evergreen, like, I’ve certainly noticed that in organizing spaces now and I’m and I’ve seen, you know, as the documentaries, that you see about various different groups organizing.\n15:56\tMichelle Schwartz:\tAnd we also just wanted to thank everyone that donated towards the screenings because we were able to source additional funding for the screening rates we were able to donate all that money to The519 and to support our youth in Toronto. So, thank you so much. We raised almost $400 for those organizations for queer Black and trans youth in the city. And that’s just a really great thing that we can do for our community. So, thank you all for donating.\n16:23\tElspeth Brown:\tI mean, it’s so nice to just watch these fabulous films without leaving my house I can’t even begin to tell you. I probably never would have gone, frankly, because I’m such a home body.\n16:35\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tThe first film, A Working Women’s Collective, opened a discussion of lesbian feminist film aesthetics and printing collectives. In listening to a cacophony of lesbian liberation print sounds we wondered what these sonic resonances told us about how printing collectives lived their politics through their work and loves.\n17:00\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd so, I just want to quickly introduce Press Gang and Press Gang was a feminist collective with a strong lesbian constituency that were in a publishing house and printing press in Vancouver, British Columbia. So, I’m happy to say that some people here are from that area. So, it started in 1970 as a mixed collective, but in 1974, it became a woman only collective and it would go on to publish several books that were integral to the lesbian liberation movement, such as Stepping Out of Line and Still Sing, and print many, many, many documents, flyers and posters for lesbian liberation organizations in the city. So, the video we’re about to see is called, A Working Women’s Collective, and it was produced by the Media Mothers organization It is currently housed at VIVO Collection or VIVO Archives,  excuse me, in Vancouver. So, what’s exciting about what you’re about to see is that it does document the origins of the collective and their values as they stood in 1974.\n17:55\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd you get to hear from the members of the press, but what you also get to see is what the site looked like. So, what I want, I encourage you to think about is, you know, what does the relationship between sound and visual do in the film? What’s the relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic sound mean what you can see in here at the same time, and if you can actually identify the source of the sound, and if you can’t do that, I encourage you to think about that with like the rest of the videos as well. And finally, really just a general question to ask yourself, which is when you’re watching this, what can you see in the documentary and what can be heard in relation to lesbian feminist culture production? So that’s really what I’ve been thinking about and collaboratively with this wonderful collective.\n18:39\tRachel E. Beattie:\tFirst off with Press Gang – I, this is such a great, I love the, like lo-fi [Sound Effect: Film Reel] kind of, it looks like it was shot on some kind of magnetic video that is rapidly deteriorating. As a person who works on analog media I really loved that. And so, when we were, when we were talking about doing this session, there was a lot of talk about the sound of the film and so I was really listening to that. And I – the thing that I’ve been sort of obsessed with for a while, which is the way that voices sound different from the past, like there’s like a different, I, don’t not like an audio person [Audio: Background Chatter from Film] I don’t know the exact word, but there’s like a different tone to those voices. And that’s so on display when, when you’re sort of, you’re looking at the beautiful printing presses and then hearing those voices in your ear. So, Mathieu, I wonder if you had any thoughts on the sort of the prominence given to the sound of the voice.\n19:35\tMathieu Aubin:\t[Sound Effect: Film Reel] What’s it’s interesting about the voices – it cuts because of the editing. Like it’s a bit choppy. It’s not just the way that they’re articulating their politics and their relationship to the press, but also the way that they sounded doing so. And also, the sound of the machines. Like they don’t sound like the printing, like the printer we have at home producing these books. Like it’s like really loud and that’s part of their daily sounds. Right. So, in thinking about that, I think like we have a cacophony of sounds in the, in the video. And so, part of what I’m interested in thinking about is not just what can we see and where the sources of the audio, but how do they inform each other? So, when somebody is talking about, you know, taking over the means of production [Sound Effect: Printing Press] and then all you see is a machine just pumping, right. You’re like, Oh, okay. Like this is literally it. And then I’m thinking, Oh, step back, let’s look at this video that they produced. And like the choppiness of that. And like, as they’re explaining something like it almost cuts out and you’re like, Oh, okay, well, we might have missed the message, but so the best way to describe it at this point in terms of that video is like a cacophony of lesbian liberation print sounds. [Instrumental Music]\n \n\n21:21\tAudio from A Working Women’s Collective:\tWhy I was a printer and why all this had happened to me because women don’t have access to the media and that women have to be printers or have to be publishers to — (crackle) (new voice)— fell into it too. You know, like I was working, designing posters and things, and I came down and I thought, Oh, there’s this press. And I knew one of the men and he was doing dark room stuff. And so, I went in and so he showed me how to do all the darkroom stuff. And so, I developed the negatives of my own, like my own artwork. And then he was starting to print it and he said, do you want to do this? And I said, sure. [Laugh] And like, I was really afraid, but I thought there’s this big press. And like, I can’t drive a car and I’ve never run a machine. And I had this mental block and I thought, now’s the time. [Instrumental Music] \n22:20\tFelicity Tayler:\tI had a kind of a follow on that is it sort of struck me like I’ve seen the film in different contexts now a couple of times, but the thing that struck me in this listening is there’s this moment where they’re talking about how it’s about the skills, like how it’s about gaining the skills and being really good at what you’re doing. And like, and, and you see them you know, working in wrenches and fixing the machines. And then they’re talking about how they’re having this conflict with somebody who’s like, who cares if you can do stuff? You just have to say things! And it’s like this big kind of like production versus content sort of false binary.\n23:14\tMaureen Fitzgerald:\tHi, hi. Yes, I was connected with Press Gang through feminist publishing because I was involved in The Women’s Press Collective, and I actually —.\n23:29\tAmy Gotlieb:\tYou’re here in Toronto?\n23:30\tMaureen Fitzgerald:\t— I am in Toronto. I’m speaking from Toronto, but there was a year that I spent in Vancouver because I was lovers with Pat Smith. And it was wonderful to see that image, those images. I knew and know Sarah. The skills debate in ’81 was very interesting. The way I worked at Press Gang, I suppose I volunteered once a week and they taught me how to do layout. I’m an academic. I was on leave from U of T for the year, because that’s where my lover was. But the, the, the raging discussion was around skills. And some people thought that everybody should do everything. Like there should be no division of labor and no acknowledgement of the skills that some of the people who had been working in the presses had and were very experienced at. As Marusya just said, I mean, it was a very sophisticated operation. And by then it was also publishing books, a lot of books. So, Press Gang publishing, I think well probably didn’t outweigh the the flyer printing and printing for other organizations, but it, it became more predominant. And when I was there, it was more predominant. And I remember this discussion around skills where some people thought, well, we should all do everything in all be able to do everything. There should be no specialization.\n25:12\tRachel Epstein:\tIt’s Rachel Epstein. And yeah, I worked at Press Gang in the early 80’s maybe just after Maureen, maybe ‘82, ‘84 or something like that. And I don’t actually remember that skills debate so much, but I started out working as the production coordinator and then I actually learned to run a press. And I remember being – that being one of the most empowering things I ever did was actually learning how to run that printing press and how to fix the printing press and all of that. And I was also lovers was Pat Smith at the same time that Maureen was lovers with Pat Smith and just [Laughs] that’s how Maureen and I met each other. So, it was, that was going on too. But also, before we, I unfortunately did not see the film. I came in late and I missed the film. I think I may have seen it a long time ago. So, I can’t really speak to that, but just not to romanticize totally what it was like there. We were also struggling with working collectively and I have some memories that were like some harsh memories of how we treated each other, how we sort of in the, in the process of trying to be fair were very unfair. So, I know lots has been written and post-feminist collectives, and that’s what we were, and it was amazing and so many ways and what we did and, and the skills that we developed, the political causes that we supported. But there was many things going on there in in that attempt to work collectively.\n26:56\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\t[Instrumental Music] In the second film, Labyris Rising, we hear no dialogue, only an Eros propelled musical score, set to a collage of visuals built through mimesis and citation. We see and hear how editing is a form of care. If you want to be part of the community, you have to understand the codes.\n27:19\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, when Mathieu and I start— first looked at these two films together, what we were listening for was, you know, the sound in the films, and how that sound worked with the visual [Instrumental, Percussion]to show us how community is created through different kinds of cultural institutions that produce a common language and a set of shared practices. It’s a video made by Margaret Moores and Almerinda Travassos who are two former members of LOOT. It was filmed in the basement of the LOOT building. [Sound Effect: Printing Press] And what you don’t see off screen is a printing press where the newsletter was published.\n28:00\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, in Labyris Rising we hear continuous soundtrack of folk rock and R&B. And I saw a, a comment go by while we were watching, where somebody was trying to guess the track. And, I got, I got to say, that’s kind of my, my experience of the film as well, trying to, trying to situate the sound while I’m watching the images. [Instrumental, Trumpet] And so the musical landscape kind of helps the flow of the non-linear narrative structure throughout the film and the collage, but as you saw between the two clips, the collage aesthetic of the video, and also the sonnet composition are borrowed from the iconic film of gay cultures, Scorpio Rising. So, there’s a lot that’s borrowed from the film, but there’s also a lot that’s kind of worked at — redefined in relationship to that film.\n28:51\tjake moore:\tWe all know the soundtrack from Scorpio Rising and that’s even many years after the fact because the – Kenneth Anger was able to draw from very known, popular culture to find the representation of this so-called outlaw. That outlaw is fully coded as what we accept as a masculine identity. And the idea that the, the sort of travel that was going to happen, this, this, the gathering that would become what was going to be a Hell’s Angels gathering, whereas in the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, you have, people riding bicycles and all of the coded things that you’re describing, but in the soundtrack, most of us are not as familiar. And well Joan Armatrading. And, until we see Janice Joplin, it really doesn’t enter into a contemporary imaginary. And, I think it’s really the outlaw status is still much stronger for the lesbian woman. It still doesn’t enter into the same kind of accepted social practice.\n29:52\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, but another parallel between them is that both opening clips also point to fashion as a signifier of community belonging. And for the woman fixing her bicycle we can look at the embroidered patch that’s, that you see on her hip of her jeans so what you see there is the line “woman identified woman.” So, this kind of echos a pop —in the context of fixing the bicycle it echoes a kind of a popular saying that people would wear on t-shirts and protests at the time, it says, “a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle.” But it also has an organizing function. And so, historian Becki Ross had, when speaking about LOOT talks about this term as a political category. So, she says “a true feminist is a lesbian by definition in the political sense.” And this further explained by a Vancouver journalist, Judy Moreton, that “all women fully committed to the cause of freeing themselves and all other women from oppression are lesbians.”\n30:54\tMarusya Bociurkiw:\tSo, I was interested in the sort of like warning at the beginning around sort of different ideas of gender in second wave feminism. And you know, that there were no non —I mean the word non-binary didn’t exist. And transgender existed, but was identified, I think, in different ways. Certainly, there was gender bending. And we see that in the the, out— the clothing and the, the embodiment of female masculinity.\n31:32\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, this of course is an articulation of an ideal that’s easier said than done, because there tensions. There’s always tensions in social movements, and so there’ll be tensions in this time period between gay and straight feminists, and also between feminist organizing and male-identified gay liberation organizing, for example. And this tension between — this tension within the gay liberation movement is alluded to in Moores’ appropriation of Scorpio Rising. So, when I also looked at this film, I looked at it as kind of a semantic structure. So, the different scenes are being put together as if the, the visuals themselves and the kind of soundtrack are a narrative structure that’s built through mimesis or citation. So, it’s, it’s repeating motifs that come from somewhere else. And it is not —so there’s no spoken dialogue. So, it’s not as it’s kind of a direct or explicit as the last film that we saw. You have to kind of like imagine yourself into the scene and imagine your knowledge of what you know about the scenes that are being portrayed, at the kind of community that’s being shared with us, the music that’s being played to kind of imagine yourself into it, depending on what your existing experiences are. So, this ambiguity of origin contributes to the sense that to be part of the community, you have to know it’s references or codes, which include specific genres of music as a cultural institution. And in Labyris Rising you’ll see that those genres of music kind of lead to this, like, you know, [sound of concert cheering] heady dream of the outdoor music festival.\n33:08\tjake moore:\tThe Michigan Womyn’s Festival was this iconic, though clearly specific, gathering site. And I think it’s telling that it was known as the land where people gathered and my exposure to it as a musician was as a punk rock musician that they invited there. But we were very much interlopers in the warm, fuzzy, like the, in the kind of breakdown of feminist status. And what was outlier? What, what was allowable outlying? Uh, I think you get into really interesting territory thinking about when a rebellious figure can be fully embraced by a larger dominant culture, like the masculine and biker that is still embraced today. Like we still see this in, in contemporary film and television. It gets a lot of play. It’s a very common association of, of, a powerful and often militarized understanding of how to achieve power.\n34:10\tFelicity Tayler:\tSo, you learn a lot about the world of LOOT from the movement of the camera around the scene in Labyris Rising and I’m going to read an excerpt that describes the scene from historian Becki Ross’s book. “An inventory of 1970s, lesbian feminist lifestyle is richly detailed in the 1980 film Labyris Rising. A deliberate feisty send-up of the urban gay male style captured by Kenneth Anger and Scorpio Rising. This lesbian cult classic was shot on location at 342 Jarvis Street and the Fly By Night Lounge by former LOOT members, Margaret Moores, and Almarinda Travassos. The half-hour super eight film is full of clues. The double-headed axe, the Labyris or cunt beads on a chain. The famous maxim woman identified woman embroidered on the back of blue jeans, pinky rings, interlocking women’s symbols, pink triangles, and suspenders. While reading the Washington DC based feminist journal, off our backs, the protagonist drags deeply on her marijuana joint and drifts off to remember scenes from the Michigan festival to the music of Be Be K’Roche, Heather Bishop, Joan Armatrading, and Janis Joplin. If you think about Labyris Rising, then taking the vocabulary from that film, what’s interesting is note— noting what they keep. Right? So, the, the scene that we all love with the cat and somebody named Mark, like on the bed, like there are some comments going by, like maybe people knew the name of this person in the bed.\n35:50\tMathieu Aubin:\tOh, we have a comment from Amy Gottlieb that says the person on the bed is Marcia Cannon known as Mars.\n35:59\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut you know, so in Labyris Rising you have somebody on the bed, they’re smoking a joint, they’ve got all the music festival kind of paraphernalia all around them, they’ve got a cat and that scene is constructed almost exact — and they’re reading off our backs right? So, it’s like —\n36:13\tRaegan Swanson:\tThey’re reading on our backs! And all I could think about was like, I were about to like, watch the movie about Chris and how much work that she did around censorship. And, it, that was one moment where I was just like, it all, I know it felt very tied together.\n36:35\tMathieu Aubin:\tThe sound of the music and the voices as they are connecting, which are mostly non-diegetic then become diegetic think at a certain point with the poster, if I’m not mistaken, like there’s a poster referenced, like that’s where you’re like, okay, here’s where, like there’s a whole community. They’re not just trying to like, leave the music production. It’s like, it’s, there. Here it is. Right?\n36:55\tMarusya Bociurkiw:\tI was published by Press Gang, but I was, I worked more in a feminist video collectives, Emma Productions and Women’s Media Alliance, which Nancy Nicol was part of. And I remember when I first joined Women’s Media Alliance, there were no, there were no roles. There was no camera person. There was no sound person. We just, we, we just rotated those roles, which, was part of that, that notion that there —of collaboration and of circularity. And I think that it, it created a kind of aesthetic actually, which at the time, you know, which, which results in those, those kinds of interesting audio choices or editing choices. We, I remember the video we worked on, Our Choice, about teenage mothers and we edited that entire thing by committee. It took —\n37:59\tRachel E. Beattie:\tWow.\n37:59\tMarusya Bociurkiw:\t— So, so what resulted was also long swaths of talking that weren’t edited and that kind of editing was a form of care. And it was, a way of caring for our interview subjects and working against the grain of, of television and mainstream cinema.\n38:26\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tThe third film, Proud Lives, featured a significant force in Toronto’s local communities and Canadian lesbian and gay liberation at large. We heard how a singular figure could be part of a generative field of queer cultural production and galvanize a movement to shift the terms of the world, our bodies, and our relationships.\n38:52\tRaegan Swanson:\tHi everyone, so the next film we’re going to be watching is Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell, which was directed and produced by Nancy Nicol. It was a commemoration video that was shown at Chris’s memorial in 2007 after she passed. For those who aren’t aware, Chris is well Nancy describes her as a towering figure in the history of gay liberation in Canada. And I think that’s a fair assessment. She began writing for The Body Politic in 1975. And she’s kind of, when you look at the pictures of like the body politic, she’s the woman. And everybody else is just like, those are the guys. She was, one of the founders of LOOT. She worked for the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay —CLGO — the coalition for lesbian gay rights of Ontario. She was a part of GATE [Gay Alliance Toward Equality] in Toronto, but she also did organizing in Edmonton when she was a teenager. When The Body Politic was charged, Chris was right along there and so there’s this really great picture of them celebrating after they’ve won the court case. But when a lot of people think of Chris, they think of Chris yelling, “no more shit” [Audio clip: People chanting “no more shit”] as part of the bathhouse raids. And I think that’s a picture of her and sums her up in an interesting way. She’s definitely one of those people that I really wish I could have met in person, especially reading about her and seeing all of her work. If you look at the material that we have at the archives, she’s got her fingers in all the pies, you see her stuff in the [inaudible] you see this stuff Body Politic you see it everywhere. And we have a small collection of her material, of one of her folios at the archive as well. And she’s a part of our national portrait collection. And I really love the portrait that we have of her. She’s done a whole bunch of stuff that I know some of it’s going to be in the film, but you should definitely look up more about her. And if, especially if this video piques your interest.\n41:38\tFelicity Tayler:\tFor me the thing that like, I mean, there’s so many things that I love about that film. and I’m like in the work that I do, I’ve been really interested in the work that Pink Triangle, no, that Pink Type that Chris did with Pink Type as the typesetter for, so many different magazines, you know, so sort of like an arm of Body Politic, but it’s also type setting Fireweed its type setting, like all these other magazines. And so, it becomes kind of this really important sub layer to all of this different – the kinds of cultural production that were coming out of all, all the different edges of this kind of lesbian gay feminist, like press movement in Toronto. So that’s kind of like where my personal desire comes from, in relationship to this field, this film, but there’s, there’s so many other aspects of it that I, that I do kind of pull on those emotional threads. And but, but one of the things that I like the biggest, I guess the biggest takeaway, I don’t know, the thing that I, that I think about from that film in relationship to Labyris Rising and the questions about how do you see or hear like these institutions that, that lesbian and gay liberation like produce for themselves is when she’s talking about how the gay rights movement or the lesbian gay rights movement is not just committed to rights in an end of itself, but that like the, the political kind of protests and boots on the ground, trying to like change legislation is just like one way of generating like community and cultural institutions that are the actual movement, like, or like the bigger kind of like part of the movement is you have this multiple multi-layered push towards shifting the terms that your body interacts with the world and that you, in your identity interact with world and you interact with others. And, and both are important, but there is like this much larger kind of like force that’s taking place alongside this kind of challenge to the law.\n43:50\tConstance Crompton:\tNot to put anybody on the spot, but I do see in the chat that Amy Gottlieb amazing has a comment about working at Pink Type. Amy, did you want to talk about it? [Instrumental, Piano]\n44:06\tAmy Gottlieb:\tSure. I worked at Pink Type. We typeset, I mean, I sort of, I remember type setting The Body Politic type setting Fireweed. At that time, we were on Duncan Street sort of queen and university area. And Gabe Bell worked there as well with me. I remember all sorts of people in the office and I remember our wonderful, beautiful typesetting machine, which we took great care of and felt quite privileged to be using to typeset all these incredible magazines and, you know all sorts of different kinds of publications. And people came in and there were, there was a space for people to do the layout. And so, you got to hang out with people and sort of learn about, you know, what the, these different publications were all about. And, yeah, lots of discussions about the content of The Body Politic about the personnel that the, the, the personal ads in the back. And, that was another, you know, interesting, and a difficult time sometimes in terms of the kind of tension that I think, I certainly felt and I think that Gabe might have felt as well. Yeah, it was, it was a time.\n45:51\tFelicity Tayler:\tWere you ever like tempted to, to change what the type was going to say?\n45:57\tAmy Gottlieb:\tIn terms of the ads? [Laughs].\n46:00\tFelicity Tayler:\t[Laughs] Or, you know, editorial copy, like who knows.\n46:08\tAmy Gottlieb:\tI don’t think so. So, it’s like, it was, it was, I mean, I think we would have, you know, you’re working at such a fast pace when you’re type setting [Sound Effect: Printing Press] and that it’s like, it’s just, you know, how any of us trying to get it out there and so that it can be proofed and pasted up and, you know, it’s, it was, you know, there was some crazy hours as well. And so no, but we, and, you know, yeah, he didn’t organize in that, in that way. Good idea though. [Laughs].\n47:15\tMathieu Aubin:\tThank you for listening to Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening. Welcome to the epilogue. My name is Mathieu Aubin and I am here with Felicity Tayler, and we wanted to take a moment to reflect upon the process of making this episode. [Instrumental Music]\n47:34\tFelicity Tayler:\tIn designing this audio collage, we have proposed a reflexive remix, an aesthetic that Eduardo Navas describes as a sonic collage that blurs the origin of the sounds that we appropriate while relying on your allegorical recognition of the many sonic codes embedded within the soundscape, their larger meaning, and how they are received by members of LGBTQ2+ plus communities. We’ve remixed the sound space of the SpokenWeb: Lesbian Liberation Across Media listening practice held in April 2020. And the watch party of the same name held later in June. We think this produces a new sonic space as a continuation of what Judith Butler calls a citation politics, and that we honor the sounds of feminist press and lesbian liberation films shown during these events. And as we consensually site and remix the sounds of people’s voices, co-producing these events.\n48:38\tMathieu Aubin:\tThis episode cites and further circulates a queer language that acknowledges rich and complex lesbian histories. It makes room for intergenerational discussion and listening. And the virtual space of the watch party attendees from different generations can together to watch lesbian liberation films, and listen to each other’s responses to them. The event highlighted the importance of earlier community building, while challenging romanticized notions of what that community meant. It also enabled members of more recent generations to reflect critically upon that time period, and to identify shared, lived experiences across generations. All this to say, the event built a virtual space that created rich intergenerational dialogue.\n49:32\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo, with that being said, I want to take this opportunity to reflect upon the whole process of making this episode with you Felicity. And you and I have been working on this project for months now, time flies by even during a pandemic. And I was thinking about this, but like, remember when you originally asked me to co-lead the listing process with you beginning of the pandemic, it’s kind of surprising that we’re now here with a podcast episode capturing all the Lesbian Liberation Across Media events. So, my question is kind of broader and it’s, it’s this what surprised you the most about the process of producing this episode, given where we started and where we are now?\n50:15\tFelicity Tayler:\tI think what surprised me the most was how easy it was. Like how smoothly it went, but I feel like it’s because we’ve been establishing kind of a set of like an, an underlying trust for so many years. And you know, the work, the work around the feminist presses and this sense that those communities produce their own, like the communities around these presses use that as the upward apparatus to produce their own kind of alternate world, is something that brought us together in the beginning. So, it’s sort of like we’re starting to, we’re starting from a space of queer affinity in order to be able to continue to speak about these things and draw a wider narrative around it. And now we’re thinking through it in relationship to sound.\n51:11\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. I still remember when we first met at that Concept of Vancouver conference and you were like, you, you do queer things. I’m going to come and talk to you. And that was what, 2016, I think? So, four years this month. Wow. Time flies by.\n51:31\tFelicity Tayler:\tYeah. So, I guess I can kind of, I can follow up on that with my question. And this is a question that other people have asked me while I’m working on this material and as I continue to work on this material. And so, the question that I get asked is whether or not this is about identity and if it, so, yeah. So, is this about identity and if so, what does that mean to you?\n51:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tThat’s a tough and good question. I think that for me, it’s, it’s strange because I’ve come to these materials through obviously, well, just say, I identify as a man and I’m interested in queer materials in general and the sounds of that period. So, for me, it’s not just an idea of identity, but also community building and solidarity, and thinking about what that type of solidarity work looks like. So, one of the things that was really powerful for me was being invited by you to not only participate in that listening practice with our past relationship and amount of work that we’ve done together, but also being invited for that launch party and being asked to contextualize some of those materials and to give some of my reflections. So, the word that I think that comes to my mind is privileged to be able to be in those spaces with the identity that I have, and also knowing when to perhaps limit the amount of space that I occupy when I’m invited to be in those spaces.\n53:04\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo being invited to be there means that I have to be responsible and be respectful. So, I guess going back to your point about the easiness of all of this work, me feeling not only an enormous sense of respect for you, but also feeling that this respect is mutual. And I think that is grounded in our shared queer affinities. I, that’s probably the best way to put that. It’s just at the end of the day, I think that it has something to do with community building and identity, at least at the level of producing and collaborating together, you and I. So yeah, I have —in short, yes, it has to do with identity.\n53:44\tFelicity Tayler:\t[Laughs]. Yeah, that’s what I always say. And I mean, of course it has to do with identity, even if it doesn’t pivot on it. But it is always about creating a sense of self in relationship to the, to the idea of communities and what does produce that idea of community. And in this sense, it’s has a temporal dimension, as it often does in, in queer spaces, because we’re always looking for a past that isn’t always necessarily available to us.\n54:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. Exactly.\n54:14\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut I do like the, you know, what we were talking about earlier today about this clip that we wanted to revisit, and the editing kind of really illustrates where these questions are going. I think where, you know, in an earlier edit, there was a mistake and there was your voice like overlaid on top of one of the other participants voices and so you, you kind of produce this like typical stereotype of the, you know, the mansplaining, like, not, not making, not making space. And so, the ease with which we were able to address that and to smooth it out, in the final product, I think is a really great kind of example, of, of how working together has worked.\n54:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tEven though it’s a tiny glitch in our process over logic. I was just thinking, you know, I was listening to that I was thinking, this is egregious if we let this be, because this is just bad.\n55:10\tFelicity Tayler:\tBut also funny that there was like an ambiguity as to whether it had actually happened in real life or not. When we were working in the collage space, which it didn’t, it did not happen in real life.\n55:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tThis is great. I’m super thankful that I’ve had this opportunity to collaborate with you on this project and for all the other collaborators as well.\n55:33\tFelicity Tayler:\tYeah. Well I thank you for your thoughtful ways. And with that in mind, here are some other thank yous for all the voices that you hear in this podcast. And also for the institutions that we were able to wrangle to make this series of events possible. So, we’d like to thank Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Scott Girouard, Constance Crompton, Michelle Schwartz, Rachel E Beattie, Raegan Swanson, May Ning, jake moore, Becki Ross, Amy Gotlieb…\n56:09\tMathieu Aubin:\t…Rachel Epstein, Maureen FitzGerald, Emma Middleton, Marusya Bociurkiw, Baylee Woodley, Elspeth Brown, Stark, Humanities Data Lab at U Ottawa, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, ArQuives, VTape, and VIVO Archives. All the proceeds from the event were donated to supporting our youth of Toronto and their Black queer youth and Trans crew and The519 trans people of colour project. \n56:47\tFelicity Tayler:\tWe couldn’t have made this podcast without you.\n57:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Instrumental Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Mathieu Aubin of Concordia University and Felicity Tayler of the University of Ottawa with guest collaborators, Scott Girouard.\n57:26\tVoiceover, Emma Middleton:\tAnd additional voiceover by Emma Middleton.\n57:29\tHannah McGregor:\tOur podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland and a warm welcome to new podcast research assistant Judy Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribed to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. [Theme Music] You can rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada from all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9279","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E3, Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp, 7 December 2020, Beauchesne and Kemp"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds-of-trance-formation-an-interview-with-penn-kemp/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Nick Beauchesne","Penn Kemp"],"creator_names_search":["Nick Beauchesne","Penn Kemp"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/43083879\",\"name\":\"Penn Kemp\",\"dates\":\"1944-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/bbda2b6f-992a-45a6-bbee-f3074a8ccfd2/audio/919f9dbb-30d9-4851-ae29-ef6b52f23820/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,299,694 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds-of-trance-formation-an-interview-with-penn-kemp/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References:\\n\\nPenn Kemp’s Pandemic Poems originally published in: Belanger, Joe. “It’s time to embrace London’s poet laureate, Penn Kemp, and all artists.” London Free Press. 11 Apr. 2020. https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/belanger-its-time-to-embrace-londons-poet-laureate-penn-kemp-and-all-artists. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “PENN KEMP – Home.” Weebly. http://pennkemp.weebly.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp: Penn, poet/playwright/performer.” WordPress. https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. From the Lunar Plexus. Pendas Productions, 2001.\\n\\nKemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. “Night Orchestra.” Barbaric Cultural Practice, Quatrro Books, 2017.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. Trance Form. Soft Press and Pendas Productions (reprint), 2006.\\n\\nRecordings:\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “[Night Orchestra] Barbaric Cultural Practice.”  Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/sets/barbaric-cultural-practice. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp – Trance Form, Live at U of A, February 18, 1977 (1).” Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/penn-kemp-trance-form-live-at-u-of-a-february-18-1977-1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. Trance Dance Form, Pendas Productions, 2006.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “When the Heart Parts – Sound Opera.”  Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/when-the-heart-parts. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549478178816,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["For Penn Kemp, poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied, and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects, while the voices in the air produce others altogether. How do these effects complement and contradict one another? How does literary sound produce bodily effects and altered states of consciousness? Where will the trance take us, as listeners?\n\nThrough conversation with poet Penn Kemp and SpokenWeb Researcher Nick Beauchesne, this episode invites us to explore these questions by tracing the threads of magical practice from Kemp’s early career to the present day. A clip from her performance of Trance Form at the University of Alberta (1977) is brought into conversation with more recent material from When the Heart Parts (2007) and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017). The episode concludes with a live reading from Kemp’s brand-new Pandemic Poems (2020). \n\n00:03\tIntro Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will be here if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. [Music Fades] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How often do you think of your own voice as sonic art? What happens when you speak poetry aloud? What effects can voices in the air produce? For sound poet Penn Kemp, poetry is something more than the written word — words must be lifted off the page into the air and sculpted in sound. Her voice is her poetic instrument and sound becomes a verb — the transporting and trance-forming act of “sounding”. In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Penn weaves us through her creative practice with SpokenWeb researcher Nick Beauchesne. Exploring the magical effects of literary sound to transport us, transform us and entrance us, Penn and Nick take us on a journey through Penn’s illustrious decades-long career discussing archival performances of Tranceform (1977), When the Heart Parts (2007), and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017), plus two brand new poems from Penn Kemp shared in this episode. Penn Kemp has published 30 books of poetry and drama, and had six plays, 10 CDs, and several award-winning video poems produced. A former poet Laureate of London, Ontario, and League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Artist of the Year, Penn has been giving creativity workshops, teaching, and performing her poetry since 1966. Here is Nick Beauchesne with honored guest Penn Kemp in episode three of The SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories of Trance Formation. [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:29\tNick Beauchesne:\tGood day, audio lovers. Welcome to a very special episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast. My name is Nick Beauchesne, PhD candidate at the University of Alberta department of English and Film studies and a research assistant on the SpokenWeb Edmonton team. Today we’ll have an interview with a very distinguished Canadian sound poet in Penn Kemp. For Penn Kemp poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy, informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects while the voices in the air produce others altogether. How do these effects complement and contradict one another? How does literary sound produce bodily effects and altered states of consciousness? Where will the trance take us as listeners? Thank you very much for joining us, Penn. How are you today?\n \n\n03:45\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s a pleasure to be here. I’m well and happy to join you.\n \n\n03:49\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, I’m broadcasting here from Kamloops, British Columbia, and here you are in London, Ontario coming together over Zoom in these very strange pandemic times.\n \n\n04:00\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s true. It’s a lovely September day here full of long light approaching Equinox, a balance time.\n \n\n04:08\tNick Beauchesne:\tThe world has seemed so out of balance in many ways. So perhaps we can look forward to that as some sort of omen.\n \n\n04:15\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s the seasonal transition from summer to fall. And the Celtic new year is coming up.\n \n\n04:23\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, we’ll get into these topics as we go, because a lot of what drew me to your work was your involvement with the mystical, the magical to some extent the alchemical — although it seems you’ve moved away from that in recent years — but you still have that very strong, magical thread that works through all your work and the way that you use sound as a tool for change and for expanding consciousness. Your website lists you as a performance poet, activist and playwright. And you have a reputation as one of Canada’s foremost sound poets. What does that category of “sound poet” mean to you?\n \n\n05:00\tPenn Kemp:\tIt means that I can do anything I like in performing a piece and how it wants to lift off the page.\n \n\n05:11\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, what do you mean by “lift off the page”?\n \n\n05:14\tPenn Kemp:\tInto sound, into performance. So, basically, I separate the written word into various categories and if the sound is predominant in the poem, in the original poem, then I lift it into a chant or various ways of expressing it beyond English language.\n \n\n05:46\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, is it that ability to, to get beyond language that, do you find that that’s what distinguishes your sound poetry from, from other types of poetry —which all do have a component of sound built into it —but how and why do you emphasize sound? What is it about sound that so draws you?\n \n\n06:03\tPenn Kemp:\tSound is both the first and the last sense. [Low chant begins, steadily increasing in volume] Hearing, as we know in the dead, in the dying, is the last sense to disappear. And it’s the sound that we —it’s sound that we first hear in our mother’s womb. McLuhan once said something that the Catholic religion lost its sense of mystery when they moved from the Latin in resounding through the cathedral, through the natural sounds of the cathedral. And when that was replaced by a microphone, it lost the resonance. It lost being inside the cavity of the mother’s womb, where sound is transmitted through the permeable membrane of the stomach. [Low chant ends] And so, I really believe that sound is transporting. It takes you back to primeval experience to first— before —it’s the closest we get to a kind of synesthesia where before sound before, excuse me, the senses are divided into five or 5,000. I think sound is the basic basis of all that.\n \n\n07:38\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat’s such a fascinating connection there between the mother’s womb and the womb of the cathedral space. Before we get into looking at some specific pieces of your work, I did want to kind of ask about that role of place. And it seems like you naturally tied into that in terms of, you know, since sound is so important for you, what are some of the coolest places you’ve been and hearing your voice in a raw environment and the different ways that that sound kind of affects it?\n \n\n08:06\tPenn Kemp:\tYes, I was —as I was talking about the cathedral, I remember performing in the ’80s at the cathedral of St. John the Divine along with a hundred conches that were led by Charlie Morrow. And that was a very interesting way of the voice resonating with the cathedral. And I’ve also done a lot of sounding in the center of standing stones in Scotland and Exmoor. And at the temple of Asclepius in Greece, you stand at the center in the hollow of that temple and the sound reverberates. You can whisper and the sound reaches the outer limits of the amphitheater. But the most amazing place to sound was being in the third pyramids at Giza. I was sat there for a night in absolute darkness, so dark that my mind started to create visual images and oral images. [low chanting begins] And I spent the night sounding. But there’s just another story. I was also invited to lie down in the sarcophagus at the King’s chamber at Giza — first in Cheops’ pyramid. And I had a very expensive Sony recorder at the time, and I was recording myself chanting in that sarcophagus. And when I came out, the recorder had blown a gasket. All the batteries had exploded with the energy. [Sound, ends]\n \n\n09:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tOoooooh.\n \n\n10:01\tPenn Kemp:\tIt was a very expensive lesson in power.\n \n\n10:05\tNick Beauchesne:\tWhat an amazing location to be able to experiment with sound. And then it’s such a strange phenomenon to have your piece of technology just disintegrate like that. Perhaps that sound was too sacred for this world, Penn.\n \n\n10:21\tPenn Kemp:\tI think so. Well, it is very interesting to have a kind of — my way of perceiving the world is, is very Celtic, very old, ancient, and yet to work with technology in a way that acknowledges its power is, has been a very interesting journey for me.\n \n\n10:43\tNick Beauchesne:\tThis podcast will proceed with basically a conversation built around four clips that I selected. I enjoy these clips because they give the listener a broad selection of material from across your lengthy career, beginning with an excerpt from “Bone Poems” which was published in Trance Form. And that recording took place in 1977. I also have clips from When the Heart Parts, two clips from the year 2007, and then the final clip we’ll be playing is from Night Orchestra in 2017. So, it’s something quite recent. And once our conversation around these pieces of sound has been completed, we’ll conclude the podcast with a special reading live by Penn Kemp from two new poems from your collection of pandemic poems. So, looking forward to getting to that material. The first excerpt I’ll play is from “Bone Poems” which is part of Trance Form. [Ambient Music starts] This clip was recorded at the U of A, from the department of English and Film Studies on February 18th, 1977. And this was how I was first exposed to your work, being a research assistant. It was my job to do a close listening of all this raw material and to then try to identify poem titles, collect timestamps, and all that. And so, over the course of listening to maybe 50 of these tapes from the EFS collection at U of A, I heard all sorts of different clips, and I’m always listening for components featuring mysticism, the supernatural, magic as poetic themes. And I identified that immediately in your work. And it’s something we’ve kind of talked about in our kind of private conversations. So, after kind of hearing this and then doing a listening practice back in June, where you joined as our guest, we put together this podcast where I wanted to pursue that strand of sound as a form of magical practice, as well as poetic practice. I’m going to play this clip. It’s about six minutes long. It’ll kind of form the — a good backbone (poem) of the rest of the interview. So, we’ll just listen to this clip and we’ll return with some questions. [Ambient Music ends.]\n \n\n12:59\tAudio Recording,\nBone Poems, 1977:\tAhhhhhhhhh. Oracle. The last section we can do together. This —my voice is running out and I’m sure you’ve got [Cough] a cough. It’s “Bone Poems.” It’s like getting down to the — it’s the last bone we wear that covers our essential emptiness. All you have to do is say, chant: “bone poems.” For those of you with books, you can follow the “bone poem” line along on page. For those of you who don’t have books, you can say “bonepoembonepoembonepoem.” And we’ll start at that. And then I’ll read the the “Bone Poems” supposedly over top of your loud “bonepoembonepoem.” You’re the bass section. Can I hear you please? Bonepoembonepoem…. [Audience chanting] If you want to get into varieties, you can. There’s quite a few. [Cough] Bonepoembonepoem. [Water pouring] You’ve died out. You have to keep it going for the next 10 pages. [Audience laughs] All right. Take a deep breath and then go. [Inhale] Hmmmmmmmm. [Audience chanting begins]\nSkin. A breeze. Hmmmmmmm. Green. Saw. Blue.\nWords. Breathe. Shed their skin. Skin to bone.\nOne bone under. Sun shine, some sun, some,\nsome sunshine, some shine. Hmmmmmmm.\nHmmmmmmm. Sa-sa-sa-hum-sa.\n\nOne bone sunshine shed skin. One bone over,\none bone under. Sun shine. Over under, over under,\nover under. Some. Cloud. Bone be nimble. Bone be\nquick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Bone\nbe quick. Bone be quick. Bone be quick. Bone be\nover, under, over, under, over under. Bone be nimble,\nbone be quick. Do. These. Bones. Live? Bone be quick,\nbone be quick. Jump over. Quick dry, quick dry, quick\ndry quick, these be quick, bone be quick, bone be quick,\nquick, quick, quick, quick. Bone be nimble, bone be quick.\n\n[Audience chanting ending]. Music to my ears! [Audience: “ it’s hard work!”]\n\n16:39\tAudio Recording,\nBone Poems, 1977:\tAnybody want a glass of water? [Audience chanting returns]\nSweet marrow sweet morrow, all fleshes as grasses as\ngrasses as whistling down wind, is whistling down wind.\nBare. Root. White. Grow. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Bare. Rock.\nBone. Root. Of fleshes as grass is as grass grows over, grows\nunder. These. Those. These. Bare. Bone. Grope. White. Flesh\nis as grass is. Sweet morrow, sweet marrow. Cell in skull, skull\nin cell. Desert father’s memento mori. Bone shards endure\nwhen soft flesh withers. Slower bone retains our image. As\nby jaw or femur, they determined what we were. What we\nbecome. Our final trance formation. Slow. Bone. Soft flesh.\nTo marrow, tomorrow. Conjure our story. Become the thing\nwe divine.\n\nCome on, don’t get tired! I’ve been reading for an hour. You can’t be tired!\n\nFrame us erect. Base, bed, rock, mountain, tree. Axis\nof our bloodline, pole on which was strung and hung\nour nine-day lives. Oh spine, oh sacred virtue spreads\nher branches as our limbs. Her white, our white. Play us,\nwe are your instrument. Tibia, flute, femur, during, enduring.\n\n[string of high pitched sounds]\n\nHold the femur by its polished leather knuckle. Clang! Clang-inggggggg. Dangling. [Audience chanting ending]\n\n19:16\tNick Beauchesne:\tWow. That was quite something there. Kind of a blast from the past for you, Penn.\n \n\n19:22\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s for sure. It’s interesting how I have continued to use certain techniques or habits of speech or habits of sounding like the rising ‘ing’. I’ve done a lot of that, of playing with the varieties of sound that can be produced.\n \n\n19:46\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat’s one of the things that really drew me to your work is there’s not a lot of singing in the EFS collection of the SpokenWeb tapes. So that was one of the, well, it was certainly the first, occasion of singing I heard in the collection, although there is another one or there’s another few of them out there. But not something that I’ve heard a lot of in our collection, anyways. So, it’s something that immediately got my attention, you know, being a vocalist and performance artist myself. I just wanted to ask about just that that pun of transform, you know, not with the Tran “N S” but with the, the “C E” of a kind of pond on forming a trance. And, you know, we can hear all sorts of, you can hear the, you know, the crowd gasping for air and, and laughing. And just also the way that the chanting is kind of known to change the brain state, you know, to like a delta or gamma brain state. So just the way that, that sound and chanting, not only like the sound itself, but also through like the breath, the breathwork, as well as a kind of tool of consciousness transformation. So, yeah, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that in terms of how you use sound, both not only in your own, but also in the kind of audience participation or interaction forming that trance.\n \n\n21:06\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah. I believe that a poem must be transporting or at its best is transporting you to, not — certainly to an altered state, not a higher state, but a more spacious state of consciousness, where there are more possibilities. For example, we know that a baby [vocal drone begins] by the time it’s a year old has made every sound that it’s possible for a human being to make. But then by the age of 10, the child has — the child’s mouth has condensed, hardened. So that say the African —some click language can’t be, can’t be pronounced properly after a certain age. So, as a person fascinated by travel and languages, I was really interested in reaching beyond English, which is such a lovely mongrel language of many sounds, but into, you know, the more guttural sounds of German, for example, or how, how language is placed in the mouth. The way French has right at the top of the lips, right at the front. And that — or Russian is way back in the throat. That sort of thing really intrigued me. But it was basically listening to how my children at the —as infants developed language. And that’s where the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What that’s where the repetition came in of what in Buddhism or Hinduism we call “seed syllables.” And so, I was very interested as well in the power of seed syllables.\n \n\n22:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd there’s something powerful in the sense of the participation about sound poetry as well, because even you said, you know, “you can feel free to follow along if, and if you have no books, you can just go, bonepoebonepoembonepoem.”\n \n\n23:09\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah. Yes.\n \n\n23:09\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, it’s —so even people who don’t have the book or have never heard the poem before are able to participate in the village chant. So, so maybe we can call it.\n \n\n23:19\tPenn Kemp:\tSo, it becomes a participatory — all my sound poetry is participatory because then the experience is reenacted in the audience’s body as a collective. And that’s a joyous thing to get beyond the mind, the ego, into an experience that is so spacious.\n \n\n23:45\tNick Beauchesne:\tThey got into that in the “bone poem” section, but I wish a few of them were more adventurous to try some of those variations to, to hear more [trill sound].\n \n\n23:56\tPenn Kemp:\tIf I had a little more time to do a sound workshop with them.\n \n\n23:59\tNick Beauchesne:\tYes. Yes.\n \n\n23:59\tPenn Kemp:\tBut I think Doug Barbour had invited me to do that reading and he very kindly had the kids, students buy the books. So, they had these — the cover is of a bare-breasted, beautiful woman caught in a slant light in a very bright yellow cover. And here they were turning the pages. And at the end they corrected me and asked why I had changed the words in “Bone Poem” because they were following it exactly. And I —I was everything I do is ad lib and improvised and I wasn’t synchronized to what the page was saying. So, they felt it necessary to correct me.\n \n\n24:47\tNick Beauchesne:\tTo inform you that you read your own poem incorrectly.\n \n\n24:51\tPenn Kemp:\tWrong!\n \n\n24:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, if the students commented on where the poem is going and how it should be delivered…Penn, where do poems come from?\n \n\n25:03\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, they have many choices, but for me, the most powerful poems come from sound. But I also write a lot from a translation or a transliteration from visual fields. So, I dream vividly. And for example, after you had sent me the possibility of the podcast, I dreamt, I wrote a poem about that dream. And for me, the dream poems that are astonishing. I’ve got a whole collection called Dream Sequins, but they’re not as powerful as poems that lead me on the way through sound. So, I like poems to lead me, to take me to places rather than translating images that already exist. But let me read you this poem and it’s dedicated to you and you can make up your own mind.\n \n\n26:11\tPenn Kemp:\t\nLiteralizing the metaphor\n\nFor Nix Nihil\n\nThe host asks me to do a Zoom podcast, live in BC. I’m to record\n\non a cloud some metres above ground. The ladder up to the cloud\n\nseems precarious, even with gold underlining and heavenly chords.\n\n \n\nI’m afraid of falling through watery vapour, afraid of heights, afraid\n\nthat my voice will be tremulous. But once embarked upon the cloud,\n\nthe local Indigenous elder teaches me her healing heartbeat chant,\n\n“la-Doe, la-Doe”. She repeats the resounding phrase as I join in.\n\n \n\nSo the recording goes well. As BC is my last stop on tour, I have\n\nrun out of books to sell. A shame, since audiences here buy more\n\nthan anywhere else. My host gladly accepts my last copy as a gift.\n\n \n\nI return to home ground, empty of baggage and replete, complete,\n\nand ready to begin again, earthed.\n\n \n\n27:27\tPenn Kemp:\tNow, if I were developing that poem as a sound poem, I would be playing with “replete, complete, and ready to begin again. Earthed.” I would be playing with “I’m afraid of falling throooooooough.” Wherever the sound takes me. I would play further.\n \n\n27:47\tNick Beauchesne:\tI can also imagine some lah-dot, lah-dot, lah, dot persisting in the background. [Sound: Echo of “lah-dot”]\n \n\n27:52\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah! Well, for sure.\n \n\n27:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tWell I don’t know what else to say, but “aww shucks!”\n \n\n28:00\tPenn Kemp:\tOh, I expect the sound poem in return.\n \n\n28:02\tNick Beauchesne:\tWell, I’ll have to return the favor. No doubt. The next audio clip that I’d like to play is from a sound opera composed in 2007, called When the Heart Parts. Written in honor of your departing father, Jim Kemp.\n \n\n28:24\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tWhen the heart parts. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wha-wha-wha-why? why? why? [interspersed sounds] When. When. When. When. When. When the heart. When the heart. When the heart. Hearts, heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, parts, heart, parts, when the heart parts company, heart parts company company, our heart stops. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh- when the company, when the company, when the company parts, when the company parts. Art. Stops. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-when the company parts. When the company parts. When the company parts. When the company parts from the hearth. When the company parts from the hearth. Company from the hearth. The heart does not stop.\n \n\n29:29\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat was a clip from When the Heart Parts. That was the first minute of the sound opera. Quite a lot of layers, quite a lot of voices. What’s going on in that opening clip?\n \n\n29:42\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, I’m trying to recreate the experience of driving through snow with the knowledge that I was going to witness my father’s dying. And coming into the hospital, to the room, hearing all the different electronic sounds that were so pervasive, trying to keep him alive. And my voice is asking, “Why? Why? Why? Why?” You know. And so, I was trying to express the immensity of all the emotions through sound.\n \n\n30:30\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, there’s the sound – The sound of like the male voice is doing like a “lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.” So, is that like the heart? The heart sounds there?\n \n\n30:37\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s John Magyar the producer. And then, Ann Anglin, the actor is performing with me the various machine sounds and the sounds of “why” taking the form of my voice and my mother’s voice as we’re in the room.\n \n\n30:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd when you were saying, “company” —I just heard this now. And I don’t know if I, if this was intentional, but— were you attending to say Penny, like your, your name is a child?\n \n\n31:07\tPenn Kemp:\tYes. Yep.\n \n\n31:07\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, “come, Penny.” So, younger Penny in there as well. And, just like the, not with sound poetry in general, but with you as well, the importance of homonyms, homophones, and puns. So, you go from heart, you know, the organ to a hearth, like a space in a home, to art, like the art that comes from the heart and then parting and leaving. So, you have all these related sounds and these kinds of concepts, in a stream of consciousness, kind of interwoven in there —\n \n\n31:37\tPenn Kemp:\tI’m trying to get whatever works to get below the mental process into a deeper experience of the sound of language. And that comes again from a love of different languages.\n \n\n31:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tThe next clip takes place about 17 minutes into the opera, which is about 45 minutes or so long. It’s about two-and-a-half minutes long, but it really dramatizes that magical power of sound and that instinctive supra, or maybe sub rational power of sound that it goes beyond mind and into direct connection and intuition. So, it was a very powerful moment where you almost succeed in resurrecting your father, just for a moment too, to have this final kind of moment of connection. And so, it struck me as a very powerful moment in the poem, not only in the message and the words, but also the way that you self-consciously use sound to try to connect with your father while he’s deep in his kind of sleep state. Here’s a clip of the sonic resurrection.\n \n\n32:45\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tIn love and ceremony [Bells Ring] he crowns Mom with a Tibetan headdress. Magenta. Magnificent. Something significant has been accomplished. When Jamie and I come home from supper, Penny stays to read Jim the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He asked her to,  ages ago, if he were ever…When she gets home, we know something has happened. I never saw anyone look so worn out. She has worked so hard doing something.\nMy commitment to Dad is to read him the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The old words are meant to appease the fear and confusion of the dying.\n\nDo not let your attention wander. Keep to the clear light. Do not be distracted by other noises or pictures. They are all projections of your mind. Keep to what is happening here. Now, do not let your attention wander. Keep to the clear light. Do not be distracted. Traditionally, this reading is a guide in the process of dying. Do not be distracted. Keep to the clear light. The ear is the last sense to go. But who knows if Dad is listening? They are all projections of your mind. To conjure these peaceable realms, pure lands, at least calms and clears by own anguish. It is true. You are dying. It is true. You are dying. We are not pretending anything else. We are not pretending anything else. We are not holding anything back from you. We know you can hear. Your family is gathered around you. Know this is happening to you, now. To the light. Keep to the light. I whisper close into Dad’s left ear because I hope his right brain might be more receptive. Remembering a super learning technique to reach the deepest typological level of the mind. I call his name in three tones of voice. In between each phrase, I pause to the count of four. Jim Kemp [Tapping] Jim Kemp, Jim Kemp. And then my father flutters his eyes, startled. Squeezes my hand tight. He tries to focus, stares, and sees me.\n\n35:20\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, a very powerful moment there. And earlier in the clip you say, “in love and ceremony, he crowns my Mom with a Tibetan headdress.” And it seems significant in a kind of a meta level, in a sense, that through the poem you in turn are “through love and ceremony” crowning your own father. So, what about this poem is ceremonial to you, or how is this poem a ceremony?\n \n\n35:44\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, dying is such a time of transition. It’s the opposite of our two great transitions, birth and death. So, for me, yes, it’s important to honor these transitions through ritual. Dad and I were both received — took initiation as Buddhists in 1974. And so, we had studied Tibetan Buddhism and The Book of the Dead. And I had offered to read him The Book of the Dead when he was dying. So, this was a prepared act. My Mom was not part of that. She was much more of a rationalist. So, the dream was such a welcoming of her into the ceremony, which at the point of his dying, she embraced. The moment that I read his name and he came to, it was just before the doctors were to pull the plug, which would mean that he would die, of course. And because he was being kept alive by these instruments. And it meant that he then lingered on [Musical tones begin] for 10 more days. I don’t know whether that was a good thing or not because they’d brought him back six times with pounding his heart and all that. So, it was very painful, but nonetheless, he was there. But when I read to him and when I said his name —.\n \n\n37:31\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:31\tPenn Kemp:\t— he responded by not only opening his eyes for the first time —.\n \n\n37:36\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:36\tPenn Kemp:\t— but lifting his hand, his index finger —.\n \n\n37:40\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:40\tPenn Kemp:\t— on his right hand as a gesture of —.\n \n\n37:45\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:45\tPenn Kemp:\t— I don’t know, admonition or instruction. I never have been able to figure that one out. But extraordinarily powerful.\n \n\n37:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd from your subjective position there, it must have certainly seemed almost like a, like a spell to wake the sleeper for a final farewell.\n \n\n38:06\tPenn Kemp:\tAbsolutely.\n \n\n38:08\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo just to call attention to, again, the idea of sound as a kind of magical technique, but also as a scientific technique as well: “I whisper close into my Dad’s left ear because I hope his right brain might be more receptive, remembering a super learning technique to reach the deepest hypnagogic level of the mind I call his name —.\n \n\n38:27\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n38:27\tNick Beauchesne:\t— in three tones of voice.” So how old were you when that happened? And did you know that technique at the time? Have you used that since in your poetry?\n \n\n38:36\tPenn Kemp:\tI was 39. It was 1983. And super learning was, there was a book called Superlearning that I think the Russians had developed these —I haven’t heard much about it since, so — I think the technique was so powerful that I’ve never used it again. I didn’t dare.\n \n\n38:59\tNick Beauchesne:\tYeah. Sometimes those maybe when something like that happens that’s so powerful once is enough.\n \n\n39:08\tPenn Kemp:\tThank you, Nick, for noticing that moment, because it’s, for me, the pivotal moment of the piece. It was also produced by Theatre Passe Muraille as a play: What the Ear Hears Last. Appropriately enough. And you’re the first person that has, aside from the actors, noticed that absolutely pivotal moment of transition.\n \n\n39:38\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, we’ll go to another night, maybe not necessarily a night of the soul, but “Night Orchestra” is the next clip. So, this is from 2017 from your Barbaric Cultural Practices. Maybe, before I play it, can you explain what this clip is doing?\n \n\n39:57\tPenn Kemp:\tYes. Again, I’m in the midst of an aural field. This time, it’s a hot summer’s night in the Toronto beaches. And I have my windows open because I don’t have air conditioning, but the flat next door has very loud air conditioning. And so, I make a sound poem out of the experience.\n \n\n40:25\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd that experience was “Night Orchestra”.\n \n\n40:29\tAudio Recording,\nNight Orchestra:\tDeep, deep, deep, deep, deep, beep,\ndeep, deep, deep in, deep in, deep in.\nDeep in summer stillnessan electric hum of air conditioner in B flat.\nStill hum, still hum. Flat. Flat.\nMonotone entrains my body. Monotonous. [Low chant]\nproduced to cool my neighbors thrums the outside air,\nheats up our collective night. Sleepless in the beaches,\nI resist the single roar — sleepless, sleepless, sleepless —\nas Blake deplores single vision. And Newton’s sleep.The sound of the perpetual 20th century colonized our\nfuture with a dominant beep sales pitch for comfort. Con-\nvenience, reliance on the pliance. The pity is not that\nthe century has wound to a close, but that it’s whining\non and on. Mechanical multitudes self-replicate in chorus.Relentless fridge and clock. The only spell-breaker is a tape\nof Tibetan chant. [Tibetan chant] Deep harmonic overtones\nconjure a resonance, disturb the soundwaves. Somewhere\nbeyond the pervasive rattle, waves break on the shore.\nSpecies diversify. Night. Orchestra.\t\n42:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnother hypnotic sound collage there. The line that really jumped out to me is, “The only spell-breaker is the sound of a Tibetan chant”, which to me is almost ironic. The chanting in this track kind of constitutes part of the spell. I didn’t really comment on the past track as well, which also had a low, deep Tibetan-sounding chant. [Tibetan Chant Begins] So, it seems that the, this Tibetan chant and this influence persists through your work and probably in other poems as well, that I haven’t heard. [Tibetan Chant Ends] You mentioned you were initiated with your father. How else has this Tibetan chant kind of worked its way into your corpus?\n \n\n43:35\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, specifically in this piece, the “deep deep, deep, deep” was the actual sound or my replication of the sound of the air conditioner from the neighbors. And as a sort of dueling banjo, I set up my own CD of Tibetan chants. So, it was very specific and very actual in that I was trying to go — it’s like going onto an airplane and rising with the airplane, as it takes off. I convert the sound of the noise of the airplane into an ‘ommmmm’. It’s the same resonance. So, it converts the mechanical into the spiritual.\n \n\n44:23\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, is that a technique you kind of frequently use in your everyday life whenever you hear obnoxious, ambient sounds? Is this an inner way in the inner monologue to overcode them with something of your own meaning to claim your head space, I guess?\n \n\n44:38\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s right. For example, the frog, there’s a bull frog in my pond, and if he hears a certain truck, if he hears a certain sound of a large truck, he starts croaking, as in kind of setting up his territory, that this truck will not compete with. So, I think it’s very —a basic technique from the animal kingdom up.\n \n\n45:09\tNick Beauchesne:\tYeah. Laying your claim —.\n \n\n45:10\tPenn Kemp:\tYep.\n \n\n45:10\tNick Beauchesne:\tStaking your sonic territory.\n \n\n45:13\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah.\n \n\n45:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tThank you for commenting on some of these pieces that I selected. I did notice that sound as an instrument of will, and an instrument of change, an instrument of consciousness has persisted through your work for decades. So, I appreciate you joining me for this interview to comment on some of those strands and to help, you know, theorize about, you know, the bones of poetry and the transformational power of sound and how sound can form the trance and change the world. So, thank you very much. Before we end off, I understand you’ve written some new material to document your experience relating to this 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.\n \n\n46:02\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n46:02\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo why don’t you —\n \n\n46:05\tPenn Kemp:\tI’ll read them for you.\n \n\n46:05\tNick Beauchesne:\t— why don’t you talk about that?\n \n\n46:06\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, first of all, I want to thank you Nick, for asking those very astute questions that helped me articulate the process because I usually work without conscious intent until I get to the editing phase. And you helped me articulate what I was doing at articulating the process. So, that’s really fun and useful. [Musical tone begins] These two pandemic poems were published in the Free Press or London Free Press, and the first one was contemplating what we’ll remember. It comes from the spring of this year. “What We’ll Remember.” I think the only thing I’d like to say about it is that — I was saying earlier that poems for me come from either sound or a vision, a visual inspiration, and these two poems come from the visual field. Necessarily they include sound.\n \n\n47:17\tPenn Kemp:\tWhat We’ll Remember\nHow first scylla sky shimmers\n\nagainst the tundra swan’s flight\n\nwest and north, north north west.\n\n \n\nHow many are leaving the planet and yet\n\nare with us, still and still forever.\n\n \n\nHow they linger,\n\nthe lost, the bewildered, the wild ones!\n\n \n\nThough tears come easily these days,\n\nwe too hover over the greening land\n\n \n\nas spring springs brighter than ever\n\nsince stacks are stilled and the pipe\n\nlines piping down.\n\n \n\nWhen the peace pipe is lit\n\nand sweetgrass replaces\n\nsmog— when the fog of pollution\n\nlifts and channels clear—\n\n \n\nEarth take a long breath\n\nand stretches over aeons to come\n\nand aeons past.\n\n48:29\tPenn Kemp:\tThe second poem came from a vision I had of, I call it, les revenants, those who have come before. Those spirits that seem to me to be brought back to a kind of half life from the influenza of 2000- excuse me – 1819. So this is a spell for them to return to their abode.\n \n\n49:05\tPenn Kemp:\tNo Reruns, No Returns\nfor les revenants\n\nThose who died once from influenza\n\na century ago, who now are pulled to\n\n \n\na hell realm of eternal return—are you\n\nrepeating, reliving the hex of time as if\n\n \n\ndoomed to replicate the old story you\n\nalready lived through? Once is enough.\n\n \n\nNo need to hover. You have suffered\n\nplenty. You’ve loved and lost all there\n\n \n\nis to lose. You have won. You’re one\n\nwith all that is. Retreat now to your own\n\n \n\nabode. Return home, spirits. You’re no\n\nlonger needed here. You are no longer.\n\n \n\nAlthough we honour you and thank\n\nyou and remember you each and all,\n\n \n\nall those who’ve been called back, called\n\nup from dimensions we can only guess at—\n\n \n\ncaught in the Great War and carried away\n\nor carried off in the aftermath of influenza—\n\n \n\nby this spell, we tell you to go back to\n\nyour own time, out of time. Just in time.\n\n \n\nMay you depart. We don’t know, how can\n\nwe tell? where your home is. It’s not here.\n\n \n\nKnow this virus is not yours. Know this\n\nwar is not yours. You are here in our era\n\n \n\nby error, by slippage, a rip. You’ve mis-\n\ntaken the signage, the spelling in wrong\n\n \n\nturns. Now return, by this charm, retreat.\n\nYou are dispelled, dismissed, dismantled,\n\n \n\nreleased to soar free from the trance of time.\n\nMay you travel well. May you fly free.\n\n51:50\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Finger Snaps] There’s my finger-snapping of appreciation.\n \n\n51:57\tPenn Kemp:\tWell I couldn’t hear it.\n \n\n51:58\tNick Beauchesne:\tThank you very much for sharing your new work with us here on the podcast.\n \n\n52:05\tPenn Kemp:\tYou’re the first to hear it.\n \n\n52:05\tNick Beauchesne:\tOh, I’m honored. Thank you very much, Penn, for joining us. Thanks to SpokenWeb for allowing me the opportunity to do this podcast. Thanks also to my friend and former bandmate, Adam Whitaker-Wilson for providing the tech support and the studio gear and space on my end here. Anyone seeking to learn more about Penn — she has a blog. Just google Penn Kemp at WordPress, and she also has a Weebly page, W-E-E-B-L-Y for further information as well.\n \n\n52:39\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpo-ken. Web.\t\n52:39\tPenn Kemp:\tSpoooooooo –\t\n52:39\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Ambient Noise Begins]. Thanks. You. Audience. For. Your. Time.\t\n52:39\tPenn Kemp:\tSpo-ken. Spo-ken.\t\n52:42\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpo-ken. Web. Spo-ken. Web. Web of life web.\t\n52:55\tPenn Kemp:\tWeb. Web.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tWeb of time.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpokennnn Webbbbb.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd then we’ll “fade out: music.”\n \n\n53:14\tHannah McGregor:\t[Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Nick Beauchesne from the University of Alberta with guest collaborator and Canadian poet Penn Kemp. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Adam Whitaker-Wilson, Douglas Barbour, Ann Anglin, Bill Gilliam, and John Magyar for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media as @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\t\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9280","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E3, Invisible Labour, 2 December 2019, Sallam and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e202a10c-3703-4bcd-b7ad-a2766139698c/sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"37:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"34.2 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"128kbps\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3\",\"title\":\"sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-12-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"49.94217525,-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Tallman, Warren. “[Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’].” N.d. Home recording. Reel-to-reel tape. SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan, SoundBox Collection, Warren Tallman fonds, 2012.002.005.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549483421696,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["From archival work to domestic and care work or the hidden labour behind the podcast you’re listening to right now… invisible labour is everywhere. That is, the work and the people not always seen from the outside or valued in our day to day lives. This month we reflect on the often invisible (or inaudible) labour entangled in the SpokenWeb archives. The SpokenWeb team at University of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox Collection – in its digitization, editing and creative-critical action that bring these archives to life.\n\nOur producers this month are the members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Karis Shearer with additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to SpokenWeb. A special thank you to AMP members Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode.\n\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Okay. Picture an archive. What do you see? Maybe it looks like the library in Beauty and the Beast, all soaring shelves and rolling ladders or maybe you’re imagining Gandalf the Grey blowing dust off crumpled parchment tomes in a stone room lit only by a single candle or, okay, maybe you’ve actually been in an archive, so you’re picturing stacks of numbered boxes and metal rolling carts and maybe that pair of white gloves you have to wear before turning the pages. But whatever you’re imagining right now, ask yourself, how did those boxes get there? Who labeled and cataloged and stored them? Who collected and organized those books and oil, those ladder wheels? Who’s been preserving those dusty old tomes until a wizard gets to them. Archival work, domestic and care work, even the labor of editing and scripting and production behind the podcast you’re listening to right now; invisible labor is everywhere and we absolutely can’t talk about archives without talking about what kind of labor goes into curating and preserving our cultural history. This month our Spoken Web team members reflect on the often invisible or inaudible labor entangled in the Spoken Web archives. The Spoken Web team at university of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox collection, in its digitization, editing and creative critical action that bring these archives to life. Here is Karis Shearer and the UBCO team with episode three: Invisible Labour.\n02:36\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer and I’m a professor at UBC Okanagan where I teach poetry, I teach in the digital humanities, and I’m really interested in literary audio and what, from a feminist perspective, we’re able to discern or hear around women’s labor in the audio archive. I’m the team lead here at UBC Okanagan on the Spoken Web project and I am working with an amazing team of almost 12 people, I think we’re at now, who’ve been working to process the SoundBox collection. And we bring I think, really interesting strengths as a team in both archiving digitization, literary studies, and research creation. As users or as listeners to audio recordings when we access them online in a digital repository, whether it’s PennSound or Spoken Web, I think often we don’t understand or see the labour that is behind that presentation. That is to say the condition assessment of the tape, the digitization of the tape, the editing of the tape, the making of singles if we’re listening to a single. So that’s what this podcast is going to do is to unpack some of that labour behind the scenes. And so what I wanted to do with this podcast was introduce you to the team behind the recording. So you’re going to hear from some of our team members who will talk about what their contributions are and what they’ve been doing kind of in the collection and the work more broadly, but also with respect to a particular recording – it’s a very special one. So what is the Soundbox collection? It’s a collection of about 166 audio tapes that we have here at UBC Okanagan, housed in the AMP Lab. It’s a really interesting collection because unlike some of the other SpokenWeb collections across the network that were formed around a reading series that took place in usually the 1960s, 70s, 80s, at a particular location. Our collection is not formed around a reading series. It is a collection of very conversational tapes, tapes that were made in the classroom. They’re pedagogical recordings, sometimes they’re interviews, they’re often very informal, and they’re messy tapes because there’s a lot going on in them. People are listening to the television, they’re talking over top of each other, they’re at various distances from the reel-to-reel machine or the tape deck. And that makes them challenging to work with, but also very, very interesting. The tape collection, the SoundBox collection that is, came to me through Jodey Castricano, who’s a colleague of mine. I had been sort of talking about how excited I was about the work that was happening with PennSound, and that I knew was just sort of in the process of starting at Concordia, which would become SpokenWeb and how I was hoping to, you know, create a similar archive of audio recordings. And Jodey said to me, she said, “Just a second, I need to go to my basement and get something for you.” And she came up with a cardboard box and in that cardboard box was a collection of tapes that had been given to her by a professor from UBC named Warren Tallman. And Warren Tallman had given those to her in the early 1990s and said, “Someday you’re going to know what to do with these.” And Jodey said to me, “I think, I think this is it.”\n06:14\tAudio Recording:\tFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious. / Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.\n07:20\tKaris Shearer:\tSo the clip that you’ve just heard is an interesting example of something that’s come out of the collection. I talked about the collection being conversational and having many voices on it. In this particular clip we have just Warren Tallman and he’s reading a Walt Whitman’s poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ What we hear first though is Tallman recording the poem solo voice and then it seems that he recorded over top of that initial recording. We still have about 20 seconds of the first one, but he recorded over top of it and created a new type of recording where he’s playing Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in the background. So we have music, we have voice, Tallman’s voice, merge together and it’s this beautiful kind of cadence that he’s timed the poem in a way that works very beautifully with the music. What do we know about this recording? We know that Tallman made this recording roughly around 1966 or ’67, we have that labeled on the box and one of the other recordings on the tape is made in 1966. We also know that Tallman was teaching a Walt Whitman graduate course around that time. In his retirement speech, he says “In 1967 I taught a graduate Walt Whitman course. We put on a Walt Whitman reading, really a group effort if there ever was one, so I gave identical first-class marks to each and all 12 participants.” So we obviously need to do more research. You know, we have lots of questions about this tape, what don’t we know. We don’t know for sure that this was connected to that course, but I think it probably was. I suspect that what we’re hearing is him practicing the type of reading and reading aloud that he was inviting his students to do. We also know from other students in his class that reading aloud was a really important pedagogical approach that he took to reading poetry. So he often made students read over and over again to figure out particular stresses and ways of performing poetry. So it seems to me that this is very likely linked to that, and the idea of adding music is a curious thing. Why Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins? Why that music? I hope that we’ll see scholars coming out of music history and theory approaching this and thinking about the relationship between ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ and what we know about Whitman and that particular recording. I’d also really like to know what recording are we listening to? What version of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins are we hearing here. We know for example that Tallman was recording the poem on his reel-to-reel deck. He can’t be using the same reel to reel deck to play Bach. So does he have a record player in the room with him? He has another device that he’s playing the music on. So you can do some work to narrow down what recording or what version of that music he’s playing in the background, and that’s really interesting to me. The other thing that we hear on this recording, which I find fascinating, is the technology. We hear technology making itself present. Warren Tallman moves a little bit too close, I think, to the mic at a certain point and we hear the feedback, early on in the second part of the second recording. We also know that he hasn’t fully erased the tape when he’s gone to tape over, so we also hear voices and the, and the things that were recorded on the magnetic tape in the past, kind of bleeding through in the present recordings. So we hear other voices that weren’t meant to be necessarily part of that and it has a kind of a ghostly effect. So there’s much to say about recording technology as we’re listening to this tape.\n11:21\tCraig Carpenter:\tMy name is Craig Carpenter. I’m a poet, a freelance journalist, and a sound engineer. I stumbled onto the Spoken Web project when I interviewed a former student of Karis’s for a short profile I was writing for UBC Okanagan. The story focuses on how Lee Hannigan’s graduate work with Spoken Web began with a work study project digitizing the UBCO SoundBox collection. I was immediately intrigued by the project and emailed Karis asking if there was any way I could be of assistance. Aside from my audio background I mentioned in the early nineties I was a student of Robert Hogg’s who had been a member of the TISH poetry collective in the 60s at UBC. Turns out Bob had recently donated quite a number of cassettes to the collection and he and Karis were quite close. So we met and I started helping out refining the digitization process, suggesting equipment and helping with training and the creation of a digitization module. Because I’m old enough to actually remember editing on magnetic tape, I knew stuff like how to thread the reel-to-reel and I was really keen to listen to these old tapes. So I immediately got to work. We had discovered a lot of the Tallman reels were recorded at an odd speed and after some research figured out that the machine these tapes were recorded on used an unusually slow speed that was meant for speech. And our machine, and actually hardly any machines have this speed when we play them back they sounded like chipmunks. With this particular reel of Tallman reading Whitman, it was one of the first I helped digitize and I was explaining to Karis this work around, I was figuring out how we were going to, you know, slow these chipmunks down. And I noticed faintly in pencil on this reel box the word Whitman. And our machine you can switch from playing tracks one and two to tracks three and four, and so I hit that button switching to tracks three and four, and that’s when we heard the speed shift to, you know, regular speed and the unmistakable voice of Warren Tallman come in. And then this warble of classical music swelling up beneath him and Karis was like, “Whoa, what’s that?” And at first I thought maybe the reel wasn’t properly erased. I remember we used to have these big magnets that you’d flip a switch and you’d zap the reels to erase them, and if you didn’t leave them on the magnet long enough they’d leave these sort of ghost recordings. But that wasn’t the case, and with this one, and Karis’s sort of eyes widening. She says, “No, he’s recording himself, reading to the music and he’s reading in perfect time.” And so I turned it up and we both sat there a little bit awestruck at what we were hearing. It was just so beautiful. And there was this added element to how we discovered it so unexpectedly. But what was really interesting is it’s him reading Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ a poem where Whitman imagines a future where people would be experiencing what he’s seeing. “The men and women I saw were all near me, others the same others who look back on me because I looked forward to them…” And we were both looking at each other jaws dropping eyes, getting wider because really felt like Tallman had recorded it knowing that more than half a century later we would discover this recording. I mean, he was likely making it for his students, but in some way it really felt like he was reciting it to us and that we were looking back on him now because he had looked forward to us just as Whitman says in the poem. So there’s this really special sort of chance-becoming-kinetic kind of feeling with this recording. In terms of the work done on the file to improve the sound, I tried not to do too much because I never want to overprocess anything. But so people can more easily listen without straining I did a few things in post-production on this recording a few more things than I usually would. At times it was difficult to hear what Tallman recites over the music. He’s probably playing the music on a record player and using his tape machine to record with a dynamic microphone and you could hear him getting closer and further away from the mic at times. I did some EQing and I used some very light noise reduction, and then compression. And often with restoring audio, if you do too much, you lose too much coloration, you know, you pull out too many of the frequencies and you lose sort of the presence and the ambient kind of feeling that adds a unique quality to the recordings. Of course with these tapes, we always want to keep a master that will be like a mirror for archival sake. But for the sake of listening back and for presenting the audio to audiences I used, on this one, I used a convolution reverb to bring back some of that presence, which was lost with the noise reduction, and that’s not a usual thing I do, but it’s just something in this case I thought I’d try. It was a new plugin that uses this technique where they shouldn’t impulse through the space that they want to recreate. And in this case, I believe it was a church in Chicago. The jury’s out whether or not it necessarily sounds that much better, but it’s definitely easier on the ears than the original one, which is what we’re going for and hopefully not losing too much of that analog character.\n17:18\tAudio Recording:\tFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high. I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, How curious you are to me. / On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations than you might suppose. / The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, / The simple compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, / every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, / The similitudes of the past and those of the future, / The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, / on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, / The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, / The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight hearing of others.\n18:50\tMegan Butchart:\tMy name is Megan Butchart and I am a BA student at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. I joined the SpokenWeb project as an undergraduate research assistant in May, 2018 and one of my main roles on the project has been to catalog the SoundBox collection, which is a collection of tapes held at the UBCO branch of Spoken Web. The SpokenWeb collection is sort of unique among the SpokenWeb network in the sense that it’s not really connected to a university library or special collections archive, but rather was a collection of audio recordings which were gifted to Dr. Karis Shearer by various poets and colleagues. And so as a result, it was never organized or cataloged in the same way that most of the other collections in SpokenWeb were, and so one of the first things I did when I came onto the project was to organize the recordings into fonds, which are collections of artifacts that come from the same source, and so in our case donors. And you know, assess the conditions of the tapes and from there I work to create item level descriptions for each recording. So in the early stages most of the collection was not digitized, and so I sort of began by doing a survey of the collection and cataloging whatever information could be learned from the physical artifact itself. So the box, the label on the cassette or reel or any accompanying material. And I really just created a really simple spreadsheet with categories that I felt would be sort of useful in describing these artifacts, so that included sort of administrative metadata, which sort of recorded the relationships between the tapes and the donors and creators. And then I also created sort of descriptive sorts of metadata, so things like the title, date speakers sort of anyone just connected with the making of the tape, venue, checklists, contents, recording medium tape brand, et cetera. And this is something which grew and evolved as I learned more about sort of different playing speeds and different categories of metadata for audio recordings. Anyway, this was the first stage in cataloging the collection, but as I quickly discovered, while this is fine to get a sort of overview of the collection listening is absolutely imperative to generating accurate metadata for these types of objects, which are quite opaque, sort of in and of themselves. As, you know, we found out things have sometimes been mislabeled or perhaps have been recorded over and then original labels haven’t been changed. And so you can’t just take what the object says sort of at face value. So for example, with this particular recording of Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, it was recorded at the end of a tape that has a recording of a bill bissett poetry reading. And in very faint pencil on the back of the box that holds this tape, it says something which is kind of cryptic, it just says ‘music dash voice Whitman experiment’ which in and of itself could kind of mean anything. So now that we are in the process of digitizing the collection at UBC Okanagan I’m going back and sort of filling in those gaps now that we can actually hear what are on these tapes. And this time, you know, I’m using the much more robust metadata schema that SpokenWeb has developed for cataloging tapes, and entering that information into the metadata ingest system or database that SpokenWeb has developed called SWALLOW at the beginning of using the SpokenWeb metadata schema a few of the challenges that arose really had to do with using a sort of standardized set of metadata categories when our collection, you know, had significant differences from many of the other collections in the Spoken Web network. And so something I kind of discovered early on is that the tapes in the SoundBox collection are, in many ways they’re quite amateurish and they’re kind of casually produced. So for example, they’re not, you know, sort of official finite recordings of an official finite reading series, in which each tape holds sort of a single recording of one event, but instead the collection contains many home recordings and sort of things like audio collage. And so very often these recordings are sort of casual conversations among poets or informal living room readings, recordings of lectures, or simply, you know, a collage of audio clips, either from poets reading, or from, you know, the radio. And so one of the challenges of creating descriptive metadata for this particular collection was navigating sort of challenges that were inherent to these types of unpredictable and sort of multiple recordings. And so the bill bissett Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman tape is a great example of this sort of challenge, you know, we have two very different types of recordings in terms of content, and so the context in which each were made, but they were held on the same tape. And so the bill bissett recording is a public poetry reading, the Warren Tallman is a home recording, you know, and he’s got classical music playing in the background while reading the poem. And so really all of this has been a huge learning process for me, but I’ve also found the work really exciting.\n24:29\tEvan Berg:\tSo my name is Evan Berg. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UBC Okanagan majoring in visual art and minoring in art history and visual culture. I also hold a documentary film certificate from Capilano University. I became involved in the SpokenWeb project because Karis Shearer, who’s the director, the AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, and the leader on the SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan was aware of my work within the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, as she thought that some of my skills would lend themselves to some of the challenges that they were facing within the lab. Some of those skills involved photography video, both filming and editing and graphic design work. So I was brought on as kind of a ‘do-everything’ person, I didn’t have a necessarily specific role, but one of the ideas was that I would be doing creative engagement within the lab and be able to take on a variety of different tasks that were given to me. Some of those were documenting the archives. So taking documentary photos of our archival objects so that we could catalogue them online. Other things were working with Caitlin Voth and being mentored by Myron Campbell in the design process of both the logo for the Spoken Web project as well as internal logos for the AMP Lab and producing video content. Karis had put a lot of emphasis on creative engagement with the archive in terms of trying to mobilize these archival objects, past just being that, exactly that, archival objects or just sound pieces that would exist online for kind of research purposes. But she wanted some more creative engagement, and so one of the things that I was commissioned to do was focused on a recording by Warren Tallman in which he is reading a Walt Whitman poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And when I first heard the poem it just struck me as being very cinematic, and so I thought that it lent itself very well to some of the stuff that I was doing with video. With this work, I was really thinking about time, and also in the poem itself, Whitman’s poem, it’s discussing kind of these almost mundane moments in life, but then relating them to this kind of much larger universal theme of just human experience. And he’s also talking about people hundreds of years from the point in which he is crossing the Brooklyn ferry, and thinking about the people a hundred years from now who will be doing the same thing. Just thinking of this thread of time of Whitman in the 1800’s, Tallman in the 1960s and then myself in 2019 and kind of adding to this layering where Whitman started the poem, Tallman reads it again, but he’s kind of putting himself into this space – like you can hear the space of the room. He’s adding other kind of artistic elements to this recording by playing Bach in the background, which added a really cinematic feel to the recording. And so I wanted to kind of add myself to this archive And so what I did was I drew on my own experience of never having crossed the Brooklyn ferry, but having lived in North Vancouver and taking the SeaBus from North Vancouver into Vancouver, and that kind of experience that resonated with me when listening to this recording. So this, this poem that is very much about a shared human experience and that was my relation to that human experience of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And so what I did was in a very short amount of time, just a few days in Vancouver, I went out each evening at kind of sunset and I crossed the SeaBus from Vancouver to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver and back to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver multiple times as the sun was setting. And I recorded, I filmed various people taking this trip.\n29:25\tAudio Recording:\tThe similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smaller sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\n30:00\tEvan Berg:\tUnless you have a reel-to-reel player and have the tapes themselves, the physical tapes, then you can’t listen to these recordings, and so the entire point was to make them publicly accessible but also searchable so that it was user friendly. People could find these things, download, listen to them, but there’s a great amount of labour that goes into that. Also I think this kind of work can be really beneficial to the SpokenWeb project because first of all, there’s so many hours of recordings on these tapes and so sometimes just making a decision to curate one specific recording and then kind of further its accessibility, because in this case, making a video, adding visuals to this audio piece, I could make it more accessible for some younger people who are constantly consuming visual content online. And I think just making the huge collection less intimidating, it offers an entry point for, a more accessible entry point for people first approaching the SpokenWeb project online and seeing these hundreds of hours of the recordings.\n31:30\tLauren St.Clair:\tMy name is Lauren St. Clair, I’m a third and a half yearin computer science at UBCO. I have an interest in sound field recording and the analog format. What brought me to the AMP Lab was actually one of the Tech Talks, part of the Tech Talk series, which was the tape surgery where you got to actually take apart a tape and then turn it into some sort of art piece based off of collage and then you could break apart the tape. I turned mine into a tape loop. So the main reason I went was just an excuse to break apart a tape and try turning it into a tape for the first time. After that I started attending more AMP Lab events, more Tech Talk series and meetings, and then got involved with the larger SpokenWeb project. Later on, after a couple of months of attending events, I was offered the ability to design the SoundBox collection website, which is the collection part of the Audio Media Poetry Lab here at UBCO. And through that we went through a couple iterations of the actual design itself. What’s supposed to be included on the website is information about the authors, the actual recordings, how to get involved with the AMP Lab and its involvement within the SpokenWeb project. And another focus of the website is to make it accessible and a low barrier entry point for those already interested in the collection or those that are just being introduced to the collection for the first time and don’t know about the SpokenWeb project at all. The iterations were mostly things like we need to include this element, how are we going to focus on making sure people are visible in the website and how are we making sure that they’re visible then in terms of the larger SpokenWeb project, so how do we make community something visible apart of this website when we’re introducing people to the project. So another large focus of this is not only making it accessible, but how do we convey the fact that community and undergraduates and students are a part of this project? So right now we’re on the beta of the website and that we have a list of the SoundBox writers and we also have some featured writers, a part of the SoundBox collection, which will have a photo of them, some information about them, and also an audio file taken from one of the collections that we have apart of the SoundBox collection. And then later on we’re going to expand that where we can go through the recordings of all of the writers that we have, such as Warren Tallman, where people will be able to access the Warren Tallman tape. Right now the Warren Tallman tape is not available on the website, but it will be shortly once we expand our website for more writers and audio files to be available. So you need the digitized files and you need the website, and you can kind of think of it and like a project management framework for one of them has a dependency on the other. So you need at least specific things digitized for your beta website in order to have it up and have those things accessible. But also you need to continue on digitization so that would be an interesting balance. Just stay posted for more information about the website, and for what is to come, there will be more provided online as more things are digitized and more rights are cleared.\n35:15\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much everyone for listening to episode three of the Spoken Web Podcast. It’s been such an exciting process for me starting to bring this podcast to life, working with an amazing team across the country, getting the chance to find out what my colleagues are up to at institutions that I haven’t had the opportunity to visit, and also starting to ask the question of how we might use podcast to tell stories about different kinds of research. If you’re listening right now and there are certain kinds of stories or ideas you would really love to hear more about, please get in touch with us and let us know. You can always reach out to us spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com and if you’re part of the Spoken Web project and you’re listening to this right now, maybe consider sending us an episode pitch. Spoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are the members of the Spoken Web, UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Craig Carpenter and additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to Spoken Web a special thank you to AMP members, Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9281","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E4, Drum Codes [Part 1]: The Language of Talking Drums, 11 January 2021, Miya and Luyk"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-pt-1-the-language-of-talking-drums/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Chelsea Miya","Sean Luyk"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya","Sean Luyk"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/3146217844209142580\",\"name\":\"Sean Luyk\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0d03515b-c5f3-4c36-a680-33aa829dd3b1/audio/6facdb5e-1ccf-45ec-a136-c878d15c7429/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e4-drum-codes-pt-1-full.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:43\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"38,192,736 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e4-drum-codes-pt-1-full\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-pt-1-the-language-of-talking-drums/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-01-11\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References:\\n\\nBabalọla, Adeboye. “Yoruba Literature.” Literatures in African Languages, edited by B. W. Andrzejewski, S. Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 157–189.\\n\\nFinnegan, Ruth. “17. Drum Language and Literature”. Oral Literature in Africa. By Finnegan. Open Book Publishers, 2012, 467-484. Web. <http://books.openedition.org/obp/1206>.\\n\\nNgom, Fallou, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, and Mustapha Hashim Kurfi. “The social and commercial life of African Ajami” Africa at LSE Blog, 1 Oct. 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/10/01/social-commercial-african-ajami-culture/.\\n\\nOwomoyela, Oyekan. The Columbia guide to West African literature in English since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. This is How We Disappear. Write Bloody North, 2019.\\n\\nStrong, Krystal. “The Rise and Suppression of #EndSARS.” Harpers Bazaar, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a34485605/what-is-endsars/.\\n\\nTúbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. Edwardsville by Heart. Wisdom’s Bottom Press, 2019.\\n\\nVillepastour, Amanda. Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum: Cracking the Code. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.\\n\\nRecordings:\\n\\nAdédòkun, Olálékan. [various tracks].\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. “My Mother’s Music.” Mother Tongue, Titilope Sonuga, 2013.\\n\\nSonuga, Titilope. “This is How We Disappear – Titilope Sonuga.” YouTube, uploaded by Titilope Sonuga, 21 August 2017, https://youtu.be/JbLwsLYrjzw.\\n\\nTúbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. “Ọláolúwa Òní reads “Being Yorùbá.” SoundCloud, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/kola-tubosun/olaoluwa-oni-reads-being-yoruba.\\n\\nSound Effects:\\n\\nBBC News. “End Sars protests: People ‘shot dead’ in Lagos, Nigeria – BBC News.” YouTube, 21 October 2020, https://youtu.be/Il5qL7YbawY.\\n\\nBloomberg Quicktake: Now. “Shots Fired in Lagos Amid #EndSARS Protests in Nigeria.” YouTube, 21 October, 2020, https://youtu.be/hu9FzU2TDvQ.\\n\\nThe Dinizulu Archives. “Asante Ivory Trumpets – Ancient Akan Music – Pt 1.” YouTube, 23 March 2009, https://youtu.be/P3XxEefvpr8.\\n\\nfelix.blume. “Dugout On The Niger River In Mali SOUND Effect.” Freesound, 20 January 2013, https://freesound.org/s/174933/.\\n\\nFilmOneNG. “Living in Bondage Trailer 1.” YouTube, 18 October, 2019, https://youtu.be/bQ9pUsXFqoA. \\n\\nLily Pope TV. “MAIN MARKET ONITSHA|| COME WITH ME.” YouTube, 9 July 2019, https://youtu.be/DJ3NyfV7tgs.\\n\\n“Nigerian Crowds – Lagos, native quarter with traffic & crowd atmosphere.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07015037.\\n\\n“Outdoor Clock – Church clock striking, 6 o’clock. (All Saints Church).” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07002268.\\n\\nPasadena Conservatory of Music. “African Roots, African American Fruits: A Musical Journey (Concert Highlights).” Vimeo, 8 March, 2016, https://vimeo.com/158205356.\\n\\nPatrickibeh. “Nigerian Young girls playing ‘Hand-clap’ game.” Wikimedia Commons, 25 February 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nigerian_Young_girls_playing_%27Hand-clap%27_game.webm.\\n\\nProtests.media. “Buhari Must Go Protest in Lagos, 17th of October 2020.” Vimeo, 27 October, 2020, https://vimeo.com/469395263.\\n\\nRueda, Manuel. “Oaxaca whistle language.” Vimeo, 2004, https://vimeo.com/77702616.\\n\\nMuir, Stephen. “City Street Winter Day – Toronto – Bay St And Cumberland St.” Dreaming Monkey Inc.“Wamba Indigenous Music – Repetitive tune using a two tone communication whistle(vocal).” Recorded by John Watkin. BBC Sound Effects, 31 March 1996, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=NHU05003080.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549485518848,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["For hundreds of years, the Yorùbá people of West African have used “talking drums” to send messages across great distances. West African languages are highly musical, full of rising and falling tones. The pitch of talking drums can be adjusted to mimic these tones, so drummers can “speak” to one another. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns, and in the process, poeticizes it. \n\nThis two-part podcast series explores talking drums as an art, a technology, and an important tool for speaking truth to power. In part one, poets, musicians, linguists and educators share their experiences of this fascinating musical instrument and its role in the fight to preserve local West African languages. In part two, airing next season, we sit down with a master drummer and learn more about how drums function as information compression tools.\n\n00:18\tTheme music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Here on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we have a fascination with language that goes beyond the novel or the codex and into the many texts and technologies that connect us through sound. This podcast itself is a way of connecting, of telling stories and building a community of literature lovers and sound fanatics across the country and around the globe. But there are many other sonic communication technologies beyond podcasts, radio, or even the humble telephone. And some are much older. For hundreds of years the Yorùbá people of West Africa have used “talking drums” to send messages and tell stories. The pitch of talking drums mimics the rising and falling tones of West African languages, allowing drummers to “speak”. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns and in the process turns them into poetic and political expression. In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast produced by University of Alberta researchers, Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk, we will hear from poets, musicians, linguists, and educators, as they reflect on the power and influence of this musical instrument, communication technology, and important symbol for West African cultures. The story of the talking drum connects to the story of written and spoken West African languages and the struggle to preserve them. This episode is part one in a two-part series about the talking drum. Here are Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk with Drum Codes [Part One]: The Language of Talking Drums. [Feature Audio Opens with Talking Drum Music]\n \n\n02:29\tChelsea Miya:\tLong before text messages, West African communities used drums to send messages from village to village. I am Chelsea Miya.\n \n\n02:38\tSean Luyk:\tAnd I’m Sean Luyk.\n \n\n02:41\tChelsea Miya:\tIn this episode, we consider the talking drum in the context of the struggle to preserve West African languages, and as a way to speak truth to power and protest oppression.\n \n\n02:55\tWisdom Agorde:\t[Drumming] Drumming for us goes beyond entertainment.\n \n\n02:59\tSean Luyk:\tWisdom Agorde is co-director of the University of Alberta’s West African music ensemble. [Drumming ends]\n \n\n03:04\tWisdom Agorde:\tDrumming brings us together for festivals, storytelling, funerals, maybe dedications and weddings and all of that. But beyond that, the drama, the divine drama connects to the ancestral world, which is the spirit world. And they help our priests and priestesses to get into trance and get information from the spiritual world, which is then communicated back to the living. So the drum could be seen as the bridge between the living and the dead.\n \n\n03:43\tSean Luyk:\tIn West Africa, there is a strong overlap between music and language. African languages, like Yorùbá, are highly musical. The Yorùbá language has three tones:low, mid, and high. Solfege symbols, names for musical notes, are used to teach these tones. Do. Re. Mi. The straps on a talking drum can be adjusted to mimic these tones and communicate messages. [Begin Music: Drumming] Listen to master drummer, Peter, one of our featured guests in episode two in the series, demonstrate the tones on his drum. [End Music: Drumming].\n \n\n04:18\tPeter Olálékan Adédòkun:\tSo this drum has ability to mimic my voice. It can speak. It can say your name. If I want to say your name as Chelsea, Chelsea Miya, I can do that. [Drumming] Yes. So look. [Drumming].\n \n\n04:36\tSean Luyk:\tSpeech surrogates are instruments that mimic the human voice so that players can speak to one another. The talking drum is just one example. Some communities also have traditions of using flutes [Sound Effect: Flute], trumpets [Sound Effect: Trumpet] and whistles [Sound Effect: Whistles] to communicate.\n \n\n04:52\tWisdom Agorde:\tYou know, in those days we didn’t have factories and industries. We didn’t have many cars. So the air was not polluted that much. So the talking drum is going to, is able to travel several kilometers. So, if there is a problem at home, let’s say there is fire at home. If the king wants people to run back home, because there was a problem, he uses the talking drum to call all the people to come back. The talking drum also announces if there is a death in the community. Once you hear the tone of it and the language in it, you know exactly that an elderly person had passed away. And if you know the appellation of that person, you will understand immediately who died.\n \n\n05:48\tWisdom Agorde:\tWhen I was in Ghana, I was quite young when my grandfather died and they were playing the royal drums in front of the family house. Normally when a royal dies, the royal drums will come out and we’ll play to send off that person to the land of the ancestors. So, the funeral started on Friday. So that Friday afternoon, we were preparing to bring the body from the morgue. And I was passing by and they were playing the royal drums [Begin Music: Drumming] and I had no clue. It just a nice sounding drum to me. And I know the drums are being played to honour my grandfather. So one of the elders called me [End Music: Drumming] and asked me my name. [Begin Music: Singing] And like, “is that not your grandfather whose funeral we’re having?” I said, “yes.” And he said, “and you were passing and they called you and you didn’t respond!?” [End Music: Singing].\n \n\n06:55\tWisdom Agorde:\tAt that time I was in the university. I had no clue. City boy doesn’t understand nothing. Apparently they were calling the family name on the drum. Man, I’m supposed to acknowledge that, but because I didn’t understand it, I didn’t respond as I should. So I was just walking by. I had no clue.\n \n\n07:20\tSean Luyk:\tHow are you supposed to respond?\n \n\n07:22\tWisdom Agorde:\tMost often you raise your hand. There are times also when, if you can dance, you will respond to the call through dance.\n \n\n07:32\tSean Luyk:\tOne time, Wisdom happened to see across a funeral procession for an important local chief. [Audio Recording: Crowd Chatter and Noise] He remembers watching the royal drummers on their way to the palace and realizing that they were telling the story of the chief’s life.\n \n\n07:44\tWisdom Agorde:\tI was in front of the palace, that there was a huge funeral. The funeral lasted for more than a week. And every day of the week specific people from different parts of the country came to pay homage to the dead chief. And this particular day I was there, the chiefs arrived from another region and they were in a procession walking to the palace to go pay homage to the body of the dead chief that was lying in state. And whilst they were passing, I realized that when they reach the front of the royal drums, the language of the drum changes. And immediately the language changes the visiting chief or king responds through different kinds of dances. And it was so beautiful. I don’t know what the drums were telling them, but definitely be understood what the drum was saying, and the drummer knows exactly who was arriving and we’ll call that person in name. The royal drummer is also a historian. So the royal drummer wasn’t just calling them. He was also telling history. What that person has done, what their ancestors have done, and how they have survived through the years. I am very sure that the divine drama might have learnt all the drum language from all the visiting chiefs and kings in order to appropriately acknowledge them. Unfortunately we the younger generation don’t know many of those songs right now. And there is that fear that some of these things are lost because during that funeral I saw certain performances I’ve never seen before.\n \n\n10:01\tSean Luyk:\t[Music Begins: Instrumental Drumming] Different communities have their own unique talking drum traditions, their own speaking styles interwoven with sayings and proverbs that have been passed down through the generations. The richness of the talking drum is reflected in the incredible language diversity of West Africa as a whole.\n \n\n10:17\tTunde Adegbola:\tMy name is Tunde Adegbola. I’m a research scientist. [Music Ends: Instrumental Drumming] I work in human language technology with emphasis on speech technologies. Also looking at the implications of speech surrogacy, which is the use of devices other than the human speech apertures, such as drums, whistles, and such to communicate.\n \n\n10:46\tSean Luyk:\tCan you tell us a bit about the history of West Africa and what made it possible for so many different languages to coexist and thrive in the same region?\n \n\n10:54\tTunde Adegbola:\tClose to one third of the 7,000-odd languages in the world are spoken in Africa. And West Africa seems to be an area where a lot of these languages are spoken. Some investigators have recognized up to about 512 various languages spoken in Nigeria. My hunch is that the Niger River [Sound Effect: Water Flowing], which deposits into the Atlantic Ocean in the Niger Delta, is a natural attraction of various peoples in West Africa or in Africa to congregate around and expand out of the Niger Delta, thereby bringing probably various languages that now have to co-exist and walk together. [Sound Effect: Crowd Bustling].\n \n\n11:50\tSean Luyk:\tNigeria is one of the most multilingual countries in the world, but over half of its languages are in danger of disappearing. Tunde is the founder of Alt-i, the African Languages Technology Initiative. His organization is searching for technological solutions to the language crisis. As he explains, colonialism fundamentally transformed West African languages chiefly through the introduction of written forms of communication.\n \n\n12:22\tTunde Adegbola:\tMost, if not all, West African languages had strong European influence in their writing systems. In languages like Hausa, for example, which is probably the second-widest spoken language in Africa, had long histories of exposure to Arabic literature. So there is a tradition of writing Hausa in Arabic script, popularity referred to as the Adjami script. [Sound Effect: Writing].\n \n\n12:59\tSean Luyk:\tAjami is an Arabic script for writing African languages and is about 500 years old. So, although there is an assumption that African cultures are purely oral cultures, written Yorùbá has actually existed for quite some time. It is true, however, that Yorùbá literature only really started to take off in the mid 19th century with the arrival of missionaries. [Sound Effect: Church Bells].\n \n\n13:26\tTunde Adegbola:\tThe coming of Europeans, particularly European missionaries, who saw a great level of importance in developing a literate people, because they were bringing a religion of the book to a people that were either oral societies or as Walter Ong would put it, a society with a high “oral residue”. So there was this need to develop literacy.\n \n\n14:05\tSean Luyk:\tAnd so, Yorùbá writing was reinvented once more, this time using the Latin alphabet. But the characters weren’t the only difference. The Yorùbá vocabulary itself was transformed to accommodate new ideas.\n \n\n14:18\tTunde Adegbola:\tI know that effect on the language and other various West African languages, is the fact that Christianity came in with new ideas. Ideas that were not embedded in the culture. So there was a need to develop words for them. And that also had great effect on the languages. The Yorùbá language that I speak, for example, does not take much account of gender. In the language you wouldn’t have such gender pronouns like he and her, uncles and aunties, nieces and nephews. Apart from fathers and mothers, everybody else is pretty the same. But with the advent of Christianity words for a brother in the fellowship, words for sister in the fellowship, some ideas came and was like [Yorùbá phrase] and [Yorùbá phrase] came into the language.\n \n\n15:35\tSean Luyk:\tSo, on the one hand, the writing system, the Latin alphabet reinforced Christian colonial ideas. But, on the other hand with the advent of writing also came a new generation of Nigerian authors.\n \n\n15:56\tAudio Recording:\tStreet Scene, People Speaking]\n \n\n15:56\tSean Luyk:\tThese are sounds from Onitsha, port city on the Niger River. Today, Onitsha is most famous for being the home of Nigerian cinema, nicknamed Nollywood.\n \n\n16:07\tAudio Recording, Film Clip:\tIf we go down, we go down.\n \n\n16:11\tSean Luyk:\tBut it’s also the birthplace of Nigerian print culture.\n \n\n16:15\tTunde Adegbola:\tImmediately after the European missionaries developed literacy, there was great enthusiasm in writing and lots of Yorùbá people try to write. And many printing presses were established in Ìbàdàn, the capital of Yorùbáland. And you saw a lot of printing presses rising up in small shacks. It was like a Gutenberg revolution in Yorùbáland at that time. And these also permeated the whole country seeping into other areas producing what was known as the Onitsha market literature.\n \n\n17:02\tSean Luyk:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental] In the 1940s to 1960s, Onitsha was the home of the largest outdoor market in West Africa. Market stalls were packed with books and pamphlets all printed on hand presses. This was a period of intense creativity and of pride in one’s local culture. For the first time Nigerian authors were writing novels in Yorùbá and winning huge acclaim.\n \n\n17:24\tTunde Adegbola:\tBut somewhere along the line, [End Music: Instrumental] this excitement in writing in Yorùbá seems to be petering out, and less and less of Yorùbá literature is published these days. People tend to think, they see English as the language of administration, the language of officialdom, the language of education, the language of opportunity. And for that reason, people put lots and lots of efforts into getting their children to speak English, to the detriment of the Yorùbá language.\n \n\n18:07\tSean Luyk:\t[Begin Music: Singing] Speaking Yorùbá, instead of English came with consequences.\n \n\n18:11\tTunde Adegbola:\tI was punished throughout my young age for speaking Yorùbá in school. [End Music: Singing] My good fortune is that my parents were educators and they knew better. My mother taught in a teacher training college and students from the teacher training college would come for teaching practice in our school. My mother would come to supervise them and would speak Yorùbá to me when she met me along the path and the school. And everybody’s expressed surprise that Tunde’s mother who is the teacher of teachers is disobeying the law of not speaking Yorùbá. There was a time in Nigeria when institutions felt English is the way of development, English is the way of modernity, English is the way of opportunities. There was a time that there was a slogan in the educational system and the slogan was “fail in English, fail in all.” So if you took five papers, mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, and did very well in all this, if you failed in English, then you had to repeat the whole class because you failed in English. And this type of retrogressive thinking continues to pervade the educational system.\n \n\n19:48\tChelsea Miya:\t[Begin Music: Drumming and Singing] Yorùbá and other West African languages are continually evolving. The diaspora has been particularly influential. [End Music: Drumming and Singing].\n \n\n19:57\tTitilope Sonuga:\tThere’s always been this balancing that I’ve done between the English language and Yorùbá and recognizing that Yorùbá was acceptable in some spaces. Whereas it wasn’t in others.\n \n\n20:08\tChelsea Miya:\tTitilope Sonuga is a spoken word poet and performer based in Edmonton, Alberta. As she explains, her approach to writing and performing poetry is informed by her Nigerian heritage and her interest in the politics of language.\n \n\n20:25\tTitilope Sonuga:\tI grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, in a household where we spoke predominantly English. Yorùbá, I would say, is a gift that my grandmother gave me. So my grandma was very particular about us speaking Yorùbá. And even though she spoke English, she always pretended like she couldn’t really understand what you were saying if you tried to speak English with her. So there was a way in which like Yorùbá was like the default language and my grandmother’s house. As a child, I regret to say, we were raised to kind of view our mother tongue, our native languages, as inferior to this other, this English language. Right. So there was a sense in which English was the official language that you spoke at school when you were trying to be proper and in certain spaces, the better your English was the more respected. So Yorùbá became relegated to the space of what you spoke at home behind closed doors or with family, but it was kind of an informal language.\n \n\n21:28\tTitilope Sonuga:\tIt took years for me to understand that as a kind of shaming [Audio Recording: Street Scene?] Then we moved to Canada, Yorùbá then became this bridge. It was the way in which we could communicate in public spaces without being understood by other people. It kind of became a refuge as well. So, I would say that my relationship to the language, this shuffling between English and mother tongue has been sort of the balance of my life. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognize what a gift it was that my grandmother gave me. And what a connection it is to my roots and to who I am. I don’t write or create arts in Yorùbá, but I definitely feel like there’s a sensibility of how the language works that follows me. You know, these proverbs and dual meanings and things like that, that I carry. Even in my writing in English, I think Yorùbá is as much a part of me as anything else. And so it kind of, it comes out in my work. Always.\n \n\n22:33\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “My Mother’s Music”:\tMy mother sang when I was born, she welcomed me head first into melody. She chanted like a talking drum. She caught Godspell in gospel. And then she named me Titilope. An eternal love song to her creator.\n \n\n22:51\tTitilope Sonuga:\tI remember even as a kid, just being fascinated by the instrument and the way that it sounds. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched or listened to it being played. It sounds like a voice. Like that’s why it’s called the talking drum. Is that like, if you’re still and listen, there is a language that is happening there that is very similar to what it sounds like to tell a story, to speak out loud. I think to do it well, to do it beautifully is to connect to this ancient oral tradition that Nigeria is so rich with, that all of Africa really is so rich with. [Music Start: Instrumental] The proverbs, the prose, the sayings, the hidden messages, this drum kind of encompasses all of that. Music has been such a big and important part of my creating life. I don’t know a poem that I’ve written that wasn’t written to something playing in the background somewhere, or a song that I had heard that inspires something.\n \n\n23:58\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “This is How We Disappear”:\tThis is how we disappear. We fall backwards into our mother’s mouths. Become them. Become the only stories we have ever been told. Stories about women who stay. Women who endure. Women who offer their bodies into the belly of the beast to protect their children. This is how we go missing. We tumble into… [Music End: Instrumental]\n \n\n24:26\tChelsea Miya:\tCan I ask about “This is How We Disappear”? So like a lot of your earlier work, I think it also has a really powerful, sonic or oral quality, but of a really different kind. How does sound or absence of sound factor in this work?\n \n\n24:43\tTitilope Sonuga:\tWell, that’s an interesting thing. I remember in an earlier edit of the collection, I had a line in there comparing the disappearance of the Chibok girls to like a tree falling in a forest. You know, if a girl disappears and nobody’s there to hear her, did she actually make a sound? The book is about disappearances. It’s about silences really, and silencing. But it is also about celebration and remaking ourselves, the ways that women do that, the world over. I would say when I started working on the manuscript itself, I was very heavily pregnant and had just had a baby. And a lot of those poems were written in the twilight hours. I remember listening to a lot of gospel and spiritual music. Somebody said recently to me about how the book feels like it has a lot of ghosts in it. And it definitely feels like a bit of a haunting. It’s interesting that you talk about silences and sound because there was a lot of both, there was these quiet moments in the world. There was me revisiting the ghost of these women who had disappeared the world over, but also there was this hum of this spiritual [Music Begins: Instrumental] sort of awakening that was happening for me as a new mother.\n \n\n26:13\tAudio Recording, Titilope Songua, “This is How We Disappear”:\tThese women who reinvented joy. Who snapped back our broken bones to the rhythm of a survival song, a song about the audacity of living and loving anyway. We became a whole new kind of creature. Something fearless and fierce. Something bold enough to call down even lightning and dare it to touch us. [Audience Cheering].\n \n\n26:36\tTitilope Sonuga:\tPerformance for me was never an option. It was just like, this is what I know. This is who I am. [Music Ends: Instrumental].,and not just performance to read the poems out loud, but performance that connects to a musicality that is grounded in the talking drum that is grounded in Yorùbá language, and Yorùbá songs, and Yorùbá names and naming. The first poets I knew were these people on the drums singing [unknown word] at weddings. Telling you of your entire lineage, the names and the names and the names of your father’s father, your mother’s mother. These people were my first experience of memorized poetry. They’re people who know, who at a glance can tell you who you are. And they know this stuff [Music Begins: Drumming] in their hearts and minds. They don’t need a page or a paper to tell them.\n \n\n27:40\tChelsea Miya:\tThe talking drum is in some ways inherently poetic. This is because of its unique grammar, which creates room for ambiguity. [Music Ends: Drumming].\n \n\n27:49\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún: :\tYorùbá is a tone language, which means that meaning can be derived from just a slight inflection of the vowels.\n \n\n27:58\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a linguist, poet, and cultural activist. [Audio Recording: Engine Revving] He recently worked with Google to create the Nigerian English version of Siri.\n \n\n28:07\tAudio Recording, Siri:\tNavigating to Hartfield.\n \n\n28:11\tChelsea Miya:\tBut before that, he was a language teacher. He won a Fulbright scholarship to attend grad school at Southern Illinois University in a small town called Edwardsville. While there, he taught Yorùbá to American students and wrote poetry about his experiences. This is a reading of his poem “Being Yorùbá”.\n \n\n28:33\tAudio Recording, Oláolúwa Òní, “Being Yorùba”:\tHow do you teach a state of being? You don’t. You teach instead tone. Do-Re-Mi. Like music on the tongue.\n \n\n28:43\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá explains how the talking drum strips away everything except for the tones, which means that the messages sent by the drummers can be interpreted many different ways.\n \n\n28:54\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tYorùbá is a tone language, which means that meaning can be derived from just a slight inflection of the vowel. And tone is realized basically on the pitch level, on the vowel. So when it would like “igba’, is different from “igba” is different from “igba” is different from “igba”. These are different words. You have got “an egg”, you have “200”, you have “time”, you have “Calabash”. All of those things spelled the same way: I-G-B-A. Except for the tone that you put on it when you speak. So it makes Yorùbá very interesting, especially for those who are trying to learn it for the first time. In English, when you say “go”, it’s still go when you say “go” or “go” or “go” the only difference is when it comes at the end of a question. But in Yorùbá, it’s not just the sentence itself that it changes. It changes the character of the word itself. When you’re playing and talking drum it’s about the same.If I say “igba” on the drum, I can make the same sound, “Re. Me.” I mean, Yorùbá tones — Do. Re. Me. is the same three level tones as you have in music. Which makes [Music Begins: Drumming and Singing] the language sound very musical when you speak it. But what is fascinating, really, especially what makes the language more amenable to poetry [Music Ends: Drumming and Singing] and literary expression, is the idea that you’ve got a talking drum, you can’t see the words that is being said. You are playing a drum and all you have is a tone. And the person listening to it has to figure out from just the tone, what kind of words you’re trying to say. If I say “uh-uh” with a drum, I could be saying “igba”, I could be saying “ohwa” I could be saying “ideh”, a number of different things. But when you put that then in a sentence, or in a song, or in tune, then you leave like so many different possibilities that can happen. And in traditional Yorùbá communities, this has either been a cause of conflict, it has caused wars, or a source of entertainment for those who understand it, consternation for those who don’t.\n \n\n31:11\tChelsea Miya:\tThat’s interesting. So the drummer could be praising someone or complimenting them or insulting them, I guess it will depend on the context.\n \n\n31:21\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tIndeed. There is an example, actually, a famous example, in the 60s, I believe, when the radio Nigeria, the Nigerian Broadcasting Service started they were looking for a signature tune to play before the program starts in the morning. And it went like this, “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-deh-dum”. And it meant, “this is the Nigerian Broadcasting Service.” But that was the first time an English expression was played with a drum. So the people who are listening to the show, in the radio every morning, many of them literate in the drum culture, couldn’t figure out what he was saying, because it was not a recognizable tune and pattern. So they decided to make up their own interpretations for it. Some people said, it’s saying [Yorùbá phrase], which means “when the Yorùbá dies, who is next in line.” Or something like [Yorùbá phrase] like “your child is little by little becoming criminal”. And there were several interpretations people just made up. Some of them pleasant, some of the funny, some of them just plain insulting. And it caused a lot of consternation among the people, especially people who were in charge of the radio, who were from a different culture of upper class elites who didn’t care about or know about the drum culture, or the colonialists who were just there to have a radio that people can use to communicate. So that’s how sometimes just a simple piece of expression can have different interpretations just because you’re not sensitive or familiar with how it’s used in society,\n \n\n32:56\tChelsea Miya:\tAs Tunde explains, historically the talking drum has also functioned as a powerful tool of political expression. Because of the ambiguity of the messages, the drummers could use their music to critique leadership and speak truth to power.\n \n\n33:12\tTunde Adegbola:\tThere are lots of narratives around the talking drum. There’s a particular saying, [Yorùbá phrase], “that it is only the drummer that can say for sure what he is using his powerful drum drumstick to see.” There are lots and lots and lots of accounts in history where talking drummers have saved whole communities from unfair leadership, wicked leadership, by naming and shaming negative acts in society to the extent that as such people have had to stop what they were doing, because they could not punish the drummer because they had this facility for plausible deniability. And yet everybody knew that the leadership was being blamed for misbehaving.\n \n\n34:12\tAudio Recording, BBC News:\tNigeria’s president has called for calm and understanding after protests against police brutality turned violent on Tuesday evening, with soldiers reportedly opening fire on demonstrators in the country’s biggest city, Lagos.\n \n\n34:27\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá is well familiar with the role of art and poetry in exposing corruption and facilitating political change. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, close to where the #EndSAR’s protest took place. [Sound Effect: Crowd Protesting and Chanting] For months, young Nigerians [Sound Effect: Gun Shots] have gathered by the thousands in these city streets to protest against the notoriously corrupt and brutal police force known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad or SARS.\n \n\n34:58\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tSince September and since, especially this #EndSARS movement, the disappointments and outrage I feel about how the government reacted to the crisis has spurred me in a new direction, and I’ve been writing a couple of forms about that. I feel my despair, my hope, my aspiration. There was one that I wrote in the midst of anger at looking at the flag of the Nigerian nation drenched in blood. It was one of the symbols of the 20th, the outcomes of 20th of October when soldiers went [inaudible]. Nonviolent protestors were gathered at night and opened fire. Somebody bled on the, on the national flag and national flag is green, white, green, otherwise. And the white part was filled with blood and many people have changed their Twitter profile pictures to that image. So I wrote a poem called a “Blood Spangled Banner.” ‘In the white of a flag, the bleeding soul of the moment wept blood near the gaping toll/ Ghosts of the nation’s past haunts in the cries their bodies made in that horrid night, singing the words written to mock their hope/ On the streets, the marauders mark the ground with the cases of the killing rounds /picked up horridly to mask the proof that the promises of vain that leaders make/ that the land is still a butcher’s slab.’\n \n\n36:33\tChelsea Miya:\tKọ́lá’s passion for advocating for local languages, including drum languages, is in a way a part of the same struggle. Much like the #endSARS protestors, he’s fighting for Nigeria to find its own voice.\n \n\n36:47\tKọ́lá Túbọ̀sún:\tPeople don’t see this kind of literacy as equally as important as writing literacy or reading literacy. But it is a kind of literacy. When people mentioned, for instance, somebody who speaks only Yorùbá or writes in only Yorùbá is an illiterate, we forget that many of those people can actually learn, can actually understand and decode drum patterns, et cetera. So, I’m interested in how this kind of engines, a kind of civilization, survives along with modern ones as a way of moving the culture forward into the future. There are probably fewer people today who know how to read or listen to the drum as the way in the past, but I’m hoping that the medium of technology keeps them relevant and important for the next generation. [Music Begins: Drumming]\n \n\n37:45\tChelsea Miya:\tIn part two of this episode, airing next season, we’ll look more closely at how the talking drum functions as not just an art, but as technology.\n \n\n37:55\tPeter Olálékan Adédòkun:\tWhat makes a master drummer? It has to do with your years of experience, the ability to lead, and your impact on other people’s lives and society.\n \n\n38:06\tChelsea Miya:\tWe’ll also meet a talking drum master and learn about the art of drum making. [Music Ends: Drumming]\n \n\n38:23\tHannah McGregor:\t[Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members, Chelsea Miya and Sean Luyk of the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A big thank you to Titilope Sonuga, Wisdom Agorde, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, and Tunde Adegbola for their generous contributions. And a special thank you to master drummer. Peter Olálékan Adédòkun who provided music for the episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spoken web.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We will see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9282","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E5, Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies, 1 February 2021, Camlot and Copeland"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/cylinder-talks-pedagogy-in-literary-sound-studies/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Stacey Copeland"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Stacey Copeland"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ff305f81-4e58-468c-a0f1-927c9318155b/audio/1b004284-35e0-4c38-b489-61f16a8c2b3d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,768,142 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/cylinder-talks-pedagogy-in-literary-sound-studies/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-02-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Alexandra Sweny,  “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s Environments Series”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:  Original recordings of Montreal by Alexandra Sweny.\\n\\nSara Adams,  “Henry Mayhew and Victorian London”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: “Victorian Street.” British Library, Sounds, Sound Effects. Collection: Period Backgrounds.  Editor, Benet Bergonzi.  Published, 1994.\\n\\nAubrey Grant,  “Poe’s Impossible Sound”\\n\\n— Sound Clips: Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room, Lovely Music Ltd., 1981.\\n\\nAndrew Whiteman,  “Bronze lance heads”\\n\\n— Sound Clips:\\n\\n—“Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound” March 26, 1976, U of San Diego; accessed from Penn Sound Robert Duncan’s author page. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php)\\n\\n—“Ezra Pound recites Canto 1” 1959; accessed from Penn Sound Ezra Pound’s author page (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— —“The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide” by Richard Siebruth, interview with Al Filreis May 22, 2007. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)\\n\\n— Sampled 1940s film music; date and origin unknown.\\n\\n— Original music; composed by Andrew Whiteman, Dec 2020.\\n\\nReferences:\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun.  The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African Music. Duke UP, 2019.\\n\\nFeaster, Patrick. “’The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.” PhD Dissertation.  Indiana University, 2007.\\n\\nHoffman, J. “Soundscape explorer: From snow to shrimps, everything is a sound to Bernie Krause.” Nature, vol. 485, no. 7398, 2012, p. 308, doi:10.1038/485308a.\\n\\nKittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.\\n\\nKrause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little Brown, 2012.\\n\\nPeter Miller, “Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” PMLA 135.2 (March 2020): 315-328.\\n\\nMayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.\\n\\nPicker, John.  Victorian Soundscapes.  Oxford University Press, 2003.\\n\\nPoe, Edgar Allen. “The Bells”, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Everyman Press, 1993, pp. 81-84.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan.  Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Inner Traditions/Bear and Co., 1993.\\n\\nSiegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Rea. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.  Fordham UP, 2015.\\n\\nStoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.  New York University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTeibel, Irv. Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore. LP Record. Syntonic Research Inc., 1969.\\n\\nWorld Soundscape Project – Sonic Research Studio – Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/worldsoundscaperoject.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.\\n\\nAdditional Sound Clips:\\n\\nCamlot, Jason.  Ambient Music for “Cylinder Talks”.\\n\\n“A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s awakening )(w Carol Singers [male quartet]).” Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.\\n\\n“Big Ben clock tower of Westminster – striking half past 10, quarter to 11, and 11 o’clock” (Westminster, London, England). July 16, 1890. Recorded by: Miss Ferguson and Graham Hope, (for George Gouraud). Edison brown wax cylinder (unissued). NPS object catalog number: EDIS 39839.\\n\\nbpayri. “crowd chattering students university loud”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\nHumanoide9000. “Glacier break”, Freesound, 2017.\\n\\nNew, David, and R. Murray Schafer, “Listen.” National Film Board of Canada, 2009. https://www.nfb.ca/film/listen/\\n\\n“Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’).” William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12” disc, 1916.\\n\\nNew, David, director. R. Murray Schafer: Listen, National Film Board of Canada, 2009.\\n\\nsbyandiji. “short alarm bell in school hall”, Freesound, 2014.\\n\\nSpliffy. “Hallway of University in silence”, Freesound, 2015.\\n\\n“Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby.” Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone Concert Record, 10” Black Label Disc, GC 1313, 1906.\\n\\n“The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.\\n\\nUdall, Lyn. “Just One Girl.” Popular Songs of Other Days, 2012/1898.\\n\\nWesterkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Transformations, Empreintes DIGITALes, IMED 1031, Enregistrements i Média (SOPROQ), 1989/2010. https://electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_1031-1.3.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549488664576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does “listening” mean within the context of the literary classroom?\nIn this episode we join Director of the SpokenWeb Network and Professor at Concordia University – Jason Camlot – in conversation with SpokenWeb podcast supervising producer and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate – Stacey Copeland – to explore how sound studies is being taken up in the literary classroom. Together we listen back to select “Cylinder Talk” sound production assignments created by Concordia graduate students, and unpack the experiences, ideas and discussions that the production and study of sound can incite across disciplines. A 3-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s most recent graduate seminar – Literary Listening as Cultural Technique – the Cylinder Talk draws on a history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with literature studies.The episode features sound work by Alexandra Sweny, Sara Adams, Aubrey Grant and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Ends]\n00:00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. On the SpokenWeb Podcast, we talk a lot about different ways that sound and literature collide, whether that collision takes place in the SpokenWeb archives or through research symposiums, poetry, readings, and literary events. While past episodes have brought us into the university setting through interviews with professors and explorations of student work in the SpokenWeb network, we have yet to really explore how sound and literature collide in the classroom. Whether that’s high school, university, or elsewhere, what are the different ways that sound is being taken up as a learning tool in the literary community? We could even say we’re in a classroom of sorts together [Sound Effect: Classroom Chatter] here and now listening and learning in dialogue through the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n00:01:33\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Bell Ringing] And it sounds like class is about to begin. In this episode, we join director of the SpokenWeb network and professor at Concordia university, Jason Camlot in conversation with SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, and Simon Fraser University PhD candidate, Stacey Copeland in exploring sound and listening in the literary classroom. Together, we’ll listen back to select “cylinder talks” created by Concordia graduate students and unpack the experiences, ideas, and discussions sparked by the production and study of sound across disciplines. A three-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s graduate course, Literary Listening as Cultural Technique, the cylinder talk draws on a rich history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with the study of literature. Here are Stacey Copeland and Jason Camlot with Cylinder Talks: Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies. [Theme Music].\n \n\n00:02:31\tJason Camlot:\tHey Stacey.\n \n\n00:02:31\tStacey Copeland:\tHello. How are you?\n \n\n00:02:36\tJason Camlot:\tGood. Sorry about that. I was in the wrong room.\n \n\n00:02:40\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, that’s what happens when we have probably five or six different links we’ve used now for the podcast.\n \n\n00:02:47\tJason Camlot:\tExactly.\n \n\n00:02:47\tStacey Copeland:\tAll right, you want to get started? [Begin Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tLet’s go for it.\n \n\n00:02:56\tStacey Copeland:\tPodcast project manager, Stacey Copeland here. I’m joined In our podcast classroom of sorts, AKA Zoom video room, by Jason Camlot, director of the SpokenWeb research network, and likely a familiar voice if you listen to season one of the podcast. So being a student, myself, teacher, a sound scholar, I’m quite interested in the different ways that audio media production is being taken up as a learning tool across different disciplines. Whether that’s a project like SpokenWeb, or I think might be the case with the audio we’ll be listening to today, audio assignments that take students out of the traditional essay writing headspace and into a different mode of engaging with ideas in the classroom. But rather than me guessing at the inner workings of your graduate course, Jason, you’ve brought a selection of student assignments for us to listen to together. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about the course, the assignments, and what we’ll be hearing today? [End Music: Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n00:03:56\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. Well thanks Stacy. Very much. I’m entering our SpokenWeb Zoom classroom, as you describe it, both as a student and as someone who just taught a grad seminar called (Literary) Listening as Cultural Technique. I should say, I’ve been trying to teach with sound in my literature courses for about a decade now with varying degrees of success. I think the first few times that I taught sound recordings of literary performances in a classroom, I just played them and then expected something to happen and nothing happened because I found that in the students, and myself as well, we weren’t equipped to actually engage critically with those kinds of materials. And so. I called this course, (Literary) Listening, and literary is in parentheses. So it’s a very typographical title I suppose. Literary is really cordoned off from listening as cultural technique.\n00:04:49\tJason Camlot:\tAnd most of the seminar we’re reading theories of listening from disciplines that are not literary. As far as the assignments went, assignment for the entire seminar were really leading towards a final paper. And then there was this assignment that we’re talking about, which I called it the cylinder talk, right. And I’ve done this before. And the cylinder talk, the title, really comes from my own research fairly extensively in early spoken sound recordings and thinking about the implications of media formats in relation to what I would identify as literary forms. Right. So how did the constraints of a particular format inform what one can do in terms of delivering a story or a poem or an argument of some kind. Because cylinders, back in the day, in the acoustic period of sound recordings, sort of pre 1920 and usually much earlier than that —so from the 1890s on —generally held between two and four minutes of sound. The cylinder represents a time constraint as a result of preservation surface. So it’s using a material artifact on which sound was first recorded as a temporal constraint to begin with for an assignment. For the courses where I was doing these cylinder talks, they knew what a cylinder was and understood what the implications were because we’d studied them. So we’d listened to cylinder recordings, right. We’d studied late Victorian, early sound recordings where full Victorian novels were compressed into the timeframe of a three-minute cylinder. How do you deliver a David Copperfield in three minutes?\n \n\n00:06:25\tAudio Recording, “David Copperfield” performed by William Sterling Battis :\tMy dear Copperfield, come in. Come in! I —\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:28\tJason Camlot:\tEarly cylinder remediations of fiction mainly focused on either character sketches— that’s one way in which you compress a 400 page novel into three minutes — or they would focus on key transformation scenes. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde —\n \n\n00:06:47\tAudio Recording, “The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Performed by Len Spencer\tThe fiend is coming! Yes, aye, is here! [laughter]\n \n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n00:06:57\tJason Camlot:\t— Or the mesmerism scene from George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby where Svengali is mesmerizing Trilby —\n \n\n00:07:01\tAudio Recording, “Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby” performed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree\tAnd you shall see nothing ,hear nothing, thinking nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali…\n00:07:14\tJason Camlot:\t—or in a Christmas Carol when Ebeneezer Scrooge is transformed from a squeegee Scrooge into a benevolent generous person —\n \n\n00:07:28\tAudio Recording, “A Christmas Carol in Prose” performed by Bransby Williams:\tGod sent dreams to save me from meself. May God in this merry Christmastime be thanked for the reformation that you now begin with Ebeneezer Scrooge.\n \n\n \n\n00:07:42\tJason Camlot:\tAnd so the fiction cylinder, that’s the way they got around the question of constraint and compression. In this seminar, I wanted to have the students engage in a sort of, not a super demanding way, but just to have the experience of working with the digital audio workstation. Even if it means just having sort of two tracks and having to edit, select, engage with digitized sound, to think about both the media, through which we were encountering all of the sounds in the course, and I also wanted them to experience the kind of intensity that audio editing entails. Having to engage in that activity, I felt, represents a way of thinking about methodology. So that it’s sort of a form of listening that to some extent estranges you from the listening, because you may not know how to use the tools that well, so it’s not so natural to use them.\n00:08:32\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s a nice extension of the longer sort of theoretical discussions we’ve been having throughout the semester, about listening as a kind of audile technique or as a cultural technique. So it required them to produce a sound work. So that was sort of one of the goals. And the other constraints, apart from time alone, was they had to present a main idea, argument, or concept that they were going explore in the paper that they were writing. And they had to integrate at least one sound from the area that they were exploring. And I did imagine this not only as a kind of production oriented assignment, but I knew we were going to have a listening session, listening party of sorts in our very last class where everyone will get to hear everyone else’s cylinder talks, but also engage in responding to what they heard.\n \n\n00:09:20\tStacey Copeland:\tYou’ve brought in four talks from the course for us to listen to today, which will give everyone a bit more of a sense of what the students ended up with after engaging in this cylinder talk format. We’re going to play the full talk, which of course is only three minutes. It’s not too long for each one. And then we’ve chosen a bit of discussion to illustrate some of the critical thought that came after that listening experience together.\n \n\n00:09:46\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. As we were listening, of course we were on Zoom, so a bunch of squares showing everyone’s faces, everyone’s video is on. And that was one of the most enjoyable and interesting elements of the several hours that we spent listening together was just watching everyone’s reactions. This was the first time that everyone got to share something they’d made in this way. And so that was, I think, a really special aspect of this last listening session that we did together. So, which is the first one we’re going to listen to?\n \n\n00:10:14\tStacey Copeland:\tI think the first one I have queued up is Alexandra’s talk.\n \n\n00:10:18\tJason Camlot:\tSo Alexandra Sweny was thinking about and reading about environmental soundscape production. I think Alexandra — who is really working on Canadian poetry so this is not necessarily in her wheelhouse — really just became excited about some of the articles that were about environmental sound. And she pursued that topic.\n \n\n00:10:38\tStacey Copeland:\tAlexandra’s talk “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s, Environments Series”.\n \n\n00:10:44\tJason Camlot:\tYes.\n \n\n00:10:44\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:10:47\tAudio Recording, Alexandra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White noise to me has always sounded like falling snow. When I was little waking up after VHS always felt like falling asleep and waking up in the middle of a snow storm. I picture static like a blizzard that surrounds and disorients you. Every sound we hear it exists on a spectrum analogous to colours. White noise, like snowfall, has a wide frequency spectrum and clear tones, a narrow one. According to bio acoustician Bernie Krauss, in a healthy ecosystem in a healthy soundscape, the sound spectrum is full with living creatures, filling every frequency band. In altered and recently developed landscapes, such as clear cut forests or logging paths, the sound spectrum has notable gaps. [Sound Clip: Synthetic White Noise] White  noise helps you forget about all that. Snowfall is an ambient sound and it blankets what it covers audibly just as it does visually. Snow absorbs noise and it isolates and insulates. I use recordings of snowfall to study, read, and write. In a library, snowfall through my headphones would dull the sounds of rattling coffee cups and scraping chairs. It began when I encountered Irv Teibel’s Environment Series, a set of set of 11 long playing records created in the ’60s and ’70s. “Alpine Blizzard” is the title of the A-side on the last record. I could imagine myself isolated as if on top of a mountain, piling text on a page while the snow piled high around me. But this isn’t how the sounds were recorded. Rather than setting the top a prime peak and letting the natural world do the work, colleagues of Teibel recall how he viewed nature as an obstacle to be tackled, wrestled, and refined.\n00:12:51\tAudio Recording, Alexndra Sweny’s Cylinder Talk:\tRather than any old beach sound, for instance, he wanted the perfect beach sound. A track he eventually mixed with samples across 12 different locations, which were ultimately processed using localizers and equalizers. The sounds broken down into new recombinations and new synthetic waves to cover this places. The result was his first track “Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.” In my essay, I want to contend with the ethics of Teibel’s Environments series, which are among the first and most contentious field recording compositions to be sold in mainstream markets. I ask what are the risks of psychologically ultimate sounded field recordings, which are designed to soothe and calm, but which distance us from the psychologically and acoustically disruptive noises of anthropocentric contact and occupation? How do these ambient and curated soundscapes made for the human, but without the human, frame our relationship to the landscape, both imaginary and real? What are we to make of soundscapes that allow us to forget our place in the world, rather than which remind us of it? [Sound Clip: White Noise].\n \n\n00:13:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tGreat job, Alexandra.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAny first thoughts for us on it?\n00:14:14\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah, I guess I got on thinking about it from one of the additional readings on the bibliography of listening that talked about other field and sound recordings that have come up in the past years and just how the composer stance to the original recordings have changed. I think the article was talking about Derek Charke’s “Falling from Cloudless Skies”, which recorded the sounds of glaciers cleaving and melting. [Sound Effect: Glacier Break] And then songs of the humpback whale also mentioned that article. So I was just thinking about how field recordings have changed to reflect the attitudes that we’re having towards the natural world since the ’60s.\n \n\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tMichael.\n00:14:47\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tI thought that the thing was, in some ways, very objectively beautiful because you have this white noise, and then the idea is that all of these —not only these ideas that you’re talking about are like being evoked out of the white noise, but you also have this really — I guess this is what meditation tips in general do is that they have white noise and then they have people evoking landscapes out of them that you’re supposed to visualize. But here you actually told us that they were coming out of the white noise itself, which is really interesting. It literalized the trick that I think that those, that meditation tapes usually used.\n \n\n00:15:18\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Michael Menezes.\n \n\n00:15:19\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tThank you. Yeah. Meditation tapes, just even as a whole, would be a really good example of this that are just designed to put you to sleep and really zone out. I’ve listened to those also in the past.\n \n\n00:15:27\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tAndrew Whiteman\n00:15:29\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman\tOn that, what I was thinking, what you were doing is you have sound behind you [Sound Clip: White Noise] and then it fades out and then you bring the sound back again [Sound Clip: White Noise]. And I thought you were tricking it. I thought you were playing us something from the LP series you were talking about. And then I thought you were fading on actual white noise because I find a lot of sort of new laptop based composers or are trying to make fake natural sounds using the sounds that are only available inside the digital audio workstation playing with the nature-culture thing there.\n \n\n00:16:00\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Alexandra Sweny:\tYeah. And no, that was that was just a recording on my fire escape with the bells that came in right at the end. And I figured I’d put them in because those are very much, they take me out of whatever I’m doing and remind me like exactly what time it is and where I am.\n \n\n00:16:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah. Just to build on everything that everyone’s been saying, I thought it was a wonderful example of a kind of anti-meditation tape or a meditation tape that makes you reflect on all the ethical issues surrounding what meditation tapes are trying to do perhaps. But also I thought rhetorically the way you brought us into the description of what a natural soundscape and it’s sort of diverse frequency spectrum would normally entail going to the silence that memetically performs that. And then when you say white noise makes us forget about all that, rhetorically that whole sequence was really, really effective and powerful because you brought us into like, “Oh, okay, we’re going to hear this sound over and over again, but we’re not going to hear it the same way” because you’re teaching us how to hear it differently. And sort of the implications of what we’re hearing.”\n \n\n00:17:01\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Michael Menezes\tThe images you actually evoke are not — you start by saying that there are these beautiful nature landscapes but then the white noise is something that is blocking out global catastrophe, like glacier slipping off of mountains. And, I don’t know, the songs of humpback whales was also a very good image.\n \n\n00:17:18\tStacey Copeland:\tSo, I never thought I would hear a student referencing Bernie Krause in a literature course, but there we go. So what is it like listening back to this discussion for you, Jason?\n \n\n00:17:31\tJason Camlot:\tIt brought me right back into the moment of sort of the excitement immediately after hearing the piece for the first time. I really did think that Alexandra’s cylinder — more than others —had a kind of almost ASMR quality to it. Really it was very tactile and also the way she delivered her text was really interesting because she allowed for a lot of space in between sentences. It almost sounded like a poem. So I think I was hearing a little bit more the form of the piece even more than I had the first time. Her selection of sounds really did get to the core of some of the ethical issues that she was interested in exploring.\n \n\n00:18:08\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, before the discussion came in, my mind was already churning all around all the possibilities of what you might’ve been listening to in the course because that sort of close recording, that very ASMR, tactile quality that the white noise track has in Alexandra’s piece really reminded me of Hildegard Westerkamp’s work—\n \n\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tThese are the tiny, the intimate voices of nature. Of bodies, of dreams, of the imagination.\n00:18:38\tStacey Copeland:\t— particularly her Kits Beach piece, which does also have a very poetic flow in the vocal performance. And then the very close recording and very tactile sensation of listening to the barnacles on Kits Beach in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:18:54\tAudio Recording, “Kits Beach Soundwalk” Hildegard Westerkamp:\tYou’re still hearing the barnacle sounds. And already they’re changing.\n00:18:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd this recording brought me right back there. So then I was so surprised to hear in the discussion that Alexandra just recorded this on her fire escape. And then also the bells, because then I was thinking, well, if you were listening to R. Murray Schafer, maybe the bells were intentional and kind of an ode to 1970s acoustic ecology, but no, it was just her everyday experience.\n \n\n00:19:22\tJason Camlot:\tThere was a longer discussion about the bells after, cause we talked about bells an awful lot in our seminar from Schafer, but also because one of the earliest sort of documentary recordings was of Big Ben tolling [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”] in London in 1890 so, we talked about what, what that meant, what it means to record a bell, what a bell is, especially a publicly heard bell as a means of something that many people in an area can hear, how the bell measures time, et cetera. So yeah, we thought about bells a lot and yet there they areright, just in her neighborhood and she integrated them. We really didn’t do much listening to soundscape recordings in the seminar. The majority of the recordings we listened to were still voice-based in one way or another, even though they may have been quite experimental, but that was all Alexandra following her interest and discovering sounds.\n \n\n00:20:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI love this first example, because it really illustrates some of the ways that thinking through sound studies, regardless of whether you’ve listened to specific acoustic ecologists or sound recordist, like Hildegard Westerkamp and thinking about the World Soundscape Project, and you had a bit of introduction in the course for students around R. Murray Schafer, and round soundscape and those ideas.\n \n\n00:20:43\tR. Murray Schafer from “Listen” (NFB 2009):\tWe are the composers of this huge miraculous composition that’s going on around us and we can improve it or we can destroy it. We can add more noises or we can add more beautiful sounds. That’s all up to us.\n \n\n00:20:58\tStacey Copeland:\tThink about how reading those ideas can then lead to very similar sonic aesthetics in this particular cylinder talk. It’d be interesting to see how that translates across different disciplines as well.\n \n\n00:21:10\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s such a great question. And coming from literature, one of the challenges is to move away from the semantic signal when you’re listening to voice recordings. Alexandra’s interest in moving away from sounds with semantic meaning was a fulfillment of what we were often trying, but failing to do in listening to some of the literary recordings. Another thing that I think I heard in the responses to Alexandra’s was a real interest in trying to identify what Michel Chion would call “causal listening”. I thought you were making the sounds do this, but actually it turned out to be that. And that also is an ongoing sort of frame for our course — thinking about what it means to identify sound as objects or with particular sources.\n \n\n00:21:56\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of see some similar overlaps in these ideas of sonic environment and our relationship to the soundscape and the way that these kind of core ideas that come out of cultural sound studies have been taken up by your students through this literature course. And we hear these themes come up again in the next Cylinder Talk that you’ve chosen for us.\n \n\n00:22:18\tJason Camlot:\tOkay. So this is Sara Adams. This is probably in some ways the most challenging of the projects, because most of the sounds that she wants to write about can never be heard again. Her world is set in the 1840s in Victorian London. Sara is a PhD student and she’s a 19th century scholar. I’m a Victorianist first and foremost, I suppose, still. And so she’s come to work on Henry Mayhew, who was journalist, also an early ethnographer, oral historian, data collector about, I guess, marginal peoples living in urban environments in the 19th century. His best-known work is called London Labour and the London Poor, which is a remarkable, extensive, and expansive document of interviews with people who are living and working in London, but not necessarily in recognized jobs or positions. So many of them are doing things, doing the work in the city that is rendered invisible to anyone above the lower middle classes. The street sweepers, the garbage collectors, people who are selling wares in the streets. A very famous figure for Mayhew who that gets anthologized for some reason, the watercress girl is the one that that gets repeated and anthologized a lot.\n00:23:31\tJason Camlot:\tMayhew —half of his work, or more than half of his work are actual transcriptions of interviews that he held. He writes them in the voices of the people he interviewed. We don’t know how accurate and there’s been a lot of sort of critique of sort of him as a mediator of these voices. So those are sounds that Sara was very interested in exploring as sounds. So actually I don’t think she had thought of them as sounds previously that informed her new investigation for her, I think, and for me, cause I hadn’t thought about Mayhew this way, either. Thinking about where different people who make certain sounds as a result of the labour they pursue, whether they’re perceived as noise or as a kind of meaningful signal in certain ways.\n \n\n00:24:13\tStacey Copeland:\tGreat. Let’s take a listen.\n \n\n00:24:14\tAudio Recording, Sara Adam’s Cylinder Talk:\tOver the course of the 19th century, Victorian London experienced an unprecedented growth in population size. Consequently Britain’s largest city was not only choked with dirt and dust, but it was also overwhelmingly “alive with sound.” [Sound Clips: Victorian Street] In the city street markets, butchers, fishmongers and other street sellers shouted over each other, trying to catch the attention of passers by. The raucous symphony of London streets was also filled with bamboo flute players, Oregon grinders, and other street musicians, as well as the clomping of horses hooves, the clattering of carriages and carts, and the distant roar of the new railway. It was truly an “age of osculation” as John Picker argues, full of careful and close listening to a noisy and rapidly changing modern world. While some 19th century writers and intellectuals try to escape from the piercing sounds of the city streets, the journalist Henry Mayhew embraced them, diving headfirst into London’s East End and interviewing street vendors and other impoverished street folk in order to compile an encyclopedic archive entitled: London Labour and the London Poor first published in 1851. London Labour was ultimately an unfinished multi-volume work that recorded the everyday living and working conditions of London’s marginalized, urban poor. Mayhew was explicitly interested in reproducing in print form the real and “unvarnished” voices of London street folk “from the lips of the people themselves.” By deploying carefully detailed and mimetic description while also striving to transcribe his subjects interview answers verbatim, Mayhew attempted to create a literary work that faithfully sounded and re-sounded like a phonograph. Not only did Mayhew seek to bear witness to and preserve the voices of a rapidly disappearing population, but his project also simultaneously pushed the boundaries of what print could do. In my paper, I will explore how Mayhew uses sound to immerse his middle-class audience in the urban underworld of outcast London. How does Mayhew’s use of sound in the text create the conditions of possibility for hearing? What kind of ear witnessing does Mayhew perform in the text and what novel aesthetic ethical or political realities does this osculate of work make possible? I find it fascinating that Mayhew’s text reverberates, not only with the sights of the city, but also equally with it’s sounds, creating an immersive reading experience that grounds its reader firmly in a stable spatial and temporal setting. Mayhew’s text is also striking because it not only records the everyday noises of the city’s quotidian hustle and bustle, but it also trains its ear and by extension it’s reader’s ear on individuals and their personal stories of loss, struggle, and small moments of joy. In this way, Mayhew conditions his readers to differentiate sound from noise, listening from hearing, a sonic and sympathetic movement with profound ethical and political possibilities.\n \n\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tThanks guys. I guess I’m always interested in like, what does it mean to listen? What does it mean to hear? What conditions specifically political arise out of certain kinds of listening? And also what do they not make possible or what does incomplete listening or partial or warped? I mean, it’s always mediated through all sorts of things. And I think in those clips there’s so many different levels of my mediation and like interpretation, but then also Mayhew trying to get towards like an authentic kind of unvarnished, untouched, idea of someone’s sound and someone’s story, but we just know that’s not possible. Right. We know that that mediation fundamentally does distort and that there are implications for that.\n \n\n00:28:39\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\tI’m not too familiar with Henry Mayhew —\n \n\n \n\n00:28:42\tJason Camlot:\tAubrey Grant.\n \n\n00:28:42\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant\t—but I know that within that context of the different social reformers at that period, there was a lot of talk of questions of sanitation and cleanliness, of the dangers that the poor brought onto society in terms of illness, in terms of also smells as well and all this stuff. But thinking about in terms of noise — I was wondering there was like a connection between a kind of discourse, the sanitation and a discourse of noise.\n \n\n00:29:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. I guess for both, I was sort of connecting them and actually I’ve done a lot of work on waste and sanitation during this period. So that’s why I was sort of like, “Oh, I never thought of the sonic qualities.” I’ve thought of like material pollution in the terms of like dirt and dust and human waste, decaying weight matter, whatever, but not in terms of noise pollution. A lot of those people and places have been extinguished and have been made obsolete by industry and by industrial processes and by modernity. And that’s actually a really big part of Mayhew’s project was actually to record these people’s voices, and their everyday lives and the details about their mundane to-ings and fro-ings because they all like disappeared basically. Slowly. Like police were more —there’s more police around so there was more policing of like the city and making people move around more and not letting them just sell wherever. There were more laws about street music and who could play where. We have that today still with like red zoning people who are on the sides, on the streets, like asking for money, policing the poor and all sorts of ways,\n \n\n00:30:10\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tIs sound in any of his [statistical] tables? I don’t recall.\n00:30:13\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Sara Adams:\tYeah. So they’re not. The closest would be like, he talks about how many carriages are on the road, how many more carriages there are now than there were before. Like for me it feels like he’s kind of putting that osculation, like that idea of like the stethoscope, he sort of applying it to the body politic or at least a very small part of it, of the urban poor in London taking its heartbeat.\n \n\n00:30:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tI just called up cause you were talking about it sort of one of my favorite methods of categorization that Mayhew uses of the population. Right. And it could be interesting to think about what sounds did these four sectors of the population create or do they tend to create right. He calls them the enrichers, the auxiliaries, the benefactors and the servitors. And the thing about Mayhew that’s so cool, right, is that it’s very leveling these categories it’s based on your instrumental contribution rather than your social status. Servitors are the actors, the servants, all of the London poor that you’re talking about, like the street sweepers and scavengers — but the queen is considered a servitor as well. And members of parliament. To think about songs sonic emanations, according to some of these attempts at categorizing populations and the spaces they use, obviously, cause space and going back to Aubery’s point thinking maybe sound is more important to me. I’d really —I’m really excited to look back and think about the status of sound in relation to the other senses in Mayhew.\n \n\n00:31:33\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s great. Listening back to this discussion, you can really hear how excited you are about this topic.\n \n\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Well it reintroduced Mayhew to me in a whole new way. So I was super excited about what —where Sara was going with her work and there’s been some excellent sort of sound studies oriented work in Victorian studies. She mentioned John Picker and John Picker’s book, Victorian Soundscapes does a lot of excellent sort of analysis of noise pollution in the Victorian period and how it relates to identity formation and different sort of […], and  especially the bourgeois subject. But I don’t think he talks about Mayhew — and I really hadn’t thought about Mayhew. And in so many ways it’s such an obvious text to think about from a sonic perspective.\n \n\n00:32:14\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. And I mean, in this discussion, I mean, this is just like a little slice of the very in-depth discussion that the students were having after listening to Sara’s cylinder talk around ideas of noise and the politics of what is defined as noise versus sound, how that relates to the Victorian era, but then also talking about contemporary politics of noise and sound and policing. And it was such a rich conversation to hear coming out of this application of sound studies ideas to say, Henry Mayhew in this particular era. And I was also curious — we hear this politics of noise come up from scholars like Jennifer Stover when we’re thinking about the sonic colour line and the racialized ways that sound is defined as noise in relation to identity. And so it should be —I would think, I mean, maybe I’m just so nerdy that I’m excited about it— quite fascinating to see how these kinds of identity politics unfold in Henry Mayhew’s discussions of sounds and noise in this particular era.\n \n\n00:33:15\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you’re exactly right in your instincts about sort of where some of this may have come from. We talked about Stover, we read Sun Eidsheim’s work The Race of Sound.. And that was a very important book I think for students in the seminar as was Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, which was amazing. The very first thing it does is take down R. Murray Schafer on this question of noise, right. Basically his account of Inuit throat singing as kind of awful noise, right. And so the politics of what is called noise and what isn’t called noise in relation to identity formations and identifications was much discussed throughout the seminar. And I think that Sara was sort of bringing some of that back to the Victorian works that she’s really interested in writing about.\n \n\n00:34:02\tStacey Copeland:\tWe kind of got on the topic of bells earlier. And this next cylinder talk that you’ve brought in for us brings up to the idea of bells yet again.\n \n\n00:34:11\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. So this is a cylinder talk by Aubrey Grant on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Bells.” There is actually a very recent article in PMLA, which is sort of like one of the major literature journals of the modern language association, on this poem that I assigned for the course, it was published just last year, 2020. So really very recent by Peter Miller called “Prosody Media and the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe.” Aubrey really dove into readings around prosody, which was sort of a new area to him. So thinking about literary prosody, so the sound in the printed word, right. That’s one way to describe what prosody is —these are things you learn in high school assonance and consonance and rhyme, right. Those are ways of thinking about how sound functions in poetry off the page, but the combination of our course and his discovery of prosody and his already quite mature thinking around signification and theories of language resulted in kind of a mind blowing reading of this poem, using language and signification techniques to communicate sound in ways that he argues are quite unique to Poe.\n \n\n00:35:21\tStacey Copeland:\tSo here is Aubrey’s talk titled “Poe’s Impossible Sound.”\n \n\n00:35:28\tAudio Recording: Aubrey Grant’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Begin/Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”  underplay] In a short story from 1919, Rilke describes his mysterious fascination with a skull he has brought home from an anatomy lesson. Where once it contained within its narrow confines, a brain and an unbounded subconsciousness, it now appeared to him as a hollow structure, an empty vessel. One evening as he passed it flickering in candlelight, he was struck by the realization that he had seen the coronal suture once before. That jagged zigzag pattern of connective fibers that joins the front of the skull to the back was the very same pattern he had seen inscribed on an equally hollow wax cylinder. When, as a child, he had listened to his own voice in all its sonic ephemerality separated from his body for the very first time. What kind of sound would issue from the skull, Rilke wondered, if a phonograph needle were to trace the contours of the coronal suture? What primal sound would be produced if, rather than simply tracing the graphic inscription of a sound that already existed, the phonograph could play the as yet unheard lines, grooves, cuts, and graphemes of nature itself? Setting aside speculation of whether the sound would be noise or music, Rilke’s perspective is decisive. It is only by means of mechanisms, machines, and techniques that it becomes possible to listen, to really listen to the unsounded sounds of the real. More broadly, the phonograph itself and its cylinder of which this talk is a simulation, points to the fact that listening has always been a technique for intervening in the real. In this way, the phonograph is merely the technological exteriorization of a practice of signal processing with its own history. A history which revolves around the question of how we listen. That is, of the techniques we use to filter sounds out of noise, to produce something that we can hear. In my essay, I argue that Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” articulates a transformation in listening techniques marked by a shift from a regime of signs to a regime of signal processing. Taking Friedrich Kittler’s media technical a priori as a starting point, I argue that Poe’s poem is a kind of phonograph avant la lettre, which is both invested in print culture and sonically undermines it. Arguing along lines set out by Eliza Richards, Peter Miller, and Jerome McGann, I will begin by situating Poe’s attention to the mechanics of prosody within 19th century print culture and industrial reproduction. In this reading Poe’s poems are prosodic machines that not only produce an infinite variety of performances, but are themselves technologically reproducible. In a manner analogous to Benyamine’s analysis of cinema it is the very reproducibility of the poetic machine that constructs the cultural modalities of listening in the mid 19th century. However, while holding onto this theory and historical context, I believe that a close reading of “The Bells” will reveal Poe’s attention to a kind of listening that exceeds the boundaries set by written signs and human voices. My reading will center around the orally evocative deployment of onomatopoeia in the poem. Although Poe’s use onomatopoeia to emphasize themes and enhance the musicality of performance has been well-documented, what has escaped notice is the fact that the word bells is not itself onomatopoeic. Rather, it is only through his use of repetition that it becomes so. Like a real bells percussive clapper, which makes its hollow interior ring and resound, the repetition of this mechanical supplement empties the word of signification while retaining its acoustic qualities. What occurs, I argue, is that the graphic inscription becomes an empty vessel. Like Rilke’s skull which channels uncoated frequencies of a primal sound concealed in the materiality of the letter. In other words, the noise of the real and impossible inhuman sound that the signifier normally articulates into signs becomes audible for the first time in Poe’s poem. From sign to signal, this sourceless acousmatic sound may well be the music of the printed words own disillusion into the noise of the coming phonographic age.[End:Alvin Lucier, “I am sitting in a room”underplayed]\n \n\n00:39:57\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\tYeah. Talk about repetition.\n \n\n \n\n00:40:03\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tYes, exactly. Exactly. So just a couple of things. Yeah. The sound that I used in the back, I think we’re all familiar with that. We listened to it actually at the beginning of the course, it’s the ending segment of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. The reason that I wanted to use that segment was because I had intended to actually base part of my thing on that. Cause what I was looking at was like, what is the sound that is sort of like hidden in the voice and how is it revealed or made present through this kind of structure of like repetitive feedback looping and how it dissolves articulation into pure noise.\n \n\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nYeah. Michael.\n00:40:35\tAudio Recording, Michael Menezes:\tI just thought that your cylinder was like very symbolically lovely. I think that you set up — I mean obviously the background noise thing, it felt like someone turning a large wheel of music in some ways when the wheel makes one revolution of the sound, of the piston hits the thing. And the piston, obviously from your presentation, the piston reminds me of like the mechanical aspect of the bell. And the sound reminds me of the individual trying to like capture this beautiful sonorous noise, just having them connected directly in one machine with no like feeling of humanity in between. And only the skull was like a, was a great image.\n \n\n00:41:12\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aubrey Grant:\tI love the Gothic media theory stuff. I mean, this stuff is great. Ultimately, Michael that’s sort of what I was aiming at. I wasn’t thinking of it as much as a piston, although that works too. Thinking about the way in which like a record [Sound Recording: Surface Crackling] as it turns, or a cylinder, as it turns is a kind of cyclical repetition. And that repetition doesn’t have to just like a bell ringer, like a hammer banging and going like laterally, but it’s actually like a cyclical process.\n \n\n00:41:40\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nA couple of things that came to mind I — just thinking about the relationship between the sign and sounds so really —and the idea of being able to, in a sense, play something like a skull or something in nature. So basically how the sound reproduction technologies seem to evoke and suggest these new possibilities of turning any sign into sort of sonic content. And this is talked about in an article by Theodore Adorno called “The Curve of the Needle.” For him, piano rolls, right, were seen as that source of potential sound [Piano roll music].\n \n\n00:42:20\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot\n \n\nHis way of thinking about it’s sound recording and sort of the bumps on a cylinder or a flat disc are still indexical to original things that made sounds that caused the air pressure to record them, but the piano roll in so far as it was generating sound just from punched holes, suggest the possibility of creating sounds out of nothing. Right. In sense, or just out of random — it made me really think of digital processes. And so this link is to Patrick Feaster’s work, and he —rather than talk about his work as about sound reproduction, he calls it eduction to reduce this, to bring out elicit, develop from a condition of latent, rudimentary, or merely potential existence. So the repetitious sound of your sound piece, in a way is one of the base necessities for educing something because it has to be moving and cyclical in order to generate a sense of continuous sound or sonic quality. So you can’t just have sort of random symbols there has to be some kind of ultimate pattern assigned. Just the concept of sonification in a way is one that it seems could be useful for you to be thinking about in relation to your project.\n \n\n00:43:31\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat are you hearing in listening back to this piece and the discussion, Jason?\n \n\n00:43:35\tJason Camlot:\tOh, it’s funny. I haven’t — the first thing I said when it was done was “talk about repetition”. Right. But what I was referring to there actually was a discussion we’d had about Poe’s “The Bells” previously, which is a poem that is built on repetition. Right. And as Aubrey points out one of the main things that’s repeated is the word “the bells” [Audio Recording: “Big Ben clock tower of Westminster”]. So there are full lines of the poem that are just bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.\n \n\n00:43:59\tJason Camlot:\tSo, just to continue with your idea that really starting with what is not an overly respected poem, Poe’s piece. It was like a recitation staple it’s seen often as not a very deep poem, very surface-y. And that’s one of the points that interests Aubrey very much actually. Discovering prosody, literary prosody as a kind of field of technical discourse around the analysis of poetry and then filtering it through some of these other disciplinary fields like media history in particular, that was extremely productive and generative for him. And I think having to engage in this sound piece exercise also expanded his way of thinking. I mean, I don’t really know, but I’m not sure that he would have taken his thinking as far as he did, if he hadn’t had to go through the process of actually making a sound work himself.\n \n\n00:44:54\tStacey Copeland:\tI do have quite an appreciation for this poem. I think because it was one of the poems that I had to read in high school, very in depth. And I think we took turns reading it aloud in the class, these kinds of things. But at the time, I hadn’t really been thinking about the ways in which Poe is really very thoughtful and thinking about the different textures and materials and the different actual soundings of these different bells. As we were listening to this, I had to pull up the poem again, to jog my memory about some of the descriptive language that he’s using. And some of the, again, prosody and techniques that we might think about and the ways that he’s describing silver bells and golden bells and brazen bells and iron bells. So I think this is really a great poem to go to almost as one of the starter texts you can think about in applying sound studies, concepts, and techniques to poetry and to poetry readings.\n \n\n00:45:46\tJason Camlot:\tI think that’s right. And I think what Aubrey and the discussions we had in this seminar did for my thinking about the poem was to move it out of sort of the elocutionary realm, which is where I would normally sort of stay in thinking about this poem, because like I said, it was a recitation manual staple in the 19th century, which means that people would find it in these parlor recitation books that they would do for their own amusement at home. Right. And this was one of the poems that they would readily read. And there were tons of parodies of the poem as well, cause it does lend itself to that. Right. But it was a kind of staple piece for the performance, the demonstration of virtuosity in elocutionary performance and ability to innocence sound the poem and do justice to the various qualities, tonal qualities of the different metals, for example, that you mentioned. How do you do that with your voice? So you could think of it as if it were a song in the 1990s, it would be a great piece for like Celine Dion to perform, right? Because it would really allow her to show off her voice and in all of its virtuosity. But I think moving it into the realm of thinking about it from the pointof view of signification and of media as Aubrey really pursued it, like you say, made this poem a kind of obvious staple for a literature slash sound studies course.\n \n\n00:47:02\tStacey Copeland:\tThat’s definitely a cover that I would love to hear — Celine Dion doing a song version of Poe’s “The Bells.” [Audio Clip: Stacey vocal as Celine] But talking about covers that actually brings us perfectly to the final cylinder talk that you’ve brought for us to listen to today.\n \n\n00:47:19\tJason Camlot:\tThis piece was done by Andrew Whiteman. So Andrew, among all the students in the seminar has the most training in sound recording media. He’s a professional musician and has been for the last 20 years. And so he didn’t attend my workshop on audacity because he really, he knows how to work with digital audio workstations and make sound. But also he’s very interested in engaging in doing sound pieces that involve poetry. So he has a whole art practice that’s around this. Anyways, he sort of fell upon finally a topic that seemed like it would be a good one to pursue and essentially boils down to the question of the idea of the cover. We talk about cover songs — can we talk about cover poems? Or the idea of the poet’s cover as he phrases it. And so, because he was interested in oral poetry, let’s say The Odyssey— like Homer Homeric bardic poetry. He started thinking about an opening canto of Pound’s “Cantos”  which is kind of a cover of a short section of the Odyssey, and then pointed him to PennSound’s archive, where there are recordings of Pound reading that opening “Canto I”as well as some other poets reading portions of it. And so he had a sort of mini archive that he could work with that brought in his interest in a bardic poetry, sort of oral poetic forms, which are formulaic forms. So we can’t think of doing a cover in the same sense because the poem changes every time a bard re-performs it versus the question of someone reading the printed already sort of fixed version of a poem differently, and thinking about that as a kind of cover. And so he focused on Robert Duncan’s sort of lecture on Pound in which he performs Canto I.\n \n\n00:49:06\tStacey Copeland:\tHere is Andrew Whiteman with “The Poetic Cover.”\n \n\n00:49:10\tAudio Recording, Andrew Whiteman’s Cylinder Talk:\t[Audio Clip: Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound] Hi. When I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community. And that is that it’s total interest in Mr. Ezra Pound seems to have faded. [Music Begins] [Sound Overlapping with Ezra Pound recites “Canto I” ] My initiation and the counters. How did I come to hear it? Set keel to breakers forth from a godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also/ Heavy with weeping, [Duncan] I found myself in the prep and a terrifying presence of mighty blue stocking who knew the entire modern scene, which made her vastly superior to the [Pound overlap returns] [inaudible] and in one fell swoop I was initiated to the mysteries of [inaudible] trembling and running [inaudible] Ezra Pound on Telegraph Avenue. Elliott. And found there the 30 cantos, what was then the avant garde. [Enter Filreis interview] A very confused domain of something one might call voice. Which in Pound, one doesn’t know whether voice is sort of actual or metaphorical. Especially — [Dunan returns] And I opened the page and then went down with the ship [Pound returns]And then went down to ship [Dunan] I can’t bear it. This is too much! For a whole week I went — [Pound] And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breathers, forth on godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship/ [Duncan] But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You go to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah [Reverb effect] . You find it the way they find it in music — [Pound] cadaverous dead, of brides/ Of youths of the olde who had borne much; [Duncan] Most people can’t find it [Pound] Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads/ [Duncan] When Pound’s recordings were made we each found out something we could not know [bell] when we read in the thirties, the forties and so forth. And that is that Pround intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of, a sort of singing, intoning to the line. “And then went down to the ship/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea [music rises]…” [Pound] Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms/ [Overlapping voices] These many crowded about me with shouting/ Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads read [Overlapping voices] [Duncan] Our American trouble with men, many. I mean, we have what we do that word men many. A man is difficult enough when you get that many in there, men, many mauls with bronze lance — and so. So, I don’t always find the most elegant reading. [Filreis interview?] [Inaudible] Olga’s husband says well, “Sound like you never got out from under the influence of Yates or something like that.” And Pound is really hurt [Small voice: He doesn’t like that] and leaves the room and take his —and then the next day reads in a completely different fashion. Much more relaxed and much more conversational. And you have the two readings there. [Small voice: He took it to heart!] [Duncan] We can overlap so the thing plays a double role. Now. [Filreis interview] He took it to heart. It’s really interesting the first high Yatesian reading, and then the next much more kind of casual and incidentally superior reading. It’s a really interesting. [Small voice: That’s great, and where did you find this thing ?] She sent them to me. [Small voice: Oh fantastic.] [Overlapping voices] [inaudible] [Small voice: I wonder if other stuff will start to surface.] Well I’m hoping. [Duncan] If you don’t find the music you have not found the elegant solution. [End music]\n \n\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tYeah, Aaron.\n \n\n \n\n00:53:17\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Aaron Obedkoff\tI find it an incredibly potent and effective way to tackle Pound’s enormous influence. I mean, he’s kind of like — when it comes to modern contemporary poetry, he’s like the wizard of Oz behind the screen, he’s just everywhere. And so the way you made him disappear into his progeny, his voice kind of being subsumed under Duncan’s and the like, I found it very, very effective.\n \n\n00:53:39\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Aaron Obedkoff\n \n\n00:53:41\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tWe always get this image of Pound, Aaron as you’re saying, as the wizard of Oz. But in that talk where Olga’s husband, who’s British, who says, “Oh, well, gee, you really can’t get away from Yates can ya?” It’s like, Oh my God, the ghosts, like whether you find them this horrible fascist monster or whether you find him — in whatever way, he looms so big. And this is like a little [Pop Sound] it pricks, the bubble in this image of poor Pound going away with his book and then coming back the next day and changing his reading style. But what’s interesting is we don’t know, like the sound of Pound that we have there where he’s like, this [Imitates Pounds dramatic style] is that him toned down? Like, there’s a whole question there. Was even worse before? Like was even more before? We don’t know.\n \n\n00:54:28\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Jason Camlot:\tWe’re really interested in the way you used space panning and also accelerating to differentiate between — sort of continuing Aaron’s observation about where Pound’s voice was in the mix of his “after-Pound era.” The way where you were using it as a way to actually make your arguments. If you, if you want to talk a little bit about like, whether there was much intentionality or whether you were just going with what sounded good, but I also liked the way you took the Filreis conversation, the talk, which is like one contemporary manifestation of continuing to engage with these recordings, the effect of speeding it up, almost highlighted it’s gossipy nature, or sort of relegated it to a less important discursive register that actually accelerating suggests belittling or something like that.\n \n\n00:55:16\tAudio Recording, Seminar: Andrew Whiteman:\tYeah. I think you’re Dr. Freud-ing me really well now because — and also trying to make them talk to each other that’s probably the big thing. I like trying to make different eras to talk to one another where they don’t belong. And so where Duncan says “I was in the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking”, like whoever that is! Someone who initiated him, he uses the word initiate three times, which I put in there because he places himself in vis-a-vis Pound in a religious place. And so when he says “the Augustine presence of lady blue stocking” I have Pounds “Aphrodite. Golden girdle.” Or whatever, to just try and emphasize Duncan’s position as an initiate. And then that is what my paper’s about. How Duncan says the exact same words that Pound says, but his cover of “Canto I” is completely different and signifies in a completely different way.\n \n\n00:56:18\tStacey Copeland:\tThis one has — it’s just so rich. It really is more of a soundscape composition. And this really does show the range that your students brought to the table when they were thinking about the idea of a cylinder talk, where here we have Andrew’s cylinder talk that doesn’t have his voice in it at all. It’s really engaging with the archive and engaging with these ideas of covers, and covers almost as layers of sound layers on top of each other through time through space, through these different contexts that he’s grappling with in these different poetic covers. Tell me a bit about listening back. What’s coming forward for you?\n \n\n00:56:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. I’ve been thinking more like, as you were just saying about what a cover is. Cause I think one of the things that his cylinder talk does so successfully is exactly what he said he was going for, which is communicate the ways in which the same sort of text can not only sound differently, but also through that sound represent an entirely different worldview, literally worldview. So ideology in relation to the world, but also sort of literary worldview, meaning what literature and what talking about literature and what performing literature is supposed to be accomplishing. He layers them for us to sort of understand that we can only partially see or know the meaning of what a sounding of a poem would mean in a particular historical context. That’s one of the things that I hear in this piece.\n \n\n00:57:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, every time I listened to this, I feel like I’m hearing something else and it could just be me projecting, but I feel like we are experiencing a bit of Andrew’s personal experience of grappling with these archival sounds. We get the sort of disorientation and listening to the harsh panning back and forth in the first half of the cylinder talk there. And then we also have this comedic moment with the speeding up of the voices, which again could be, I mean, for me evokes the feeling of the monotony and maybe the hilarity that ensues after listening to hours and hours and hours of archival tape in real time. Right. Because its sound. You have to listen and you have to digitize in real time and it can make you a bit loopy.\n \n\n00:58:28\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I think that’s what he was referring to when he said I was Dr. Freud-ing him, like, I think he was sort of the point he was making is that he —you can hear his own himself in the positioning that he gives to the sounds in the piece, but he’s also positioning them in relation to how he feels about what he’s doing right now.\n \n\n00:58:45\tStacey Copeland:\tInviting students to engage in audio production — one of my hopes and what I think sound does really well is opening up the doors to allow students to grapple with and experience and describe and share their own embodied experience of engaging with these ideas outside of the very traditional essay writing format that we get engrained with in high school and then carries forward into their undergrads and haunts us later in our academic careers as well.\n \n\n00:59:14\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really true. And I think we’ve heard some of that through the various comments in response to all of the cylinder talks that we listened to. It’s somewhat different from the formulae of knowledge production that they’re used to engaging in. And so I think that’s very quickly associated with putting themselves out there a little bit more, right. That there’s more of themselves in the decisions they’re making, because the decisions haven’t been sort of pre-made for them as to what an essay is supposed to be or what this kind of knowledge production is supposed to have in it. And then also as you point out that it is a very embodied experience because it involves listening. It involves bodily fatigue because that work can really take a long time when you’re sitting at the computer doing the sound editing.\n \n\n00:59:57\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then it makes me think also about the relevance of calling this a cylinder talk assignment rather than a podcasting assignment, because no one knows what a cylinder talk is. Right. It’s sort of a made up idea as a constraint. And I add some—and we did have discussions like say, well, what is a cylinder talk? So that they knew what they could sort of engage in. But people have ideas about what a podcast is already. So in some ways a podcasting assignment would allow them to lean a little bit more on models than an assignment where they have to do a cylinder talk where there aren’t really aren’t any precedents for this. In retrospect, I think that was a productive aspect of the assignment was that there wasn’t even a kind of sonic generic precedent that they could rely upon.\n \n\n01:00:40\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the cylinder as a —.\n \n\n01:00:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah.\n \n\n01:00:44\tStacey Copeland:\t– a very simple constraint that has a very material aspect to it as well. Versus I think if we thought about podcasting more in that way, we might start to create some more interesting things.\n \n\n01:00:57\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. Yeah. Possibly.\n01:00:57\tStacey Copeland:\tI was curious listening through some of the cylinder talks that your students made, how you see this kind of assignment being applied to other courses that you teach, or maybe in the future, other disciplines as well.\n \n\n01:01:10\tJason Camlot:\tI guess it all starts with an exercise in the use of constraints, to generate really interesting creative solutions. The cylinder talk, it’s a cipher or an empty container in a lot of ways. And yet a very restrictive constraint simultaneously, right.The idea of having assignments of constraint and maybe of unfamiliar constraint could be extremely productive across the disciplines. I mean, this seminar was really about engaging with theories of listening from many different disciplines and then thinking about our own discipline from the respective of those readings. But I think the sound assignment was getting at that question [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] and problem and goal in a different way, in a much more practice and sort of embodied way.\n \n\n01:01:56\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Thinking about the different ways that we can approach our pedagogy. What other assignments can we bring in to kind of shake students awake a little bit? So I guess at this point now it’s my turn to go and listen back through the that we just had.\n \n\n01:02:20\tJason Camlot:\tSorry, we talked too much!\n \n\n01:02:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Maybe we should put out an extended cut.\n \n\n01:02:27\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n01:02:28\tStacey Copeland:\tThis has been a pleasure listening to some of the work that your students put out because this is one of the frustrations always is both as a student and as an instructor, students create these wonderful works and only everyone in the course gets to hear it. And no one else. I’m glad we got to share some of these out in the world for others to enjoy as well. [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n \n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor:\t[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Stacey Copeland of Simon Fraser University and Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Alexandra Sweeney, Aubrey Grant, Sara Adams, Andrew Whiteman, and all the students of English 604: Literary Listening as Cultural Technique for their cylinder talks and discursive contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourselves and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9284","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E6, Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 1 March 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/a9212c02-0491-458c-9d5a-eae284bc37f3/audio/3d08da82-0039-4ad4-8ed7-f1377e559fd8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,822,300 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/11/29/grippes-and-poche\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Painful Affair.” The New Yorker, 16 March 1981, p.39 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/03/16/a-painful-affair\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Flying Start.” The New Yorker, 13 September 1982, p. 39. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/09/13/a-flying-start-2\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “In Plain Sight.” The New Yorker, 25 October 1993, p. 96. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/10/25/in-plain-sight\\n\\nkyles. “cassette tape deck open, close +tape handling.” Freesound, 5 December 2018, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450525/.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. “Preface.” The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMackie, John. “A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces.” Vancouver Sun, 31 December 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/a-hidden-treasure-of-1960s-vancouver-recordings-resurfaces\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549494956032,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["On February 14, 1984, Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University. She did a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche,” which was published in the New Yorker in 1982  — her ninety-fifth work in the magazine. Containing the full recording of her reading, which includes Gallant’s live commentary as she reads, “Mavis Gallant Reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU” celebrates Gallant’s voice in print and audio. \n\nPart one of a two-part series, this episode engages with Gallant’s voice and the materiality of the recording: how do we perceive Gallant’s explanatory interruptions, unincluded in the printed work? How do we hear the physicality of the audio recording itself? While this episode takes up these questions in regards to the recording of the event, part two will take them up in combination with further consideration of the live event itself.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What is your favourite way to hear a story? How does a written work change when it’s read aloud, interrupted, or framed by moments of laughter and applause? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are always considering what transformations happen in the conversions between printed words, live events, and our un-archiving of recorded stories. These questions frame today’s episode, which will be a special treat for Canadian literature fans of prose and the short story. We present you with a full audio edition of a 1984 recording of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story “Grippes and Poche” at Simon Fraser university. This story was originally published in the New Yorker magazine in 1982. Our episode producers, Kate Moffatt, Candace Sharon, and Michelle Levy are researchers of book history.\n00:01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThey contextualize Gallant’s reading and invite you to consider the physical lives of her stories. How do we respond differently to this recording of a live reading, as opposed to engaging with a printed work? What do you hear in Gallant’s reading voice and her comments as she reads? This is part one of a two-part series based on this recording of Mavis Gallant. In June, part two of the series will guide us in a deeper exploration of the characters in the short story, the author, and recorded questions from the event we will hear today. We hope you enjoy this audio edition. Here are Kate, Kandice, and Michelle with [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Episode Six of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:02:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLike all people who read or perform – I’m a fetishist. The watch has to be there and not there. And you see, that’s why I’m doing all this fiddling. Can you all hear me?\n00:02:36\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Accordion] goes into background piano] On February 14th, 1984, acclaimed short story writer Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University to do a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche”, which was printed in the New Yorker in 1982. My name is Kate Moffatt.\n00:02:56\tKandice Sharren:\tI’m Kandice Sharren.\n00:02:58\tMichelle Levy:\tAnd I’m Michelle Levy.\n00:02:59\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as three members of the Simon Fraser University SpokenWeb team, we are inviting you to come back in time with us 37 years to February 14th, 1984, to attend Gallants reading of her story [Audience Chatter].\n00:03:11\tKate Moffatt:\t“Grippes and Poche” was published in the New Yorker in November of 1982. The print publication spans nine pages [Sound Effect: Page Flipping] and includes what one expects from the New Yorker: cartoons on every page, a poem partway through, and the beginning of the next section of the magazine on the last page, which reads “social notes from all over” and includes an announcement for a Susquehanna County Sunshine Club meeting of which municipal police chief Charles Martel and his police dog will be the guests. Gallant’s reading, of course, includes none of this. And in fact, she did not read from a New Yorker copy of “Grippes and Poche”. She mentions partway through the event that she’s reading from proofs.\n00:03:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tI have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? [Laughs] Yes. These are proofs.\n00:03:56\tKate Moffatt:\tThe recording provides us with an opportunity, not only to hear the author read her own work, but to hear a version of the story unavailable to readers complete with her inflections and added commentary. Born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant is one of Canada’s most noteworthy writers, known for short stories, novels, plays and essays. During the 1940s, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard where she began publishing some of her early stories, before moving to Paris in 1950 to pursue writing full-time, and where she remained until her death in 2014. The year after she moved to Paris, saw the beginning of her lifelong relationship with the New Yorker. Between the publication of “Madeline’s Birthday” in 1951 and “Scarves, Beads, Sandals” in 1995, she published over 116 stories in the magazine. “Grippes and Poche” embodies the complex linguistic, political, and national cultural spaces Gallant occupied. Although her family was Anglophone, she was educated at a convent where only French was taught. Gallant explained that she learned to write primarily through her reading of English books. And by the age of eight, she writes, English was irretrievably entrenched as the language of imagination. Born in Canada, but living in and writing about postwar France in English for an American magazine “Grippes and Poche ” speaks to the multiple cultures and histories her writing navigates. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:05:15\tMichelle Levy:\tAt the time of this SFU reading, Gallant was an established and critically successful writer. “Grippes and Poche” was her 95th story to appear in the New Yorker. Published on November 29, 1982, the story is the third in a four-part series with recurring characters. Previously, Henri Grippes has appeared in two stories, “A Painful Affair”, March 16, 1981, and “A Flying Start” September 13, 1982. Stories that recount Grippes literary rivalry with the English author, Victor Prism, and detail their early encounters with their American patroness. In 1985 these three stories were reprinted in Overhead in a Balloon, a collection that brings together 12 stories set in Paris. Nearly a decade after “Grippes and Poche”, she returned to Grippes for her final installment in the series: “Within Plain Sight”. A story that takes us forward to an aging Grippes recounting his refusal to accept the advances of his long suffering neighbor Madame Parfait, and his troubled past in Nazi occupied central France. Importantly, Gallant collected the four stories together under the titular character’s name in 1996. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:06:31\tKandice Sharren:\tThe audio cassette containing this recording is housed in the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department, where it is accompanied by a poster advertising the event, which was hosted by the now defunct Canadian Studies program in Images Theatre, a lecture hall on the Burnaby campus. Michelle unearthed this recording because of her interest in Gallant. However, once listening, we were struck by the story itself with its sharp jabs at French bureaucracy, which were emphasized by the clarity and dramatic range of Gallant’s voice on a tape recording from the 1980s. In addition to our work on SpokenWeb, Kate, Michelle, and I research 18th and 19th century book history. And in our conversations about how to approach this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we were struck by the impact of material circumstances on the recording, both in the clues it provides as to what those circumstances were and the way it imposes them on us.\n00:07:25\tKandice Sharren:\tOur framework for working with print also impacted our interpretation of this reading. Throughout Gallant interrupts herself to explain French words or phrases, or to provide additional contextual information. Independently, all three of us began referring to these asides as akin to footnotes, even though for a listener, they are not marginal commentary that can easily be ignored or skimmed, but rather are fully integrated into the reading. As you listen to this recording, we invite you to think about the places where print and audio performance intersect as well as where they diverge. What are the gains and losses of hearing the author read the story rather than reading it yourself in print. What evidence exists within the recording about the event itself? How big does the room sound and how full is it? How many people seem to be present? How does Gallant respond to their presence, reshaping her proofs along the way? Our interpretation of the recording was also impacted by the material form of the cassette, which only allows for 45 minutes per side. This means a break occurs roughly 35 minutes into the reading that attendees of the event would not have experienced. We’ll check back in with you at this break to talk more about its significance. For now, we’ll leave you with Gallant “Grippes and Poche” in 1984.\n00:08:41\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThis is a story called “Grippes and Poche”. Henri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It’s just a very gentle send up. The Poche in question is the income tax man in Paris.\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt an early hour for the French man of — [Aside] if you can’t hear just say something and I’ll do the best I can — At an early hour for the French man of letters Henri Gripes, it was a quarter to nine and an April morning. He sat in a windowless brown painted cubicle facing a slight mop headed young man with horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. The men wore a dark tie with a narrow knot and buttoned up blazer. His signature was O. Poche.\n00:09:46\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHis title on the grubby, pulpy summons Grippes had read sweating was: controller. He must be freshly out of a civil service training school, Grippes guessed. Even his aspect of a priest hearing a confession a few yards from the guillotine seemed newly acquired. Before him lay open a dung-coloured folder with not much in it. A letter from Grippes full of delaying tactics and copies of his correspondence with a bank in California. It was not true that American banks protected a depositor’s secrets. Anyway, this one hadn’t. Another reason Grippes thought O. Poche must be recent was the way he kept blushing. He was not nearly as pale and as case-hardened as Grippes. At this time, President de Gaulle had been in power five years, two of which Grippes spent in blithe writer-in-residence-ship in California.\n00:10:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tReturning to Paris, he had left a bank account behind. It was forbidden under the fifth Republic for a French citizen to have a foreign account. The government might not have cared so much about drachmas or zlotys, but dollars were supposed to be scrapped and converted to francs at bottom rates, and of course counted as personal income. Grippes’ unwise and furtive moves with trifling sums, his somewhat paranoid disagreements with California over exchange, had finally caught the eye of the Bank of France as a glistening minnow might attract a dozing whale. The whale swallowed Grippes, found him too small to matter, and spat him out. Straight into the path of a water ox called Public Treasury Direct Taxation Personal Income. That was Poche. What Poche had to discuss, a translation of Grippes’ novel, the one about the French teacher at the American university and his doomed love affair with his student Karen Sue, seemed to embarrass him. Observing Poche with some curiosity, Grippes saw unreeling scenes from the younger man’s inhibited boyhood.\n00:12:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sensed, then discerned the Catholic boarding school in bleakest, Brittany. The unheated 40 bed dormitory and nightly torment of unchaste dreams with astonishing partners. A daytime terror of real hell with real fire. Human waywardness is hardly new, said Grippes, feeling more and more secure now that he had tested Poche and found him provincial. It no longer shocks anyone. It was not the moral content of the book he wished to talk over, said Poche, flaming. In any case, he was not qualified to do so. He had flubbed philosophy, had never taken modern French thought. He must be new, Grippes decided, he was babbling. Frankly, even though he had the figures in front of him, Poches found it hard to believe the American translation had earned its author so little. There must be another considerable sum placed in some other bank. Perhaps Monsieur Grippes could try and remember.\n00:13:11\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe figures were true. The translation had done poorly. Failure plagued Grippes’ advantage reducing the hint of deliberate tax evasion to a simple oversight. Still, it hurt to have things put so plainly. He felt bound to tell Poche that American readers were no longer interested in the teacher-student embrollio. Though, there had been some slight curiosity as to what a foreigner might wring out of the old sponge. Poche gazed at Grippes. His eyes seem to Grippes as helpless and eager as those of a gun dog waiting for a command. Encouraged, Grippes said more. In writing his novel, he had over the essential development. The airing professor was supposed to come home at the end. He could be half dead limping on crutches. Toothless, jobless, broke, impotent. It didn’t matter. He had to be judged and shriven. As further mortification, his wife during his foolish affair would have gone on to be a world-class cellist under her maiden name.\n00:14:18\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWife had not entered Grippes cast of characters, probably because Poche didn’t have one. He had noticed Poche did not wear a wedding ring. Grippes had just left his professor driving off to an airport in blessed weather, whistling a jaunty air. Poche shook his head. Obviously it was not the language he was after. He began to write in a clean page of the file taking no more notice of Grippes. What a mistake it had been, Grippes reflected, still feeling pain beneath the scar, to have repeated the male teacher-female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Fleaubair, his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. The novel had not done well in France either. Poche still had to get around to that.\n00:15:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe critics had found Karen Sue’s sociological context obscure. She seemed a little removed from events of her time, unaware of improved literacy figures in North Korea. Never once mentioned. Or that since the advent of goalism, it costs 25 centimes to mail a letter. The Pill — that’s the Pill —was still unheard of in much of Europe. Readers could not understand what it was Karen Sue kept forgetting to take, or why Grippes had devoted a contemplated a no-action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. The professor had not given Karen Sue the cultural and political enlightenment one would expect from the graduate of a preeminent Paris school. It was a banal story, really, about a pair of complacently bourgeois lovers. The real victim was Grippes, seduced and abandoned by the American middle-class.\n00:16:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was Grippes’ first outstanding failure, and for that reason, the only one of his works he ever re-read. He could still hear Karen Sue. The true, the original, speaking of every vowel a poignant question. “I’m Karen Sue. I know you’re busy. It’s just that I don’t understand what you said about Flaubert and his young niece.” He would call her with tolerance, the same tolerance that had weakened the book. Grippes was wise enough to realize that the California Bank affair had been an act of folly, a conman’s aberration. He had thought he would get away with it knowing all the while he couldn’t. There existed a deeper treasure for Poche to uncover well below public treasury sites. Computers had not yet come into government use. Even typewriters were rare. Poche had summoned Grippes in a cramped, almost secretive hand. It took time to strike an error, still longer to write a letter about it. In his youth, repaid received from an American patroness of the arts three rent bearing apartments in Paris, which he still owned.\n00:17:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe patronness has had been the last of a generous species, Grippes one of the last young men to benefit from her kind. He collected the rents by devious and untraceable means, stowing the cash obtained in safe deposit. His visible way of life was stoic and plain. Not even the most vigilant controller could fault his under-furnished apartment in Montparnasse shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents. He showed none of the signs of prosperity public treasury seemed to like, such as membership in a golf club. [Aside] And this is not a joke — on French income tax form you’re asked if you belong to a golf club. It puts you in another bracket.\n00:18:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter a minute of speculative anguish and the airless cubicle, Grippes saw that Poche had no inkling whatsoever about the flats. He was chasing something different. The inexistent royalties from the Karen Sue novel. By a sort of divine even handedness, Grippes was going to have to pay for imaginary earnings. He put the safe deposit out of his mind so that it would not show on his face, and said, “What will be left for me when you finished adding and subtracting?” To his surprise, Poche replied in a bold tone, pitched for reciting quotations, “what is left? What is left? Only what remains at low tide when small islands are revealed emerging.” He stopped quoting and flushed. Obviously he had committed the worst sort of blunder, had let his own personality show, had crossed over to his opponents ground.\n00:19:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It sounds familiar,” said Grippes, enticing him further. “Although to tell you the truth, I don’t remember writing it.” “It is a translation,” said Posche. “The Anglo-Saxon British author, Victor Prism.” He pronounced it Priss-um. “You read Prism,” said Grippes, pronouncing correctly, the name of an old acquaintance. “I had to, Pris-sum was on the preparatory program. Anglo-Saxon commercial English. They stuffed you with foreign writers, Sigrid with so many of us having to go to foreign lands for a living.” That was perilous. He had just challenged Poche’s training, the very foundation of his right to sit there reading Grippes his private mail. But he had suddenly recalled his dismay, when as a young man he had looked at a shelf in his room and realized he had to compete with the dead: Proust, Flaubert, Balzack, Scondale, and on into the dark. The rivalry was infinite, a Milky way of dead stars still daring to shine. He had invented a law, a hand on publication that would eliminate the dead, leaving the skies clear for the living.\n00:20:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAll the living? Grippes still couldn’t decide. Foreign writers would be deported to a remote solar system where they could circle one another. For Prism, there was no system sufficiently remote. Not long ago, interviewed in “The Listener,” Prism had dragged in Grippes saying that he used to cross the channel to consult a sear in Halfmoon Street, hurrying home to sit down the prose revealed from a spirit universe. Sometimes I actually envied him, Prism was quoted as saying. He sounded as though Grippes were dead. I used to wish ghost voices would speak to me too, suggesting ribbons of pure prism running like ticker-tape round the equator of a crystal ball. Unfortunately, I had to depend on my own creative intelligence, modest though I’m sure it was.\n00:21:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not know about this recent libel in Anglo-Saxon commercial English. He had been trying to be nice. Grippes made a try of his own. “I only meant you could have been reading me!” The trouble was that he meant it ferociously. Poche must’ve heard the repressed shout. He shucked the file and said, “this is too complex for my level I shall have to send it up to the inspector.” Grippes made a vow that he would never let natural peak get the better of him again. “What will be left for me?” Grippes asked the inspector, “when you have finished adding and subtracting.” Madam De Pelle did not bother to look up. She said “somebody should have taken this file in hand a long time ago. Let us start at the beginning. How long were you out of the country?” When Poche said send up, he’d meant it literally. Grippes looked out on a church where Delacroix had worked in the slow summer rain.\n00:22:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt the far end of the square a few dark shops displayed joyfully trashy religious goods. Like the cross set with tiny seashells Madame De Pelle wore round her neck. Grippes had been raised in an anti-clerical household in a small town, where posing factions were grouped behind the schoolmaster, his father, and the parish priest. Women, lapsed agnostics, sometimes crossed enemy lines and started going to church. One glimpsed them in grey creeping along a grey-walled street. You were free to lodge a protest against the funds said Madame De Pelle, but if you lose the contestation your fine will be tripled. That is the law. Grippes decided that he would transform Madam De Pelle into the manager of a brothel catering to the foreign legion, slovenly in her habits, and addicted to chloroform. But he found the idea unpromising. In due course, he paid a monstrous penalty, which he did not contest, for fear of drawing attention to the three apartments.\n00:23:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was still believed he had stashed away millions from the Karen Sue book, probably in Switzerland. As summons addressed by old Poche’s shrunken hand the following spring showed Grippes he had been tossed back downstairs. After that, he forgot about Madam Dupel except now and then. It was at about this time that a series of novels offered themselves to Grippes, shadowy outlines behind a frosted glass pane. He knew he must not let them crowd in altogether or keep them waiting too long. His foot against the door, he admitted one by one, a number of shadows that turned into young men, each bringing his own name and address, his native region of France portrayed on coloured postcards, and an index of information about his tastes in clothes, love, food, and philosophers. His bent of character, his ticks of speech, his attitudes to God and money, his political bias, and the intimation of a crisis about to explode under foot.\n00:24:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAntoine provided a Jesuit confessor, a homosexual affinity, and loss of faith. Spiritual shilly-shallying runs long. Antoine’s covered more than 600 pages making it the thickest work in the Grippes canon. Then came Thomas with his spartan mother and a Provisal fruit farm rejected in favour of a civil service career. Bertrand followed adrift in frivolous Paris tempted by neo fascism in the form of a woman wearing a bed jacket trimmed with Marabou. Renee cycled round France reading Chateau Brianne when he stopped to rest. One morning, he set fire to the bar and he’d been sleeping in leaving his books to burn. This was the shortest to the novels and the most popular with the young. One critic scolded Grippes for using crude symbolism. Another begged him to stop hiding behind Antoine and Renee, and to take up the metaphysical risk of revealing Henri. But Grippes had tried that once with Karen Sue, then with a roman a clef mercifully destroyed in the confusion of May, 1968.\n00:25:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe took these contretemps for a sign that he was to leave the subjective Grippes alone. The fact that each novel appeared even to Grippes to be a slice of French writing about life as it had been carved up and served the generation before made it seem quietly insurrectional. Nobody was doing this now. No one but Grippes. Grippes for a time uneasy, decided to go on letting the shadows in. The announcement of a new publication would bring a summons from Poche. When Poche leaned over the file now, Grippes saw amid the mop of curls at coin-size tonsure. His diffedent steely questions tried to elicit from Grippes how many novels were likely to be sold and where Grippes had already put the money. Grippes would give him a copy of the book inscribed. Poche would turn back the cover, glance at the signature to make certain Grippes had not written something compromising and friendly.\n00:26:53\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe kept the novels in a metal locker fastened together with government issue webbing tape and a military looking buckle. It troubled Grippes to think of his work all in a bundle in the dark. He thought of old fashioned milestones, half hidden by weeds. The volumes marked time for Poche too. He was still a controller. Perhaps he had to wait for the woman upstairs to retire so he could take over her title. The cubicle needed paint. There was a hole in the brown linoleum just inside the door. Poche now wore a wedding ring. Grippes wondered if he should congratulate him, but decided to let Poche mention the matter first. Grippes could swear that in his string of novels, nothing had been chipped out of his own past. Antoine, Thomas, Bertrand, Renee and by now Clement, Didier, Laurent, Hughes and Yves had arrived as strangers, almost like historical figures. At the same time, it seemed to Grippes that their wavering ruffled reflection should deliver something he might recognize.\n00:27:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWhat did he see bending over the pond of his achievement? He saw a character close mouthed, cautious, unimaginative, ill at ease, obsessed with particulars. Worse, he was closed against progress, afraid of reform, shut into a literary reactionary France. How could this be? Grippes had always insincerely voted left. He had proved he could be reckless, open-minded, indulgent. He was like a father gazing around the breakfast table suddenly realizing none of the children are his. His children, if he could call them that, did not even look like him. From Antoine to Eve, his reflected character was small and slight with a mop of curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. Grippes believed in the importance of errors. No political system, no love affair, no native inclination, no life itself would be tolerable without a wide mesh for mistakes to slip through. It pleased him that public treasury had never caught up with the three apartments. Not just for the sake of the cash piling up and safe deposit, but for the black hole of error revealed. He and Poche had been together for some years.\n00:29:22\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAnother blunder, usually controller and taxpayer were torn apart after a meeting or two so that the revenue service would not start taking into consideration the client’s aged indigent aunt, his bill for dental surgery, his alimony payments, his perennial mortgage. But, possibly, no one except Poche could be bothered with Grippes, always making some time-wasting claim for my new professional expenses, backed by a messy looking certified receipt. Sometimes Grippes dared believe Poche admired him, that he hung onto the dossier out of devotion to his books. This conceit was intensified when Poche began calling him maitre. Once, Grippes won some city of Paris award and was shown shaking hands with the mayor and simultaneously receiving a long cheque-filled envelope. Promptly summoned by Poche, expecting a discreet compliment, Grippes found him interested only in the caption under the photo, which made much of the size of the cheque. Grippes later thought of sending a sneering letter, “Thank you for your warm congratulations,” but he decided in time it was wiser not to fool with Poche. Poche had recently given him a 33% personal exemption. 3% more than the outer limit for Grippes category of unsalaried earners. According to Poche, a group that included as well as authors, door-to-door salesmen and prostitutes. The dung coloured Gaulist-era jacket on Grippes’ file had worn out long ago and being replaced in 1969 by a cover in cool banker’s green — that is with the advent of a Pompidou who had been connected with a bank — green presently made way for a shiny black and white marbled effect, reflecting the mood of opulence of the early ‘70s Called in for his annual springtime confession, Grippes remarked about the folder, “Culture seems to have taken a decisive turn.”\n00:31:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not ask what culture. He continued, bravely, ” Food for the cats. They depend on me.” said Grippes, but they had ready, settled the cats as dependents. And for all Poche drooped over Grippes is smudged and unreadable figures. Grippes tried to count the number of times you’d examine the top of Poches’ head. He still knew nothing about him, except for the wedding ring. Somewhere along the way, Poche had tied himself to a need for retirement pay and rich exemptions of his own. In the language of his generation, Poche was a “fully structured individual”. His vocabulary was sparse and to the point, centered on a single topic. His state training school, the machine that ground out pelles and Poches all sounding alike, was in Clermont-Ferrand. Grippes was born in the same region. That might’ve given something else, them —excuse me —something else to talk about. Except that Grippes had never been back. Structured Poche probably attended class reunions as godfather to classmates, children jotted their birthdays in a leather covered notebook he never mislaid.\n00:33:01\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tUnstructured Grippes could not even remember his own age. Poche turned over a sheet of paper, read something Grippes could not see, and said, automatically, “We can’t”. “Nothing is ever as it was,” said Grippes, still going on about the marbled effect folder. It was a remark that usually shut people up, leaving them nowhere to go but a change of subject. Besides, it was true. Nothing can be as it was. Poche and Grippes had just lost a terrifying number of brain cells. They were an instant closer to death. Death was of no interest to Poche. If he ever thought he might cease to exist, he would stop concentrating on other people’s business and get down to reading Grippes while there was still time. Grippes wanted to ask, “Do you ever imagine your own funeral?” But it might’ve been taken as a threatening, gangsterish hint from taxpayer to controller. Worse, far worse than an attempted bribe. Folders of a pretty mottled peach shade appeared — that accompanied [inaudible] rain.\n00:34:10\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche’s cubicle was painted soft beige. The torn linoleum repaired. Poche sat in a comfortable armchair remember—resembling the wide leather seats and smart furniture stores at the upper end of Boulevard St. Germain. Grippes had a new straight metallic chair that shot him bolt upright and hurt his spine. It was the heyday of the Giscardian period, when it seemed more important to keep the buttons polished than to watch where the regiment was heading. Grippes and Poche had not advanced one inch toward each other. Except for the paint and the chairs and maitre, it could have been 1963. No matter how many works were added to the bundle in the locker, no matter how often Grippes had his picture taken, no matter how many Grippes’ paperbacks blossomed on airport bookstalls, Grippes to Poche remained a button.\n00:35:07\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe mottled peach jacket began to darken and fray. Poche said to Grippes, ” I asked you to come here, maitre, because we have overlooked something concerning your income”. Grippes’ heart gave a lurch. “The other day, I came across an old ruling about royalties. How much of your income do you kick back?”\n00:35:29\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Excuse me?”\n00:35:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“To publishers to bookstores,” said Poche. “How much?”\n00:35:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Kickback?”\n00:35:35\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“What percentage?” said Poche, “Publishers, printers?”\n00:35:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“You mean”, said Grippes, after a time, “how much do I pay editors to edit, publishers to publish, printers to print, and booksellers to sell?” He supposed that to Poche such a scheme might sound plausible. It would fit his long view over Grippes’ untidy life. Grippes knew most of the literary gossip that went round about himself. The circle was so small, it had to come back. In most stories, there was a virus of possibility, but he had never heard anything as absurd as this or as base.\n00:36:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche opened the file, concealing the moldering cover, apparently waiting for Grippes to mention a figure. The nausea Grippes felt he put down to his having come here without breakfast. One does not insult a controller. He had shouted silently at Poche years before and had been sent upstairs to do penance with Madame Dupell. It is not good to kick over a chair and stalk out. “I have never been so insulted!” might have no meaning from Grippes, keelhauled month after month in some lumpy review. As his works increased from bundled to heap, so they drew intellectual abuse. He welcomed partisan ill treatment as warming to him as popular praise. “Don’t forget me,” Grippes silently prayed, standing at the periodicals table of La Hune, the left bank bookstore, looking for his own name and those quarterlies no one ever takes home. “Don’t praise me. Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m dead.”\n00:37:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tBut even the most sour and despairing and close-printed essays were starting to mutter acclaim. The shoreline of the ‘80s, barely in sight, was ready to welcome Grippes, who had re-established the male as hero, whose left wing heartbeat could be heard loyally thumping behind the armor of his right wing traditional prose. His re-established hero had curly hair, soft eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, dimples, and a fully structured life. He was pleasing to both sexes and to every type of reader, except for a few thick-ribbed louts. Grippes looked back at Poche, who did not know how closely they were bound. What if he were to say, “this is a preposterous insinuation, a blot on a noble profession and on my reputation in particular,” only to have Poche answer, “too bad maitre, I was trying to help.” He said as one good natured fellow to another, “well, what if I own up to this crime?”\n00:38:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It’s no crime,” said Poche.” I simply add the amount to your professional expenses. “To my rebates?” said Grippes. “To my exemption?” “Depends how much.” “At third of my income!” said Grippes, insanely. “Half!” “Ohhh—reasonable figure might be 12 and a half percent.” All this for Grippes. Poche wanted nothing. Grippes considered with awe the only incorruptible element in a porous society. No secret message had passed between them. He could not even invite Poche to lunch. He wondered if this arrangement had ever actually existed. If there could possibly be a good dodge that he, Grippes, had never even heard of. He thought of contemporary authors for whose success there was no other explanation. It had to be celestial playfulness or 12 and a half percent. The structure, as Grippes is already calling it, might also just be Poches innocent indecent idea about writers.\n00:39:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche was reading the file again, though he must have known everything in it by heart. He was as absorbed as contented and somehow as pure as a child with a box of paints. At any moment, he would raise his tender bewildered eyes and murmur,”four dozen typewriter ribbons and a third of the fiscal year, Maitre we can’t. Grippes tried to compose a face for Poche to encounter. A face above reproach. But writers, considered above reproach, always looked moody and haggard, about to scream. “Be careful,” he was telling himself, “don’t let Poche think he’s doing you a favour.” These people set traps. Was Poche angling for something? Was this bait? Attempting to bribe a public servant. The accusation was called. Bribe wasn’t the word. It was corruption the law mentioned; an attempt to corrupt. All Grippes had ever offered Poche were his own books formally inscribed, as though Poche were an anonymous reader standing in line in a bookstore where Grippes wedged behind a shaky table sat signing away.\n00:40:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Your name?” ” Whose name?” “How do you spell your name?” “Oh, the book isn’t for me. It’s for a friend of mine.” His look changed one of severity and impatience until he remembered that Poche had never asked him to sign anything. He had never concealed his purpose: to pluck from Grippes’ bright plumage every bright feather he could find. “Careful,” Grippes repeated, “careful. Remember what happened to Prism. Victor Prism, keeping pale under a parasol on the beach at Torremolinos, had made the acquaintance of a fellow Englishman. Pleasant, not well-educated, but eager to learn, blistered shoulders, shirt draped over his head, pages of the Sunday Express around his red thighs. Prism lent him something to read because his sunburn was keeping him awake. It was a creative essay on three emigre authors of the 1930s in the reviews so obscure and ill-paying that Prism had not bothered to include the fee on his income tax return.\n00:41:42\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPrism had got it all wrong, of course. Putting Thomas Mann to die in the charity ward of Paris hospital, sending Stefan Swag to be photographed with movie stars in California, and having Bertolt Brecht, who’s playing name Prism could not spell, win the Nobel Prize and savour a respected old age in a suburb of Zurich. As it turned out, none of Prism’s readers knew the difference. Prism might’ve got off with the whole thing if his new friend had not fallen sound asleep after the first lines. Waking refreshed, he had said to himself, “I must find out what they get paid for this stuff.” A natural reflex, he was at the inland revenue. He’d found no trace, no record. For inland revenue purposes death and exile did not exist. The subsequent fine was so heavy and Prism’s disgrace so acute, that he fled England to spend a few days with Grippes and the cats in Montparnasse.\n00:42:44\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sat in a kitchen chair while Grippes, nose and mouth protected by a checked scarf, sprayed terrored cockroaches. Prism weeping in the fumes — prism, excuse me, pronouncing it in French! — Prism weeping in the fumes, wiping his eyes, said, “I’m through with queen and country!” — something like that — “And I’m taking out French citizenship tomorrow.” “You would have to marry a French woman and have five male children,” said Grippes through the scarf. He was feeling the patriotic hatred of a driver on a crowded road seeing foreign license plates in the way. “Oh, well then.” Said Prism, as if to say, “I won’t bother.”\n00:43:26\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Oh, well then.” Said Grippes, softly, not quite to Poche. Poche added one last thing to the file and closed it, as if something definite had taken place. He clasped his hands and placed them on the dosier. It seemed shut for all time now, like a grave. He said, “Maitre, one never stays long in the same fiscal theater. I have been in this one for an unusual length of time. We may not meet again. I want you to know I have enjoyed our conversations.” “So have I,” said Grippes with caution. “Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time.”\n00:44:09\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s 2021 again. And at this point, the cassette holding Gallant’s reading needs to be flipped. The recording on Side A has neatly stopped after Poche’s comment, and the tape now has 12 blank seconds before it ends. We’re none of us listening to this reading by playing a physical cassette, but at this pause where I had to close the digital file with the recording of Side A and open the digital file for the recording of Side B, we were made aware of physical limitations of the cassette holding the recording that resides in the SFU archives. If you were listening to a physical copy of this cassette on an old tape player, you would be pressing the eject button to open the little plastic door, pulling the tape free, flipping it, and inserting it again, before closing the door with its soft click.\n00:44:49\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd here time grows fuzzy. We’re listening to Gallant reading in 1984, not reading her work from a page. And that brings with it an altered experience of “Grippes and Poche”. We can hear Gallant’s inflections, her commentary that doesn’t appear in print, the audience’s laughter, all the evidence alive event. We don’t see the New Yorker cartoons on every page, or Roberta Spear’s poem “Diving for Atlantis”, which appears halfway through, or the traditional New Yorker layout that looks much the same for short stories printed in the magazine today…which makes Gallant print publication in 1982 less obviously indicative of its age than the cassette recording of her reading in 1984. Even the recording itself asks us to consider the circumstances of its creation more than 30 years ago. The 12 second pause following Poche’s complete comment suggests interference by a critical editor or recorder of the reading, someone as aware as we are of the necessity to flip the tape from Side A to Side B and aware, too, of how moving from the end of one complete sentence to the beginning of another is a very different experience than hearing only the first half of a sentence and having to fumble your way towards the second.\n00:45:51\tKandice Sharren:\tThe fact that this break does not occur mid-sentence made us suspect that the recording may have been transferred from reel-to-reel. Although our attempts to learn more about how this reading was recorded turned up little solid information, they did draw our attention to a piece of SFU trivia: that many of the events held at SFU during this period were recorded by the highly regarded Vancouver-based recording engineer, Kurtis Vanel. While we have been unable to turn up definitive evidence about who recorded Gallant, our deep dive into SFU’s AV history served as an important reminder of the often unseen human hands that shape archival materials. Conversely, the unanswerable questions this break raises reminds us of the fragmentary nature of the archive as theorized by Diana Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire. No document, whether paper or sound, can fully capture a live lived event or practice. It is with these considerations of time and form that we return to 1984, to Gallant’s reading, where her voice is shaping the story. And we’re Poche has just told Grippes that…\n00:46:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time —” [Sound Effect: Cassette Tape Deck Open and Close] “So you have read them,” said Grippes, with an eye on the locker. “Why, I read those I bought,” said Poche. “But they’re the same books.” “No. One book belongs to me. The other was a gift. I would never open the gift. I have no right to.” His voice rose and he spoke more slowly. In one of them when what’s-his-name struggles to prepare his civil service tests —and now he quotes something, presumably from one of the books — “the desire for individual glory seemed so acquisite suddenly in a nature given to renunciation.” “I suppose it is a remarkable observation”, said Grippes. “I was not referring to myself.” He had no idea what that could be from and he was certain he’d never written it.\n00:47:56\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not send for Grippes again. Grippes became a commonplace taxpayer filling out his forms without help. The frosted glass door was reverting to dull white. There were fewer shadows for Grippes to let in. A new French fashion for having well-behaved Nazi officers shore up Western culture gave Grippes a chance to turn Poche into a tuberculer poet trapped in Pari, by poverty and the occupation. Grippes throughout the first draft in which Poche joined a Christian-minded resistance network and performed a few simple miracles. Unaware of his own powers, he had the instinctive feeling that a new generation would not know what he was talking about. Instead, he placed Poche sniffling and wheezing in a squalid hotel room, cough drops spilled on the table, a stained blanket pinned around his shoulders. Up the feeted staircase came a handsome German colonel, a Kurt Juergen’s type smelling of shaving lotion, bent on saving liberal values, bringing Poche buttered cognac, and a thousand sheets of writing paper.\n00:49:09\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter that Grippes no longer felt sure where to go. His earlier books, government tape and buckle binding them into an oeuvre, had accompanied Poche to his new fiscal theatre. Perhaps, finding his career blocked by the woman upstairs, he had asked for early retirement. Poche must be in a gangster-ridden Mediterranean city, occupying a shoddy boom period apartment he’d spent 20 years paying for. He was working at black market jobs, tax advisor to the local mayor, a small innocent cog in the regional mafia. After lunch, Poche would sit in one of those Southern balconies that hold just a deck chair, rereading in chronological order all Grippes’ books. In the late afternoon, blinds drawn, Poche totted up mafia accounts by a chink of light. Meanwhile, Grippes was here in Montparnasse facing a flat, white, glass door. He continued to hand himself a 45 and a half percent personal exemption.\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe astonishing 33, plus the unheard of 12 and a half. No one seemed to mind. No shabby envelope holding an order for execution came in the mail. Sometimes in Grippes’ mind, a flicker of common sense flamed like revealed truth. The exemption was an error. Public treasury was now tiptoeing toward computers. The computer brain was bound to wince at Grippes and stop functioning until the Grippes exemption was settled. Grippes rehearsed: “I was seriously misinformed”. He had to go farther and farther abroad to find offal for the cats. One tripe dealer had been turned into a driving school. Another sold secondhand clothes. Returning on a winter evening after a long walk ,carrying the parcel of sheep’s lung wrapped in a newspaper, he crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse just as the lights went on. The urban moonrise. The street was a dream street, faces flat white in the winter mist.\n00:51:20\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt seemed Grippes that he had crossed over to the 1980s, had only just noticed the new decade. In a recess between two glassed-in sidewalk cafes, four plain clothes cops were beating up a pair of pickpockets. Nobody had to explain the scene to Grippes, he knew what it was about. One prisoner already wore handcuffs. Customers in the far side of the glass gave no more than a glance. When they got the handcuffs on the second man, the cops pushed the two into the entrance of Grippes’ apartment building to await the police van. Grippes shuffled into a cafe. He put his parcel of lights on the zinc-top bar and started to read an article on the wrapping. Somewhat unknown to him, a new name, pursued an old grievance. “Why don’t they write about real life anymore?” “Because to depict life is to attract it’s ill-fortune,” Grippes replied.\n00:52:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe stood, sipping coffee, staring at nothing. Four gun-bearing young men in jeans and leather jackets were not final authority. Final authority was something written. The printed word. Even when the word was mistaken. The simplest final authority in Grippes’ life had been O. Poche. What must’ve happened was this: Poche, wishing to do honour to a category that included writers, prostitutes, and door-to-door salesmen, had read and misunderstood a note about royalties. It must’ve been in italics at the foot of the page. He had transformed his mistake into a regulation and it never looked at the page again. Grippes climbed three flights of dirty wooden stairs to Madam DuPell’s office — I have an editorial query here: Is he imagining this? Yes. [Laughs] These are proofs. — He observed the small— the seashell crucifix and a broach he had not noticed the first time: a silver fawn curled up as nature had never planned. A boneless fawn. Squinting, Madam DuPell peered at the old dung-coloured Gaullist-era file.\n00:53:33\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe put her hand over a page, as though Grippes were trying to read upside down, and said, “It has all got to be paid back”. “I was seriously misinformed!” Grippes intended to answer. Willing to see Poche disgraced, ruined, jailed. “I followed instructions. I am innocent!” But Poche had vanished leaving Grippes with a lunatic exemption, three black market income-bearing apartments he had recently unsuccessfully tried to sell, and a heavy reputation for male-oriented, left feeling, right thinking books. This reputation Grippes thought he could no longer sustain. A socialist government was, at last, in place. Hence his hurry about unloading the flats and his difficulty in finding takers. He wondered about the new file covers. Pink? Too fragile. Look what happened with the mottled peach. Strong denim blue, the shade standing for giovinezza workers overalls. It was no time for a joke, not even a private one. No one could guess what would be wanted now in the way of literary entertainment.\n00:54:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe fitfulness of voters is such that having got the government they wanted, they were now reading nothing but the right-wing press. Perhaps it’s steady right-wing heartbeat ought to set the cadence for a left-wing outlook, with a complex bravely conservative heroine contained within the slippery, but unyielding walls of left-wings style. He would have to come to terms with the rightest way of considering female characters. There seemed to be two methods, neither of which suited Grippes’ temperament. Treat her disgustingly, then cry all over the page, or admire and respect her. She is the equal at least of a horse. The only woman his imagination offered with some insistence, was no use to him. She moved quietly on a winter evening to St. Nicolai du Chardonnay, the rebel church at the lower end of Boulevarde St. Germaine —that is the conservative-led church— where services were still conducted in Latin.\n00:55:58\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe wore a hat ornamented with an ivory arrow, and a plain gray coat, tubular in shape, and a narrow fur collar. Kid gloves were tucked under the handle of her sturdy leather purse. She had never heard of video games, push button telephones, dishwashers, frozen fileted sole, computer horoscopes. She entered the church and knelt down and brought out her rosary, oval pearls strung on thin gold. Nobody saw rosaries anymore. They were not even in the windows of the traditional venue across the square from the tax bureau. Believers went in for different articles now. Cherub candles, quick prayers, and plastic cards. Her iron meekness resisted change. She prayed constantly into the past. Grippes knew that one view of the past is just as misleading as speculation about the future. It was one of the few beliefs he would’ve gone to the stake for.\n00:56:55\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe was praying to a mist, to mist-shrouded figures. She persisted in seeing clearly. He could see the woman, but he could not approach her. Perhaps he could get away with dealing with her from a distance. All that was really needed for a sturdy right-wing novel was its pessimistic rhythm. And then, and then, and then, and death. Grippes had that rhythm. It was in his footsteps coming up the stairs after the departure of the police van, turning the key in his triple- bolted front door. And then, and then, the cats padding and mewing, not giving Grippes time to take off his coat as they made for their empty dishes on the kitchen floor. Behind the gas stove, a beleaguered garrison of cockroaches got ready for the evening sortie. Grippes would be waiting, his face half-veiled with a checked scarf. In St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, the woman shut her missal got off—off her knees scorning to brush her coat.\n00:57:59\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe went out to the street, proud of the dust marks, letting the world know she still prayed the old way. She escaped him. He had no idea what she had on besides the hat and coat. Nobody else wore a hat with an ivory arrow or tubular coat or a scarf that looked like a weasel biting its tail. He could not see what happened when she took the hat and coat off, what her hair was like. If she hung the coat in a whole closet that also contained umbrellas, a carpet sweeper, and a pile of old magazines. If she put the hat in a box and a shelf. She moved off in a gray blur. There was a streaming window between them Grippes could not wipe clean. Probably, she entered a dark dining room, fake Henri Quatre buffet — [Aside] that means something especially hideous —bottles of pills next to the oil and vinegar cruets.\n00:58:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLace tablecloth folded over the back of a chair, just oil cloth spread for the family meal. What could he do with such a woman? He could not tell who was waiting for her or what she would eat for supper. He could not even guess her name. She revealed nothing, would never help. Grippes expelled the cats, shut the kitchen window, and dealt with the advanced guard from behind the stove. What he needed now was despair and excitement, a new cat and mouse chase. What good was a computer that never caught anyone out. After airing the kitchen and clearing it of poison, Grippes let the cats in. He swept up the bodies of his victims and set them down the ancient cast-iron shoot. He began to talk to himself as he often did now. First he said a few sensible things, then he heard his voice with a new elderly quaver to it, virtuousand mean. “After all it doesn’t take much to keep me happy.”\n00:59:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tNow that was untrue. And he had no reason to say it. Is that what I’m going to be like now? He wondered. Is this the new era Grippes? Pinch-mouthed? It was exactly the sort of thing that a woman in the dining room might say. The best thing that could happen to him would be shock. A siege of terror. A knock at the door. A registered letter with fearful news. It would sharpen his humour, strengthen his own private, eccentric heart. It would keep him from making remarks in his solitude that were meaningless and false. He could perhaps write an anonymous letter saying that the famous author Henri Grippes was guilty of tax evasion of the most repulsive kind. He was moreover a callous landlord who had never been known to replace a door knob. Fortunately, he saw he was not yet that mad. Nor did he really need to be scared and obsessed. He had got the woman from church to the dining room and he would keep her there, trapped, cornered, threatened, watched until she yielded to Grippes and told her name. As in his several incarnations good Poche had always done. [Audience Applause] [Begin Music: Accordion]\n01:01:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Piano and Strings] In the June episode of this podcast, we’ll be returning to Mavis Gallant’s reading of this story in an attempt to reconstruct this event from the surviving archival and textual materials, as well as the fallible recesses of human memory. This episode had us thinking about the many connections visible in the archival recording of the reading between the story itself and Gallant’s storytelling, between Gallant’s voice and the clarity of the recording and the hands that shaped it during the recording, editing, and archival processes. In June, we’ll be thinking about these connections in terms of what they can tell us about the event itself. We’d love to hear from our listeners about what caught your attention and what questions you have about Gallant’s reading on February 14th, 1984 at Simon Fraser University.\n01:02:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n01:02:16\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb [Music Begins: Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod mini stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9285","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E7, Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word, 5 April 2021, Fong and O'Driscoll"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/1856e0ce-b7c4-459b-a647-fda358f5396a/audio/784305a8-060a-4ebe-8a56-4876884a0869/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"56,532,367 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The following are Creative Commons attribution licenses\\n\\nTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray (Old phonograph “Cabaret”)\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Take_Me_to_the_Cabaret\\n\\nNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Night_on_the_Docks_-_Sax\\n\\nBlur the World by Tagirijus\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Manuel_Senfft/Easy_2018/manuel_senfft_-_blur_the_world\\n\\nQueer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta \\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta/unlikely_objects/07_-_isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta_-_unlikely_objects_objetos_improvveis_-_queer_noise\\n\\nThe following are spoken word performance clips\\n\\nMathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, courtesy of recordist.\\n\\n“Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen, courtesy of Radiofreerainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books. \\n\\nHartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, courtesy of The People and the Text, \\n\\nT.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at Edgy Women Festival, courtesy of performer.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549498101760,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode is a series of interviews with Humanities scholars Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L. Cowan about their approaches to the ethics of listening in their own research. We join Deanna Fong and Mike O’Driscoll as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Alberta), with additional audio courtesy of the radiofreerainforest Fonds at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections; the Hartmut Lutz Collection, made digitally available by the SSHRC-funded People and the Text project (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/); and support from Jason Camlot, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, and Judith Burr. Special thanks to Deanna Reder and Alix Shield of The People and the Text Project, and to Mathieu Aubin, bill bissett, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Campbell, and T.L. Cowan for permission to share interview and performance audio. \n\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tHi! Hannah McGregor here. Before we get into our episode today, I want to tell you about our new partner podcast [Start Music] , New Aural Cultures: The Podcast Studies Podcast. If you like the sound studies episodes of SpokenWeb, you’ll love this in-depth but accessible take on podcasting culture with hosts, Dr. Dario Linares, featuring interviews with internationally renowned podcast producers, academics, and critics, New Aural Cultures delves into the medium in all its complexity. New Aural Cultures is also a distribution network for one-off podcasts, ongoing series, and sound-based projects of all kinds. If you have a sound based project or idea that you think would lend itself to becoming a podcast, reach out on Twitter @NewAural, that’s aural as in A-U-R-A-L. To listen to the show, head over to anchor.fm/NewAuralCultures or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll even hear episodes featuring SpokenWeb members like Stacey Copeland, Jason Camlot, and me! And now onto our episode. [End Music]\n \n\n01:30\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWord Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What does ethical mean to you? Perhaps you took an ethics course in school where they taught you about Aristotle or Kant, about ethics as a system of rules or theories concerned with what is good for individuals in society. O.r perhaps ethical is something tied more to the way you live each day, your interactions with loved ones and strangers, your choices in what food to buy or political cause to support. But how does ethics apply to the way we listen? And in particular, the way we listen to the spoken word? Poet Robert Duncan once described himself as a poet who “listens as his poetry pictures his listening”. A reminder that poetry is, in its first instance, a record of sonic performance, an artistic practice that takes place as much on the stage in front of a listening audience, as on the page. What’s more, poetic performance is at its heart about attunement and attention. About a response, or a responsibility, to the world enacted through sound. We can think of listening as ethics or “po-ethics”, as the composer John Cage often said. In this episode, we joined SpokenWeb contributors, Deanna Fong, and Mike O’Driscoll, as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them. Here is Deanna and Mike [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] with “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n04:01\tMusic:\t“Take Me to the Cabaret” by Billy Murray\n04:16\tDeanna Fong:\t[Continue Music] Hi, I’m Deanna Fong.\n \n\n04:16\tMike O’Driscoll:\tAnd I’m Mike O’Driscoll. In her book The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, Gemma Corradi Fiumara remarks that genuine listening creates ever new spaces in the very place it is carried out. We’d add, it’s a site for the emergence of something radically new. [End Music] New forms of care, new ways of relating to our environments and to each other. Like her, we believe that listening is a revolutionary activity.\n \n\n04:48\tDeanna Fong:\tOver the next hour, we will introduce you to four speakers who cultivate that creative space of listening in their practice: T.L. Cowan, Mathieu Aubin, Treena Chambers, and Clint Burnham. Each introduces us to a sound recording that is important to their work and takes us through what attentive, ethical listening means to them. As you listen to this podcast, we invite you to be attuned to your own listening by considering the following questions. What are you listening for in the space of this podcast? At what points is your attention fixed and at what points does it wander? What is the material situation of your listening? Where does it take place? What else is going on? How does listening feel in your body?\n \n\n05:30\tMike O’Driscoll:\tBy giving special attention to these cues, we hope that this episode will prompt you to reflect on your own ethics of listening by considering how you listen and what is important to you when encountering the spoken word and other sounds.\n \n\n05:47\tDeanna Fong:\tI’m going to guess that when most of us imagine what listening sounds like, we imagine nothing at all. Silence. But for queer cabaret performer and professional spokeslady Trixie Cane, also known as Professor T.L. Cowan, it sounds a lot more like this.\n \n\n06:02\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tIt’s not too late. You can [Audience Laughter] eat me today. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n06:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tHi T.L. Thanks for joining us today. Can you begin by telling us a bit more about that clip and why it’s important to you?\n \n\n06:38\tT.L Cowan:\tSure. Thanks. And thanks for having me. This is just fabulous. This was my performance at the final cabaret of the Edgy Women Festival, which was a festival of feminist performance –performance art that was organized and curated by a really awesome person named Miriam Zenith GA in Montreal from 1994 to 2016. So a 22 year run of this feminist performance festival. And so this was the very last show of that festival and it was called Left Fe and the cabaret was hosted by Edgy Women superstars, Dana McLeod and Natalie Clode, and the festival or the cabaret itself was a kind of funeral awake and a celebration of life of The Edgy Women Festival. And Natalie and Dana as the hosts took us through the stages of grief. So I was invited and commissioned –invited to perform, commissioned to make a piece.\n \n\n07:35\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so I was performing as my alter ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane. And Mrs. Trixie Cane is –she’s a character who I perform in drag. And she is a professional spokeslady, and I was performing alongside my partner Jazz Rock, who is a very good cello player. And Jazz and I play together as a duo called Mrs. Trixie Cane and Her Handsome Cellist. And it was called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. That was the title of the performance. But what you’re listening to now is the very end of that performance. And this was happening at the Leon D’or Cabaret in Montreal.\n \n\n08:20\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tHi. [Audience Laughter] I’m Trixie King. [Audience Laughter] I’m here tonight to talk to you about an exciting new fundraising initiative called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. [Audience Laughter] Or, “EW-MILF-PAPT-GO-OFFE.” [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:06\tT.L Cowan:\tSo that clip is important to me because I have been a performer for many, many years, and I’ve performed in lots of different kinds of venues, but, the thing that I have found the most remarkable about a performance life is when it feels like the audience is just really picking up what you’re putting down and that they’re like, they’re in it, they’re listening, they’re following along. They get all of the stuff that you’re trying to do with your look, with your gestures, with your texts, with your movement, with your sexy cellist – all of those kinds of things. And when you’re a feminist performance artist, it’s not that often in the world that you feel “gotten” that you feel like people really get what you’re doing. Usually, in my professional life, I always kind of joke that I feel like I’m the fire-breathing lesbian in every in every professional meeting, for example.\n \n\n10:09\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so, usually the way –our ways of being in the world are kind of at a weird raw angle to a kind of mainstream straight non-feminists way of doing things. And so, when we bring our performance selves into these spaces and get that kind of applause, it’s like the best mental health medicine ever. Because it’s a moment where you feel seen and heard, understood and that you share a sense of set of references and that you share a set of aesthetics and understandings [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] and that people get what you’re doing.\n \n\n10:54\tDeanna Fong:\tThis reminds me of your recent article on the avidly channel of the LA Review of Books, which is a great series, right? It’s writing with intense eagerness [Laughs] and that essay, “Holding for Applause: On Queer Cabaret in Pandemic Times”, you wrote –there’s a quote here: “Applause is necessary. It makes us feel seen and arguably safe, loved. Applause is the audio equivalent of the sweaty crush upon crush, a bodily affirmation that you can hear. ” And I love that implication of like the sonic importance of applause there. So – how does applause and all of the other sort of like audio accoutrement of heckling and cheering and callback and all these sorts of things – how in your mind does that relate to an ethics of listening in the context of live cabaret performance?\n \n\n11:43\tT.L Cowan:\tWell kind of coming back to what I was saying earlier about the applause that I got for that – my Edgy Woman performance in 2016, I would say that that kind of applause indicates that the audience was paying attention. And that you have not been ignored. You’ve not been dismissed, you’ve not been overshadowed, you’ve not been written off as the kind of flamey queer in the room. Or as I said earlier, that like kind of fire-breathing lesbian in the room, or the angry feminist or whatever it is. But instead by bringing those elements to the stage, and bringing them into that trans feminist performance scene that you are –and telling your stories – that you’re taking a risk to a certain extent, right? That you are hoping that the audience will love what you’re doing, that they will pick up what you’re putting down.\n \n\n12:41\tT.L Cowan:\tBut you never really know. So it’s always a risk. You’re always making yourself vulnerable. And trans, feminist, and queer people know the experience of vulnerability and risk so well because almost anytime that we are ourselves, that we’re not kind of a muted down version of ourselves, in the ways that we need to mute ourselves to generally survive in our everyday lives – that by bringing the kind of full self, the flamboyant self into the space, and then for the audience to be like, “Yeah, that was amazing. I see what you’re doing!” That means that you’re being paid attention to and that not only that, but that what you have to offer is needed, not just tolerated. And so that what you’re bringing into that space is something that people need and want. And that when people give you that kind of applause back, it’s a kind of building a relationship of that kind of intensity that kind of need that kind of caregiving. So a performer giving that kind of performance is a way of caring for her or their, or his community. And for audiences to give back with that amount of attention and love, I think is a kind of ethical engagement with not just the work, but in building these spaces where these stories can be told in a way where they’re going to be supported and appreciated and attended to, and not met with a kind of like cool indifference or or derision or anything like that. But that, that you really are going to feel like your work is needed and loved, and that you are not going to be judged in a way that leaves you feeling like shit – sorry – about yourself afterwards. That you’re going to end up feeling like, “Oh yeah, I can bring my – I can bring what I’ve got here. I don’t have to tone it down.” [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] And so when audiences also don’t tone it down, then that produces a kind of reciprocity of a queer fabulousness and flamboyance and over-the-top-ness that many of us need to thrive and survive, but don’t get in our everyday lives.\n \n\n14:47\tMusic:\tTake Me to the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n15:16\tMusic:\tNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\n \n\n15:16\tDeanna Fong:\tT.L Cowan reminds us that an audience’s response, applause, cheering, and other forms of vocal affirmation are not only acts of listening, they’re also acts of care. But how does that care extend beyond the live space of the performance, into the collection and interpretation of participants’ memories of those events? To put it differently, how can historical listening also enact an ethics of care? To answer this question, we turn to our next guest, Mathieu Aubin.\n \n\n15:43\tMike O’Driscoll:\tMathieu Aubin is a scholar of print and performance cultures in Canada. He’s working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture, and his work on queerness and literary communities in Vancouver has been published in the Journal Canadian Literature. Here’s Mathieu at work interviewing legendary poet, bill bissett.\n \n\n16:11\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tI was so grateful for Warren’s support of me. There was a television station then I think called CKVU.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOkay.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nI think –\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWas that a local Vancouver station?\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nYeah.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOk.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tAnd I did a reading on it and Robin Blaser was there supporting me and saying wonderful things about me. And I lived in secret and I was, everything was kind of very bizarre and wonderful, the possibilities of things getting better. And then after that, like my phone number was listed. And after that I had death threats about five times a day –.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWow.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\t– just from that TV appearance, I was only chanting. It’s like, people are, it’s like still, I mean, Trump mobilizes those kinds of people. They’re so addicted to everything being the same. And that’s not a judgment at them. They get that way probably because they haven’t read enough books. They’re not informed enough. They hadn’t had an education. Maybe they’ve been very frightened when their children, by something awful that happened to them. And now they can’t handle anything. And it was only musical chanting that I was doing. It was based on the honey chant. And maybe I read a couple of love poems, you know? [Music Begins: Night on the Docks – Sax] And everyone in the house I was living in, they all knew that I was living there secretly, they came down in the apartment, we all watched it together. They thought it was fine [Laughs] but not everyone.  [Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n17:49\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThanks for being here with us today, Mathieu. To begin, can you give us a bit of context about the clip that we just heard?\n \n\n17:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this clip is from an interview that I conducted with bill bissett in April, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia. And at the time I was really interested [Music Ends: Night on the Docks – Sax] in this reading series called The Writing and Our Time reading series that happened in 1979. And so I had the chance to meet with him in Kitsilano, a neighborhood of Vancouver. And we had met a few times beforehand, so we already had some rapport and we’ve been working together a few years. But the main interest was really about the series and thinking about perhaps its role as a form of queer cultural activism. The reason why I was thinking about that is because the series was started as a way of organizing people together and getting them to raise funds for bill bissett who’s press, blewointment press, Canada Council funding had been cut. And as you know, small presses definitely depend on that money to be able to survive.\n18:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo the issue, in part, was a result of accusations in the House of Commons in the year prior and the year before that – so ’70, ’77, ’78 – that we’re calling poetry by bill bissett as well as that by Bertrand Lachance pornographic. So the issue really was that there was this huge debate that led to a lot of backlash. And when I was asking you about the role of homophobia in those events and the House of Commons, as well as the sort of galvanizing movement around challenging what I thought was homophobia with the reading series, he told me about a CKUTV reading, and that happened in ’78 –September ’78, – that was organized by Juan Tolman and attended by many other poets. And so, what you hear in the recording here is basically him describing what happened – [Start Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod] obviously the excitement of the event, but also the kind of negative backlash that happened afterwards.\n \n\n20:06\tDeanna Fong:\tSo I know a lot of your research and also your pedagogical interests revolve around something that you’ve called listening queerly or queer listening. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the techniques and practices of queer listening?\n \n\n20:21\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this is something that I’ve been working on for a few years now, even more closely as a postdoc at Concordia. And to me, queer listening entails basically attending to how LGBTQ+ people interpret or articulate their lives. And that means like friendships, family, intimacy, politics, artistic expression, really all different kinds of facets, but from a queer position. And so, what I’m often listening for and where I’m listening for is often audio recordings of literary events or conversations, but also in oral history interviews. But when I’m thinking about old recordings, I’m mostly interested in thinking about how they’re articulating queer codes, and how they’re connecting with other LGBTQ+ writers in the room, people who are presenting an audience members, or how they also introduced their works, discuss the works and even just the works themselves, obviously, it seems like the most obvious point, but it’s not just about the work itself, but also around it. And how is it actually shaping what we’re listening for?\n21:31\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd with a quick reference to the clip that I shared with you just before we started recording, there’s one moment I – it makes me smile now listening back again, because – not the condition that he had to go through, but like when he says “living in secrecy” I know what that means, but somebody who might not quite understand the context would not be able to understand the resonances of that. And so for me, it’s thinking, okay, well, 1978-79, bill bissett gay poet, who is under the – has been targeted by the Canada parliament, excuse me, Canadian parliament – I wass going to say the Canada Council, but that wasn’t the case. And then, and also getting death threats. And so living in secrecy for him meant survival at a time when homophobia, wasn’t just something that people were like, “Oh, we’re homophobic, but we hide it.”\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tIt’s like this was public and overt. And for him it meant survival. So living in secrecy – if he is mentioning something like that – is speaking much louder from a queer positionality, if you’re listening and attending to those concerns. Or another thing could be him reading a poem about RCMP surveillance. Sure, he was arrested for possession of cannabis, but he was also surveilled for other reasons. And part of that was his own sexual identity. So, when he reads a poem about queer surveillance and the RCMP, you know that means more than simply just police state. So, what does that mean about that time period? And what does it mean to be able to share that in that moment to a public audience?\n \n\n23:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut in an oral history interview, queer listing, for me entails something not quite the same, but quite similar at the same time. And it’s about how that person, how they –they would probably identify as LGBTQ+ – how they’re interpreting whatever facet of their lives from a queer positionality and how that might resonate differently for queer listeners. So it’s not just about listening to the past, but it’s thinking about how are they interpreting that time in their life today. And that’s why I think like that moment of secrecy – living in secret system. Okay. Well, what does it mean? And maybe along the person to unpack that a little bit, or even just keeping it at that. Not letting it just be a queer code. [Transition Music: Night on the Docks – Sax]\n \n\n24:07\tDeanna Fong:\tAnd so, what sort of ethical considerations have been important in your work – especially as you say that you’re listening for the articulation of these kinds of queer codes, connections between members of communities, perhaps intergenerationally, especially when queer subjects had been the target of so much censure and violence? And I guess maybe one more, very specific question is: in that case, do you feel that there is an ethical impetus to make those codes legible outside of a queer community? Is that part of your task as an oral historian or is there a different kind of ethics that those sorts of artifacts and conversations demand?\n \n\n24:57\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think your questions are right on point. They’re important things that I’m thinking about at the moment. Some of my ways of thinking about this have been – two key ethical principles have been one – and we talked about this last week– which is non extractive listening where things like Dylan Robinsons work – but here more in the queer context because with the measure of the RCMP using tape recorders to literally record people who would be identified as queer today to incriminate them or blackmail them, how do you today listen to this from a position of white privilege and power at the institutions that we work with, and not reproduce that kind of violence? So how do you listen, not extractively but listen with or hopefully from a respectful position. And I think that part of that work – like you’re saying –is thinking about it for me through the queer context, through works that have been written about that period by people who are reflected by that time period.\n \n\n26:07\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut, “who is this for?” is a question that I keep asking myself. Am I writing this to inform the general public, or is this for the communities themselves? And I think it’s a bit of both, but always first and foremost, the queer community itself, because if you’re doing the work for others, how are they going to benefit whatsoever from listening and interpretation and oral history telling. But I think that the general public also needs to know when there’s a lack – like when they don’t understand what it is – the experiences of queer people over the last 50 years, let’s say.\n \n\n26:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat’s interesting to me is when I share these kinds of historical events with people who would identify as maybe an ally or who would try to not be homophobic [Begin Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod], they’re always – they’re often surprised by the stuff that I document for them, about this time period and share with them. So, I think that’s like – the ethics is like how do you do that in a way that’s not just meant to like reproduce the power structures? [End Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n27:26\tMike O’Driscoll:\tListening, much like the language we listen to and for can be structured by uneven relations across social forms, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. Mathieu shows us how queer codes land differently for different listeners, depending on their position in relation to heteronormative power structures. For our next guest Métis writer, scholar, and organizer, Treena Chambers, language offers us a vantage to critique and dismantle structures of colonial power, and also to heal through storytelling and deep listening. [Music start: Blur the World] Thanks again, Treena, for agreeing to meet with us. You’ve worked extensively with the Hartmut Lutz’s collection of interviews with Indigenous writers, which has been made available on the People and the Text site, listening to them, cataloging them, digitizing them, and even traveling to Germany to work with the collection. It seems that so many stories about the archive begin by encountering a box of tapes. Can you tell us that story and what that encounter was like for you?\n \n\n28:47\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah, I’m happy to. So, I was working with Dr. Deanna Reader and she had some money and was trying to go through Dr. Hartmut Lutz’s library. So, she found myself and Rachel Thomas and Thompson, and sent us to Germany [End Music:  Blur the World by Tagirijus] to go through his archives because he was getting ready to retire. And, in going through all his books and all his paraphernalia, we came across this box of tapes and low and behold, open it up, and there are interviews with all sorts of people. Howard Adams, Maria Campbell, Thompson Highway, there was just so many. And so we looked at these and immediately tried to figure out how we can save them– because very quickly, looking at the box– when you pull out a box from the 1960s and 1970s, you’re like, “Uh-Oh!” [Laughs]. Technology has changed, tapes degrade, all of that.\n \n\n29:46\tTreena Chambers:\tSo immediately we’re like, how do we, as quickly as possible get these into some sort of format that we can use? And the only thing we could do at that point was get them back to Canada and hopefully work with the library. So I packed them into a backpack and carried them through Germany and through Portugal because I was making a stop. And then back to Vancouver.\n \n\n30:10\tMike O’Driscoll…:\tHow did it feel, the first moment you got to start listening to them? What did – what was that like for you?\n \n\n30:18\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. I grew up outside of a strong Indigenous community. I had a very strong Indigenous family who understood its self as Indigenous inside those sort of walls of our home. But we grew up in a very white, small town in Canada that was proud of its mining roots and settler roots. And so there was always a conflict with how you understood being Indigenous within that context. And so sitting down and going through those tapes, was a really interesting exercise for me to think through who I was and the sort of dichotomy that I lived within. And so the tapes were really – yeah I just loved hearing [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] these people, these thinkers that I had heard at the kitchen table being heard in a larger context. [End Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n31:23\tTreena Chambers:\tOur goal was to bring them back to Canada. As soon as we saw what they were, we really wanted people to be able to hear the voice of Indigenous thinkers, Indigenous writers, and to hear them here on our shore and to give them the respect that a German scholar gave them, but nobody in Canada had given them in the past. So to bring them home, preserve what we could, document what we could, and make them available for Indigenous scholars, for settler scholars, and to bring them back to the land that they spoke of.\n \n\n32:01\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. And so I think you mentioned that you’ve listened to about 25% of this quite large collection of interviews is that right?\n \n\n32:08\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah. Yeah. It’s been a really interesting project. I mean, we were really lucky that once we got them back to Canada, there were so many other people who were willing to help us digitize them, willing to help us work towards transcripts and that. So a lot of my job became, connecting all of those different groups. So I really got to listen to just the ones that drew me [Laughs] into everything.\n \n\n32:37\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah, of course among those is Maria Campbell’s interview with Hartmut Lutz, which you’ve selected an excerpt for us to listen to today. So, would you mind giving us a little bit of context about that choice and why that tape spoke to you?\n \n\n32:51\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. So, I was lucky enough–doing the work of preserving them, that I was able to put them on my phone and listen to them as I was commuting back and forth back pre COVID days where we had to commute further than our bedroom to our living room. And so I was commuting from Burnaby to downtown Vancouver. I was doing my Master’s in –or am still doing my Master’s in public policy at SFU. And, there’s nothing quite as colonial as public policy school. And so having these – the Maria Campbell in particular interview in my ears as I was going to school was a really interesting experience, to hear her talk about her experiences in Canada, and to understand her as a strong Métis woman who really defined community for so many years for so many of us. Yeah, so it was a beautiful moment to think through what she was saying about how we tell stories, and the obligation of stories, and the work that stories do before I would go into a school that started to talk about, “Oh, we’re all neutral and we’re data driven” and I’d be like, [Laughs] I know you’re not! And I heard someone tell me that on the way to school!\n \n\n34:13\tDeanna Fong:\tNo language is neutral. No data is neutral.\n \n\n34:18\tTreena Chambers:\tExactly.\n \n\n34:18\tDeanna Fong:\tSo why don’t I play? I’ll play the clip for us here. I’ll just share my screen.\n \n\n34:24\tAudio Recording, Hartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, Maria Campbell:\tSo one of the things that’s very difficult for me is I don’t, I don’t think of myself as a writer. My work is in the community. Writing is just one of the moves that I use in my work as an organizer. If I think that something else will work better than I’ll, you know, so I’m, it’s multimedia kinds of things. I do video, I do film and I do oral storytelling. I do a lot of teaching. Well, I don’t like calling it teaching, but it’s facilitating. And, I work a lot with elders, so it’s not like I’m a writer and I’m bopping around all over reading and talking about the great literature or anything. I’m not a – I don’t think of myself as an authority on –in fact, I get quite embarrassed when I – if I have to speak from the point of view of a writer, because I really don’t know what that is. I know what a storyteller is. And a storyteller is a community healer and teacher. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n35:40\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. So fantastic recording and so much to talk about. Can we just start by asking you why this particular recording or this particular excerpt of this recording is important to you?\n \n\n35:54\tTreena Chambers:\tWell, I think –so in the work that I do, I’m trying to challenge the way we use language within public policy. We often talk about things like Crown land and stuff like that, but we don’t need interrogate what that means. And particularly in British Columbia, there’s no such thing as Crown land really. There’s unceded land and there’s treatied land, but the Crown [End [Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] has not established a real legal claim to the land here. And so I think often about the work that the story that we tell ourselves both in how we envision the birth of what we call Canada, how we envision our obligations to each other and what story can do. And I think in particular, Maria Campbell has taken that very, very seriously and built story and done story work that has really worked to heal many people’s experiences on the land, but also challenge our assumptions about what words mean, what story does and, how we relate to each other. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n37:13\tTreena Chambers:\tSo most of the listening that I do is done just to experience it. It’s not done with this end goal of, okay, this is my conception of this author, or of the speaker, of this process, or product. Therefore I need to listen specifically for things that relate to that. So when I’m listening, I listen just to listen. And that’s not to say that my own internal biases and my own processes and ideas don’t influence what I hear, but I don’t go into much of what I’m listening to with a specific question in mind. I don’t have a research question that I am exploring. I don’t have a specific understanding of the people that I’m listening to. That influences what I’m listening for. I try and listen just to hear what they have to say. And, for me, that allows me to experience what I’m hearing, but also to maybe hear things differently.\n \n\n38:25\tTreena Chambers:\tI think the interesting thing is when we were listening to the Maria Campbell interview, the types of quotes that people pick out and the moments like the moments that you picked out as important were ones that I’m like, nah, that’s kind of a throw away for me. Because it just wasn’t something I was listening for. The Canadian literature scene is not my scene, particularly. I have lots of friends who are in it and I love being there, but I wasn’t listening to hear Maria Campbell’s critique of, or experience of being in groups of other writers. I was just listening to see what she had to say. And in particular, I guess for me about what she had to say about community. And so that’s one of the beauties of just sort of promiscuous listening, I think, is that you don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for –just for the sake of listening that you don’t have to be made better for it. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]  You don’t have to learn from it. You can just listen and be.\n \n\n39:44\tDeanna Fong:\tWe can listen attuned to the resonances of historical context and the dynamics of power as Mathieu Aubain asks us to do, or we can listen through response as T.L. Cowan invites us as a fundamental practice of careful relationships and community building, or we can listen simply to be fully present and enjoy as Treena Chambers reminds us. But it’s listening always unequivocally a good thing? To address that question. We turn to Clint Burnham, professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and a cultural theorist who brings the writings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to our conversation on the ethics of listening. [Music: queer noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n40:25\tClint Burnham:\tI want to do two things. First of all, I want to hold that up and think about, or add or critique. I still believe in the idea of critique, the notion, that listening is an unalloyed good. And then secondly, I want to say, listen, if listening is not great, it’s also not, not great. So part one, we’re told in the era of #MeToo that we should listen to women. We were told in the era of reconciliation that we should listen to residential school survivors’ stories. Let me be clear that what I am not saying is that we should not listen to survivors. Yes, should we should read and listen to testimony. You have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We should read and listen to their stories and songs and novels and poems about that horrible continued history of cultural genocide in our settler colonial past and present.\n \n\n41:14\tClint Burnham:\tAnd yes, we should listen to our loved ones, our colleagues, our students, and our public figures when they talk about acts of sexual assault and improprieties. But, I also want us to think more about what listening means, what it entails. I want us to consider how listening is often the activity of the powerful. Think of the judge in a courtroom who listens to testimony, or a priest who listens confession, or a therapist who listens to a patient. The structure of listening actually bequeaths a kind of master position onto the listener, who then decides what to believe, what to do with this knowledge. We put too much trust in listening. We think the listener is a good person. It’s good to listen. We have an entire repertoire of neoliberal, therapeutic listening, active listening. “I hear what you are saying.” Blah, blah, blah.\n \n\n42:12\tClint Burnham:\tSo what am I proposing? So, I’m not proposing to get rid of listening, to stop listening, but I am proposing that listening is not, not great. Lacanian psychoanalysis proposes a different kind of listening. So it’s still based on the idea of the psychoanalyst, but it’s a different sort of modality, Lacan famously combined the words caritas, or love, and trash, or déchets in French, to characterize what the analyst does as decharite, or what was translated into English as “trashitas.” So not caritas, but trashitas, a kind of a sifting through, a listening to garbage. And part of this is because there’s a through line of Lacan talking about his work as garbage. He’ll pun on poubelle-lication – a publication and poubelle, meaning garbage. Or he’ll say his work is only fit for the wastebasket. So he is talking about his own writings as well as about what the analysand, the patient, is saying.\n \n\n43:12\tClint Burnham:\tBut trashitas comes from caritas, so it’s also the love of garbage. An example of listening as trashitas can be found in how I listened to the Radio Free Rainforest archive. So thinking about the archive, sifting through the archive, of looking for that nugget, that gold, the archival jolt, as I think actually Michael O’Driscoll first theorized it. So we’re looking for something in the archive and the rest is– the remainder, is dross, is garbage, is uninteresting to us. [Audio Recording: “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman] And so for me then finding the poem, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman…\n \n\n44:04\tAudio Recording, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman, courtesy of Radio Free Rainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books:\t[Drumming] [Singing] [Drumming] [Singing] [Repeats] [Voices overlapping]. A moment ago, once I was like, this is an interesting thing. Once I was interested in [inaudible] everything. I was talking a moment ago. Everyone’s talking to someone. Nobody’s talking to noone. [Breathing sounds]. [Singing].\n \n\n46:58\tClint Burnham:\t“Mayakovsky”, a sound poem by the sort of Canadian avant-garde sound poetry group, the Four Horsemen, active in the 70’s and the 80’s. This is actually a record that was from a record, their record, Live in the West from 1977, played on Jerry Gilbert’s radio show called Radio Free Rainforest in, I think November, 1990. And that was a show on community radio CFRO in Vancouver. That show ran for 15 or 20 years. And at a certain point after Jerry passed away, his fonds became – were collected by the contemporary literature collection at SFU. And the tapes –he taped all of his shows – I actually have cassettes of when I was on that show in the late 90’s. He would give a cassette to people when they were on the show. And he also kept tapes himself. Larry Bremner for a while was his technician as well, the Case W poet. And so all those tapes ended up at a SFU and through the SpokenWeb team of gremlins, [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] they were digitized and archived and now it’s all up on the SFU library website, which is quite amazing.\n \n\n48:20\tClint Burnham:\tAnd even then, as we just listened to the poem, sound poetry itself as a genre takes these, these kinds of – in this case, mostly with the body, but not necessarily, there’s a drum in there as well –these guttural or breathing or throat singing. There’s a bit of that Tuvan sort of thing going on there. The versions of sound that don’t quite seem to be language, that seemed to be something else that we might think of as being experimental or trashy or garbage, like in a certain kind of way. And of course, even listening for that extraneous stuff, the chatter, the car noises, the needle on the – in the grooves of the vinyl and the dust and the scratches and the vinyl that make for that kind of noise. And finally thinking about the mediation of that sound. We’re listening through a computer – it was a tape that had been digitized from a radio show. There was a record being played – what has to do with the affordances of how we listen, the ear buds, and so on. All of the ways I’ve been thinking about listening to “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen via Radio Free Rainforest, for me, is a form of listening that embodies that kind of trashitas ethics.\n \n\n49:40\tDeanna Fong:\tThat’s great. And you know what immediately comes to mind is, I remember Tony Power, who’s the contemporary literature collections librarian at SFU. When that collection came in, Gerry Gilbert’s fond , it was full of literal trash. It was full of cigarette butts and old birth control packages from the 1970s and paperclips and all sorts of things. So I think actually what you’re proposing here is a different reading of the archive itself too. Not as this elevated site of the arc-on, as we imagine it in other various theoretical texts, but literally the trash heap [Laughs] in many cases. And that’s a way to sort of unravel that archontic kind of power.\n \n\n50:32\tClint Burnham:\tYeah. I mean, both – so, I mean, it’s that trash heap, and something that Lacan rifts off from Joyce as well – a letter, a litter from Finnegan’s Wake probably –that materiality of it is trash, is the sublime is unsorted. But then also that the listening, I think, to talk about listening in terms of the trashitas means – and it’s not to, it’s not to say that what I mean, whether it’s a work of literature or a testimony or something else is trash in the sense that it doesn’t matter, it’s just that– because on the one hand, there’s this love for it, there’s this real desire to hear it– but it’s not treating it as this kind of, that that makes me a better person for having been the person who listens. That ethical call to listen is what I think really has to be, thought about because it puts the listener into this position of the master, of the beautiful soul.\n \n\n51:33\tClint Burnham:\tAnd I’m using master very conscious of the ways in which, with Black Lives Matter over the past six months since the George Floyd uprisings, has really asked us to think about what the signifiers are. And that mastery itself – we can sanitize or cancel language in terms of when – you know, master bedroom or master files and so on. And some of that obviously is very important, but I think I want to retain that idea, that one is put into a master position by the ethics of listening for precisely, for the problem of being a master. That perhaps when we call on others to listen to us, we don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we’re putting them into that powerful position [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] and we have to think about that.\n \n\n52:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tSo Clint, I’d like to ask you about modalities or methods of listening then in terms of recognizing that the listener assumes a master position, even while purporting to conduct a kind of ethics of listening. So how can that position of mastery be subject to disruption or to intervention? Is – are there ways that one might imagine listening or not listening, or not assuming that position of mastery that you might imagine?\n \n\n53:06\tClint Burnham:\tThat’s the hard part. I was saying to Deanna earlier, I hadn’t got to the the conclusion. I hadn’t got to the, “what do we do now?” part of the evening. And I think it’s in part what I’m calling for. First of all – what I’m saying and what I’m asking, but also what I’m saying is that we have to think about that power position itself. And being aware of it – of that problem is the first thing. And being aware that when I’m listening to somebody tell me of – give this testimony or talking about their trauma. Let’s just say, let’s just put it in that kind of way, right. That I can’t make the mistake of thinking, or I should be really critical of thinking that this makes me a better person because I’m the one who’s listening. And in a certain kind of way, the problem with the ethics of listening is that it depends on the speaker having this trauma to bring to me. You know, I can only be a good listener if you’re going to tell me about the horrible day you had you know, at the level of an analyst or, you know, about your sin, if I’m a priest or about your crime, if I’m a judge. I can only do those – all those positions depend on that person, bringing that trash to them, bringing those horrible things to them. So my beautiful soul, as Hegel put it, as a listener, depends on the trash in the other person’s soul. And so it’s a very disavowed relation, I think, it’s something that –or a repressed relation perhaps to put it more strongly, that the listener has with what is being brought to them. That what is being brought to them, makes them into a good person. [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]And just to flip it around as well, when we are saying, “listen to me”, we are elevating that person into a position of power, and do we want to do that? [End Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n55:19\tDeanna Fong:\tLike the great variety of sounds that move us in our practices as makers and researchers, so too, are there many modalities of listening each with their own ethical demands. Sometimes listening demands an embodied response where we offer our voices as gifts freely given to a community-based and reciprocal trust. Other times, listening is about generating space. For thoughts, for reflections, for emotions, as they play out in the improvised performance between an interviewer and an interviewee. Sometimes voices ask us to listen otherwise, without the impulse to place demands upon that which we are hearing or to extract what we want to hear toward our own ends. And sometimes, listening asks that we turn the acoustic mirror back on ourselves as listeners to examine our own implications in a social and political forces that structure our listening.\n \n\n56:10\tMike O’Driscoll:\tFor us, the creation of this podcast has been an extended exercise in listening. One that in many ways has placed our own definition of ethics in tension with demands of the podcast genre. That is, what you have heard today represents only a small portion of the conversations we’ve had with friends, colleagues, and interviewees recorded and unrecorded, that themselves comprise a larger scope of listening activities around this final product.\n \n\n56:44\tDeanna Fong:\tIn the spirit of imagining an ethics of listening that is multiple, nuanced, and context-specific, we invite you to listen to the full recordings of these interviews, which have been made available for streaming on the Archive of the Present, ArchiveOfThePresent.SpokenWeb.ca. We also invite questions, comments, and further dialogue by email to Deanna.Fong@Mail.Concordia.ca and MO@ualberta.ca.\n \n\n57:11\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThank you for listening.\n \n\n57:19\tMusic:\tTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n57:28\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Deanna Fong of Concordia University, and Michael O’Driscoll from the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland, and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. Thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L Cohen for their generous contributions to this episode. Special thanks also to Deanna Reader and Alex Shield of the People and the Text project, and to Hartmut Lutz and Maria Campbell for giving their permission to share the audio from their interview here on the show. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there, and we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals]\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9287","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E4, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart, 6 January 2020, Bloom"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Myra Bloom"],"creator_names_search":["Myra Bloom"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/79174225341311352865\",\"name\":\"Myra Bloom\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/d97b6935-00ff-4807-9d53-f71e0758d2ff/sw-ep-4-elizabeth-smart_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-4-elizabeth-smart_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:30:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"29,805,131 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-4-elizabeth-smart_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/\"},{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-01-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23334883\",\"venue\":\"York University Glendon Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON M4N 3M6\",\"latitude\":\"43.72824305\",\"longitude\":\"-79.37750288670469\"}]"],"Address":["2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON M4N 3M6"],"Venue":["York University Glendon Campus"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.\\n\\nMUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.\\n\\nAll the music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549502296064,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Over the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.\n\nFeatured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer.\n\nThis episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).\n\n00:08\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. One of the main goals of the Spoken Web podcast is to tell the stories behind a big research project in a different kind of way. Usually all you get to see of research is what comes out at the end, an impenetrable monograph or a series of densely cited articles. And those can leave the impression that scholarly work is birthed whole like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus. Or if you’re like most people, they’ll leave no impression at all because you’re probably not reading them. So we started this project with a question. What kind of stories will podcasting let us tell? This month’s episode is telling a different kind of story than what we’ve heard so far. The story of one particular writer and the enduring impact of her work on generations of women. Over the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which tells the story of an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover is based on Elizabeth’s real life relationship with the poet George Barker, but its enduring impact, lies in its lyricism and passionate intensity. After publishing By Grand Central Station smart lapsed into a 30-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single parented four children. In this poetic reflection episode producer, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station, and the obstacles that prevented Smart from recreating its brilliance. Here is Myra Bloom with episode four: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart.\n02:35\tAudio Recording:\tI thought, if it’s agreeable to you that I’d read a chapter book I wrote called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. And this is about a couple of people, in case you haven’t read it well they fall in love they’re dancing away across America as in love.\n03:18\tMyra Bloom:\tI first encountered the writer Elizabeth Smart in a time of great passion. I was 19 and reading her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for an undergraduate class. Her description of a transcendent, debilitating obsession captured what I was going through at the time. The beautiful harrowing torment of first love. By Grand Central Station details a love affair that comes to an end as hyperbolically as it began. As the title implies, it ends with the narrator pregnant, bereft, and crying out to her lover, who by this point has returned to his wife. I would soon come to relate to these darker feelings too, as my own relationship combusted, albeit under less salacious circumstances. I’m pretty sure there’s a direct line between my feelings about this novel and my decision to teach literature for a living. I wanted to talk to other women who had been similarly affected by the novel. I sought out writers and filmmakers who had written or made films about Elizabeth or were planning to do so to ask them what drew them to her. I expected that their stories would sound similar to mine, that they would tell me tales of great loves, loved and lost. I was planning an anthropological study of female passion, but those weren’t the stories they told me.\n04:51\tSina Queyras:\tThere was only Vancouver Island when I was living in the rainforest and they had a cabin and I could see through the wall and it would just rain and rain and rain and rain.\n04:59\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is poet and professor Sina Queyras\n05:03\tSina Queyras:\tAnd I was sitting there reading this, somebody sent it to me, my friend Rita whos a fellow from creative writing, sent me this book and that had been, I mean the reason she sent it to me was I loved Marguerite Duras’ A Lover and they’re sister books, right? They’re totally sister books. But the surprising thing about the Smart, it was that like there’s just no Canadian voice that’s anywhere near the depth of feeling and just the intellectual precariousness like she’s so present but also vulnerable and self propelled. There’s just nothing. I mean, I guess Margaret Lawrence, but that’s not ecstatic like By Grand Central Station is just so ecstatic. So I know that going forward it was like, it’s like Sappho, it’s like Sappho wrote a novel.\n06:20\tKim Echlin:\tMy name is Kim Echlin. I’m the author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fuge Essay on Women and Creativity, and I was drawn to Elizabeth Smart first because of her great passionate love affair with George Barker. But then that quickly led me down to a much more complex story and it is the story of her as exile in England, as writer, as mother and as a single woman earning a living. Romantic love is by definition irrational. It means sexual passion, the love of beauty, the potential for destruction, the taste of immortality. It is obsessive. Sometimes it flickers briefly, deliciously. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Its destructiveness evident even to the lovers themselves. Yet, lovers are loath to give up romantic love. Lovers believe they are most alive and it’s embrace. With strange pleasure we watch ill-matched lovers devour each other. They believe that their love is their very life force. I think about passionate, romantic love when I consider Bluebeard’s castle or some of John Donne’s poetry or Wagner Tristan und Isolde or such novels as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or García Márquez Love in the Time of Cholera. I think of a different kind of love, one that still has no name. When I think of some of Samuel Beckett’s characters and of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Rosalind ironically and wittily says to the object of her desire, “love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as mad man do, and the reason why there are not so punished and cured is the lunacy is so ordinary that the wipers are in love too.” Elizabeth wrote this ordinary lunacy in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but her telling is extraordinary. Just as Rosalind tells love in a fresh way from a woman’s point of view disguised as a boy, the narrator of By Grand Central Station tells love in a fresh way from the point of view of an unmarried pregnant woman, but before Elizabeth wrote it, she had to live it.\n08:39\tElizabeth Smart:\tBy Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical emotion of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow, but I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone: it leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces: everyone compromises. They say, as we grow older, we embrace resignation, but oh, they talked her into it blind and unprotesting and from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there’s no redemption. It’s the sin of damnation. What except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tiger shark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every impossible side. The senses deliver the unbearable into sleep. And it ceases, except that it appears gruesomely at the edges of my dreams making ghastly sigils, which wear away peace, but which I can’t understand. The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end, it had operatic grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station, like a Judgment Day. It was more iron muscle than Samson in his moment of revelation, it might’ve shown me all Dante’s dream, but there was no way to endure.\n10:15\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd what did it mean for you, for Elizabeth smart to be the subject of your first film? Is that important to you?\n10:22\tMaya Gallus:\tIt was important to me. My mother was an artist and I saw her struggle as an artist and a mother, also a single parent.\n10:31\tMyra Bloom:\tDocumentary filmmaker, Maya Gallus.\n10:35\tMaya Gallus:\tSo I think that Elizabeth represented some of those elements for me as well because I was trying to figure out how to be a woman and an artist in the world. And it seemed to me that women of my mother’s generation and previously of Elizabeth’s generation really had this conflict and dilemma about being able to stake their claim in what is largely a male-dominated world. And also then the additional challenges of being a mother. So I was kind of figuring all of that out and Elizabeth’s writings really spoke to me because she really went into the nub of that in a lot of her work and her poems, you know, a poem like The Muse: His and Hers, I still find is very relevant in many ways. I mean, we still are living in a male-dominated world and people are speaking about it a little more openly now than before. And perhaps people are more willing to listen to what women have to say and recognize that actually women have something important to say about life and art and love.\n11:54\tElizabeth Smart:\tNo, I would like to read you a little poem that most amazingly I wrote last week. It just sort of popped out and lo and behold, it’s a feminist poem. I hope this won’t give any offense. Right? Anyhow, it’s called The Muse: His and Hers. His pampered Muse / Knew no veto. / Hers lived / In a female ghetto. / When his Muse cried / He replied / Loud and clear / Yes! Yes! I’m waiting here. / Her Muse screamed / But children louder. / Then which strength / Made her prouder? / Neither. Either / Pushed and shoved / With the strength of the loved / and the, unloved, / Clashed rebuked. / All was wrong. / (Can you put opposites / into the song?) / Kettles boiling! /Cobwebs coiling! / Doorbells ringing! / Needs haranguing! / Her Muse called / In her crowded ear / She heard but had / Her dirty house to clear. / Guilt drove him on. / Guilt held her down. / (She hadn’t a wife / to lean upon.) The dichotomy was killing me. She said till old age came to assuage. Now Muse, now you can have your way. No, what was it I want him to say? And used, abused and not amused. The mind’s gone blank. Is it life you have to thank? Stevie, the Emily’s, Mrs. Woolf bypass the womb and kept the self, but she said, try and see if it’s true and without cheating. My muse can do. Can women do. Can women make when the womb rests animus awake. Pale at my space starved and thin like hibernating bear too weak to begin to roar with authority. Poems in the spring so late in the autumn of their suffering. Those gaps. It’s decades of lying low earthquakes, deep frozen mind askew is it too late at 68? Oh fragile, fresh reanimate, oh flabby teetering body concentrate. Astute, true woman, any late profligacy squandered on the loving of people and other irrelevancy useful in the dark in articulacy. But drop it like poison now if you want poetry. Let the doorbell ring, let the fireman put out the fire or light it up again. Sheepish and shamefaced at 9:00 AM till the Muse commands her ritual hymn. See lucky man, get off his knee. And hear now his roar of authority. This test case woman could also be just in time for a small cacophony, a meaningful screen between folded womb and grave. A brief respite from the enclave.\n15:31\tRosemary Sullivan:\tI remember one wonderful moment when Elizabeth and I went to this reading.\n15:39\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth Smart’s biographer.\n15:43\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd it was by Mavis Gallant, who of course one admires deeply and it was amusing to see how jealous Elizabeth was because, you know, she’d written a great book when she was in her late twenties, and then she didn’t write again for 30 years. She used to say, when asked her who she was, she’d say, I’m my son, Sebastian, the poet’s mother. And when we talked about this in detail, she did say, and this is quote that she felt that the Maestro of the masculine was sitting on her shoulder telling her she could never be good enough. So she had sought out George Barker because he wrote the kind of poetry she wanted to write. And then George, being a poet of his era in the tradition of not TS Eliot, but Dylan Thomas, you know, kind of knocked her down and she said that she needed to be knocked down because she came from this wonderfully arrogant position of a debutante in Ottawa put forward by her mother, hobnobbing with the prime minister’s set and so on. She said “I needed to be knocked down a little bit, but not nearly as much as George knocked me down.” And of course you ask her, well, why did you keep, what was it about George that was so seductive? And she said, “Oh God, he had such a sense of humor.” So I did meet George.\n17:18\tMyra Bloom:\tWhat was he like?\n17:18\tRosemary Sullivan:\tExactly what she said. He was with his last wife, Elspeth you know, that he had – this could not happen now – he had five wives, two of them legal, 15 children, and then they all adored him, because the creative male was given a kind of permission that can’t be given today. But here I was at Elspeth’s and she was lovely, there was a point at which she had tried to get Elizabeth to take George back, she was so fed up with him, but it didn’t work. And she was teaching, she was a Latin teacher, even though she had at one point aspired to be a poet. But again, that was part of the time, if you wanted to be creative, you were creative vicariously through a man. Right?\n18:06\tRosemary Sullivan:\tYes, you in another of your poems, you talk about, this is the trying to write one, that you had last night. You talk about it being unfeminine to write.\n18:21\tElizabeth Smart:\tYes. Yes. And somebody asked me last night, too, about why I said that love was parallel. You see, I do feel very, I’ve always been thinking about that, that you really have to be ruthless to write, and it isn’t, so it isn’t a loving thing. And of course we all want to be good perhaps, but they do conflict: if you’re good, you’re not ruthless, you always take it from somebody else. They want to come in and tell you about their troubles, you’re writing, you don’t say “No, off, I’m busy.” You say “Come in!” And listen to them.\n18:54\tElizabeth Smart:\tThis is called Trying To Write. Why am I so frightened / To say I’m me / And publicly acknowledge / My small mastery? / Waited for sixty years / Till the people take out the horses / And draw me to the theatre/ With triumphant voices? / I know this won’t happen / Until it’s too late / And the deed done (or not done) / So I prevaricate, / Egging them on, and keeping / Roads open (just in case) / Go on! Go on and do / It in my place! / Giving love to get it / (The only way to behave). / But hated and naked / Could I stand up and say / Fuck off! or, be my slave? / To be in a very unfeminine / Very unloving state / Is the desperate need / Of anyone trying to write.\n19:54\tElizabeth Smart:\tAnd so in fact, goodness and art are parallel and can never meet. That was my theory.\n20:02\tRoberta Buchanan:\tThat it is egocentric to write.\n20:04\tElizabeth Smart:\tYeah. You really have to have a large ego. I felt the mind had been rather squashed so that, I feel I had to get it back a bit.\n20:12\tRoberta Buchanan:\tAnd do you think this, this is a particularly female problem? That it is a problem when women write–,\n20:16\tElizabeth Smart:\tWell I do, because whenever people say, I do think that women are, perhaps it’s a training, I don’t know, but they do want to be more loving and kind and helpful don’t we? Maybe that’s because they’re in that position.\n20:32\tAnne Hart:\tWhen you speak about it is necessary for a writer to be ruthless, I mean, it does remind me of Virginia Woolf and her, her essay on the the angel of the house, that a woman to write successfully had to kill the angel of the house.\n20:47\tElizabeth Smart:\tWell that’s it, that’s the same thing.\n20:48\tAnne Hart:\tShe couldn’t, she could no longer be, if she was going to write, she couldn’t be responsible in this way, recognized for her family and her house, or else she would never find time to write.\n20:57\tElizabeth Smart:\tAnd then was with children and a house, I mean, you’re always, you’re fragmented, your mind, you think, “Oh dear, we’re out of them” You know, “The soap flakes are down” you know, so these are the things that are in your mind and you’ve got to remember to go and get this. While the men really, they are doing it more now, but there was never any question they wouldn’t notice if you’d run out lavatory paper or something. In fact George would just tear out a sheet of a book. Yeah. No respect for literature. Yes, his own ones! He wouldn’t care to.\n21:35\tAnne Hart:\tAnd yet, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I know you’ve written so much more recently and that is all sort of new developments and further thoughts and you may be tired at times of hearing people harp back to the book you wrote many years ago,\n21:51\tElizabeth Smart:\tOh no, i’m delighted to have a little attention.\n21:53\tAnne Hart:\tYes, yes. Well, so many people particularly I think women do identify with it. It is a love story, which must’ve been very unique. Still is unique when it was published in 1945, a very moving, very explicit, very passionate description of a love affair. And I think at that time it must’ve been thought, well, this is a bizarre thing. I mean, I think it’d be men that had been writing about this sort of thing. I mean, did you get that sort of reaction?\n22:29\tElizabeth Smart:\tWell, yes. I think I mentioned last night that they said a trivial subject. This women’s feelings are a trivial subject and nobody’s sort of said how shocking to say ‘trivial subject’ they just took that, right?\n22:43\tRoberta Buchanan:\tDoes it make you angry when they said that?\n22:46\tElizabeth Smart:\tI don’t know, one just thinks that’s the way things are. I don’t really make any judgment.\n22:56\tMyra Bloom:\tDo you really feel that Elizabeth’s writer’s block was attributable to the fact that she felt overshadowed by George? You don’t necessarily attribute it to the material circumstances of having to raise four children.\n23:10\tRosemary Sullivan:\tYou know, I know people who’ve raised four children and continued to write, Judith Thompson is one. So in fact, what’s so interesting is when you look at Elizabeth’s work, she was writing Grand Central before she met George, so he was simply the embodiment of it. After that I do think that she lost her ego as a writer and it’s easy to- writing is such a fragile activity, you know, I mean, I haven’t written poems for quite a while because I think I need that vertical sledgehammer into the end of time before I can write. Everything’s going horizontally. There’s every reason not to write. And so, it became a habit, not writing, but also Elizabeth would, she had her youngest daughter Rose in a private school, so those children were off during the week and sometimes on the weekend they’d have these crazy so-called uncles taking care of them. So in fact it was, she had a professional life, but some people had managed a professional life with writing at night. But I think Elizabeth lost her nerve.\n24:34\tElizabeth Smart:\tA warning. This old woman waddles toward love, becomes human, but the Muse does not approve. This going flesh is loved and is forgiven by the generous. But how is it the demon? Hello, my dear sit down. I’ll soothe your pain. I’ve known what you’ve known, but won’t again. Though [inaudible] not gone. Merely contracted into a last ditch weapon. A deed, not dead. A mine unexploded and not safe to have near the playground of innocent life. Keep clear of this frail old, harmless person. 50 years fuel of aimed frustration could shatter the calm and scald the soul. and love fall like napalm, over the school.\n25:36\tMaya Gallus:\tOh, I think, I think Elizabeth Smart should always be read. I think she brings an enormous amount of wisdom and life experience to the later work and an enormous amount of passion and literary innovation to the early work. And, also, some of her poems are really powerful as well. Her poem, A Bonus is one that I always think of whenever I finish writing something because she captures so beautifully that feeling of being in a bubble. And as she says, feeling dirty and roughly dressed and getting through this difficult thing of finishing something, and then that beautiful feeling of completion.\n26:29\tMyra Bloom:\tA Bonus. That day I finished / A small piece / For an obscure magazine / I popped it in the box / snd such a starry elation / Came over me / That I got whistled at in the street / For the first time in a long time. / I was dirty and roughly dressed / And had circles under my eyes / And far far from flirtation / But so full of completion / Of a deed duly done / An act of consummation / That the freedom and force it engendered / Shone and spun / Out of my old raincoat. / It must’ve looked like love / Or a fabulous free holiday / To the young men sauntering / Down Berwick Street / I still think this is most mysterious / For while I was writing it / It was gritty it felt like self-abuse / Constipation, desperately unsocial. / But done done done / Everything in the world / Flowed back / Like a huge bonus.\n27:42\tMaya Gallus:\tI can’t think of another poem that captures that moment and that feeling as beautifully as that does. So I think Elizabeth is relevant now and will continue to be relevant for continuing generations.\n27:59\tMyra Bloom:\tI hope so. Okay, thank you.\n28:01\tMaya Gallus:\tYou’re welcome.\n28:08\tElizabeth Smart:\tGood morning boss. A cup of coffee and two Fried eggs. Look at the idiot boy that got the fat knife. Here’s all the world that is left. He has American better than love. He is civilization’s heir or you mob whose actions brought him into bed. He is happier than you, sweetheart. But will he do to fill in these coming thousand years, well, it’s too late now to complain, my honeydove. Yes. It’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are. That’s all. You have to learn to be adaptable. I myself prefer Boulder Dam to Chartes Cathedral. I prefer dogs to children. I before in corncobs to the genitals of the male, everything’s hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything’s OK. It’s in the bag. It can’t miss. My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep?\n29:08\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using the Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Myra Bloom from York University and our podcast project manager is Stacy Copeland. Thanks to Sina Queyras, Maya Gallus, Kim Echlin and Rosemary Sullivan for their candid discussions presented here. This podcast also features archival audio of Elizabeth Smart in conversation at Memorial University in 1983 and reading at Warwick University in England in 1982. Special thanks to Vinita Patel, Donna Downey of MUN Archives, and the Glendon Media Lab. Myra Bloom is currently writing Evasive Maneuvers, a book all about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart. You can keep up with Myra’s work and watch for more info on Evasive Maneuvers at myrabloom.com that’s M Y R A B L O O M .com. To find out more about Spoken Web visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the Spoken Web podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9288","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E8, Talking about Talking, 3 May 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-about-talking/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3ce8b0fe-6175-403e-8a62-87afba9aed34/audio/8aae097f-18b7-4b66-8223-57c76570c48e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep8-talking-about-talking.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:00\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,780,700 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep8-talking-about-talking\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-about-talking/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music used in episode:\\n\\nOriginal SpokenWeb Theme by Jason Camlot\\n\\nNight Watch by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/34642\\n\\nLinks to sounds and artists mentioned in this episode:\\n\\nLillian Allen: https://lillianallen.ca/\\n\\nOctavia Butler, Kindred: https://www.octaviabutler.com/kindred\\n\\nMichelle Pearson Clark, Suck Teeth Composition (After Rashad Newsome): https://www.michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions/\\n\\nNikita Gale, Hot World: https://www.nikitagale.com/hot-world\\n\\nAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals: https://www.alexispauline.com/\\n\\nJessica Karuhanga, through a brass channel: https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/through-a-brass-channel\\n\\n“Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pm80etkAzE\\n\\nShani Mootoo fonds, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/manuscripts\\n\\nSoledad Munoz: https://soledadmunoz.com/\\n\\nRashad Newsome, Shade Composition: https://rashaadnewsome.com/performance/shade-compositions-pittsburgh/\\n\\nJeneen Frei Njootli: https://www.jeneenfreinjootli.com/\\n\\nRucyl, Sound Prism: https://rucyl.com/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549504393216,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. For her residency, jamilah is building an online archive highlighting Black women sound artists across Canada to provide inspiration and representation for future sound art from Black femmes across Turtle Island. Jessica is creating “a sanctified Black space in the form of a website that celebrates aural, visual and somatic witnessing” through shared audio recordings of personal stories.\n\njamilah and Jessica sit down – over Zoom – with producer Katherine McLeod to share two pieces of audio from past works that set the groundwork conceptually and methodologically for their current projects. As the producer of the series ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. When talking with jamilah, they start by listening to the audio composition “Listen to Black Womxn” and, when talking with Jessica, they start by listening to the audio composition, “ALL OF ME.” In between these conversations, Katherine talks with SpokenWeb RA, poet, and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections with their projects in mind. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run throughout these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or, as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking.”\n\n\n00:08\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voices]\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music Continues: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. An archive is a space of collective memory, a place where materials deemed to have historical or social significance are stored and ordered. But who controls what is collected – what gets remembered? Archives are inherently political. And we can rethink the archive as a space for celebrating marginalized voices, for contending with historical exclusion violence, and under-representation through addressing the politics of the archive, what futures might we imagine? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, artists and SpokenWeb fellows jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence award.\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tWe also hear from SpokenWeb RA poet and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run through these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking”. As the producer of the ShortCut series on the SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. Here are jamilah malika, Jessica Karuhanga, Faith Paré, and Katherine McLeod [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] with “Talking about Talking”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n02:46\tjamilah malika:\t[Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot] I’m reading Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. And she has this quote here – chapter one is called “Listen”, and she says, “listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.”\n03:08\t Katherine McLeod:\tThat was jamilah malika. jamilah holds the position of Artist in Residence with SpokenWeb this year.\n03:15\tjamilah malika:\tHey everyone, I’m jamilah malika and I’m so happy to chat with you today, Katherine, about sound and my upcoming project with SpokenWeb. [End Music] I am a sound artist. I also work with tech stuff – page, but also thinking about video and installation. Mostly my practice is thinking about Black women and care. So whatever I make, no matter what it looks like, or what it reads like, or sounds like, Black women are always at the center.  [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n03:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tFor this episode of the SpokenWed Podcast, I sat down over Zoom with the two recipients of this residency, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga. In these conversations, we’ll start with an audio piece and we’ll learn how the piece began, the voices that inform it and how it’s influenced the current residency projects.\n04:11\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview\tWhy don’t we jump right into talking about the audio that you sent over and use that as our ground –\n04:17\tAudio Recording,  jamilah malika, Zoom interview.\tOkay! Cool.\n04:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe way that I approached these conversations was like sitting down to talk and listen together like we do on shortcuts. Yes, I’m Katherine MacLeod and you may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, a monthly feature on the spoken web podcast feed on shortcuts. I play a shortcut from spoken web audio collections as a starting point for reflecting upon what it means to listen to archival sound for my interviews with jamilah and Jessica, I thought I’d try using the ShortCuts approach in which an audio clip would be the starting point for our conversations. Listening to this piece was how jamilah and I started our conversation and that’s what we will listen to now. This is “Listen to Black Womxn” by jamilah malika.\n05:51\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\t[Layered background sounds] This is / As a Black woman / which is / Black, Blackness/ calling myself / constantly being called out for/ my people/ my people/ I even subjugated myself and tried to hide / thinking about/ as a Black woman/ it’s expected/ it’s expected/ it’s expected/ my people/ my white boyfriend/ I said “hi, thank you!”/ [inaudible] talking in a way that makes white people comfortable has become a second skin/ I worked for 24 years in a telecommunications company without using my Trinidad dialect /super comfortable/ super comfortable/ dialect/ [Repeated breaths] Yeah/ Um, um /Yeah, um/ I’ve been moving and loving / My spirit in a way, I feel it/ As a Black woman/ in my spirit I can feel it /moving, trusting/ [Repeated breaths]/ in spirit I can feel it/ navigating /it’s so powerful /yeah / power/ like I said/ brown girl that was Black/ authority/like I said/ in relation to others/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ brown girl that was Black/ finding space for yourself/ finding space for yourself/ less small /with and in my body in totality/ [Repeated breaths] Um, ah, um, and, um, um, uh, / Yes, what do you feel it is in order to get your needs met?/ Which seems like a lot, but all of those things are happening/ Ugh! I don’t know [Laughs]\n10:31\tjamilah malika:\tYeah, “Listen to Black Womxn” is such a community – and lonely – it was such a weird evolution of a project. I was out in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute having a really hard time. And I was in this cool class – it was called psychoacoustics and it was led by this great artist named Kamala Patterson. And he had asked us to think really broadly about a sound project, and thinking about how sound occupies space. And I started thinking a lot about code switching and how in the space of the school, I was doing something with my voice in certain exchanges, notably with white women, where I was trying to mimic pitch and tone and like register as a way to navigate a lot of this terrible tension around being a Black girl who was making a lot of trouble.\n11:38\tjamilah malika:\tSo in my first month and a half at that school, I was in about five meetings with admin about things that we talked about in Canada, like cultural competency and decolonizing your curriculum, and what’s going on with your cannon, and how can you transform that and make it more accessible for different kinds of people. I was trying to figure out how to be a part of shifting that, and hearing myself bend and contort vocally. And so I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to do a project where I record myself doing these shifts.” And I just, I felt so lonely [Laughs]. I was just really intensely lonely. And I just put a call out to my friends, like “can you send me audio of yourselves just talking about what it’s like to talk as Black women?” Just talking about talking –\n12:37\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\n \n\nLess small/ how I’m actually always in my body / in totality/ in relation to my body/ in relation to/ trusting [Breathing]\n12:48\tjamilah malika:\t[Audio Recording of “Listen to Black Womxn” continues and fades] I made it for the class and then I took it to a sound symposium at school, and I felt really weird.\n13:54\tjamilah malika:\tAnd other times I’ve had it playing in conjunction with a video work. Other times through headphones, and I ask people to look in a mirror and watch themselves listen. And then there’s a notebook where I ask them to leave me a reflection. What does it feel like to listen to Black women? And the idea of: pay attention. So once it was at Prefixed Gallery and they have an audio art gallery, so that’s like this just very nice enclosed space. And a curator who saw it there reached out to me and asked me if I would design an enclosure. So now, I got to think about what’s the interiority of that sound as an experience of what I could wheat paste in terms of a collage, or what the smells might be in that space or what the lighting would be like that space. So it’s really been this exciting evolution at work.\n14:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s fantastic to hear about all the different iterations of it –\n15:00\tjamilah malika:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n15:00\tKatherine McLeod:\t– and there’s so many things from what you just – because the piece is about the speaker and the speaker’s voice, but really – especially as I made a note of the word relation that starts to emerge through. And so thinking that even in the presentation of it, if there’s a sense that there’s a connection between the sound and the listener and that you could be part of developing a sound booth to design that experience, or really to be thinking about “how is this sound reaching the listener, and what is that experience like?” And so then the piece becomes about that listening experience too, which is really, really fascinating.\n15:36\tjamilah malika:\tI’m always really curious – what is it like to listen to Black women? When’s the last time? – so some of the prompts in the notebook were like, “when’s the last time you listened to Black women?” And what are those circumstances? And I think one of the showings was around the moment of Trump’s election and there was so much social commentary around –we should have listened to Black women and this idea of the Black women in your office or the Black women in your private personal spaces – how do you listen? When do you listen? Do you listen? I’m really interested in that as a bigger question.\n16:20\tKatherine McLeod:\tCircling back to that very first – the very first sound that we hear in the piece. Could you speak about that?\n16:25\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. Like the non-verbal. And I think there – in the first iterations I made, they were very legible and I think – somewhere conversations with friends, with advisors, what is a move more towards like fugitivity, and mystery and not explaining everything? And so a lot of those [makes sounds] – those sounds, they do a lot more. They do the thing they’re talking about – and how we can’t explain everything, but it can be something the body does – just a letting go of something or a sucking in of something and how that just comes out really organically.\n17:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd even the sound of it – I felt like it caught attention. You almost do take a breath yourself or just kind of really pause – the breath is so integral, but also it really says it says everything. So it’s –.\n17:39\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. You know, and there’s ways – I’m Nigerian and Trinidadian and in both of those cultures, we suck teeth and Michèle Pearson Clark has this beautiful sound work that’s also a visual, it’s an audiovisual work that’s just acquired by the National Gallery. It’s exciting when sound work is becoming a part of that echelon of art to me, because that work, you know, it’s “Suck Teeth Composition”. And it’s really just about that sound and everybody making that sound and how that sound relates to grief and to emotion and to all kinds of responsiveness and and it has meaning. And Michèle names that work “Suck Teeth Composition” after Rashaad Newsome. And he’s an African-American sound artist and that – his work is called “The Shade Composition” and it’s all these Black women making all these nonverbal sounds. And I learned about it only after making “Listen to Black Womxn”. I was like, “Wow!” It’s this really beautiful performance where he has all these Black women on stage.\n19:00\tjamilah malika:\tAnd it’s really orchestral and like a symphony of these nonverbal sounds. It’s really– it’s very special about these – [Laughs] like I just did it. These sounds that are just a part of knowing Black women. If you’re –in knowing this kind of little responses. But it’s very personal, it’s very intimate.\n19:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. And it also – thinking too about something becoming something that is so personal and intimate becoming, say a composition or becoming compositional. And I did think of the way that the voices – like I wrote down the word polyphonic at one point of thinking about what it creates. And it really – it’s this overwhelming sort of polyphony of voices, but they’re, and they, they become very musical. It felt like a very polyphonic experience in listening to it –.\n19:57\tjamilah malika:\tYeah. There’s definitely rhythm. And I think there are places when I really played that up. And it just –it felt good.\n20:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, exactly. Exactly. And it feels good to listen to as well.\n20:11\tjamilah malika:\tYeah! That’s great to hear.\n20:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd I love the idea too of it being sort of – coming out of also thinking about talking about talking too –\n20:20\tjamilah malika:\tYeah.\n20:20\tKatherine McLeod:\t– because that’s something that – just thinking of it’s a way too, to think of how we connect as bodies together too. So…\n20:32\tAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika:\t[Words with echoes and layered sounds] Just as I am/ As a Black woman/ Power in her voice/ That’s her bass/ that’s her bass / that’s her bass / that’s her bass\n20:40\tjamilah malika:\tWhen it comes to the SpokenWeb project, this is really an opportunity to build an archive that shows that Black Indigenous and People of Colour artists who make sound works, who are women, femmes, gender nonconforming, are really contributing to what sound art looks like, and it doesn’t have to be verbal. So Nikita Gale is a sound artist who I really love who makes works that – there’s an installation she has where it’s water rolling off of drum kits. And there’s an artist named Ruth Seal, some Black woman who makes a solar informed sound work. Right. So has these panels and they are connected to different notes and they sat out in this field and they just produced sound. Right? There’s just so much sound art that is really about found sound, about evoking sound, and also all the way into the spectrum of recordings that include voice, and how do Canadian Black artists show up in this work?\n22:17\tjamilah malika:\tAnd in my work, I know who I’m in conversation with. I don’t know who else knows. So the project is really about giving –and I hate to use the word visibility because it’s not about visualuality right? Because it’s giving an audibility to these sound artists who I’m really certain that when it comes to people who face the burden of representation and just the way the art as the market drives certain trends in reproducing Black pain and trauma. And I think what sound does is it undoes what visualuality does. And I think it does what visualuality cannot. It makes the listener almost interrogate themselves in a different way than looking. When I think about art and its limitations or its libertory capacity, I really think that sound art is this really exciting opportunity to free yourself of visualuality and to give whole new possibilities in terms of relating to the audience.\n23:42\tjamilah malika:\tI hope the website as an archive serves to highlight these Canadian contributions. I think there might be some works like across Turtle Island, but largely Canadian contributions to sound art – and in my greatest hopes will inspire a lot of young people who are Black Indigenous and of colour to try their hand at some sound art. There’s some great stuff in the archives like Lillian Allen, so sound poems, and Faith Paré as being really super helpful, helping me navigate the archives. So I think if I had to kind of go into the SpokenWeb archive and dig around myself, I would probably be having a way harder time. So it’s really helpful that Faith, as someone who’s at SpokenWeb is really collaborating with me and I owe her a great deal for helping me figure out –she’s like, “okay, kind of what are you, who are you looking for?”\n24:51\tjamilah malika:\tAnd I’m like, “Okay, these people, these people, these people.” And she’s like, “Got it”. And so there’s some great recordings of Shani Mootoo that she’s found. And so it’s – Shani is a writer and a novelist and also a painter it’s this quite large range, so Shani talking is going to be included. And I think it does – this idea of drawing a circle is kind of where I’m at in this moment of like, what is in, what is out, how do I make something that feels not comprehensive, but as generative as possible so that people are like, “Oh, there’s all kinds of possibilities”. And yeah, I think kind of hard definitions isn’t really what I’m going for, but more so this feeling of range. [Begin Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]\n25:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter speaking with jamilah, I was interested in the kinds of resources in the SpokenWeb audio collections that she might be tapping into. And what could these recordings tell us about the sound of Black women’s voices in the archives? She mentioned SpokenWeb RA Faith Paré and I asked Faith about what she had found so far and also about the process. [End Music: ‘Night Watch’ by Blue Dot]\n26:17\tFaith Paré:\tYeah. I think what was really interesting and starting off with Cumulus project reading through it for the first time after she was selected by the jurors and starting to get acquainted with it and our first Zoom meetings, was how much I felt immediately that her project, as well as Jessica’s, was going to impact my own research as a Black woman poet with a huge research interest in Black cultural production in Canada. I’m really invested in taking a look at Black created artifacts and my own experience at SpokenWeb for the last year or so – almost a year – has been digging through and seeing what is also in the archives that is waiting to be discovered or waiting to be animated in a particular way. Last summer, I had worked with the Words and Music shows metadata and community collection which contains a lot of spoken word.\n27:16\tFaith Paré:\tThat’s a tradition that’s full of Black innovators, and it’s a tradition that I’ve come out of and I’m very familiar with. From the get-go I revisited this collection because I’d grown to know it so closely and known grown to know the curation and the collaborators on that project. I started off by essentially listening to pieces that I had already listened to a few times – sets by Lillian Allen, for example, or Takita Tanya Evanson. And then from there, it was a matter of consulting Swallow, which has SpokenWeb’s open source metadata ingestion system, as many will know, and using keywords around Black poetry and poetics in an attempt to find recordings from other institutions. Because we have lots of community collections, there were also really exciting pieces by young Black spoken word artists, who may be recording technically for the first time, as well as there were more formal readings coming out of SFU, for example, of Esi Edugyan and Juliane Okot Bitek And there was also some materials too that probably will make it into the final, just because of the particular interests that jamilah has run her project, which is really about honouring the sonic artistry of Black artists. But there were some interviews as well with Gwendolyn Brooks and the Amiri Baraka, and some more materials of Amiri Baraka’s that I wouldn’t have expected to find not only in SpokenWeb’s archives, but just to Canadian archives, per se, as well.\n28:50\tKatherine McLeod::\tIn terms of recordings that really sort of caught your attention, what would they be?\n28:55\tFaith Paré:\tWell, I’m a huge, huge, huge Lillian Allen fan. And particularly when we think about Lillian’s career and her huge influence in dub poetry, not only in Canada but in the Caribbean and around the world, that dub poetry is the perfect example of a form that integrates a literary form, and what’s going on in a studio, and also the oral performance tradition and also rejects all of those labels at once.\n29:38\tAudio Recording, “Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen\t[Caribbean Beat] Riddim and hardtimes [Singing] [Speaking] [Repeated]\n29:38\tFaith Paré:\tTo hear some of her work again in the archives was very exciting. And because I also have a huge interest in what a Black aesthetic is and what tradition of Black criticism around poetics is finding some of those Amiri Baraka interviews was very, very exciting too. And I’m very excited to revisit them. And we also –me and jamilah had another gushing moment when we got sent some Shani Mootoo  recordings and Shani Mootoo  is an Indo-Caribbean, particularly Indo-Trinidadian writer. She’s not Black, but because jamilah is Trinidadian and has a relationship and all of Shani’’s work, we had this, “Oh, wow!” moment of, I can’t believe this is like sitting in an institution. We haven’t been able to listen to it! So, it’s one of those things where I think when you’re researching, everything is never going to make it into the final cut, but still finding those recordings and knowing that they can enrich your own listening experience, or also you can pass them along to someone else who might benefit from it.\n30:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt makes me think too, that it really – in finding these recordings, it’s also changing the sound of SpokenWeb as a project and sort of it not only changes the sound of what one thinks of in terms of the sound of it [Music Begins: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions], but also the what kind of sound-based research can be done through its archival collections.\n31:13\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI really think storytelling is about self articulating. It’s also about witnessing. It’s also about every assertion or an affirmation of presence that I am here. [Music Ends: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I am Jessica Karuhanga – I also go by Kichoncho. I am a multi-disciplinary artist.\n31:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tI spoke with Jessica on Zoom. We started with an audio clip of where it all began. It is a piece called “ALL OF ME”. You can find a link to the entire piece in the show notes for this episode. We started our conversation by listening together to the opening section.\n32:05\tAudio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by  Jessica Karuhanga:\t[Electronic Orchestra Chords – interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing] Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed. Big. And never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. [Choral Singing] Because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. [Choral Singing] [Drumming and singing begins, underlaid] I don’t want to think about the past so, like, I don’t really, like, I don’t really like to think about nostalgia because it just makes it sad because we don’t really have a family anymore. I don’t know sometimes like, cause like, just when you think about happy memories with your family, but, and you remember when your family was happy, your family is just so not even existed anymore. So thinking about those happy times, or we had like a childhood and, and we would get in the van and go camping every weekend. And our, like our summers used to be us as a family, swimming in the pool and how happy we were and I guess sometimes you gotta think about that stuff because you remember when you were just like purely happy and just didn’t have to stress out about, about the dynamic that your family was in, because you thought – felt safe and you felt secure. So I feel like I feel nostalgia. I feel nostalgic for the feeling of when I was a child and I felt secure and safe and happy, and I didn’t have any care in the world. I’m really – I was nostalgic about not necessarily even nostalgia – I just yearn for that feeling. And I wish I knew at that time that I should enjoy that feeling because I have – because of all the stuff that was going to happen. And like, I guess it makes you look forward to when I have children of my own, I want them to have those memories and then never let those memories get ruined, like the way that those memories have kind of been ruined for me. Yeah. Is that good? Sure. [Vocalizing music]. [Piano chords] There is no time in the past that I want to return to in my life because I have trouble relating to who I was in the past. I can never quite return to that headspace. I experience regret and time travel for me would be an opportunity to correct those mistakes, rather than stay within the same history as it played itself out.\n35:35\tJessica Karuhanga:\t“ALL OF ME” is the name of the piece. It’s an assemblage of voices, Black women, femmes, nonbinary, gender non-conforming folk, and I basically ask people who are close to me – so there’s that innate trust there, which felt very pertinent – to just address how they were feeling. The original voice that we listened to, the initial voice is an acceptance speech that Viola Davis made for an Emmy or a Golden Globe. I remember being really blown away by this because she was articulating something for me that transcended – kind of affirmed or reminded me that there’s a lot that you’re still injuring in doing the work or the work that she may be doing, a person that I do not know, but I felt there was analogies I could draw to my experience. So I was very moved to that notion of exhuming and withstanding these kinds of thresholds. So yeah, that just felt like the initial impulse.\n36:42\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd then I was – from that I wanted to just hear from people that I know intimately to speak to these kinds of alterities, these self-forming self articulations – the imagination, like how we imagine ourselves. So, I find that in moments of despair, there are two-fold responses: one that is kind of this nostalgic past tense, looking to the past, romanticizing it. And then it’s like, for what? For whom? Often the greater your proximity to whiteness or able-bodied cis-hetero embodiments, maybe the more likely you are to have this kind of nostalgia, or it’s about these alterities, they’re trying to imagine, a kind of Afro-future, or maybe it’s just an entirely different dimension. And there is one of the speakers who speaks to – later on to dimensionality and time travel and all these beautiful, strange things. So, it’s in a constellation with Octavia Butler’s thinking and is – actually, the project was heavily inspired by texts of her as like Kindred and Black science fiction as well. So that’s –it’s really through the voice I feel like there’s something there that maybe is tied to storytelling, mythmaking, and like oral rituals.\n38:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. I’m thinking the opening line of like, “they ask me all the time, what stories do you want to tell?”\n38:17\tJessica Karuhanga:\tYeah. I really wanted to take you kind of on a journey –a journey like where you begin being hyper aware and attentive to every word that’s being said, but that the music can be a kind of compliment or buttress or support to that voice. So, I listened over and over and over again to the recordings I recorded on voice memos, on recorders that I have – so they’re a mix of low and very high fi, depending on if I can meet in person for person or if we are geographically dislocated. But I basically listened – spent time with these recordings after getting their consent and okay to use the material, and just spot about what sounds could compliment it. Already in having these voices, it speaks to a history of assemblage and sampling, and these kind of markers of hip hop, R&B, pop music, all music at this point involves a lot of sampling and remixing.\n39:24\tJessica Karuhanga:\tThere’s all these different stylistic things that happened that were really just me kind of reflecting back –back and forth between us. So I really wanted to reinforce that kind of call and response. So I asked a question, they responded to it and I– and when they’re comfortable a few seconds into speaking, it becomes kind of free form. You kind of lose yourself in the storytelling. And then the same –then I respond again with the sound. So it’s this kind of call and response in the actual making and coalescing of the project. And also it’s a project that’s about, it’s almost 30 minutes long, the entire piece, so it’s something – I mean the experience, or witnesser always has a choice to stay or go. And also I usually have it playing on a loop on headphones, kind of evoking what might be a listening booth at music stores, just as an experience.\n40:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tTo step outside the conversation for a moment on Jessica Karuhanga’s website, there’s some documentation from a piece called through a brass channel from 2017. I wanted to ask her about a woman moving while listening to headphones. I asked her if she was listening to “ALL OF ME”.\n40:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t– the visual of the listening… so I had to ask you that.\n40:43\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAbsolutely. And what are you privy to? So, you’re close. Yep. Yes and no. So, in that installation, it’s – I call it like a multi-vaillant, multi-channel installation. So I had about six different works that were either sculptures, video installations, and whatnot. So, in that documentation of the performance and exhibition making, you are really saying, seeing exhibition making happening in real time and temporality, which is also like an element of music making it space making, but it’s like oral, you know? And so that person, they’re listening on headphones to the sound of a video that’s looping, but you’re not privy to the screen. And that was also a structure – a structural or a devisive choice I made – that when you entered the space, through the doorways, that the back of the screen would be towards you.\n41:50\tJessica Karuhanga:\tSo you as a spectator have to acknowledge that being a viewer, observer is a verb, is an action, that you are complicit in the space making. So someone else can go to the listening booth, listen to “ALL OF ME”on their headphones and then be watching what it is you’re looking at. So that’s why I was saying yes and no. It’s both, the two co-exist – is because someone actually had that experience where they were – they’re explaining to me that they had the headphones on and they were listening to “ALL OF ME”. And then they saw the performer in the corner, swaying back and forth with their headphones on kind of in their own world and felt like there was a moment of synchronicity, a moment that they shared that was temporal that no one else could embody and experience. So I really was wanting to cultivate that.\n42:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfter hearing that response, I knew that I had to ask Jessica one more question about through a brass channel. I saw that the performance had featured a guest M. NourbeSe Philip, and I had to ask her about what that performance was like.\n43:01\tJessica Karuhanga:\tthrough a brass channel was the installation, and “ALL OF ME” was one of the art-i-facts in that constellation of words. So there – there is that another project was called Kiss the Sky, another object, and they all had different names. The video that the person’s witnessing with the headphones on is called Moon and the 12th House. And there were four constant performers that are circulating the space. And I just basically told them come and go, as you please. And the roommate, the initial kind of precursors or determinants were, “I want you to come to the space with an object or a gesture. That’s something that only we share.” So someone brought in an urn, someone else brought in turmeric, someone brought in salt, someone brought in cloths. And at first you were using them the way that the general public might think to use them. Like salt, I’m pouring it out, picking it up.\n43:56\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI’m like –a scarf. I’m folding it, unfolding it. But over time, it went from not just using these objects to like the wall becomes material. The headphones that have a utilitarian function for visitors becomes an art material as well. So that’s where those boundaries started to blur. It’s like giving that – in the spirit of liberatory politics, giving that freedom to the people I invited in to activate the thing. And then with NourbeSe Philip we met through a childhood friend of mine who has worked with her for years. So through this connection of a mutual close person in our lives, we kind of built this friendship, or this like – from my side, it’s deep affinity and respect and reverence. And also from someone who’s very kind and generous and you feel like they’re approachable.\n45:01\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd so just based out of that kind of respect or affinity– I shot my shot, so to speak and asked if she would be willing to be a guest in my piece. And I think she found it really interesting because I don’t think she considers herself a performance artist, even though she does these – every year, this kind of elergy. And to be clear, I think the enactment raison is not at all a performance. It is like a reading. It is a response. It is elergic. So it isn’t – it isn’t an enactment that happens annually or sometimes multiple times a year. It’s different from performance art capital. But even with my performance art, I’m not – precisely because I am a Black queer person, it’s very different for me because of the gaze that I’m there, that we have to deal with but have no power over. It also doesn’t feel like performance art for me.\n46:00\tJessica Karuhanga:\tIt’s not – I’m not ever playing a character. It’s never play time for me. In fact, it’s exhausting. And that is why I told the performers, show up however you are, if you need to take a break, if it’s only for 15 minutes today, if it’s for four hours, what is it that you can do? So in asking Nourbese I –yeah, we didn’t, I just invited her. We’d decided on a date. We opened it to the public for people who wanted to witness. So we had seating there. And we kind of just improvised and intuited what we did. So she brought in leafs from [inaudible] – photocopied leafs and some libations and other ritual objects, because that was also –it was already happening in this space. And we just did this call and response.\n46:52\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI couldn’t tell you if it lasted an hour or two hours, there’s no documentation of it at all. Maybe some poor quality cell phone photos that were very discreetly taken so as not to disrupt the energy exchange that was happening. And the few people that shared with me, their experiences of watching us said, they thought we rehearsed it. Like there are moments of profound synchronicity or just sharing. Like there was a moment where she was making these sorts of sounds or gestures, and I kind of received it, but my eyes were closed. Just these beautiful moments that happen over and over and over again. And I think it involves trust and risk and an openness to allow for something like that to happen, to not want to control the thing, to understand that it isn’t, that it is art, but it also transcends art.\n47:45\tAudio Recording, “ALL OF ME” by Jessica Karuhanga:\t[Electronic Orchestra Chords – interspersed and underlaid throughout] People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell? And I say exhume those bodies. [Choral Singing].\n47:56\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI guess I’ll start with how my relationship to SpokenWeb took shape or came into vision. The feel of the vision. There was an open call and I responded. And then was at a moment where, we are reeling around more unmoored from not simply the deaths of George Floyd and others – just the kind of response to that. Like suddenly, because we are all forced to be silent and home and obedient kind of proletariats to care – suddenly people were like, “Oh, I have proof I’m witnessing anti-Blackness differently”. And so there’s this retraumatization that was also going on. So I had a lot of feelings thatI was going through, a lot of grief, a lot of rage, a lot of this. So that there’s that bit and then all the opportunities predicated – are riffing off of people’s guilt. Do the Instagram takeovers, to do, to make art, not even people naming that it’s directly a result of this, but we know that it is no coincidence you have all these positions popping up in institutions of Black people doing Black things and the IG takeovers, whatever it is, like all of these positions being formed in the wake. There that’s the second bit. The third bit is in my way of dealing that was plugging out and ignoring that thing. And in resistance to the pervasive circulation of images, violent images being like, I want to return to this other space. I want to be with the music I’m doing. I want to – I want to feed my senses, nourish my senses, and I want to start to heal. So I actually was remembering this piece in that project and as a whole and how nourishing it was for a different point in my life where I was also dealing with a lot of grief and illness.\n49:54\tJessica Karuhanga:\tAnd some friends of mine had brought up the project. So I was like, okay, there seems to be this need for this. I found myself sharing a lot of voice notes with close friends. And I was like, Oh, there’s something here with the voice note, even musically, how something like an interlude functions as this kind of interstitial thing. So I kind of put all those things together and vomited up a proposal very last minute, kind of undulating –should I, shouldn’t I? And then I was like, no, I’m gonna, this feels important. I’m going to just do this. It’d be nice to have support and resources to help make this happen because I’m one person and I don’t know how much I could actually facilitate different people being vulnerable. You know, I’m not a therapist. I don’t have a practice like that and all of these things. So that’s kind of what happened.\n50:43\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI responded to this open call. I got selected. And now what – how that has to do “ALL OF ME” is “ALL OF ME”  was started within my own circle. These are people that I cared deeply about. These are close friends. But I wanted to bring it expanded outward to people who are not my family, but are kin, are fam. So I was like, Oh, maybe it has to be an open call. I want to facilitate something that is bigger than me, larger than me. That can become a self-sustaining thing. So that’s how I arrived at my current project, which is basically a digital artwork, website repository for people to unleash their stories.\n51:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ve covered a lot. But I was wanting to ask you about whether you see this as an archive…?\n51:31\tJessica Karuhanga:\tI think it is. I think– I have this project that is also involved sound and performance called a #carefree. And with that, I made a video collage out of all the images and videos and Vines – when Vine was still a thing – and Twitter. With that is all archived cause hashtags are a form of archiving or classification we can say, classified through carefree Black girls. And I was like, Oh, it’s interesting –or carefree Black boy– and I was like, Oh, what if all of these things – I assembled all of these things into this visual assemblage and I responded to them. So again, that call and response thing is there. What if it’s cues for choreography? So I think of it in a similar way because these people are still living people, they’re present. They were in the moment and present when they made these videos. It’s all about self defining. Like I am deciding the terms of how I reveal and conceal and what I share, what I don’t share.\n52:38\tJessica Karuhanga:\tThat’s where the social media bit is distinct, but interesting. So I do see this as in proximity to that or in a constellation of that. So it is an archive, but I just don’t feel like oftentimes when we speak about archive particularly in relation to Indigenous subjectivities, I mean that globally. So let’s get even more specific about African peoples. There’s primitivism, it’s always about this past and this thing of like, rareify our subjectivities to the past as objects, so a larger thing, like these museological conversations, cabinet of curiosities, these kind of colonial capturing of artifacts and living beings, whether they be plant life or humans that are captured. So yeah, archive is loaded. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] Artifact is loaded, but I don’t know what other words to use. It is situated in not saying, but in a space of reclamation or something\n53:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tAt one point, Jessica refers to the recordings as “cues for choreography”, a phrase that not only suggests that the recordings invite a response, a doing, a making, but also that this doing and making might happen in another medium or art form altogether. I think back to speaking with jamilah and how throughout our conversation, she was sitting beneath a vivid painting, and only when our conversation veered into the archives towards the end and about the writers whose voices are recorded there, she mentioned Shani Mootoo  and that the painting behind her was in fact, a Shani Mootoo painting. [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions] I tell that story here, because it feels as though it brings it all together, the painting, the recording, the speaking body in front of the painting, the listening, the conversation.\n54:32\tjamilah malika:\tShani is a writer, and a novelist and also a painter. I’m actually sitting under one of her paintings.\n54:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tI wanted to ask you but I was like, Oh, maybe I’ll wait til the end [Laughs].\n54:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tThey were all invitations or responses to “cues for choreography”. And thinking back to that, painting reminds one that talking about sound art is not only talking about sound. Talking about talking is not only about talking. [Begin Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]What kinds of cues for choreography do the sounds of this podcast activate? In which practices of everyday life might this activation bring a kind of freedom? What might you make in response?  [End Music: Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions]\n \n\n55:21\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n55:36\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb team member Katherine McLeod of Concordia University. Thank you to Jessica Karuhanga, jamilah malika, and Faith Paré for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. And our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Dr. Kristin Moria of Queens University and to Tawhida Tanya Evanson of Mother Tongue Media for their role in adjudicating the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWord Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. And we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9289","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E9, Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 7 June 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/701010c0-9bb5-412c-acb0-2e48a249ca09/audio/792ab3ed-977c-43e3-9e55-a10c09f5495d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:10\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,362,594 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\\n\\n“Delamine.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39295.\\n\\n“Silver Lanyard.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39298.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549506490368,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the March 2021 episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented the first episode of a two-part series: “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU,” which included a full-length recording of Mavis Gallant’s reading of her New Yorker short story at Simon Fraser University in 1984. In the second episode of this series, we dive into what we are calling the “paratexts” of the reading: the material and contextual circumstances that informed Gallant’s performance, including an unrecorded and unarchived event that took place the day before; the audience; the theatre; and the physical tape itself.\n\nThis episode features our efforts to understand how these paratexts may have informed not only the experience of attending the event in 1984, but also our own experiences listening to the recording of the reading now, in 2021, and our interactions with the surviving archival materials. This investigation led Kate, Kandice, and Michelle to interview Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who attended and contributed to the organization of the two events, and talk to Grazia Merler, a professor in the Department of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the time of the reading. Their contributions provided both memories and facts not captured by the archival remains of the reading.\n\nWith additional archival materials available in a supplementary gallery, this episode takes us beyond the bounds of an ‘audio edition’ to instead consider how the ‘paratexts’ of this reading deepen our understanding of the recording and bring to life the reading of the story by acclaimed Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the spoken web podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. There’s a kind of magic to finding an old recording and listening to the sounds of the past. When researchers listes to archival recordings, each sonic literary record comes with silent questions: who is speaking and who is recording? Where was this recording made? And, what are those background sounds? How are we listening to and interpreting the recording in the present and how might people have listened differently at the time the recording was made? How can we preserve this physical tape so it’s protected for future listeners? In March of this year, SpokenWeb researchers, Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy brought us a full audio edition of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story ‘Grippes and Poche’ at Simon Fraser University in 1984.\n \n\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tNow we bring you part two of the series, an exploration of the questions that surround this recording of Mavis Gallant. Kate, Kandice, and Michelle refer to these as the ‘paratexts’ of the recording. And their illuminating investigation takes us back to the year 1984 and the days surrounding Galant’s presence at the SFU podium. The stories that they uncovered are surprising and often delightful, and they help us listen to Gallant’s reading with fuller awareness of the realities that surrounded the event. Here are Kate, Kandice and Michelle with episode nine of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Mavis Gallant Part Two [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n02:34\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown, so we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10!” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office.” So anyway, [Accordian/French interlude music] it was one of those ones…\n \n\n02:58\tKate Moffat:\tOn March, 2021. We – Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented Mavis Gallant reading of her New Yorker short story ‘Grippes and Poches; as an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast – [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tI’m a fetishist. That’s why the watch has to be there and not there. And you see that’s …\n \n\n03:15\tMichelle Levy:\t[Clips of audio layered] …at the time of this SFU reading Gallant….\n \n\n03:17\tKate Moffat:\t…the recording provides us with an offering…\n \n\n03:19\tKandice Sharren:\t… the audio cassette containing this recording is housed in…\n \n\n03:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tCan you all hear me? [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:24\tKate Moffat:\tWhile we were preparing our last episode, we used our grounding in book history methodologies to think about the recording as an unofficial audio edition of “Grippes and Poche”, in which Gallant’s explanatory asides take on a role similar to that of footnotes or endnotes. In our last episode, we noted, however, that unlike footnotes or endnotes, listening to Gallant’s asides were not optional, but integrated into the text. Something paratextual became textual, so to speak [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n03:51\tKandice Sharren:\tWhile putting together the second episode, we were curious about exploring the relationship between the text and the paratexts of the reading further. Paratext was coined by Gérard Genette to describe everything that surrounds a text, including the material form the text takes, contextual information about the author, and even book reviews and interviews. Genette talks about paratexts as “thresholds of interpretation”, that is to say that they fundamentally shape how we approach, encounter and engage with the text. For the original print version of “Grippes and Poche” in the New Yorker, it’s paratextual material would include the cartoons interspersed throughout the text, other articles that appeared alongside it, and even the magazine’s signature font. These paratexts established Gallant’s story as a self-consciously literary work, one that carries with it a certain amount of prestige. In dealing with an audio recording of a text, we had to expand our idea of what a paratext might be. In the case of Gallant’s reading, the paratexts include the audible and inaudible contexts that surround the event and inflect how we interpret the story. The circumstances that surrounded Gallant’s visit, the planning that went into the reading, Gallant’s delivery, the audience, and even the tape that holds the recording.\n \n\n05:12\tMichelle Levy:\tInterested in supplementing the archival materials we found with human memory to reconstruct the event and its paratexts, we sought to make these paratexts visible by talking to Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who worked in the liberal studies department at SFU and were involved in organizing the Mavis Gallant events during her visit. I also spoke at length with Grazia Merler, a friend of Gallant’s who worked in SFU’s Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics at the time of the event. [Start Music: Piano] From these investigations, we have assembled a series of conversations and artifacts to contextualize the audio recording of the reading you heard in the first part of this two-part series. To establish the paratext of this reading, we asked the following questions, which structure this episode.\n \n\n06:03\tKandice Sharren:\tFirst, what were the circumstances of Gallant’s visit to SFU in 1984? Second?\n \n\n06:10\tKate Moffat:\tWhat do we know of the reading the day before otherwise known as the fiasco?\n \n\n06:16\tMichelle Levy:\tThird, how do we place Gallant’s accent and understand her pronunciation choices?\n \n\n06:21\tKate Moffat:\tFourth, who are the unseen, but audible audience members for the reading?\n \n\n06:27\tMichelle Levy:\tFifth, why did she select ‘Grippes and Poche’ to read to this academic audience?\n \n\n06:32\tKandice Sharren:\tAnd finally sixth, what physical artifacts of the events survive and what do they tell us about the event?\n \n\n06:39\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter One: The Visit, in which Michelle talks to Grazia Merler and Gallant’s reason for visiting Vancouver becomes clear.\n \n\n06:54\tKate Moffat:\tFollowing our close listening to the recording of Gallant’s reading for our last episode, we were curious about the circumstances that brought Gallant to Vancouver in 1984, given that she lived in France for most of her life. In addition to chatting with Ann and Carolyn, Michelle was able to connect with one of Gallant’s old friends,\n \n\n07:10\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant was invited to SFU by Grazia Merler, then an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics on the recommendation of her supervisor, Merler had met Gallant while researching her PhD on Stendhal In Paris in the early 1960s. Merle told me about how she was invited to Gallant’s apartment at [French addresss] in Paris for tea. Upon arriving on a frigid day in the middle of winter, Gallant asked Merler if she wished for tea or something stronger. Merler agreed that something stronger would be welcomed. They hit it off immediately and remained friends until Gallant’s death in 2014,. Gallant lived in the same apartment in the sixth arrondissement for over four decades, from 1961 or 62 until her death. Merler told me that Golan came to visit her when SFU was first being built, and she references this first visit in her introduction for Gallant at the Burnaby event.\n \n\n08:07\tAudio Recording, Gratzia Merla:\n \n\nI talk a little bit louder. Can you hear me now?\n \n\n08:09\tAudio Recording, Audience Member:\tThat’s fine. Thank you.\n \n\n08:11\tGratzia Merla:\tIn 1965, before Simon Fraser University opened, I took a friend to the top of this mountain to show her a striking piece of architecture and the awesome site or this architecture. At that time, we both decided that we should come back to see the development of what seemed at that time a master temple. I kept my promise about 15 years ago. Mavis Gallant was the other part in the promise, and she’s keeping her part of the bargain today.\n \n\n08:56\tKate Moffat:\tAs we know from the recording of ‘Grippes and Poche’, Gallant visited SFU again in 1984, to give her reading on February 14th. The poster for the reading tells us that Gallant was, at the time of the event, writer in residence at the University of Toronto. She likely took advantage of her relative proximity to Vancouver to make good on her promise to return.\n \n\n09:15\tMichelle Levy:\tMerler told me that during this period Gallant came regularly to North America. She was being paid well for her New Yorker stories and could afford to visit friends in Montreal, as well as her editor, William Maxwell, in New York. From what we’ve been able to gather, it seems Gallant gave a number of readings at universities in Canada during this time. In addition to the SFU reading of Grippes and Poche in 1984, she also gave a reading of the same story in June of that same year at the University of Toronto, a reading of her story ‘Virus X’ at the University of Alberta in 1975, and reading at the University of Victoria, although we haven’t been able to track down a date or the story she read for that event. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano][Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages]\n \n\n10:00\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Two: The Fiasco. In which attendees and organizers Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate meet Mavis Gallant, and an event goes terribly wrong.\n \n\n10:13\tMichelle Levy:\tI was hoping that you could each just introduce yourself briefly and maybe tell us a little bit about where you are now and where you were in 1984. Carolyn, do you want to start?\n \n\n10:24\tCarolyn Tate:\tSure. Well, right now, I’m in my dining room in Toronto, Ontario in the Bloor West Village. I’ve lived in this house for about 20 years. At the time Mavis was in Vancouver I was the director of Liberal Studies – the Liberal Studies program for Continuing Studies, and I was the person who was responsible for organizing the downtown part of her visit. And as we’ll discover, it was complete fiasco. But really my main reason I’m here is I’ve been a tremendous fan of Mavis Gallant for many years. And maybe I should add that since Continuing Studies, I went to law school and I practiced intellectual property law for 20 years.\n \n\n11:10\tMichelle Levy:\tWonderful! Well, thank you so much. Ann, do you want to tell us a little bit about you now and where you were?\n \n\n11:17\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, now I’m sitting in my study in Vancouver. I live in the West End near Stanley Park and I’ve lived here for a while. But in 1984, I was in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser and Carolyn came to join us. I think she came a couple of years after I did, and we became great friends. And we had babies together. I had one, she had one, I had one, she had one. So we – the same maternity clothes were floating around the office for almost five years, which drove everybody nuts. But anyway, so we’d been friends all these years. I did my BA at U of T in English – English Language and Literature it was called then. And then I did a Master’s degree in Carlton because I was married to – at that time a physiology professor who had a job at the University of Ottawa. But then I fell in love with Peter Buitenhuis and moved to Vancouver and started working at SFU about a year after that. So – and Peter was the chair of the English department at the time that this recording was made…\n \n\n12:35\tKandice Sharren:\tIt was through our conversation with ann and Carolyn that we learned that Mavis Gallant’s visit to SFU actually included two events: the reading of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU Burnaby at Images Theater at 11:30 in the morning of February 14th, which we have a recording of, and a mid day reading downtown the day before for which we have no archival material whatsoever. In fact, we were unaware of the event on February 13th until we had the opportunity to chat with Ann and Carolyn about their experiences organizing and attending these events.\n \n\n13:09\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, first of all, you’re quite right. There was an event downtown. It was the day before the event on campus. And it was in quite a small room because we were at 549 Howe in those days and we didn’t have any large rooms. So we did – as Carolyn said, she organized the downtown talk and neither of us can remember what story she read downtown. It was not the same one as she read on campus. But I think Carolyn should tell you a little bit about that event because some of the behaviour of Mavis in the recording of the second event, I think stems from her experiences downtown. So maybe Carolyn would talk a little bit more, because you were really in charge of that event. And I certainly remember the room being full of very enthusiastic people.\n \n\n14:00\tCarolyn Tate:\tI’m happy to talk about the downtown event and Mavis. It was a fiasco, frankly. I didn’t think that there would be very many people and we had this little free room down there and somebody set up the mic and I thought, well fine. You know, 20 people will come or something like that. Well, more like 50 or so people came and the room was very crowded and we didn’t have the technician – he had set it up, but then it didn’t work. So it was really quite miserable for everybody, but especially for Mavis. She was very, very put out by it. And in truth, I was a little bit put out by how put out she was. I expected her to be this kind of, I don’t know, nothing would phase me sort of person. And really, she wasn’t that at all.\n \n\n14:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tShe was very proper. She was very neatly dressed in a very good French suit. She’d come on the airplane and she told us that she had a terrible time because she didn’t want to ask somebody to help her get her suitcase down from the bin. And you know, you couldn’t just ask somebody to help you – didn’t you know? And frankly, I didn’t know that [Laughs]. I thought – I really thought she was a bit precious. I have to say. [Laughs] But, notwithstanding that, she came along and we were going to do the talk and there was no mic. So she had to shout the whole time, and she did. And she finished, she gave her reading and people heard her. I have to say – I was so fritzed by that time that I didn’t, I didn’t know – I have no idea what story she read. I have no memory of her actual talking, which was why I was so thrilled with the recording that you have because I think she is a brilliant speaker.\n \n\n16:04\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell she was a little grumpy, I have to say. And she – not only was she grumpy, she told everybody to ask Carolyn for their money back, which was $10. The event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown. So we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10.” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office”. So anyway, it was one of those moments. But the reason I mentioned that is that the next day, you’ll notice, she says several times on the recording, “can everyone hear me? Can everyone hear me?” And the thing is that she wasn’t a very large person and she had a not particularly strong voice. So I think that having exercised her voice to the max the day before she was a little bit overly nervous on that recording about how well she was being heard and so on. And she was fussing if you remember, at the beginning, she was fussing about the microphone and so on. And I I think she was nervous about technology in the same way that both Carolyn and I are. So, we have to forgive her that. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano]\n \n\n17:24\tKandice Sharren:\t[Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Three: Mavis Speaks, in which we try to pin down Gallant’s accent.\n \n\n17:31\tKate Moffat:\tDespite Ann’s memories of Mavis being somewhat grumpy and nervous about her delivery, we all agreed upon listening to the recording that it was rather brilliantly done. She’s an engaging and dynamic speaker and one who is perhaps more self-conscious or aware of the unique elements of her delivery than her audience. In the short question period following the reading, someone in the audience asks a question, barely audible on the recording. Gallant’s response indicates she heard him mention a mistake, and contextualizes her various pronunciations of Grippes and Poches throughout the reading, which she clearly considers as slips of the tongue.\n \n\n18:02\t   Audio Recording,   Audience Member:\tBut in this context, you committed the best kind of blunder, which revealed a bit of your personality to us.\n \n\n18:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tWhat kind of blunder?\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording,   Audience Member:\n \n\nRevealing your personality.\n \n\n18:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tOh! I thought you were talking about pronunciation because when I’m reading in English in English, it’s almost impossible for me to pronounce French names in French because you have to change the pitch of your voice, you know, and it’s a different pitch, the two languages, and it interrupts the reading. And that’s why I say Grippes, Grip, Grips, just as it comes most easily, I thought you meant that [Laughs].\n \n\n18:35\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant’s remarks on her uneven pronunciation of characters’ names reveals her position between English and French and between Canada and France, not just in her adult life. All of us had strong responses to Gallant’s accent, which we struggled to place until Ann and Carolyn compared it to that of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who also grew up bilingual in Canada during the 1920s and thirties. Like the New Yorker’s font, Gallant’s accent conveys particular contextual information about her and her place in history.\n \n\n19:08\tCarolyn Tate:\tI wanted to ask you what you thought of Mavis’ accent, if you had any, do you have any reaction to that? Because I found her accent quite amazing, sort of mid Atlantic. It didn’t sound totally Canadian. It didn’t sound British. It’s kind of, she kind of reminded me a bit of the way Pierre Trudeau talked, it was just its own thing. And I don’t know whether you had a reaction to that or not.\n \n\n19:42\tMichelle Levy:\tI think we had trouble –I had trouble placing it. And I remember discussing that with Kandice and Kate. I asked my husband about it [Laughs], I was like, “where is this voice coming from?” It did seem really unusual. Lovely. One of my favourite stories of hers called ‘Specs Idea’, which is from around the same time, it was in that same volume, and it’s about an art dealer. There’s this woman that owns the art that her husband has left her, and her voice is described as like trilling bells. And I always feel like that to me, that’s almost like Mavis’ voice. It’s – I thought it was beautiful. But the accent, I just, I had no idea.\n \n\n20:25\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, it’s –I think that you mentioned that she was educated in French, but her English became the language of literature for her. So I’m wondering if, as Carolyn said, Pierre Trudeau had a bilingual early childhood as well. And I’m wondering if that’s a West Mount Montreal or [French word] accent or something like that.\n \n\n20:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tI think so. I mean, that’s what I thought. I mean, his mother was –Trudeau’s mother was an Anglophone and of course, Mavis’ parents were Anglophones too, but she had this French education. [Start Music: Piano]\n21:04\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Four, The Unseen Audience. In which we learn about bums in seats, how many there were, where they sat, how they laughed. [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Our listening to the recording and our reactions to what we could hear of the event, the story, and her voice, and accent were necessarily mediated by the recording and our own personal circumstances listening to it, which differ greatly from the live experience that the audience of the reading had. Ann realized while listening to our last episode, that she could hear her husband in the audience during the reading.\n \n\n21:37\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd it was really kind of spooky for me because when I listened to the recording, I could hear Peter laughing. And I haven’t heard it for so long.\n \n\n21:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tNo action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. [Audience member laughs] The professor, one.\n \n\n21:57\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tOne of the wonderful things about Peter was that he always laughed very loudly and the kids would always say their school plays went better on the days when he was there, cause he would laugh at all the jokes.\n \n\n22:08\tKate Moffat:\tListening to the recording, we have no information about the audience except what we can hear. With Ann’s input, We know Peter Buitenhuis, chair of the English department at the time, was in attendance, and also the longer personal history of his laugh. And this prompted a general curiosity about the audience, including how many people attended, and thus how full the very large Images Theater might have been, which isn’t something recorded in the archives.\n22:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah, I think that the Burnaby audience was not bad. I think we probably– that theater is good. I think we persuaded people to sit near the front and to kind of group, but I think that the theater would have been three quarters full. And I think that theater holds over 200 people.\n \n\n22:51\tKate Moffat:\tIn asking about and considering both our own reactions to the reading and the audience, we wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed or not from that of the individuals attending the event, who we hear occasional rumbles of laughter from\n \n\n23:04\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t…Anglo-Saxon commercial English [Audience Laughter] shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents [Audience Laughter] He showed…\n \n\n23:16\tMichelle Levy:\tNow from the talk itself you mentioned, Ann, that there were, that Mavis was asking questions at lunch about how you felt it went, and I’m wondering how you felt it went during the talk itself. I mean, it sounded again from the recording, which we’ve all heard, like it was crystal clear. So it sounds like the –some of the issues that happened the day before didn’t happen, but did you get a sense people were laughing, people were getting the jokes, people were enjoying it?\n \n\n23:49\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tYes, I certainly did. And, I was listening to the responses as the talk went on. I think the story was a bit long, quite frankly. I think –there’s a point where she tells you she’s reading from proofs and that her editor had a query. I mean, is he thinking, is this in his head or is that actually happening? So – and I had had the same thought myself, like, wait a minute, is this in this guy’s head? Or is he actually having this conversation? Or what have you. And I realized that I had drifted off, listening to the recording, and my recollection in the talk itself was that it was quite a long story. I felt at the time. And I think – but I do think people got it and there was still enthusiasm. But my recollection also is that the university classes were programmed in such a way in those days. The scheduling was done in such a way that there was a certain period of time in the middle of the day that you could fill with an event and people would have to go to class if it went too long. So I remember having a little bit of anxiety because I figured having observed her behavior the day before, if people stood up and started leaving, she was not going to be happy. So, I think I had a certain amount of nervousness about how long it was and – no concern about people’s lack of interest – but just a little bit of event planner angst I guess.\n \n\n25:21\tMichelle Levy:\tThat people would have to leave. [Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n25:23\tKandice Sharren:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Piano] [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Five: Choosing ‘Grippes and Poche’, in which we reconsider Gallant’s story in light of the audience she performed to and are deeply unimpressed with Henri Grippes.\n \n\n25:45\tMichelle Levy:\tOne of the things that I find most fascinating about paratexts is that they don’t just work one way. Artistic choices are made anticipating a certain format of publication. When we’re talking about print, it can be hard to pin down how involved an author was in the design of, say their book. Although we do know that Gallant wrote many of her stories specifically for the New Yorker, meaning that she would have been aware of the format her stories would be published in. Again, down to the font, although probably not the cartoons.\n \n\n26:15\tKandice Sharren:\tIn the case of a reading though, it’s a lot easier to see how a writer might be responding to their immediate context, which led us to ask: why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984? As you may recall, in her introduction to the reading, Gallant describes her story as a “gentle send-up” or satiric commentary.\n \n\n26:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHenri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It was just a very gentle send-up.\n \n\n26:59\tKandice Sharren:\tShe may have chosen the story for its delicate comedy, as she sends up French bureaucracy, as we meet the hapless and misinformed tax agent, O. Poche and Henri Grippes with his secret apartments and tax evasion. The main object of her send-up seems to us to be Grippes as writer. As Jonathan Coe noted in the London Review of Books in 1997, “Grippes is one of her most memorable characters, a shallow opportunistic writer who nevertheless, somehow manages to elicit the reader sympathy by virtue of his rotten luck and his chronic unpopularity with the book buying public. There’s a mordant redeeming humor here, which has given free rein then in Gallant’s weightier stories.”\n \n\n27:41\tMichelle Levy:\tDoes he elicit the reader’s sympathy though? I have to say, as someone who rents in Vancouver, I am hard pressed to want to spend time looking for a slumlord’s redeeming qualities, especially when it’s paired with literary opportunism. I really found myself hoping that Poche would catch him out by the end. So hearing Ann and Carolyn discuss the reading really struck a chord with me in part, because I kind of agreed with Carolyn’s assessment of the story.\n \n\n28:09\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah. I’m kind of surprised, ann, that you say that people received the story well, and that they laughed and whatnot because I found the story of a bit dismal. I think of it, she mentions Flaubert, as I was saying to Kate at some point during the story, and I feel that this was her kind of her Flaubertian moment or something. And it kind of reminded me of that novel the [French book title] by Flaubert where he has the ex-bureaucrat and somebody else doing all of this extremely grotesque kind of pseudo literary stuff. And I found that when I read the story, it dragged quite a lot and I didn’t find it all that amusing. And I think of it also as sort of the beginning of the end of her North American kind of– well, maybe I’m wrong about this because I think that North American readers were fascinated and gripped by these expats that she wrote about. I don’t think they were so interested in French bureaucrats and you know, French literary life and who is this English writer anyway, you know? Anyway, as I say, I don’t think it’s her best moment. Although because of this literary aspect of things, I’m going to read the other Henri Grippes stories and see whether, you know, they kind of interest me more now that I thought a little more of a take on this kind of this world.\n \n\n29:38\tMichelle Levy:\tCarolyn, if you read the rest of the Grippes story, you will indeed find much more on this kind of the French literary scene – corruption may be a bit strong, but there’s a really hilarious whole story about this attempt to write an encyclopedia of French authors that drags on for decades because they’re constantly changing who they think is important and who should be included, and the editors keep fighting with each other.[Laughs] It’s really funny. So there’s definitely more of that in that series of stories about the writer.\n \n\n30:13\tCarolyn Tate:\tI did read them sometime, but that’s very Flaubertian too. That’s what this –I don’t know whether you’ve ever read this, [French book title], it’s a terrible thing actually, but this is their whole thing too. They’re trying to be more and more kind of literary and correct, and all the rest of it. And it’s a complete balls up, frankly. [Laughs] I think Henri, he’s sort of in that frame somewhere.\n \n\n30:44\tMichelle Levy:\tThat said, and in Carolyn’s discussion of the literary trends of the 1970s and 80s,, a period that I didn’t live through and haven’t paid much attention to either academically or in terms of its literary culture, but one that ‘Grippes and Poche’ engages with did help me appreciate what exactly this story was doing.\n \n\n31:04\tKandice Sharren:\tI was struck by the sexual politics of the story, and particularly Gallant’s deadpan, imagining of a very capital P problematic male writer. Grippes regrets that in his American novel, he resorted to the stale male teacher, female student pattern. Could this failed attempt to write a novel about an academic romance be the reason for her choice?\n \n\n31:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t… female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Flaubert with his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. [Audience Laughs]\n \n\n31:48\tKandice Sharren:\tThis line elicits a knowing laugh from the audience. In fact, Gallant had been one of the first to write about a real life female teacher, male student affair between a 32 year old Gabriel Roussier and her 16 year old pupil for the New Yorker in 1971. It was a story that scandalized France, when it broke in 1967, as the parents of the boy brought legal proceedings against Roussier, that resulted her in her imprisonment, and that brought about her suicide in 1969. As Gallant dryly points out in her article about the affair, the story was an old one rife with the double standard, reflecting what Gallant calls “a prevailing belief that Don Juan is simply exercising a normal role in society, whereas women have been troublemakers ever since Genesis.” ‘Grippes and Poche’ ends on a note of implicit violence as Gallant relates Grippes storytelling as a process of stocking and confining one of his female characters. In her reading, she slows down to relate his menacing attempt to invent a female character.\n \n\n32:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe had got the woman from church to dining room and he would keep her there trapped, cornered, threatened, and watched until she yielded to Grippe and told her name.\n \n\n33:08\tKandice Sharren:\tThus ending the story on a more ominous note than the gentle send-up with which it begins.\n \n\n33:14\tMichelle Levy:\tThe story is commentary on sexual politics in a campus environment, complimented her location and audience. In our conversation with Carolyn and ann, they speculated that the academic satire within Grippes and Poche, maybe one of the reasons why Gallant selected this story for her on-campus reading.\n \n\n33:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tDon’t you think she was a brilliant reader on campus?\n \n\n33:36\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI do. And I was thinking about the context of that story: 1984. And I kind of – I was thinking, what else was being published at the time? And it was interesting that she was sending up the campus drama, the campus romance, the professor who falls in love with the student – and remember he had written a failed novel. It wasn’t quite good enough in that genre. And so I was thinking who was writing in that genre that time? And I remember David Lodge’s trilogy – do you remember? And they were so good. They were so good. And so I think, she was sort of sending up professors and sort of commenting a little bit on David Lodge’s three books, which were Changing Places in 1975, Small World – an academic romance in 1984 – and Nice Work in 1988.\n34:33\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd the other thing too I found was – as Carolyn said earlier –just the vagaries of literary tastes. People going in and out of fashion and suddenly being reinvented as somebody who’s okay with women, at a time when, when suddenly we’re worrying about whether or not somebody has the right feminist credentials to be read by the students in women’s studies, et cetera. So I think that there was certainly a memory for me of literary tastes and fashions and so on that I found quite interesting hearing the story again. None of this occurred to me particularly at the time.\n \n\n35:19\tKandice Sharren:\tIt’s something that testament to these vagaries of literary trends that I had actually never heard of David Lodge before. Apparently this shocked Michelle who asked me if I was sure I wanted to admit to this publicly. When I think of campus novels, I think of on the one hand, Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night published before the outbreak of the Second World War, or on the other hand, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. But I haven’t really read any written between the Second World War and the early 2000s, perhaps because the sexual politics of novels written in that period speak to a very different historical moment, and one that isn’t the subject of nostalgia, the way something like Sayers book is.\n \n\n36:05\tMichelle Levy:\tThe literary context of this story are only part of it’s satire though. Grippes refashions the dull civil servant in an attempt to keep up with literary fashion, but also with the winds of political change. The beginning of the story is set in 1964 and ends in the early 1980s, thus tracking both the progress of Grippes writing career and that of the fifth Republic itself.\n \n\n36:29\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe other thing though, I thought that was interesting about the story was how she talked about the change in government and this story spans 20 years or something. And so you have those [French phrase] coloured folders and you have the Charles DeGaulle coloured folders and so on. And the poor old tax guy gets his baby face gets sterner, and he got some little bald spot in his curls and so on. And so there’s a sense of a time passing. To me that sort of Proustian, and maybe that was a kind of melange of that as well. I really haven’t thought too much about what she might’ve been trying to accomplish in terms of her own oeuvre, but she had published that some years before she read that story. So it certainly wasn’t new work she was reading. But I have a feeling she kind of hauled out something that she thought might appeal to an academic audience. And the question that you asked…\n \n\n37:34\tMichelle Levy:\tDespite the literary and political moments that Gallant’sstory is in conversation with, her language has a strikingly timeless quality, precisely descriptive, but with a wry restraint that ironically captures the rhythms of Grippes thoughts.\n \n\n37:47\tKandice Sharren:\tIn writing about a writer, Henri Grippes, Gallant celebrates his flights of imagination, but also wryly observes his limitations. The meta-fictional elements of the story are both profound and comic as we are treated to a description of Grippes entire oeuvre, and also to his inability to recognize himself in his characters. On contemplating the protagonists of his books, Gallant dryly explains that…\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe was like a father gazing around the breakfast table, suddenly realizing none of the children are his.\n \n\n38:18\tKandice Sharren:\tThis was something that Ann commented on too.\n \n\n38:21\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI thought she had some wonderful metaphors and some wonderful sentences. I mean she talks about the shoreline of the 80s at one point –and talking about the rise to acclaim as this man’s career is a little bit rejuvenated at the end of the 80s. And she had just lovely, lovely metaphors from time to time and quite extended – she’d spin it out in kind of interesting and droll ways. And so I really admired her as a wordsmith in this story. And– as I said earlier, I did feel it was a rather long story, but I felt that her language – I had forgotten what a fine craftsman she was. [Start Music: Piano] She really, she really does write in a very original and refreshing way\n \n\n39:26\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter six: Grippes and Poche in the archive, in which Ann remembers the reel-to-reel machine at the reading and a hunch is confirmed. [End Music: Piano] Listening to Gallant’s original and refreshing language in her own voice is only possible through the archival remains of the event, especially their high-quality. In the March 2021 episode we talked about how these archival materials –in this case, the tape that holds Gallants reading – reveals the hands that manipulated it. The clean break between sides one and two had us convinced that despite the fact that the tape said “master” on it, it was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n40:11\tKate Moffat:\tWe were delighted to hear Ann confirm some of what we questioned and hypothesized in the first episode surrounding Curtis Vanel’s involvement. In a subsequent email, she shared with us that “the sound technician was set up on the right side, facing the stage and had a desk with reel-to-reel recorder. I always paid to have the technician there. Otherwise someone else had to make sure the record button was pushed and that the thing was at the right level. The technician also made sure the audio levels were good. I have a vision of Curtis walking up to the mic, turning it on and checking, and then adjusting the height for Mavis, and then sitting down. He would have done the same for Grazia.” She even recalled that Vanel was particularly interested in generations of recordings. His master tape was the one that other generations were created from.\n \n\n40:55\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI remember having many conversations with Doug about first and second generations. I mean, this is before things were digitized. So, he used to make a master cassette that would come from the reel-to-reel stuff that he did. And it would be very clean, whereas the reels would not be – I mean, he was a master at fixing things, getting rid of all the ums and ahs and whatever. And so he probably then had a master cassette from which copies would be made, but he would always hold onto the master because every copy was another generation. So that was the way he thought about it.\n \n\n41:40\tKate Moffat:\tAs far as we, and the folks in the SFU archives have been able to determine, we no longer have the original reel to reel for this reading evidence of its existence lies only in evidence of editing hands on the cassette tape, recording. [Start Music: Accordion]\n \n\n42:01\tKandice Sharren:\tOur interview with Ann and Carolyn, and Michelle’s conversation with Grazia Merla was a reminder that while the archives can provide records and a certain amount of contextual information, particularly when you pay sustained attention to your materials, they cannot capture everything. Ann’s recollection that Images Theater was three quarters full for the reading is information we would never have been able to track down otherwise, as it wasn’t recorded anywhere. Gallant’s fussing over the microphone at her reading in Images Theater is informed by the technical difficulties the day before. And that day before the event downtown uncaptured on audio doesn’t seem to exist in the archive at all, only in fickle human memory.\n \n\n42:56\tMichelle Levy:\tWe want to end by connecting our conversations about the reading with the larger paratextual paper record, including the label on the cassette, the poster used to advertise the event, and the proofs Gallant was reading from. In addition to these materials, we were also fortunate to obtain a copy of proofs of photos, taken of Gallant by Bruno Schlumberger on November 1st, 1990, during another visit to Canada. These photos taken near the Rideau canal in Ottawa offer a wonderful glimpse of Gallant, charming, exuberant, but still well-dressed and put together. Kate, Kandice and I were not fortunate enough to have met Gallant or heard her read in person, but with these photos and the recording and our interviews with Ann, Carolyn, and Grazia, yet we are able to conjure a distinct portrait of this most entrancing and provocative writer. [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n44:06\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada., Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, mini-stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9290","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E10, Robert Hogg & The Widening Circle of Return, 5 July 2021, Carpenter"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Craig Carpenter"],"creator_names_search":["Craig Carpenter"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/13172193219706490344\",\"name\":\"Craig Carpenter\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7dd301e3-2ea3-4ad4-928a-50c123f42cfd/audio/85084a62-41f6-40e0-bfaf-b9835fe7c239/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e10-roberthogg.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,818,467 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e10-roberthogg\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-07-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Sound Recordings Featured:\\n\\nArchival Audio from PennSound.com\\n\\nShort intro clips of: Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering: all from PennSound digital archives.\\n\\nRecording of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC/the_red_wheelbarrow_multiple.php\\n\\nRecording of “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” by Robert Duncan: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Duncan/Berk-Conf-1965/Duncan-Robert_01_Often-I-am-Permitted_Berkeley-CA_1965.mp3\\n\\nRecording of “I Know a Man” by Robert Creely: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley/i_know_a_man.php\\n\\nRecording of “Maximus From Dogtown I” by Charles Olson: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Olson/Boston-62/Olson-Charles_14_Maximus-Dogtown-2_Boston_06-62.mp3\\n\\nArchival Audio from AMP Lab’s Soundbox Collection\\n\\nRobert Hogg reads at Black Sheep Books, Vancouver, 1995: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\\n\\nArchival Audio from KPFA \\n\\nRobert Hogg reads at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965: http://www.kpfahistory.info/bpc/readings/Young%20poets.mp3\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549511733248,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of poets at UBC Vancouver began a little magazine: the TISH poetry newsletter. The TISH poets would later be called one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history. In the summer of 2019, Craig Carpenter visited one of the former editors of TISH magazine —who is also his former professor of modern Canadian poetry. Based on interviews conducted during this visit and a subsequent visit in the winter of 2019, Craig has created an episode that explores his evolving relationship with his former professor and scenes from more than 50 years of literary history. Craig takes us through the relationships and the stories that formed a part of the TISH movement and the poet that Robert Hogg has become.\n\nCraig gives a heartfelt thank you to all those who took the time to offer feedback on early script drafts: Deanna Fong, Judith Burr, Mathieu Aubin, Marjorie Mitchell. Special thanks to Dr. Karis Shearer, all of his  colleagues at the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, and, of course, to Robert Hogg.\n\n0:00\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Theme Music]\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history began at UBC Vancouver—the TISH poetry movement. The voices of many TISH community members have been archived and cared for within the SoundBox collection at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab as part of the SpokenWeb Project. Today, UBCO Masters student Craig Carpenter brings us on an immersive and personal sonic journey into the life and poetry of one TISH: poet Robert Hogg. Craig was a student of Dr. Hogg’s, and in this episode, he weaves archival recordings together with original interviews with Bob, taking listeners on a poetic journey. The episode takes us back and forth in time—into the sonic spaces of poetry readings, the laughter of present day conversations, and worlds of memory and reflection. This is an audio story about Robert Hogg the professor, Bobby the poet, the TISH community, the power of Canadian poetry, and the moving emotion of mentorship and connection across decades of shared inspiration. Here is Craig Carpenter with Episode 10 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return.\n \n\n \n\n02:11\tOriginal Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\t[Begin Music Gentle Instrumental] [Faint voice and car sounds in background] Mountain Path Farms…Hogg.\n \n\n02:31\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt’s August of 2019. I’m on my way to visit my old professor at his farm on the outskirts of Ottawa. As I approach, I notice one of the “Gs” of his last name has fallen off the sign at the foot of the long drive towards Mountain Path Farm. This is where Robert Hogg raised his family, ran his flour mill, and studied and crafted his poetry since the 1970s. It’s been a quarter of a century since I knew Bob as my professor of modern Canadian poetry at Carleton University.\n \n\n03:10\tSound Effects Mixed with Original Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] [Sound of car key turning off the ignition and car door opening]\n03:24\tCraig Carpenter:\tWhen Bob greets me at the door, I reflexively call him Professor Hogg. He is just as I remember, except a little more rounded and perhaps a bit more jovial in nature. As Bob offers a quick tour of the old farmhouse, our feet creek the fat wooden plank flooring, and I wonder—who else has trod these floors? What stories could they tell? [End Gentle Instrumental Music] [Sound Effect: Whirring sounds of tape rise] [Faster Instrumental Music Begins]\n \n\n04:01\tCraig Carpenter:\tI have decided to return to school to work with Dr. Karis Shearer on the SpokenWeb Project. A box of tapes donated by my former professor awaits digitization. [Sound Effect: Whirring sounds of tape end] The box contains recordings of his own poetry community from the 1960s at UBC’s Vancouver campus.\n \n\n04:24\tAudio Recording, Short clips of Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, and George Bowering from PennSound Archives:\n \n\n[Instrumental Music Continues] The microphone may seem like a lot of rigmarole, but actually…it’s necessary. [Faint voice] This isn’t working? [echoing inaudible voices] Poem. Poem. [Stammering voice] Did that introduction – does that come off my twenty minutes?\n04:46\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] The voices of his former professor Warren Tallman and his peers, Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt, Gladys Hindmarch, Fred Wah, and George Bowering are not only being preserved through digitization, but remediated and re-presented through new forms, such as podcasts like this one.\n \n\n05:10\tOriginal Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] [Audio recording, Sounds of door latch opening]\n05:17\tCraig Carpenter:\tAfter the tour of the farm house, Bob asked me to give him a hand moving a few things in the barn. The barn is oddly clean for a barn, I think. In fact, there is an astonishing order to everything at Hogg farm. Even the out-of-order tractors appear to be meticulously cared for. Bob shows me the remnants of his old grain mill. He somewhat softly recounts its last days of operation. And then his demeanor shifts. There’s a sudden bounce in his step as I follow him up a set of stairs to what used to be a hayloft. We take a bin filled with periodicals down to an old office. [Recording of voices rises in the background] The former office is jammed with books, magazines, and bins of papers. There’s scarcely room to step as we enter. This is what Bob refers to as the overflow of his poetry collection. [Gentle Instrumental Music Continues]\n \n\n06:21\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\n[Inaudible] …this says sun, S-U-N… [Sounds of rustling papers.] Georgia Straight…one of my poems was in there too. Anyways, somebody somewhere along the line will want to go through all this stuff, I knew most of the Beat poets…\n06:31\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nYou did.\n06:33\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\n…The only really important Beat poet I never met with Jack Kerouac…[Recording continues and fades. Gentle Instrumental Music Continues]\n06:34\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt would be easy to spend hours sifting through the old journals. But finally, we head back to the house and up the narrow wooden stairs to Bob’s writing room. [Instrumental Music Tempo Increases] The slanted ceiling meets an entire wall of books stacked with first edition Ginsbergs and Kerouacs. Knowing this is where Bob crafts his poems, the attic feels like a cathedral of sorts. Bob positions himself behind his desk and turns on his computer. He is keen to record himself reciting his work.\n \n\n07:19\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\nAlright.\n07:20\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nAnd let me just get this in a better position, and…[inaudible]…I’ll just monitor that while you read…Just do a test first.\n07:31\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\nYeah…Okay, so I’m going to read a poem called “Amber Alert”, and I’ll just read the first few lines and we’ll test it out.  [Reading poem] It  was a day like any/ other you know / the kind the poet/ wrote about /people/ going about their business. [Ends Poem]\n 07:44\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nThat’s good. Yeah, I think we’ve got that good so… [We hear a click as Craig presses play on the recording and Bob’s voice appears again] “a day like any/other you know / the kind the poet/ wrote about /people/ going about their business.”\n07:56\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] Bob reads a few newer poems. I’m reminded of William Carlos Williams by some of Bob’s poetry, and we begin to talk about the poetics of Williams and Ezra Pound who were both major influences on the TISH and the American Black Mountain poets. We discuss Williams’ statement: “No ideas but in things.”\n \n\n08:17\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tYou do need to remember that one of the problems with modern verse, when you drop all the trappings that were typical of  traditional writing in the form and structure—like a sonnet, for example, with its rhyme scheme and everything—you are left with a fairly naked body of words, right? And something in those words has to keep that poem cohering for people…it has to keep jumping at you in some way. And of course, between Pound’s insistence on the image and Williams’ more direct insistence on the Thing, which is also of course the image — you know, that helps to bring that idea of the vividness of experience into focus in the writing of poetry. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n09:02\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of William Carlos Williams reading “The Red Wheelbarrow”:\n \n\nThe red wheelbarrow // so much depends / upon// a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens\n09:11\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tThings trigger, right? They really do. They are they—I think that could be, that could be quite, quite exciting at times. And I guess, sometimes it leads to something quite profound and other times it just leads to something, you know, a little bit more expressive or it widens the perception or whatever it does, or deepens it maybe. Hand me those scissors. You can hand them to yourself. [Craig laughs] This poem is called “A Miller’s Tale.” [Reading poem] These tailors sheers / that long before I was born / cut yards of fabric my English grandfather sewed into clothes / for Finchley’s finest /  somehow passed onto my father / settled in Canada after the Great War / never used them for anything so far as I can tell / except to leave them to me who gave them a second life / when I opened the flour mill / mountain township 1983/found them rusting slightly / ideal for trimming paper flower bags / 25 to 10 kg / and after stitching cut the thread old job once again / as fate would have it/lying now on the carpet of my study floor /  tucked under the tredel of mom’s old Singer sewing machine/sent from Langley decades back / the plywood crate reworked to become the grain hopper of both my 30 inch stone mill / it must be 30 years before it all went still. [Poem ends] And that’s the sewing machine over there, and they typically lay underneath the treadle. I have been using them lately so that’s why they’re in my drawer. Yeah. Yeah. [Sound effect of shearers clipping echoing.] [Gentle Instrumental Music Begins]\n \n\n10:49\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt’s 1959 in the sleepy town of Abbotsford, British Columbia. Among the carousels of paperbacks at Bennion’s Pharmacy the teenage Bobby Hogg is stumbling across Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The only poetry Bobby has heard spoken aloud up to this point is the Victorian verse his father recited to him as a child. He loved listening to his Dad recite poems. But like so many of his generation, it’s On the Road that opens up a new way of hearing words and seeing the world. It isn’t long before his high school friend Frank Davey, who has skipped a couple of grades and gone off to UBC ahead of him, is bringing Bobby the City Lights Pocket Poets Series books. Bobby devours the little books filled with free verse. Among his favourites: Ginsberg’s Howl, Gasoline by Gregory Corso and the selected poems of Robert Duncan.\n \n\n11:47\tSound Effects Mixed with Original Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] [Low rumble of a car driving mixes with the music]\n11:56\tCraig Carpenter:\tAt the end of December 1959, Frank pulls into Bobby’s driveway in Langley where his family had just moved. He’s driving his ‘47 Ford coupe. He orders Bobby to get in. [Sound of car door shutting] Frank’s professor Warren Tallman and his wife Ellen have invited Robert Duncan to Vancouver to read. Duncan is here. In person. In the Tallmans’ basement. Tonight. Bobby didn’t have a choice.\n \n\n12:26\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tI said, “well, I’m busy,” he said that doesn’t matter how busy you are, you’ve gotta come. And it was like, I mean, if he put a shotgun to me as it were. And says, if you don’t come to this you’re blowing your whole life—which was, totally would have been true. So, I can’t remember now whether I jumped in his car with him. We both had—he had a ‘47 Ford coupe and I had a ‘48 Ford coupe. Real classic cars in our time. And so, I either went with him, which I think I did, and then he must have had to bring me back again the next day or something. In any case he did. We went in together and I heard Robert Duncan read his poetry in Warren’s basement. That was absolutely the quintessential moment in my entire life in terms of poetry, because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was really hearing poetry from a distinguished person that I had never been able to hear before. I mean I’d read famous poets but I’d never heard one read. So I went from being just sort of genuinely interested in poetry to being converted, I guess you could say, by this experience. And I think I felt from that moment on I would probably have to write poetry as a means to survive, right. In my spiritual side, right. And it’s been true for me ever since. And he read the poems that were then subsequently published in The Opening of the Field including that famous poem, “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” which is the poem I think he started off the reading with. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n13:40\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Robert Duncan reading “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:\tOften I am permitted to return to a meadow // as if it were a scene made up by the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place, // that is mine, it is so near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought / so that there is a hall therein // that is a made place, created by light // wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. // Wherefrom fall all architectures I am / I say are likenesses of the First Beloved / whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. // She it is Queen Under The Hill / whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded. // It is only a dream of the grass blowing / east against the source of the sun / in an hour before the sun’s going down // whose secret we see in a children’s game / of ring a round of roses told. // Often I am permitted to return to a meadow / as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos, // that is a place of first permission, / everlasting omen of what is.\n \n\n14:45\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nWhat was the effect of actually hearing him?\n14:48\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tWell, the effect was incredible, because we hadn’t—The Opening of the Field was not yet in print. It came out that year actually in 1960. But, well, the next year—it was ‘59 when I actually heard him. But still, it was almost 1960, it was like the end of December, 1959. And that book came out with Grove Press just a few months later. But he was reading from manuscripts still, right? So the poems that were in The Selected Poems were not like the poems in The Opening of the Field. He broke new ground there. It was a lot more accessible. It was a lot—to me it was a lot more poetry that somehow spoke about poetry. I mean that very poem “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”—that meadow immediately becomes a page, it becomes the subject of poetry itself. [recites part of the poem] as if it were a scene made up by the mind, / that is not mine, that is a made place // that is mine, it is so near to the heart, / an eternal pasture folded in all thought. [ends recitation] I mean, all those things are statements about writing, right? And then he says, “that is mine, it is so near to the heart.” Okay, [laughs] I’m hearing that, and I’d never heard anybody talk about the act of writing. I mean, I think I intuited right away that this was a poem about writing not about a meadow or some children playing a children’s game. It really was all about the process of writing. That’s what I think I heard — something new about writing, which is often about writing. It’s surprising how much of modern poetry [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] and maybe all poetry has been to some degree about writing.\n \n\n16:21\tCraig Carpenter:\tBob tells me this now mythic Duncan reading set off a chain of events that included the evolution of TISH. We now know, from the work on hidden labour that SpokenWeb researchers Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer have done, that it was Warren Tallman’s wife, Ellen, who knew Duncan personally, and not only arranged for him to come read, but also helped select which poems he would read. Bob explains to me what it was about this reading that changed his relationship to poetry.\n \n\n16:52\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tWhat that reading that he gave in Warren’s basement did for me, I think, that nobody else had done before [End Gentle Instrumental Music] and probably very few people have done since, was that it gave me a sense of the physicality of language as it was being spoken. Not only in the gestures that he was making. The body—the way he embodied, he seemed to embody poetry for god’s sake, he was like a walking poem. He was very much—he was a showman and he was very much involved in being like a shaman, shamanistically, you know demonstrating with his body what the poem was about. Robin Blaser was a bit like that too. I don’t mean to say in the cheapest sense of showmanship, there was a bit of showmanship in it too, let’s face it. But it really had to do with wanting to show physically what was going on in the physical nature of the poem. I had been taught about poetry that had things going on in it. Like you could scan a poem and you could say, yeah it’s got iambic pentameter, it’s got anapestic, whatever, four beats to a line, or whatever. But nobody made me hear a poem, nobody made me think of the poem as a physical gesture that was being spoken aloud. And that was the thing that I really got from Duncan’s reading. I heard poetry being read aloud as though this was what its real articulation was, not on the page but in the air. And in his body and my body because we’re both in the same room together and I’m hearing and feeling it, the way you do music. It’s like trying to stand still when some really incredible rock band is playing right in front of you. It’s pretty hard [laughs], sometimes you just gotta move with it. You just want to say, oh my god, I really feel, I just want to dance. The dance that was part and parcel of Duncan’s poetic sensibility and his gestures as a writer I think really hit home for me. [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n18:49\tCraig Carpenter:\tDeclared “the Wonder Merchants” by Warren Tallman in his essay of the same title, the group of poets who created TISH magazine were all students of Tallman’s at UBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They are known for having been heavily influenced by the American Black Mountain poets, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Critic C.H. Gervais calls TISH one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history. My old professor, another Robert, was a “TISHITE” or a member of TISH himself and considered part of the second wave of the movement. After Bob hears Duncan read, the following fall, he follows Frank to UBC. Like his friends Frank and George Bowering who precede him, and other second-wave TISH editors like Daphne Marlatt and Gladys Hindmarch, Bob takes poetry classes with Warren Tallman.\n \n\n19:51\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] The most important thing, in some ways, besides Duncan’s reading in Vancouver at that time, was the emergence of the New American Poetry Anthology by Donald Allen, right. Not only did it have poetry by all these people in it—\n \n\n20:02\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\n \n\nThat was the book I think we studied.\n20:04\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\n \n\nYeah, yeah. In my class. Yeah, no doubt. I still have copies. I even have my original here. This is my old original copy. If this was on video it would be exciting. [Gentle Instrumental Music and Audio Recording continue under narration]\n20:14\tCraig Carpenter:\tAs his cat jumps onto his desk, Bob pulls a well-thumbed and  marked-up copy of the New American Poetry Anthology from his bookshelf.\n \n\n20:21\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Multiple Speakers:\n \n\nI’ll take a photo of it. This is a first edition probably. It is utterly falling apart. 1960, see that? Bob Hogg. What’s it say, Arts one at UBC. [Laughter]\n20:37\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] Like the old books on Bob’s shelf, there are audio reels from the late 50s and early 60s that are also falling apart. These reels hold living memory in voice. They are the only means we have to hear how poets spoke their poems aloud. And unlike books, these literary analog audio objects are at risk of decaying and disappearing forever [Sound Effect: tape slowing down on reel] if they are not preserved through digitization. [Sound Effect: Sound of click and reels rewinding]\n \n\n21:04\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Faster-Paced Instrumental Music] It’s late Spring of 2019 and Professor Karis Shearer and I are in the AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan. Karis shows me the box of analog reels given to her by her colleague Jody Castricano. Warren Tallman gave Jody the box and told her when the time was right she’d know what to do with them. It’s been over two decades since I’d threaded a reel-to-reel machine. Scrubbing my memory from second year radio journalism class, I manage to loop the brittle 50-plus year old magnetic tape across the playheads and onto the take up reel. [Sound effect: Threading tape and clicking play]\n \n\n21:50\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Warren Tallman:\tFlood tide below me, I see you face to face. [Inaudible] of the west…[Recording continues under narration]\n \n\n21:57\tCraig Carpenter:\tTallman’s voice leaps out of the machine at us. As if magically fast forwarding through time, his rich harmonic tone captures us immediately. [Audio, from recording: …the tires and the usual costumes…] Its magnetic authority and ringing certainty must have been incredibly moving to hear in person as a student.\n \n\n22:19\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Warren Tallman:\n \n\n…Are more curious….\n22:21\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Recording Ends] [End Faster-Paced Instrumental Music] Well, he was a remarkably beautiful prof. How else to say it? I think he did more to make poetry available to me as a young writer and as a young reader. I think those two words are almost synonymous with each other. I try to tell people today, if you’re not a reader of poetry, you can’t be a writer  of poetry. And if you think that reading your friend’s poetry is being a reader of poetry, you’ve got another learning curve coming because there’s so much wonderful poetry that’s been written throughout the ages that we all have to become more immersed in in order to have some sense of what we are trying to do ourselves as writers. And  Warren was remarkably eclectic in his appreciation of poetry. Warren had a great capacity for reading poetry and letting every syllable of the poem have its own articulation. And I guess I might’ve said this before, and I’m not sure if it was in talking with you, but one poem he read was “Lapis Lazuli” by Yeates, which just absolutely blew me away. And I can still hear him reading that poem with his slow, deliberative unfolding as the poem progresses so I can’t recite in full, but…[Sound Effect: Click and whirring of tape on a reel] [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n23:49\tCraig Carpenter:\tIt’s the fall of 1995. Ottawa is overflowing with small poetry journals and regular poetry readings. I’m studying poetry with Bob at Carleton. We read Charles Olson and Canadian poet bpNichol. I take over editing the Carleton Arts Review from the infamous Ottawa poet, the lowercase rob mclennan. rob churns out zines, pamphlets, posters, littering the city with free verse. This same year, Bob flies back to Vancouver to revisit the stomping grounds of his old poetry community and give a reading. Among the box of tapes Bob has donated to the Lab, is the 1995 recording of his reading at Black Sheep Books. [Sound Effect: Tape sounds] It is among the first tapes to be digitized from the box Bob donated to the Lab.\n \n\n24:49\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg reading “Extreme Positions for bp” at Black Sheep Books in 1995:\tExtreme positions for bp. [Gentle Instrumental Music Ends] The lovely play language is / the lay of the poem / the place made / the dropping or adding of a letter / tension / Love crosses all bodies of water / or of land / violent / Love knows its own bounds but crosses these / willingly / Knows to stay / stray / brings the point of light / right up to the eye. Knows that all event is also a screen /  retina / page / where the hand trembles / to leave a mark in / violet space / so great the mind’s demand that a map be drawn / lines be drawn / against chaos / but also break the edge / put an S on things / put S in the world / sing / silent / space / spell / sound / light / words standing / alone / essential / free / The lovely play / love is / a language made / sign / against unknowing. [Sound Effect: Click of a stop button]\n \n\n26:17\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] My younger self never thought to ask Professor Hogg much about his own poetry. I had no clue that my professor had not only studied under Charles Olson in the early 60s at SUNY, Buffalo but  had written his thesis on Olson’s MAXIMUS POEMS under the guidance of Robert Creeley. As I sit with Bob in August of 2019, I feel so grateful that time’s turned as it has and I find myself meeting him again. I am beginning to get to know Bobby the poet.\n \n\n26:48\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] …general literature course and creative writing. Then in my third year, I could take poetry or whatever. And I actually got the credit for the poetry course by taking the summer conference. So, in a way I was with Bob Creeley and Ginsberg and all  the rest of them for that. [End Gentle Instrumental Music] But I knew Bob, and I hung around him to a certain degree, not a huge amount, but was in his presence and heard him read on at least a couple of occasions I’m sure in that year he was in Vancouver. Also, he read from The Island, which just came out. And when he read the prose in The Island when it first came out, and he read almost like a poem.\n \n\n27:19\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Craig Carpenter:\tYeah, a big inspiration to me. Hearing him from these tapes, I have a recording. [Bob: Okay.] I could even play you some of it. What is it…[recites from poem] goddamn big car and drive. [Bob: Oh yeah. Drive he said, yeah.] Yeah, drive he said. But the way that he read it was so different than how I read that. I was sort of whoa. Even the way that—I thought, well, no, there’s a break there.\n \n\n27:39\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tThat’s right, in that particular poem he really freaked me out too. I never got that poem right until I heard him read it, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That’s funny, a lot of people misunderstood that poem. [Laughs]\n \n\n27:58\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Robert Creeley reading “I Know a Man”:\tThis is a poem called “I Know a Man.” As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking,–John, I // sd, which was not his / name, the darkness sur- / rounds us, what // can we do against/ it, or else, shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car, // drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going. [Audience laughter]\n \n\n28:17\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] Some critics of TISH say their work was too influenced by the American Black Mountain School. Bob explains to me that it was more their poetics than their poetry that had really attracted TISH members. Bob had met Olson at the 1963 Vancouver poetry conference organized by the Tallmans. In the Fall of ’64, Bob visits Buffalo and attends one of Olson’s lectures. With the support of Olson, the young Bobby is fast-tracked to his PhD at SUNY.\n \n\n28:45\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tYeah, very lucky. And then when I first went there, it was like many of us who were there for Olson were only there for Olson, we were not there for a PhD. [End Gentle Instrumental Music] Fred was there for that, I was there for that. Some of the English poets like John Temple and Andrew Crozier. Many many people that were hanging around Olson were there—‘oh my God this guy’s interesting, this is why I want to be here.’ Some stayed on and did the doctorate with either like, with him or, in my case, on him, later on, under Bob Creeley.\n \n\n29:10\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music ] The attraction to study with Charles Olson was in large part because of the incredible power of his poetic manifesto: the “Projective Verse.” The dense and poetic prose of the “Projective Verse” essay can be confounding. Olson works with words like a sculptor’s stone, shaping them physically, employing ALL CAPS and indents creatively with a force that opens the ear anew.\n \n\n29:37\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tBut I mean, I think it really, really was unique. And I’ve said this to so many people, [End Gentle Instrumental Music] when you read something like the projective verse essay, you weren’t just reading Olsen’s ideas, you were reading about his own percussive and projective style. It was the style in which that essay was written that was hammering itself out to you. And like you said earlier, like with the typewriter, the way Olson made use of the typewriter and typeface, which he also talks about in that essay, was extremely important. And so we’re talking about changing the morphology of language itself and the structure of language. And grammar. I was very interested in how the grammar of poetry was not like the grammar of prose, and that’s continued to interest me in all my own writing. So then when I got reading the “Maximus from Dogtown” poems, which is basically how the second sequence starts, the second section of the Maximus poem starts, I became really fascinated by the spiritual and mythological and cosmological aspects of that. And that became the center. [Sound Effect: Typewriter Typing] I was reading Jung for my own interest, and of course, he was big on Jung. He was reading psychology and alchemy and other things by Jung, Symbols of Transformation…\n \n\n30:44\tAudio Recording, PennSound recording of Charles Olson reading “Maximus From Dogtown I”:\n \n\nMaximus from Dogtown — 1/ proem. [Sound Effect: Typing Sound Ends] The sea was born of the earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says// But the then she lay for heaven and she bear the thing which encloses/ every thing. Okeanos the one which all things are and by which nothing/ is anything but itself, measured so// screwing earth, in whom love lies which are unnerves the limbs and by its/ heat floods the mind and all gods and men into further nature// Vast earth rejoices,// deep-swirling Okeanos steers all things through all things,/ everything issues from the one, the soul is led from drunkenness/ to dryness, the sleeper lights up from the dead,/ [Sound Effect: Ticking Sound Begins] [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] the man awake lights up from the sleeping.\n \n\n31:48\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Sound Effect: Ticking Sound merges with highway sounds and cars whooshing by] [Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] It’s the fall of 1964 and Bob, having completed his undergrad at UBC is ready to see the world. He hitchhikes to New York City via Toronto and Buffalo. There, he connects with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Carole Berge, and Ted Berrigan. During his final year at UBC, Bob became more involved with TISH magazine. Despite his immersion in TISH and his passion for verse, in 1964 Bob had yet to publish a book of poems. In New York, Bob writes most of the poems that make up his first book, The Connexions. His inspiration for that book—that pours out in a matter of months—is not the poetry scene around him, but a deadly illness that tears through his body. As he lies in his bed fighting for his life, poetry becomes a necessity for survival.\n \n\n32:45\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tSo, when I went to Buffalo in the Spring of 1965, I had already written in New York City quite a lot of poems about my illness there. And then I continued to write about that [Ticking Sound and End Gentle Instrumental Music] when I got to Buffalo because I was actually still ill and living in the infirmary on campus. And, so, I ended up with a book of poems in my hands called The Connexions, as it turned out. So the strange thing is that that book of poems was a-hundred-percent written in New York City and Buffalo. There might have been a scrap of a poem that was written in Vancouver before I left. Because there’s one that talks about the coast range of the mountains, towards the end. But whether I actually wrote it in Vancouver or wrote it in Buffalo, I can’t remember now for sure. When some of these poets from the States came up and did read in Vancouver, they did have a strong strong effect on some of us. And I know that Duncan’s reading had a huge effect on what kind of—how I would write my poems thereafter. [Sound Effect: Sound of tape rewinding] Although I didn’t sit down and write one that was like, that emulated “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”, right, which was the poem he read that blew me away. But I know that that poem sank into my bloodstream, as it were, and never left.\n \n\n33:53\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] [Sound Effect: Sound of tape rewinding ends] It’s the summer of 1965, and Bob has recovered from his near death experience. He has made it down to Berkeley, California where Charles Olson is headlining the 1965 poetry conference. He carries with him a manuscript of The Connexions. [Sound Effect: Protest Chanting Sounds Begin] Amid the growing upheaval in opposition to the Vietnam War and student protests at Berkeley, the poetry conference quietly continues. [Sound Effect: Protest Chanting Sounds End] Tallman was supposed to arrange a contingent of Canadian poets to read. As it turns out, Bob is one of two Canadians and one of five tyros, as he refers to them, to read at the conference. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n34:41\tAudio Recording, KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965:\tSo small falls in the Cariboo. My famous Cariboo, one of my friends anyway. Called Little Falls on South Bonaparte River. And when I was about 10 years old, we lived on a ranch in the Cariboo. And the neighbor girl was daring enough to walk across the precipice of this falls. And of course, all I could do was watch her, because I wasn’t about to walk across it too. This poem is written very recently. So it’s a memory from way back. [Begins reading poem] And the voice said, walk / Up river then / You will find her / at Little Falls / where I had left her / ankles amid flow / walking the precipice / brazen she was / not afraid to fall / or that she would fall / down / as the water as I did one fall / years later, walking up river / the rifle / clattered and fell / gouged by the rock / And I hurt my knee while hunting / I had meant to speak of an old woman / whose hair / and of a bend in the river / where / and of a tree whose leaves hang over / it was all mirrored there. [Ends poem] I’ll close the reading with a small poem, simply entitled “Song.” It’s also the last poem in this series that I have in The Connexions. [Begins reading poem] The sun is mine / and the trees are mine / The light breeze is mine / and the birds that inhabit the air are mine / Their voices upon the wind / are in my ear. [Ends poem] Thank you. [Applause]\n \n\n37:13\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Begins] It’s December 2019, and I have returned once more to visit Bob at his farm. There is snow on the ground now. I can see my breath as I walk up to the door. The fields of flowing wheat that once fed his mill turned to white sheets. This time, we don’t go into the barn but straight to the attic. I sit with my old professor in his attic writing room surrounded by his poetry books. There is a generosity of spirit in the air that seems to have expanded since my last visit in the summer. I imagine the spines of his poetry books bursting with ideas beyond my own ability to name. In preparation for a reading the next night, Bob is keen to share some of his poems aloud. I try to keep quiet and listen closely. I’m hearing something more this time. [End Gentle Instrumental Music]\n \n\n38:06\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\tSo, this could interest you, ‘cause phonology of course is something you guys could do too, you know. [Begins reading poem] “The Phonology of Love” I speak of love/ as though it were // a word as though / it were syntactic // simply /said // oval /lips// breathe out / a gesture // lungs send / sound in a tongue curl // palatal L / down throat // a velar/ cord song // voiced / fricative // ending/  lip to enamel //teeth where/ resonant// air is /evocation // love / that is a dance of tongue// teeth and tendon / turn // breath/ into word. [Ends poem] So actually, it’s a description of the word love. These are all poems that are hopefully going to come out in this volume to be called “Postcards from America.” So these are poems that were written in Buffalo, never got published. [Craig: Yeah, they’re good. It’s good.] I think they are actually. Here’s another one…[Craig: Hot morning sun, read that one] [Bob Begins reading poem] To my friends / a hot morning sun / white for noon / through glass / waves of hot blood in my spine / line a blue vein / I go through / fluid as fire is / a kindling surge. [Ends poem] I wanted to read this poem too. It’s called “Four Seasons.” [Craig: Yeah, I was looking at that, it looks nice on the page.] Yeah, well it didn’t start like this. It started in a different form, and it started falling into tercets I’ve called them here, like little three line poems, right. Or three line stanzas. And I didn’t know what else to call them. So, and it was written quite literally by sitting on my deck, which you saw earlier. In the summer when the honeysuckles were blooming and the berries were falling. [Begins reading poem] First white and pink flowers / now little red berries / fall from the honeysuckle / onto our cedar deck / Next leaves browning / with summer sun / soon abundant snow [Poem Ends] [Bob Laughs] Which is what we’ve got now! [Craig: Yeah] Yeah. So there was the four seasons. Like I was just like sitting there…\n \n\n40:22\tAudio recording, Poetry reading at the Carleton Tavern in 2019, Ambient Sounds:\n \n\n[Bob’s voice fades into a recording from the poetry reading the next night. We hear the sounds of people talking before the reading as Craig’s narration begins.]\n40:27\tCraig Carpenter:\tThe next evening, Ottawa’s poets congregate in the back room on the second floor of the Carleton Tavern.\n \n\n40:33\tAudio recording, Poetry reading at the Carleton Tavern in 2019, rob mclennan:\tI’m not waiting for him. Thank you very much for coming to this, to our little annual event. The Peter F. Yacht Club, you know, holiday extravaganza. You’ve got to start calling it that, that would be cool. There are books in a book table…\n \n\n40:47\tCraig Carpenter:\t[Audio recording of rob mclennan speaking continues under narration] rob mclennan has invited Bob and other local poets to read at the annual above/ground press Christmas party. Bob tells me rob has mellowed with the years. Perhaps he has recognized his own gift to the community I think—his dogged persistence of publishing so damn much, now a document of the moving of time through the eyes of poets. The room is packed pre-pandemic style. Beers are flowing. The scene reminds me of my time here in the 90s. rob mclennan sits at a table registering the evening’s readers. When I approach to say hello, in typical fashion with a mocking gasp, he points out just how much I have aged. His signature long hair and goatee whiter now. But he’s the same lowercase rob mclennan. And, it’s true, he has mellowed. Or maybe it’s me who’s mellowed. Either way, I find myself happy to see him and smiling as he introduces the evening. [Begin Gentle Instrumental Music] As the night draws to a close, a few of us head to a cafe for some food and drink. I think about the poets—all their poems still jangling around in my heart and mind. It was a good night. This is Bob’s community. It’s mine too. Poets don’t much like to form alliances. So, when poets do come together to create books, magazines or events like tonight’s—something turns. It’s hard to mark time. Like sound, we cannot pause it. It keeps passing. As I listen to Bob recite a poem he has dedicated to Bob Creeley called Dig-it, I sense time turn. It turns in widening circles of return.\n \n\n42:44\tAudio Recording, Robert Hogg interview with Craig at Mountain Path Farm, Robert Hogg:\t[Gentle Instrumental Music Continues] Here. Can I read this one? [Craig: Please do.] This one’s called “Dig-it.” [Craig: Now, this is for Bob Creeley.] This is for Bob Creeley. I wrote it last night, or yesterday sometime. [Craig Laughs] Had nothing to do with today, it was just one of these things that came to me. Bob Creeley was always saying, dig it, dig it, you dig it, dig it—right? But if you take the hyphen out, it becomes a different word. Alright. So, “Dig-It” for Bob Creeley. [Begins reading poem] 11:11 my clock reads / 1 1 1 1 / marching across / the face of it / twice a day / just like that / marking time / we say / standing in one / place / one / minute / marking time [Ends Poem] [Bob laughs]\n \n\n43:35\tOriginal Music Score by Chelsea Edwardson:\n \n\n \n\n[Gentle instrumental music rises and fades into outro narration.]\n44:19\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. This episode was written, produced, sound-designed and voiced by Craig Carpenter, with additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox Collection, PennSound, and KPFA. The musical score was composed by Chelsea Edwardson. Special thanks to Karis Shearer, Robert Hogg, Deanna Fong, Mathieu Aubin, Marjorie Mitchell, and Judith Burr for their feedback on drafts of this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts, a new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9291","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E11, Revisiting “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”, 2 August 2021, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3d457003-914f-4df1-8fec-3c1cb15f6efa/audio/b7c2eb87-f831-4a8f-a949-3509ce817a0e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2e11-revisitingpodcasting.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:04:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"62,182,339 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2e11-revisitingpodcasting\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-08-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549514878976,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode takes us back to a SpokenWeb Project panel presentation from April 2021: “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study.” This panel was organized by Jason Camlot and Stacey Copeland, and led by SpokenWeb Podcast host Hannah McGregor. It used the recently published volume, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry), as an opportunity to think about and discuss the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study – a subject central to the mission of the SpokenWeb Podcast. \n\nIn this episode of the podcast, Jason draws upon the recording of this event to revisit key moments: a presentation by Dario Llinares about the main theses of the book and his reflections on how the landscape of research around podcasting is rapidly developing; brief position papers from respondents Stacey Copeland (SFU), Elena Razlogova (Concordia U), Kim Fox (American University in Cairo), Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta) and Deanna Fong (Concordia U); and questions and participation from event attendees. You can watch the full event as a Zoom recording on the SpokenWeb Project’s Archive of the Present: https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study-20-april-2021/\n\nHere’s a note from Jason about making the episode and using the Korg Monotron to score it:\n\nIn editing and producing this episode, my goal was to capture the feeling and flow of the original panel presentations and discussion, while speeding up the pace a bit, and creating new thematic sections and transitions, where necessary. To mark transitions between thematic sections I decided to compose some sounds using a lo fi instrument, the Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.  This little device has just a few knobs, switches, and touch ribbon keyboard, but can generate a vast range of sounds.  It is simple, DIY and accessible (anyone can play it), yet it also suggests endless possibilities of sound, pacing, tone and mood; just like podcasting!  It was also just there, sitting on my desk, ready at hand. For these reasons, I felt the Monotron was an appropriate instrument to use for scoring this collaborative discussion about podcasting as a critical medium.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\t Hannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: Intro Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As you, our listeners, may well know at this point, we’re a podcast created by and grounded in the scholarly research of the SpokenWeb project community. It’s natural, then that we’re interested in how podcasting is generally being taken up as a tool, talked about, and studied in academic spaces. It may seem surprising that this is happening, that podcasting is being studied as a form of scholarly production, as an important new mode of knowledge making and sharing. An episode of your favorite podcast feels and sounds so different from the written journal articles and conference papers traditionally used to share academic knowledge. What does it mean when podcasters engage with, infiltrate, maybe mess with and transform the way the production and dissemination of knowledge happens in the academic sphere and what critical work is currently being done to understand the impact that podcasting is having on specialized fields of research, scholarship and teaching?\n01:49\tHannah McGregor:\tJason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb project and he’s helped us think through pieces of this question in past episodes of the podcast. In our episodes, ‘Ideas have feelings, too: Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in Podcasting’ and ‘Cylinder Talks: Podcasting in Literary Sound Studies’, Jason, and his co-producers took us into the university classroom and showed us how students are using podcasting as a tool for critical analysis and communication. Scenes from these episodes demonstrate the emotional and intellectual depth and merit that podcasting has when used as a teaching method and research tool, and raise questions about what podcasting is doing in scholarly contexts. When Dario Llinares invited Stacey and Jason to discuss their cylinder talks episode for his own New Aural Cultures podcast, they got to talking and thinking that it would be fun to organize a panel with a bunch of scholar podcasters to consider the current state of podcasts studies. Is podcasts studies emerging as an actual disciplinary field of study in the way that film studies and radio studies have established themselves in the academy?\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does it mean to define podcasting as a distinct field of critical study? Is that something we really want to do? Jason and Stacey went on to organize the panel. They invited Dario to provide some opening remarks based on arguments he first outlined in his co-edited collection, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Stacey acted as a respondent along with Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, Michael O’Driscoll, and Deanna Fong, each of whom had something unique to say in response to the core question: what is podcasting as a field of critical study? In this new episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Jason has selected and arranged key parts of a conversation that was first heard live on Zoom on April 20th, 2021 in a virtual panel called “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. I, Hannah, hosted the panel and you’ll hear my voice alongside some of my esteemed colleagues who are deeply engaged in thinking about podcasting as a powerful medium of scholarly inquiry. So let’s get on with the episode, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music. ] “Revisiting ‘Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study’”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n04:12\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.] And what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies?\n \n\n04:17\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nHow are shows categorized? How are they discovered across different platforms?\n \n\n04:21\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nA new stage of podcasting, the industrialization of podcasting.\n \n\n04:25\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI want to challenge you to be more open and inclusive.\n \n\n04:29\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech, as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio and Hindenburg.\n \n\n04:36\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nWe felt a clear tension between ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast.\n \n\n04:44\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI hope the audience get in on this. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.]\n \n\n04:51\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHi, everyone. Welcome to “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. My name is Hannah McGregor, and I am going to be moderating the conversation today. For those who don’t know me, I am a professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University, as well as a podcaster as is the case with, I think basically everybody on this panel. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that I’m speaking to you from the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I think in this era of digital events, it’s harder than ever to ground ourselves in the places where we live and work and play, but it’s also more crucial than ever to think about where our knowledge comes from. And that includes recognizing whose territory we’re residing on, for those of us who are living on Turtle Island. So I would like to encourage you to add your own territory acknowledgment in the chat if you would like to do so, or just pop into the chat and say hi to the assembled group and tell us where you’re coming from. We’ve got quite [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] an international gathering here today.[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n06:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOnto the event itself: Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study builds on the recent volume podcasting, New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, to think and engage in discussion about the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study. We are going to begin with some comments from Dario about the book, followed by brief position papers from respondents, Stacey Copeland, Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, and Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. So first up, Dario Llinares is principal lecturer in contemporary screen media at the University of Brighton, and of course co-editor of Podcasting New Aural Cultures and Digital Media and co-producer of the accompanying podcast, New Aural Cultures. Note: this is a SpokenWeb panel that is also co-sponsored by the Media History Research Center at Concordia. So thanks so much from Concordia – to Concordia for helping us to put this together. That is all of the housekeeping stuff, so now I will stop talking and we will hear from Dario up first. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n07:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThanks, Hannah, very much appreciated. And thanks to Jason and Stacey for inviting me and for setting everything up [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and welcome to everybody. Glad you could join us. I was thinking about how to prepare for this event and since taking up podcasting, whenever I’ve given a lecture or a talk in another university or a conference paper, I’ve used only loose notes, usually just bullet points comprised of prompts that point me in the direction of what I want to talk about. This move away from writing a script and reading it out was actually one of the effects of podcasting – one of the effects that it had on my academic practice. So learning how to edit, hearing over and over again, the foibles of how I presented myself orally and how content came out as a result reminded me how much meaning is created and received differently through the speech that articulates thoughts in the moment. Rather than speech that is pre-prepared.\n08:19\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, on the other hand, if you’re riffing the speaker and listener have to deal with all the hesitations, the repetitions, the mis-speakings, and the possibility that one’s immediate thoughts actually don’t really amount to very much. So, today I’ve prepared a written text, as you can probably tell. And the reason I’ve done this is to try to articulate some of the ideas and questions that influenced the development of the book that I edited with Neil and with Richard: Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media – particularly with regards to what we might mean, what we do, and what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies. The book as a whole was an attempt to draw out and articulate the ways in which we as editors and the authors were making sense of the impact of podcasting practice, to recognize its significance in the cultural landscape because of these practices, and, in turn, an encouragement to think reflectively as to why this significance needs to be examined.\n09:18\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tTo put a name on this, Podcast Studies, was a call to engage with the possible parameters through which critical study could be done. Perhaps the most profound development since the book came out has been the extent to which podcasting, particularly in the United States, is discussed as an industry. The journalistic, popular cultural, and professional production narratives are overtly concerned with monetization, audience expansion, and corporate infrastructure. The focus on this from a critical standpoint is, and should continue to be central to popcast studies. The question of what podcasting is, which probably everyone here is engaged with in some form, is in many ways the foundational question of Podcast Studies, and I’ve tried as many of us have to intellectualize that through research, analysis and self-reflection. But in the end it still does remain somewhat personal and ineffable. Because of this, the introduction to the book does read are speculative. “Are people thinking the same way about this media as we are?” is the question we were implicitly asking ourselves.\n 10:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tIn order to try and schematize what we lay out in the book – I’m thinking about the myriad research I’ve read or listened to in the proceeding few years after the book was published – I offer now three interrelated strands that might help to engage with what Podcast Studies is doing conceptually. These are notionally and intentionally broad in scope. So I ask you for a little of what Malcolm Gladwell calls conditionality in your interpretation of this. These strands are communication, knowledge, and identity. To complicate matters though, I think these three categories can each be broken down in terms of the interrelationship between structure, form, and content. So in terms of communication, we may think of the structures that not only make podcasting feasible, but have manifested what we think of now as an identifiable and discreet medium. This might incorporate technological elements, such as RSS and iTunes, audio recording technology, podcaster apps, podcatcher apps, but also social media and internet functionality.\n 11:28\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow do these structures foster processes of production, distribution, and reception that we identify specifically as podcasting? Communication forms may relate to the aesthetic artifact itself. What do podcasts sound like? Are podcasting forms the same as genres? Aurally, what makes a podcast different from radio or, for example, from a piece of recorded audio that is simply accessible online? How might we consider the experience of listening, both in terms of apparatus the mechanics of how we listen and affect? – and I’m thinking here about the thorny issue of intimacy. Communication content engages with what a podcast episode and series is about. Interestingly, that area of research may look to leave the mechanics of podcasting behind. But isn’t an analysis of a podcast or podcasting that discusses content only – is that really Podcast Studies? To me, we have to think about this in a synergistic fashion. How does structure, form, and content merge in ways that allow us to engage with how podcasts work as a medium?\n 12:35\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tKnowledge, the second strand, reflects on how we might understand the impact of podcasting philosophically or epistemologically. For example, in terms of the structures of knowledge, to offer a student a podcast to listen to, rather than a journal article to read should make us reflect on how knowledge is made available to us and what function does it serve. If we organize our lives around listening to podcasts, how does what we listen to reflect our exposure to knowledge, and then how we might disseminate that knowledge further? It’s clear that a key element of Podcast Studies relates to its pedagogic use. So how might podcasting as a form of knowledge creation help students in the understanding and application of their own learning? What does it offer both in conceptual knowledge and in terms of skills-knowledge? I’m very much interested in the speech, text image relationship. In that context, how universities, the media, and politics frames knowledge is fundamental to the cultural zeitgeist.\n 13:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPodcast Studies needs to contextualize podcasting at heart of this, particularly where speech and knowledge is being fought over ideologically. A critique of big technology companies and their content gatekeeping analytics program decision-making is another question of knowledge structure, form, and content that we also want to investigate. The third strand, identity, relates to what we ask ourselves in terms of who our podcast producers, podcast listeners, and podcast fans. Furthermore, what do podcasts tell us about the lives of the individuals and groups they represent? Structurally, we can think about the demographics of producers and listeners, but a more vital question might be: how do individual subjects or community groups formulate a sense of self through podcasting? What might be the barriers to entry, even considering how we might assume the relative ease of access, there are many cultural, social and economic obstacles to creation, production, and even listening. We doubtedly want to consider and critique the replication of hierarchies of power based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, et cetera. In terms of forms of identity, we might consider the crucial element of the voice.\n 14:49\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHow might we analyze the voice as a key tool in podcasting? It’s texture, it’s timbre, it’s materiality, to be sure, but how does the disembodied voice then materialize a sense of embodiedness through its use in podcasting? Podcast Studies must consider what it means to have a voice and to be listened to. And in this sense, it has to advocate openness, equality, and diversity through its structure, form, and content. Of course, we need to think about Podcast Studies in relation to other disciplinary fields. In the introduction to the book that the relationship with radio was a key element, but the need for us was to interrogate and assumed filial relationship. Should Podcast Studies look to disassociate itself from the history, culture, and aesthetics of radio? No, of course not. It really can’t. But if there is to be a usefulness to Podcast Studies, there has to be a criteria of autonomy.\n 15:43\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tEven if we acknowledge that the very term podcasting is a flash of journalistic serendipity. We need to analyze the important influences of other forms of mediums that make podcasting the flexible, hybridized, liminal medium it’s been described as. This brings us to sound [Start Sound Effect: Echoes] itself, and the overlaps with sound orientated disciplines: sound study, sound arts, audiology, musicology are all areas in which Podcast Studies can take methodological and conceptual influence. Indeed, there is an interesting question with regards to how Podcast Studies should articulate the centrality of sound. The nature of sound on an ontological level, may be fundamentally of interest to Podcast Studies analysis. In turn, the recording, editing and production of sound could be envisaged as key to a particular angle of research. Furthermore, the cultural impact, psychological effects, and phenomenological shaping of our material experience through sound might be at the heart of Podcast Studies concerns. [End Sound Effect: Echoes] One of my favourite podcasts recent times was Hannah and Jason and the team at SpokenWeb – their episode on “How we are Listening Now”. Does podcasting make us listen to the world and therefore experience it in specific ways?\n 16:57\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tHowever, it is vital that podcasting has a focus on criticality from whatever perspective or approach acknowledges the essential sound artifact or process as a podcast. This, to me, is true of individual podcast criticism, audience research, industry analysis, cultural studies, or media technology. What gives the focus of research it’s “podcastiness” is the cornerstone of the discipline – and I’m still not a hundred percent sure whether I like that word. This may require the researcher to expand, extend, or challenge notions of what a podcast is. And therefore, we must accept and reflect that the parameters of podcasting ontology will continue to be a contested area. Thinking about the impact of one’s own practice of podcasting should also be central to Podcast Studies. But that leads to the question: should Podcast Studies academics be actively using the medium? I guess this argument depends on how much you see the discipline of Podcast Studies needing to push an agenda that podcasting and other forms of non-traditional media practice should be recognized as being both a research tool and a method of dissemination that doesn’t have to default back to the text as a guarantee of rigor.\n 18:10\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis requires us to challenge the mechanisms, both material and structural, of closed source access, publishing and peer review traditions, and attitudes to the very nature of knowledge and learning and their ideological function within academia. Finally, I argue in the book that podcasting sits in a liminal space, not exactly conforming wholly with producers or consumers, with professionals or amateurs, with teachers or students, with interviewers or interviewees. I think it’s important that we see Podcast Studies challenging the traditional status quo, but also reflecting on its place in relation to the highly uncertain digital future that we are all inculcated in. We all know podcasting is great, but that cannot remain an uncontested assumption. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 19:16\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tOur first respondent is Stacey. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Stacey Copeland is a Joseph Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication here in Vancouver, Canada, where her research engages with feminist media oral histories and sound archives.\n \n\n 19:35\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nOh, great. Alright. So, thank you Dario. That was really informative and got me tweaking some of the things and thoughts that I brought to the conversation today. So in revisiting the collection, which I have of course my copy fresh, you can kind of see through the background that I’ve chosen to exist in today. I was brought back to the moment I first received the call for chapters back in 2016, a fresh faced master’s student at the time navigating my new found identity formation as a media scholar and a queer feminist. My gender and media studies professor at the time, Dr. Susan Driver, recommended I submit a course paper I’d written about The Heart, which I fangirl over all the time, as a proposal for the book. It seems so long ago now, 2016, a time when there was still a need to argue for the importance of sound as a valuable field of study. Podcasting was still so new in popular culture and podcasts studies, even newer, not quite yet a field of its own back then, and some would argue it still isn’t. Podcast Studies feels like it will always still be emerging.\n 20:52\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nThere’s a sense of newness about it that I, and many others, including Dario, would argue is key to the very ethos of the medium itself. A newness defined on the oldness of other media forms, particularly radio. As Lisa Gitelman so eloquently writes on the newness of new media, quote “This overdetermined sense of reaching the end of a media history is probably what accounts for the oddly perennial newness of today’s new media. ” Unquote. Podcasting is a new media with an old history. And the same can be said about Podcast Studies as an emergent academic field. Now I’m less concerned with defining podcasting as its own unique medium of study, as separate from radio or other media forms, and more interested in the ways in which the growth of interest in podcasting has opened up new or renewed conversations around mediated, spatial politics, platformization, sonic narrative form, and the role of sound-based media in shaping our subjective everyday experiences. In short, how identity and community, knowledge and power, power play out in the podcast arena.\n 22:03\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo I’m intrigued by some of the correlations and overarching themes that Dario has invited us to consider today. Now, what I particularly love about this collection and Dario’s work on podcasting, is that it straddles the two worlds of theory and practice. I truly do believe as scholars, we learn just as much, if not more, by embedding ourselves into the practical aspects of our field of study. Sometimes I’ve learned – something I’ve learned really through my time in radio and podcasts communities and something I continue to practice in my academic work. In the introduction to this collection, Dario, Neil and Richard write, quote, “podcasting imbued in us the enthusiasm of possibility.” And we see this term possibility spark again in Dario’s opening remarks. This line really sticks with me, drawing me back to the forever newness so key to podcast culture. Possibility, a sentiment we often hear in relation to podcasting, listeners and producers alike can hear this possibility, the potentials for podcasting to give space to voices unheard in the mainstream, to engage deeply with niche audiences, and communities across the globe.\n 23:20\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nStill, by approaching the sentiment of possibility with a critical ear, I would argue we must also consider the increasing constraints of the platforms on which podcasting takes place. We’re seeing major giants like Spotify and Netflix now enter the podcasting race. And these are important questions to consider. Echoing Dario’s early remarks on structure in relation to communication, knowledge, and identity, this is one of the key differences we can consider that defines podcasting from other mediums is it’s distribution and discoverability through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and more. Podcasts studies provides a grounding, a community in which to study these platforms and algorithms so deeply entangled in key questions of identity and representation, of possibility. How are shows categorized? How were they discovered across different platforms? And how is this changing now that podcasting has truly entered the mainstream? How long will this sentiment of possibility last and how true is it in practice? In a talk I gave at SCMS last month, I mentioned how in 2019, a search for “queer” as a term on Apple Podcast actually assumed that I was searching for the word queen, which was really opening my eyes to just how interesting these tools can be in study, who they are built for, and how.\n 24:39\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nDid queer not exist as a search term? Or was this a tongue-in-cheek joke coded into the platform by a fellow queer? So, all of this said, I still believe in this sentiment of possibility Dario, Neil, and Richard first wrote about. And as researchers, makers, and listeners, by establishing podcasting as a serious object of study, a cultural practice, we play a key role in shaping how this possibility unfolds into action. So as you scroll through your podcast feed today, I invite you to consider the age old critical question: what do you hear? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 25:24\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Stacey. Our next respondent is Elena Razlogova. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Elena Razlogova is an associate professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, though she is not coming to us from Montreal today, she’s coming to us from Moscow. She is also the author of The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture”, an issue of the Radical History Review.\n \n\n 25:57\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you very much. It’s great to be here. I was happy to be invited to participate on this panel. By the way, my background is my parents’ kitchen – that’s why it’s blurred. I’m in Moscow right now and I can’t have a fake background for some reason. So I was really happy to be invited to this panel because I’m a radio historian, rather than a full-on Podcast Studies person –so I’m kind of an interloper here. I’m most excited about podcasting as a fantastic teaching and public dissemination medium. And in my field history, especially, there’s a great variety of podcasts out there that demonstrate to historians alternative ways to tell stories about the past. From Nate DiMeo’s 10-minute Memory Palace that uses dramatic music and sound effects to tell stories about individuals in history, to Hardcore History where just one dude, Dan Carlin rants about history for over three hours at a time. You get professional historians like Jill Lepore and outsiders like Malcolm Gladwell, and you get 99% Invisible, a great podcast about the history of design, as well as More Perfect about the American Supreme court. And all of that is history. I have assigned podcast making in both undergraduate and graduate courses as group work and individual work.\n 27:15\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd podcasts as a term assignment introduces a creative element to coursework. It makes students think about sound effects, diegetic non-diabetic music, proper ways to intro and outro the narrative as well. After making the podcast, they no longer think of interviews as an optional research method. And writing for speaking, as Dario mentioned, writing for speaking aloud makes them better writers as well. So I’m looking at podcasting as a practitioner rather than simply an academic. And I also should say that I actually didn’t ever publish a podcast, but I work as well – I volunteer on campus radio, so I do a little bit of radio. So reading the introduction to the book, and the book itself, several chapters, it’s amazing how much podcasting has advanced since the years since its publication. It may no longer be a liminal medium, and it’s harder to argue for liminality today, than in 2018, because Spotify, for example, has this whole stable of gated podcasts, including the Michelle Obama podcasts.\n 28:20\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tJeremy Moore calls this new stage of podcasts the industrialization of podcasting, where standards, and barriers for entry are much higher and it is more difficult to stand out, as other speakers already mentioned. And research on platformization of podcasting aligns with studies of music streaming and algorithmic recommendations in general. So, I hate to come back to the point, to the question whether podcasting is radio or not, but as a radio historian, I have to come back to it. In the introduction, authors focused on BBC and NPR as radio counterpoint to podcasting. But I would like to come back to independent radio broadcasting rather than large scale government sponsored networks. A few features of independent radio broadcasting seem lost to podcasting, but perhaps can be recovered, such as real-time possibility for community organizing, the critique of commercialism, and border-crossing that pirate, low power, and community radio offers. For radio, national borders matter in a different way.\n 29:29\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd here I’m thinking of Black power activist, Robert Williams broadcasting his Radio Free Dixie from Cuba in the 60s to the still segregated American South, or more recently, Christina Dunbar-Hester’s work on low RFM radio service to local communities, or in [inaudible] Garcia’s work on Spanish-language radio warning of anti-immigration rates via real-time call ins. As well, independent shows and hosts often migrate to podcasting in a sort of “brain drain”. And here I’m thinking of Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show, or Benjamin Walker’s Care of Everything, both migrated from audience supported station WFMU. Or more locally, a show called Audio Smart, that started at CKUT at McGill University, and then was taken from the station and turned it into a podcast. So my question is: compared to these local community radio forums, how do we recover in podcasting the forms of solidarity and activism that these alternative radio forms have been doing and perhaps alternative or independent podcasting is the answer? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 30:40\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing. Thank you so much, Elena. Next up is Kim Fox. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Kim Fox is a professor of practice in the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo, where she primarily teaches audio production and other journalism courses. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].\n \n\n 31:04\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you, Hannah. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] I’m really excited to be a part of this and thank you all. I really want to add something very important and build on the conversations that we’re hoping to have here. So thank you for having me a part of this discussion about the current digital cultural phenomenon that we know very closely as podcasting. And I’ve decided to freestyle a little bit, so I’m sure that I will not take up my full time, but perhaps I can get that time back at the end. I do want to kind of build on what Stacey was saying in terms of – about the listening and more or less like where to from here? In this short time, since the book has been published, we see this huge gap in terms of what has happened.\n 31:48\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021::\tI mean, there’s a huge gap in terms of what happened between now and last year, but where the future could go is more symposia like this, where we’re able to have these conversations that are really important, especially as we try to redirect the lens of what is podcasting? You know, and what is Podcast Studies specifically? And I’m also thinking about this multicultural lens. I’m thinking about the women’s centeredness of it, or perhaps a lack of it. And of course, LGBTQ issues, other marginalized communities, who we would think there would be a space for them in this independent world, but as we see the commercialization and capitalism that’s involved in podcasting, that perhaps they too will get left behind with this new platform and in the academic look at the platforms. I’d also like to add about the kind of research that we are seeing in the field.\n 32:50\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd there is a lot of cultural, there is a lot of critical, which is great. Perhaps we want to look at, how do we diversify that? And especially when I start to think about: what will be the Podcast Studies canon? Surely some of those people are in the room. Thank you, Richard Berry. But we’re also thinking about how much more depth will that have and what will that look like? Because we also see from the past what the history of theory, for example, in many fields, if you’re thinking about classical social thought and how do we grab a hold of the field now to help decolonize before it becomes something that we want to avoid that has already happened? Also, we want to think about the critical production that we’re aiming to produce, and looking at it in terms of, is this an opportunity for us to again, make a concerted change? I really liked the points that were made about the embodiment and disembodiment of voices. Again, that’s something that is very valuable to us. But as I wrap up, I do want to say, I want to challenge you as media scholars to be more open and inclusive in your future research. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] So that’s both in terms of content and in collaboration. Thank you.\n \n\n 34:31\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Kim. Our final respondents are Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Michael O’Driscoll is a professor in the department of English and Film Studies in the faculty of arts who teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories, including material cultural studies. And finally, Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, also in Montreal where her research project towards an ethics of listening in literary study intersects the fields of oral history and literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices.\n \n\n 35:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThank you so much, Hannah. Deanna and I would like to use our platform to share our recent experience in producing an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast series. The episode was launched in early April and was titled “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” We’re interested in particular in talking about podcasting as a form of self-reflective critical practice and reflecting on our experiences during this collaboration. We entered into producing this podcast with a specific meta-critical goal, listening attentively to our conversations about listening. We did so with certain presuppositions about the imbrication of theory and practice as mutually constitutive activities. And we did so with a focus on listening through an ethical lens, asking particular questions about how we listen, why we listen, the material conditions of that activity, and with attention to the conventions of listening within the constraints of podcast production. The episode was an open-ended experiment that involved recorded and non-recorded dialogues with scholars who perform, gather, curate, and analyze spoken word performance across a range of audio textual genres. The queer cabaret performance, the oral history interview, the circulation of an archive of Indigenous creators, and scholarly engagements with spoken word recordings.\n 36:39\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThroughout, we felt a clear tension between our own ideals about ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast within the affordances of the medium and the conventions of possible podcast genres. We listened as our interviewees represented their own practices of listening and worked to achieve a certain attunement to the convolutions of critique. And I mean critique in the truest self-reflexive sense of that term, with an openness to difference, to the incalculable, and to the indeterminacy sees this scenario provoked.\n \n\n 37:16\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tSo for me, coming from a background in oral history and literary study, particularly a study of sounded poetry, making this podcast was an important meta-critical experiment that deepened my understanding of my research goals and methods in these fields. Listening has always been at the forefront of my work and as an attendant theoretical concern, paying attention to how we listen, what we listen for and the different modes of listening that are occasioned when we shift contexts from readings to interviews, when we speak of genre or from live events to digital and analog recordings when you speak of media. One of the fascinating outcomes of our foray into the podcasting world was new forms of deep, and I would argue ethical, listening that it invited at every stage of production. Before recording the interviews with our respondents, Michael and I had informal unrecorded conversations with them, both to create a level of comfort and intimacy –there’s that word again – but also to zero in on what we wanted to talk about in the interview.\n 38:10\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThis genre of interviewing differed from the meandering type of life story interview that I’m used to conducting. As Michael suggested in our conversations leading up to this panel, what we were listening for in this case was expertise in lieu of, or at least in addition to experience. Our listening practices continued as we edited and transcribed interviews shaping them into a continuous, or at least resonant narrative. I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio inHindenburg, adding an extra two seconds, pause to let an idea, breathe or editing a sentence to best reflect the speaker’s line of thought – with their permission of course. Underlying each of these editorial decisions is a complex set of ethical questions. How we represent the speakers who give us their ideas and voices, but also how we connect with and create a listening environment for an imagined audience. On the other side, the podcast’s extensive engagement with the voice gave us multiple opportunities to critically reflect on our own practices as scholars and carry those observations forward until the other academic work that we do.\n \n\n 39:15\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tPerhaps one of the most provocative moments in the podcast is our conversation with Simon Fraser University scholar, Clinton Burnham, who proposed that while listening is without doubt an ethical imperative, it does not always in and of itself constitute an unalloyed good. That is, Clint reminded us the position of one who listens –and you might think here of judges, priests, analysts – is structurally configured as a position of mastery, a master position in which what is received is put back into circulation in a revalued – you might think extracted refined, reprocessed – form of judgment, absolution, cure and so on. You might extend this insight into all forms of listening, especially those in which a listener, however well meaning, receives the disclosures of those who have been harmed in some fashion. The unaddressed question here is how a listener might disavow, or acknowledge, or act in response to that structural configuration, and how listeners constitute themselves across a range of listening practices.\n 40:21\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd I’m thinking having just listened to Kim’s words that this has perhaps particular resonance with the call to decolonize and diversify. One of our thoughts on this front is that if podcasting remains yet in its formative stages of development, and that question is on the table right now, if podcasting is a germinal cultural practice, studying offers enormous possibility and a little shout out here to Stacey and Dario, even while constrained by its own ideological and historical horizons, the process of podcast production offers rich opportunities for such ethical engagements, born of the very contradictions inherent in this cultural practice. And furthermore, we might ask ourselves whether this kind of self-reflexivity is germane to the practice of podcasting: do we all listen to our listening? Or whether podcasting is itself, a field of cultural production that has only begun to engage [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] in a practice of self-reflexive critical collaboration?\n \n\n 41:33\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAmazing, thank you both so much. There were [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] a lot of really beautiful threads that were weaving through that and a really interesting conversation already starting in the chat about canonicity, which I think is really fascinating. So maybe we can start the round table conversation there thinking about the sort of idea of canonicity. So Dario, maybe you can start us off on this idea: is it time for a podcasting studies canon?\n \n\n 42:05\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question specifically. I mean, I think what’s interesting is whenever you’re talking about canons, these are sort of not neutrally organic developments, but they are an outcome of the – both the structures and the people who are defining what is being talked about, what is being written about, what is the focus of interest. So I think that the idea of there is a group of scholars or a group of works that are going to be forwarded as part of the canon will happen because of the way that universities look to define these are the works that we need to be engaging with. So the question then becomes, how does everybody – as Kim was talking about – how do we open up the possibilities of access, both in an academic sense, and also in a production sense for podcasting to be this inclusive area where we do podcasting, we talk about podcasting, and we self-reflect on how it represents people? And then the analysis of that will hopefully naturally come out as not being a problematic, bounded kind of canonical approach or set of texts. Now, maybe I’m – maybe that’s slightly naive. You know, maybe we need to make that happen more. I guess that’s both– that’s my first sort of opening gambit now on that I suppose.\n \n\n 43:38\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’m really interested in the possibility of an audio cannon. I think Richard Barry mentioned it in the chat because it is a time – and I agree that canon is a terrible word in the sense that it’s always about exclusion. And then it needs to be always attacked and reconsidered, but starting it, it’s kind of exciting to look back three years or five and already knowing what was important. So I wonder what you guys would think. What would you put there?\n \n\n 44:07\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThoughts? What would you put into an audio canon? It’s a fascinating question, I think particularly for folks who teach podcasting, is the sort of the incredibly lateral world of podcasting as a medium, the sort of deep niche listening practices make it difficult to establish shared objects of study that conversations can circulate around.\n \n\n 44:31\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, by audio canon, Elena, do you mean specifically pieces of audio that we would use to create canon over texts or both?\n \n\n 44:39\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nNo, more like a mixtape of podcasts to share with other people.\n \n\n 44:45\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI love that. I love that – we should record them onto tapes.\n \n\n 44:48\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s what the kids call a playlist. So yeah, mixed tape is old school [Laughs].\n \n\n 44:53\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nMixed tape is good. It creates this awareness of looking back – the history of old media and the new media. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] [Sound Effect: Creaking Wood]\n \n\n 45:08\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI wonder if we might [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] – one of the things that was really striking to me about the sort of overlap between all of our panelists’ comments was about the relationship between practice and theory of Podcast Studies. And Laurie has put the question really well in the chat here, that it is important for podcast academics to also be practitioners and Dario your point that that may be more so than for other media. Laurie would like you to expand on that, but I would also love to hear from the rest of the panel about how you think about the relationship between practice and theory in podcasts studies and whether that feels – I think particularly if people coming in from, from different disciplinary perspectives – how’s that different from the relationship between theory and practice in film studies, or in literary studies, or in radio studies, which are all media-engaged disciplines.\n \n\n 46:03\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tThat was just kind of born out of experience. And when I was doing podcasting, it was making me look at the way I write and the way I speak, not just in an objective sense, but also the identity of that. But the difference, say between something like film, which is the background that I came from, probably is just for the fact that film has 120 years behind it –\n \n\n 46:23\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs].\n \n\n 46:23\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t–and therefore there’s 120 years of people saying what film is, and you don’t have to start a film studies essay by having to – three or four pages explaining what you think film is –.\n \n\n 46:38\tSeveral Voices:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n 46:38\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t– in a way, whereas a lot of Podcast Studies papers do because we’re still arguing about it. So, I think maybe that’s where my assertion that having a practical sense of podcasting leads you to a wider understanding of what it is at this point.\n \n\n 46:55\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s really, hasn’t been my position for some time, especially coming from a radio background that I find when people who don’t have that background, they really do teach it from a perspective of like, well, that’s not how it works. Like that’s not how news is made. And once you’re in the room and you know how the meat is made, then you kind of have a better insight and your positionality is so much more informed than your previous self. And also think about this, when anthropologists embed in communities, there’s a reason there’s a certain observation level that takes place from that perspective. And so when I’m trying to coach students into producing audio, storytelling, and podcasts, it really comes from a place of, I know this process and I can help you develop this story into something – into something really interesting. So I think having that practicality under your belt is really useful and it’s something that everyone should venture into, even on a short series, a podcast, or just an interview podcast, whatever. I think everyone should have that experience.\n \n\n 47:58\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nSo this is a great conversation to have and something that I’m constantly engaging with in my own work. And I think it’s interesting to think about it in the broader sense of media studies as well. So as a media studies scholar, documentary researchers for instance, have been making their own media for a very, very long time. And that’s a field I look to quite often for what that might look like in the podcasting realm as well, both radio documentary and film documentary. And I think what those fields can tell us is podcasting is an interesting place to bring together practice and theory, because it’s also a medium that is very much grounded in a personal practice, in an individual researcher. Even when we’re thinking about large podcast productions, teams are still realistically quite small, maybe five or six people who are actively working on a podcast series together. These aren’t the same as a large Hollywood film production, which would be a much more difficult thing for a scholar to, well get the funds to do, but also the resources and people to actually put it together. So thinking about podcasting, I think in relation to film and radio documentary is quite useful in this way. And we see, of course, people like Siobhán McHugh writing about this. And we need to look to those scholars for some answers around this connection as well.\n \n\n 49:17\tMichael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI just wanted to throw a term into the conversation because I think I’d be really interested in hearing what people think about it. And I keep thinking, as I’m listening to you, keep thinking about the concept and the practice of research creation and I’ll do a shout out to my colleague, Natalie Loveless, who has an amazing book called How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation. I think in many ways there are a whole set of well articulated practices and theories coming from colleagues in the creative and performing arts about what it means to bring practice and theory together in this way in a manner that is very much about the production of research and insights through this. And I think there might be some real opportunity there for thinking about how podcasting might itself constitute a form of research creation.\n \n\n 50:09\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tGreat point, Mike. Yeah, because for myself, I’m coming to the field with this kind of wide-eyed naivete, in that I really, I think only listened to a podcast for the first time in maybe the last six months, before embarking on making my own. [Laughs] But I think as I was trying to suggest in our response, that so many of those ethical decisions, that one makes that one is really attuned to, come from those editorial decisions of figuring out like, oh if we have four guests, do we need to balance things out? What parts of all of these incredible interviews do we keep in? Do we put music beneath people’s speech? Does it enhance the experience that their words? Is it music that they ultimately hate and want to change? Like all of these very, very small material decisions matter in how we’re representing other people’s voices. And, for me, that’s just absolutely essential in grappling with those ethical considerations on a material level.\n \n\n 51:09\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. And there’s wonderful – it’s a beautiful chat and there’s I think really, really significant sort of amplification of those questions of materiality. It’s a great point here from Jennifer Lynn Stover about the way that a focus on practice could become another form of gatekeeping. Because access to the possibility to even experiment in audio composition goes hand in hand with certain material conditions. And it does seem like there is an interesting overlap between this question about practice and this question about canonization, which has to do with what forms and genres and styles and structures to be introduced to our students as the way that podcasts are made. That there is possibility for implicitly creating canons through how we ourselves practice podcast making, or teach podcast making. So these all – just a beautifully tangled [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] set of questions.\n \n\n 52:24\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nLet’s let the audience get in on this.\n \n\n 52:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve got a couple of questions sort of flagged here. So are there sort of emerging recognized genre forums in the podcasting world and where is the experimental genre-defying work happening?\n \n\n 52:42\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWell, I know that PhD student Anne [Inaudible] – I don’t know if she’s here, Anne – but she’s doing work on the genres and forms, which is interesting because I think what she’s talking about is the way in which traditional genre categories related to things like film and television music don’t really work in the same way for podcasting as they do for those media. So there’s a kind of layering of how you would have to think about podcasts in terms of taxonomies and categorizations like that. And I think it’s just indicative as well of the difficulty of that whole process in the way that Apple podcasts, when it did its revamp just seemed to add to the problem.\n \n\n 53:25\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs].\n \n\n 53:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[Laughs]. I think. So, yeah. I mean, I think it’s an, it’s an interesting question about, about genre distinctions in terms of podcasting.\n \n\n 53:32\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI really appreciate that you brought up Anne, Dario because Anne and I have had some really great conversations around this, and Kim’s been in many of those conversations as well as part of our podcast PhDs group. And we’ve been talking a lot about genre, about how we define podcast genre, and how we approach storytelling and narration. And for me, because I guess because my media studies background, I do see quite a lot of correlation between a genre’s set up in TV, film, radio being really just pushed onto podcasting because it’s what’s familiar already. That said, because podcasting is really this messy mishmash network of all of these different media forms put together, we do of course see experimental work being done as well is just less talked about, as we see in all other media forms as well. It’s really about where the money is, and those are the podcasts that we see and hear, versus maybe some more experimental work that’s being done. And I’d encourage anyone interested to maybe look more into soundscape composition work and experimental radio for where those ideas are really coming from.\n \n\n 54:43\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tRichard Barry has suggested three – a sort of typology of podcasting here, which is narrative, conversation, and experimental, which I think is a really sort of interesting non-generic way to break down the world of podcasting. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n 55:06\tElena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was wondering [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] what is the space of the critical writing in podcasting, not academic writing, but critical writing. There is some, there are recommendation articles and magazines, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be the place to make the marginal mainstream, because that’s how mainstream manual music happened in particular decades. Not always, but occasionally it does happen that music journalism drives certain genres to prominence. And I think as academics we could participate in that kind of boundary crossing activity.\n \n\n 55:44\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tA good site is somewhere like Bello Collective as a starting point for that. They do pieces that –they do kind of recommendations in terms of kinds of lists and stuff, but there is some what you call journalistic longer form critical writing about podcasts. What’s interesting is that the – it is people who are just interested in podcasting doing the writing as well as producers and some academics. I think the difficulty is if you look at long form journalism in film, again, that is now contracting, it’s all short form listicles type stuff or academia. I mean –and especially the pandemic that sort of, the idea of the long form magazine [Inaudible] all these kinds of things, they’re managing to survive, but it’s such a small kind of base. So I think, again, it’s in terms of academics doing that and just generally producers, whoever’s interested in podcasting, is kind of having to do it off your own back.\n \n\n 56:42\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI was just adding in the chat, how I know that there are some journals that are – not only will the journal have a podcast, but in the physical journal, they are accepting podcast reviews as you would with a book review. So that’s one way to get sort of a critical look or maybe a critical conversation going about a specific podcast or series or something like that. And of course, Radio Doc Review, which was mentioned in the chat as well.\n \n\n 57:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. It’s interesting to think about that historical formation that, is it anything about podcasting that doesn’t lend itself to long form critical analysis, or is it just the way the emergence of podcasting aligned with the sort of disappearance of that particular form of critical writing from our media landscape? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n 57:21\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\t[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] There is a question in the chat that I actually think will be useful probably for a number of the folks here. This is from Devin Bait. They say, “I noticed that the word intimacy was brought up a couple of times and seemed to carry some weight: why? I’m brand new to Podcast Studies.” [Laughs] Which I love –that I’m brand new. Why is intimacy spoken with such a tremble?\n \n\n 57:54\tStacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nI mean, I’m happy to start. [Speaks closer to the microphone] Is it better if I speak like this? Is this a bit more intimate for our particular talk of intimacy? So I put in the chat, I actively avoided using the term intimacy in my provocation today, and that was intentional. So the word intimacy gets thrown around so much in the discussion of podcasting and there’s great work being done by scholars like Alan [Inaudible], who’s just finished up their PhD on podcast intimacies specifically. And we see this term used in radio as well, but less so in public broadcast radio and the kind of radio that reaches out to the masses and more so radio and podcasts that are speaking to you as an individual listener, the individual you in your ears. And that has created some really interesting scholarship around the relationship between headphone listening and intimacy with podcasts and even deep into discussions of how podcasts are produced, among producers as well, being produced for headphones to kind of create this internal sense of a voice in your head, in the experience of listening to podcasts. So there is a ton you can dig into in relation to the term podcasting and intimacy together. But maybe that’ll start off the panel on the subject.\n \n\n 59:25\tDario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tWhen you actually sort of get down to it, what do you really mean when you’re talking about intimacy? And I think with people that are writing a paper and they’re setting out criteria of what they understand by intimacy is fine. Just get on with it! It’s when it’s like oh, podcasts are an intimate medium. That’s too broad and a little bit too problematic, I think.\n \n\n 59:46\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tI’ll add to that from a bit of a different perspective and maybe this comes from my radio days, but I really got used to the Zoom world and especially all of these black squares, because I just feel like I’m on the radio. And, who’s really listening? Who am I talking to? And occasionally with Zoom, someone will talk back, but with students at eight in the morning, you’re usually just talking to the ether. So that sort of dynamic in that intimacy, when we think about the famous phrase from NPR in their “driveway moments” that either it’s in that car radio space or if you’re wearing earbuds and it is like Dario and Stacey mentioned that – the tenor of the voice, what is it that really makes us feel connected?\n1:00:31\tKim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tAnd even when teaching podcasting and teaching audio storytelling, you’re writing in a certain kind of way, there’s a writing for radio style and that you’re writing for one person, potentially. I tell students now about design thinking, you’re designing this prototype of a listener and then you’re going to talk to that listener so that you really create this connection. So that’s a little bit of what I think about intimacy and podcasting and radio.\n \n\n1:01:01\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. Well, I will say for my part on the idea of physical intimacy I definitely affected a calming ASMR lady voice for my podcast [Laughs] which I don’t know why, but it seemed like the thing to do. But on a more social level, I would say the most interesting thing that came out of our podcast was all of the forms of intimacy that happened outside of the episode, that spilled over the container of the episode. Which are the many conversations that we had with the interviewers, getting in touch with bill bisset and Maria Campbell who had excerpts of audio in the podcast, knowing that they were listening to the podcast. So I think actually if we look at the podcast, not necessarily as contained within the media form itself, but as a broader set of social practices, then we get into this really sort of exciting territory of community building and social intimacy, which to me, I think is probably the most exciting part.\n \n\n1:02:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\tYeah. I love that emphasis. That makes me think back to what Elena was saying about pirate radio practices and the possibility of community [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] formation. And how do we build for community in this asynchronous medium? There has been a wonderful conversation [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and links and resources shared in the chat here. Thank you again so much to all of our wonderful panelists. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:02:42\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nCan everyone on mute and say goodbye? So that’ll be some good sound for the podcast.\n \n\n1:02:46\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nEverybody unmute! We need 46 goodbyes. Let’s go.\n \n\n1:02:50\tJason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs]\n \n\n1:03:01\tVarious voices:\tGoodbye! [Laughs] Bye!\n \n\n1:03:06\tHannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] Love this audio. Love it.\n \n\n1:03:07\tDeanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:\n \n\nIt’s a sound poem if I ever heard one.\n \n\n1:03:07\tVarious voices::\t[Laughs] [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]\n \n\n1:03:07\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n1:03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb project director, Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Stacey Copeland, Deanna Fong, Kim Fox, Dario Llinares, Michael O’Driscoll, and Elena Razlova for their contributions to the panel discussion featured in this episode. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] From all of us at spoken web, thanks for listening to season two of this SpokenWeb Podcast, and we hope you’re ready for season three, coming soon with brand new episodes from the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. 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V6B 5K3.\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":[" 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C., Canada. V6B 5K3."],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The program for the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 can be found HERE.\\n\\nThe program for the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound can be found HERE.\\n\\nArchival audio from the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 and the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019, Simon Fraser University.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549521170432,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, student contributor Kate Moffatt revisits “Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal” – a live panel from the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. With presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec (moderated by Hannah McGregor) the panel explores how we understand sound, noise, voice, silence, and voiceless-ness when they intersect with gender, feminism, and the expected, mandated, or performative aspects of speech. Including a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation, project and sonification, Episode 5: “Revisiting ‘Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal’” returns to the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium as Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.\n\nTo find out more about our next SpokenWeb Symposium in 2020 here. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. Now this month we’re bringing you something a little bit different. In this episode of the Spoken Web Podcast student contributor, Kate Moffatt is revisiting a live panel from the 2019 Spoken Web symposium called Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. That panel happened right here at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and it featured presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec and it was moderated by me.\nYou hear me introduce the panel and also laugh a little bit too loudly, a little bit too close to the microphone a couple of times. The panel was exploring how we understand sound and silence, voice and voicelessness where they intersect with gender, feminism and the expected mandated or performative aspects of speech. This episode also includes a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation as well as the larger project that it touched on and the project of sonification in general. And what I’d particularly like you to listen for in this episode is the way that it expands on the way we’ve been talking about archival sound in the Spoken Web Podcast so far. The reflections on noise and silence that you hear in these presentations as well as in Kate Moffatt’s discussion challenges us to ask how certain sounds end up in the archive and what gets left out or ends up being unarchivable. A project like this one, the Spoken Web project is in some ways limited by what’s there, by what’s been recorded by what we can find by what we’ve already found. But of course there’s a lot of power and politics that goes into what ends up in the archive in the first place. We tend to archive things that are remarkable that we mark as important, but that leaves out all kinds of banal background noise. What Brady Marks refers to as the acoustic weather. And when it comes to the challenge of archiving, how would we begin to think about archiving silence?\n\nIt’s particularly interesting hearing all of these different speakers on these ideas in the form of an episode where Kate has essentially created an archive of an event that might have otherwise passed by unremarked. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this episode grapples with the challenges of thinking about the relationship between feminism and noise. So without any further ado, here’s episode five Revisiting Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Taking us back to the 2019 Spoken Web Symposium. As Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.\n\n03:42\tKate Moffatt:\tIn May of 2019 two inaugural Spoken Web events took place in Burnaby and Vancouver, British Columbia, the Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 and the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound. This episode of the Spoken Web Podcast will be revisiting a particular panel from that symposium and talking to one of its presenters, Dr. Milena Droumeva. But first, let me introduce you to these two exciting events.\nThe Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 was a Spoken Web members’ event that took place at the Simon Fraser University Burnaby campus over May 28th and 29th. The Institute questions how we work with sound and with literary recordings in particular, recognizing the impact that Spoken Web, as a large scale and widespread project, can have on the future of literary sound studies. How do we interact with sound in the archive? How do we curate it? How do we manage mass amounts of files in ways that make them accessible? How do we name them? How do we store them? How do we make them archivable and resilient in the face of technological advancements?\n\nHow do we share what we’re learning, the scholarship that we’re creating, with a broader audience? With individuals both inside and outside of universities? The Institute not only endeavored to begin answering these questions by sharing current research projects and scholarship, putting on workshops on podcasting, copyright, oral history and data management, but it also brought together the geographically widespread members of the project to celebrate the first year of Spoken Web. The Institute was followed by the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound, which took place over May 30th and 31st at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.\n\nMany of the themes and topics taken up by the Institute were represented, questioned, illuminated and challenged by the Symposium, which was open to all scholars and creators and brought together students, teachers, authors, artists and scholars to share their work in the field of sound studies. The wide ranging presentations, which included everything from recreations of old radio broadcasts to analyses of the use of accent and audio books, took up the themes of performance, space, gender, politics and technology to name just a few. Today we will be revisiting one of the symposium panels, Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec made up this particular panel and their presentations explored how we understand sound, voice, silence and voicelessness when they intersect with gender, gender, politics and mandated expected or performative speech. First we have Dr. Lucia Lorenzi Introduced by Dr. Hannah McGregor, Dr. Lorenzi’s presentation questions, the rising expectations of speech from survivors of sexual violence and assault in an age of social media and reality and the potential effects that mandating that speech can have on our understanding of voice and silence and noise from activists and survivors.\n\n06:47\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome everyone to Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. I am Hannah McGregor. I’m an assistant professor of publishing here at SFU. Dr Lucia Lorenzi is an ambivalent scholar, but an excited thinker finishing up a postdoc and cultural studies at McMaster university.\n07:08\tLucia Lorenzi:\tMy dissertation was about silence and representations of sexualized and gendered violence in literature and the kinds of readings that I was doing felt very literary to me. I was looking for omissions or nonlinear forms of storytelling or particular types of narrative voice. But when I got into performance, namely theater, it became really impossible to avoid thinking through sound as a material experience. So for instance, when I was writing about Colleen Wagner’s play, The Monument, in the stage directions, there are silences and long silences and long, long, long silences.\nSo trying to think about reading a text and writing about a text that also exists in another world as a performance and as a sonic experience. But as I’ve done this work over the past decade or so, in addition to my work as an activist and an advocate around these issues, one of the main questions that I keep coming back to is this isn’t necessary to speak out about sexualized and gender violence? And to what extent has a particular configuration or understanding of sound, and not just voice, created, yes, feminist communities, but also pressures and expectations around the category or the identity of survivor. So perhaps more simply, what I’m trying to think through is how we challenge the binary of speech and silence that characterizes a lot of understandings and representations of violence.\n\nSo put another way, is there a third option to this formulation proposed by Arundhati Roy who in their now famous remarks at the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize stated, “We know there’s no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” I wonder if there is such a thing ,and here I’m going to invoke Sara Ahmed’s ideas around willfulness, could there be something like the willfully silent? And what might those silences, or what I’m calling sonic refusals, look like in an era of digital mediation? The performances I’m looking at are several, but I want to talk about one in particular that stands out to me that I’m still really trying to understand from a sound studies perspective.\n\nEmma Sulkowicz is a queer nonbinary Asian American artist who’s best known for their 2014/2015 endurance performance piece entitled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) And they carry around this standard size dorm room mattress everywhere they went on the campus of Columbia University until either they graduated or their rapist was expelled. They graduated and you see them carrying it with friends across the stage. Their art went viral in part because this work emerged at the height of the student activist movement around campus sexual assault in the United States. Sulkowicz was featured on the cover of New York Magazine and their work was really seen as I think emblematic of the campus movement, antiviolence movement more generally. Much of their work in the intervening years has not received the same level of public attention, but it’s received a great deal of positive critical attention in the art world, and several of their pieces have worked to think through the experience with being a very public survivor of sexual assault including the kinds of discursive pressures, ways of speaking that have been placed on them. Their 2016 performance, Self Portrait (Performance with Object) takes place on two, I guess technically four, pedestals in a gallery space. So on the one pedestal Sulkowicz stands ready to engage in conversation with audience members who are free to ask them about anything.\n\nNow if they want to know about stuff that, Sulkowicz has frequently asked very invasive questions, they are directed to address Emmatron. And Emmatron is a likeness of Sulkowicz who speaks via an iPad that is loaded with preset questions and answers you can scroll through. As Matt Stromberg describes in review for Artbound quote “Answers recorded by Sulkowicz play from Emmatron’s unmoving lips. On the afternoon I visited these responses were barely audible, unintentionally highlighting the primacy of the interaction with the living breathing artist in the room.” So in the next few minutes, I want to think through how Sulkowicz selective speech and this digital mediation of sound pose both material and discursive or philosophical challenges to how sound and speech have of course been used by survivors, but they’ve also been weaponized against them. I think that their art provides a departure point thinking about the antiviolence movement as a sonic community and an archive, but to unpack how the production of ‘survivor’ as a political identity is deeply bound up in particular kinds of sonic production in public space. In his essay collection, Silence: Lectures and Writings, American avant-garde composer, John Cage stated, all caps, “I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT.” So Cage, obviously his broader arguments work to destabilize the binaries around sound and silence, but I think what he says when he says, I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it, is talking about one of the most difficult things I think about silence. Because it’s so often risks being misunderstood, it often still requires a narrative apparatus that circles it. Cage speaks in order to give his reasons for not speaking, which is that he has nothing to say, and I’ve been thinking about Cage’s having nothing to say and saying it just because voice, literal voice and mouths are so important to the imagery of antiviolence movements. The importance of breaking the silence, which suggests a sort of sonic power that is powerful enough to really deliberately destabilize objects perhaps, also exist in relationships to other political movements.\nWhile broadly used across antiviolence work of all kinds, the slogan of ‘breaking the silence’ and imagery such as a person with a hand or tape over their mouth, has to become also iconic and representative of the ways in which voice, a particular kind of voice, a particular use of that voice, perhaps a particular intonation has been linked to a particular kind of identity politics. Because a survivor as opposed to a victim isn’t just someone who speaks but they break or shatter silences, which calls up this very material instantiation of sound, so shouting or chanting at rallies using a megaphone. And these forms of sonic production are deeply related to feminist practice, we amplify voices, we pass the mic.\n\nNow I’m still struggling with the ways that silence seems to be a kind of counter intuitive mechanism, because I’m aware of the deep history and the weight politics and oppression that mean that people are silenced or that they are unheard. But I’m also trying to connect this to rich traditions of silence as a means of political disruption. In describing the political strategies employed by American suffragists in the early 20th century, Mary Chapman notes that a key strategy of the suffrage movement was the use of voiceless speech. So obviously that the historical context surrounding these activists, and I’m thinking particularly about, queer, trans, racialized activists in the 21st century, could not be in some ways more different, but I think that contemporary activists are still grappling with some of the same difficulties. So to what extent can survivors participate in public spheres of discourse? Where can they use their voice? What are the political risks, including risks to physical safety? Knowing the myriad ways in which survivors continue to be silenced, how can survivors, and I’m going to quote Chapman here, quote, “creatively rework the cultural significance of their political silence, changing it from a sign of powerless citizenship to an example of creative forms of participation in the modern public sphere.”\n\nSo Sulkowicz’s piece helped me think about these creative forms and participation, and I want to make a few suggestions, however preliminary, about how I’m reading how it uses sound and silence. So the first thing that I think of is this divide in terms of, this sort of divide, this little physical divide in terms of how audience members can interact. So Emmatron I had is still voiced by Sulkowicz, but the voice is predefined and limited. And I wonder if that also then resists manipulation, it has boundaries around it, it cannot be altered. I’m thinking about the use of audio recording and the ubiquity of access to voice recording technology, and also the alleging democratization. Listening to Sulkowicz’s recorded voice isn’t a private experience, which sort of seems, you know, my experience of gallery spaces often with sound art, unless it’s an exhibition that’s sort of, you know, is curated in particular ways, is that you listened to it in headphones, you’re listening to it privately. But as audience members have observed, there’s this sort of dual listening where you’re trying to listen to the iPad and you’re also trying to listen in on what’s going on with the fact that you don’t get to have that private experience. Sulkowicz’s voice is, this is really interesting to me, described by many reviewers as pleasant and joyful and warm like as if it’s a surprise. And I think that comments on the ways in which survivors literal voice is also a point of suspicion. A comment on a YouTube video which provides a little bit of documentation of this piece, one of the commenters says “She laughs a lot. Not sure what’s so funny.”\n\nI’ve been thinking about reading this laughter alongside the laughter of other performance regarding sexual assault, namely survivors who use stand up comedy to talk about their experiences and who in that interaction is able to laugh and why, who is laughing at who. And then scrolling through the iPad and thinking about where it is that we now most frequently encounter the voices of survivors and where that archive lives. Cause I’m trying to think about the archiving of, you know, the Women’s March or other kinds of marches and then the ways that that’s hard to access, versus you can go through and you can literally pick any hashtag that you want. And it’s really easy to be able to sort of go through that archive and sort of make notes of the kinds of stories that are being told there.\n\nSo in an article from the early nineties, maybe 1994 perhaps, or ’91, I can’t remember, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, they sort of read Foucault talk about, you know, is survivor speech transgressive, right? So it’s almost 30 years ago and I feel like those questions are coming up, but they’re coming up differently because of the technologies and the types of public assembly and the way that public assembly is archived or not archived have changed. They say, quote, “when breaking the silence is taken up as the necessary route to recovery as or as a privileged political tactic, it becomes a coercive imperative on survivors to confess, to recount their assaults, to give details, and even to do so publicly.” This is justly deserving of the critique Foucault offers of the way in which the demand to speak involves dominating power. So freedom through speech or voice then is no longer one of a series of possibilities, I worry about the way in which it becomes mandated. And Tarana Burke echoed this recently in an interview with the Washington Post where she mentioned her frustrations with the goals of the MeToo movement. She says, “culture shift doesn’t happen in the accusation and it doesn’t happen in the disclosure, culture shift happens in the public grappling with these questions because nobody has firm, definitive, or perfect answers.” What I wonder, then, is if we’re shifting away from disclosure or ‘the speaking,’ maybe what we’re trying to articulate is a different politics or a different strategies for eliciting that seems to be what Burke is calling for. And I also think that’s what Sulkowicz’s piece asks of audience members.\n\n19:56\nKate Moffatt:\tDr. Lorenzi’s presentation recognizes the complicated history around silence, speech and activists’ sonic actions. And her suggestions that sound can exist both as a material experience and a sonic one, and that it can change or impact our understanding of the identity of survivors and the identity of those who do or do not choose to speak, is a theme that can be traced through the following two presentations of this panel, Dr. Milena Droumeva and Brady Marks’ presentation questions how social media data, such as tweetsm can exist as a soundscape. In particular, what do the hashtag MeToo movement tweets sound like when reinterpreted as sound and what effect emotional or otherwise does sonifying those tweets have on the listener?\n20:39\tHannah McGregor:\tOur next speakers are Milena Droumeva and Brady Marks. Dr. Milena Droumeva is a sound studies professor here at SFU in the school of communication. She does work in critical approaches to urban soundscapes and gender and the game sound. And Brady Ciel Marks is a computational artist who is concerned with our technological entanglement and so creates soundscapes that demystify, transgress, and reinterpret our potentially free relationship to tech and framing. What a beautiful bio. And other things, it says and other things.\n21:17\tBrady Marks:\tSo we’re going to talk a little bit about a sonification that we’ve created together, and do a demonstration. So what does is a sonficiation? Let’s start there. For me, a sonification is a reinterpretation of a dataset into sound. And the dataset that we are interested in exploring is the MeToo phenomenon as represented through tweets. Turning this into sound has a number of different ways to do that, it’s very flexible cause obviously those tweets don’t make sound in and of themselves.\n22:01\tMilena Droumeva:\tJust to refresh everyone’s memory just in case you don’t remember what #MeToo is all about or what happened because our social media memories, you know, are three seconds long.\n22:13\tBrady Marks:\tThis is the virtual phenomenon, global phenomenon, reacting to sexual intimidation and sexual violence that happened at the end of 2017 and we’ll be seeing today how it’s still happening online through sonification after the live demo.\n22:37\tMilena Droumeva:\tWe want to ask you some questions about, you know, what this type of, representation of information, I don’t want to call it data because it’s so cold, it’s not really data, but it also is, it’s accessible as data. But whether, you know, we can think of it as an archive or memorial or other things.\n23:03\tBrady Marks:\tI was very inspired by soundscapes as this idea of something that we listen to and we sort of embody or incorporate into our everyday activities. I always come back to the same example, which is like, you hear the wet tires of a car on the streets in the morning and you know Oh, I should get my umbrella. It’s like it’s background, this thing that becomes foreground because it’s relevant to you. But something that you live with and that becomes sort of acoustic, whether the you react to it.\n23:41\tMilena Droumeva:\tI love that. Wait wait, I just wanted to say about the choice of sonification because I do realize that that is new for a lot of folks and unfamiliar. I’ve been doing work in sonification for a long time. But typically when you go to, especially an audio conference or a sonification conference, sonification sounds something like woo woooo. That is what they sound like. They’re literally a kind of a pitch shifting, following a line graph. So a lot of them don’t go like a lot further than that, and we wanted to go like a lot further than that with this kind of sonification because I really got to the point where I wanted to explore what would it mean to create a sonification not only sonifying something boring in an interesting way, but sonifying something really interesting in an interesting way. And what would it mean to sonify social data? It’s tweets, you can download a dataset, but it really, it’s people’s lives and people’s truths that are being shared, it’s kind of a voice, but it’s silent. So there’s a soundscape of that silence in there and we want to give it voice in a way. Now, what voice would you ask that we give it? Well, here’s where, just to have fun, because another part of my work has to do with, that I’ve been chipping away at, has to do with the rather sexist sonic representation of women in video games. If you play any video games or if you’ve heard about video games, you probably see fighting ladies like these and you’ve heard about, you know, the conversations around well maybe they should be wearing some more clothes or, you know, they shouldn’t be fighting in a bikini, that kind of thing. Not a lot of talk really about how they sound, but it is very interesting.\n25:55\tVideo Game Audio:\tPlease stop! Please don’t! What? No! Help! This is wrong!\n26:06\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo these are actual, battle cries, these are actual clips from actual characters from actual games. So I’ve been doing that other work and I really wanted to bring it in and somehow co-opt it and subvert it and see how it can actually, because what it does is it makes one feel really uncomfortable. It’s pornographic, it’s sort of really fragile, it’s excessive, it’s hyper feminized in a negative way. But I wanted to kind of bring in that discomfort that it creates and use it to sonify the phenomenon of #MeToo and see what that would sound like.\n26:58\tBrady Marks:\tWe took these battle cries and we mapped them one to one where each tweet becomes one simple sound. And so with the soundscape paradigm we’re not trying to make music, we’re not trying to make notes, we don’t, we’re not using pitch relationships. Every tweet you’ll hear is a battle cry. Retweets then become these echoes of that same battle cry, so those are those splurging out. And they’re the same cry echoed at slightly lower volumes. So again, we wanted to do the counterpoint. We were like these tweets, we don’t want to say that every single one represents someone declaring an event of sexual abuse, which they often are. There was also a strong backlash, right? We wanted to get this counterpoint. We wanted to get the trolls voice and we failed at that point. We looked into sentiment analysis, I did try, I looked into a few different methodologies, haven’t got that part sorted yet. Another aspect of MeToo that we wanted to represent the society of the zeitgeist of a reach. The fact that all tweets are not exactly equal. There are movers and shakers, people with large followings, and we thought that would correspond to the reach. If someone retweets or tweets and they have a large following.\n28:31\tMilena Droumeva:\tLike Alyssa Milano, if you remember, there was a big spike in October because Alyssa Milano came forward with her story about Harvey Weinstein and she has, I mean anytime she tweets something she’s got millions of people, right? So that was a big event. And that will be different than, you know, me tweeting something, and I know you’re now dying to hear what this thing sounds like. So, drumroll.\n28:56\tBrady Marks:\tI’m going to just hit our live one, which is real time tweets, so they’re tweets that are happening right now, they’re delayed by 15 seconds just so I can get the timing so they don’t bunch up too much. And then our person with the historical data sets, we’ve got one day at 60 times speed and then we can maybe try the one month, which should get 1500 times a week. So this is the site. So there were four, so that’s a week’s reach. It was busier during lunch, it was very quiet last night. Silence is loud. Silence is…\n30:13\tMilena Droumeva:\tWe’ve been reflecting a lot on the silences\n30:18\tBrady Marks:\tIt’s particularly quiet, actually.\n30:32\tMilena Droumeva:\tYeah, I’ve never heard it so quiet. But it’s one of the, one of the things that we did want to create, and I, and I want to connect this with your talks, is the, to experience like the folding of this in time, and just the kind of like, we’re literally waiting for a tweet right now, of somebody sharing, possibly sharing a story, responding, commenting.\n31:11\tBrady Marks:\tThis is January 10th.\n31:20\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo this is, you know, when you compress time. This is just one day. [sonification starts in background]\n32:21\tBrady Marks:\tSo that’s one day of tweets during that intense time. And so every single sound you hear is a tweet, using those vocalizations is a tweet or retweet. Let’s slow it down. That was 150 times speed.\n32:44\tMilena Droumeva:\tJust 30 seconds and we’ll be done with this. Just to conclude, I wanted to see, this is obviously and somewhat deliberately under-theorized at the moment, because it’s, well I really wanted to prioritize this experiential engagement and see like what it sounds like, how we feel, what happens. And it’s very much a ongoing work in progress and I’m very interested in everybody’s thoughts and suggestions both in terms of practical and reactions but also like ways of theorizing that would seem intuitive or natural, synergies and so on. So thank you\n34:12\tKate Moffatt:\tMilena Droumeva and Brady Marks’ presentation indicates in an uncomfortable, discomforting, thought provoking manner, the facelessness of social media data and the fact that reinterpretations as Dr. Droumeva pointed out, tell a story. This particular re-interpretation reminds us all that each contributor to that mass amount of data for the #MeToo movement is an individual, is their experiences, or a contribution to their story because others are engaging with it. Both Dr. Lorenzi’s questions about silence and sonic refusal and Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks’ questions about how silence, noise, and performance can affect our perception or emotional understanding is found, also, in the last presentation of this panel. Blake Nemec’s presentation questions how the voices of unprotected workers, and even the sounds pitches and intonations that these voices make rather than simply their words, differ from protected workers. Nemec questions, how sonic performances, how silence, noise, and unexpected disruption, can communicate the emotional and political circumstances of these individuals.\n35:15\tHannah McGregor:\tAll right. Our third speaker is Blake Nemec. Blake Nemec is obsessed with language justice as it intersects with sonic intimacies. He teaches ESL film and creative writing in Chicago. It’s all yours.\n35:32\tBlake Nemec:\tI feel like my heart is racing a little bit. Sorry. No, it’s interesting, you’ll see that I do similar things with noise, so. Okay. Sonic Intimacies of Unprotected Dialogues: the MolyBDenim Project as Syncopation, Noise, or Silence. This analysis, queers missive United States and informal trade worker dialogues and their syncopation noise or silence by reflecting on the MolyBDenim sound project that I created. Even as this discussion hones in on sex worker conversations and intentionally troubles the boundaries of this trade to include how other care industry workers who are criminalized, such as domestic workers, talk to each other or do not, or how their sonic interactions differ from those of protected workers. This analysis understands informal trade, unprotected, system D workers as labourers who do not have legal protections while at work. Syncopations and heats, massage workers. I’d like to start with how I experienced sonic intimacies with unprotected worker dialogues. Like this clip, beats and rhythms from phonemes and truncated dialogue easily form into song. After I began doing sex work, I found myself repeating clip phrases that I shared with my coworkers. There were regular intonations and I liked cycling the sound parts in my mouth, whether it was a little hot or juicy, didn’t matter, the content did not hold my connection to the sounds. It was the kind of rhythms, repetitions or intonations of the phrases that I liked repeating. What enliven me and what was animate. In Foucauldian in terms, a deeper relationship to the elements of the language can occur below the level of identities and differences, where the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions and natural criss-crossings are found.\nThe MolyBDenim sound project’s creative process was also often syncopated. In 2016, after finishing a manuscript that would become my hybrid book Sharing Plastic, I reached out to sound artist friends of mine, who had also done informal trade work, to create a collaborative sound project named MolyBDenim. As the collaborators were spread across the United States, we met online to rehearse and created a lot of video conference chatter about the music we could manifest, how our collaborations could grow, or how to make our performances interactive. Then the video conference would pixelate, or drop one of us from the call. Our online rehearsals, uncontrollable and truncated, mirrored elements of the informal trade work we were using as source material. The rhythms had feedback or echo, the beats from one piece of equipment would eclipse another, truncating words allows for rapid dialog and fast talk creates energy.\n\nYugoslavian born experimental fiction writer Dubravka Ugrešić speaks about the verbal steam of the communal bath in her book Lend Me Your Character. This postmodern book of short stories portrays dialogue as heat by including everyday conversations between women as communal bath and verbal steam. Listeners don’t need to imagine steam or water particles to consider dialogue as animate. Musicology shows us how sentient beings hold emotional connections to sound waves. The idea of language as steam simply assists us in acknowledging and sound wave particles as matter. The difference between the verbal scene of protected chatter and unprotected worker conversations, however, exists in the underlying temporality of unprotected worker positions, while making observations when starting during or departing work, cognisance about safety, the time, the customer, or the work landscape can be signaled by the intonations within ‘hello,’ within the tone of ‘okay,’ within the pitches of ‘oh, I see.’ Workers who have no job security do not speak to each other like nine to five workers. In my experiences with other unprotected labor, informal work may only have predictable tools their job uses and coworkers may converse about those tools while sonically implying other information. We may be ‘uh-huh’ or ‘mhm’. We can only vocalize interests or critiques through volume, intonation, or tone because more explicitly it could cost us arrest, incarceration, or deportation. Coworker chatter in United States secure employment, however, is centered on and validated by what coworkers think of each other’s lives in a shared understanding that they will see each other again. The unprotected worker is legally and socially accepted as toxic because the voices are not consistently heard.\n\nMutable is deemed suspicious. The utterances as unprotected workers are less centered on a person’s past as I know it and a person’s future as I can predict it today. I or we may only have the sound of their voice, their accent, or the intonation as an element of who they are. I may only have their volume as a sense of their opinions. This is further reason for poetry and music to amplify such dialogues and the elements of them. These art forms can portray the energy or volition of the conversations. They can portray heat, vibration, pulses, and auditory sensations. MolyBDenim tracks start with dialogue. The songs or tracks are different every time because they’re created live, surrendering control. Utterances between temporary workers are also unpredictable. Mechanical, geographical and scheduling challenges, parallel stylistic and contextual elements in the MolyBDenim sound project.\nOur equipment compelled us to be ready to change a track mid performance because the loop pedal, if not press softly, would erase all our layered songs. This loop pedal and the unlimited amount of repetitions of dialogue sounds temporarily recording to two beats was the core of our sound art. As you heard, we would start with truncated dialogues, then loop phonemes into rhythms or melodies. We knew the looping pedal could erase all the loops during the performance, so prepared for that switch. When it happened during our performances, we had to shift, start over, going to accidental openings, re-imagine the track or recenter our sound. Unprotected workers are similarly ready for change, reframing and recentering their identities, thus their voices. Every system D worker voice has a frequency, a speed pattern of which they move through the world, and MolyB’s speed also had a great range that moved from brilliant to chesty in short amounts of time. Silence. Within MolyBDenim syncopations and delicious switches are equally paralleled by deafening silences. The loop pedal switch could be started after it cut out. First, however, was the silence. Disenfranchised workers talk to each other, they also consistently do not. Silence between workers reflects the reality of the many workers cannot communicate because of their worker residency or criminal status. Therefore, some of the poems or tracks have negative spaces or silence to reflect the losses.\n\nThe lofty idea that workers in conversation are energized is met with portrayals where worker dynamics are iced. Is in these tense worker moments, the vulnerable truths of cyclical violence, for example, can emerge. Marginalized or oppressed groups of people, in this case informal trade workers, don’t have access to the right privileges. In MolyBDenim we simply allowed the pedal cuts to be. To give silence before starting up again. Mel Chen discusses toxic animosities, environmental sensitivity and how a person articulates how vulnerable bodies navigate pollutants, able bodied people, and syntax. They ask which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and un-interuptability. Noise. I began this discussion with my personal one-on-one dialogues with other workers.\n\nA further impetus for excavating sonic intimacies or animosities of informal trade worker dialogues in MolyBDenim came from Days in April, a 2008 grassroots response to the depoliticization of United States mayday. Several meetings were organized for informal workers to gather and speak about their experiences, and these conversations between and among sex workers, domestic workers, farm workers, and hotel workers resulted in alliance building and a room full of transformative noise. This discussion troubles the idea of good worker versus bad worker. It amplifies, remixes, unprotected worker dialogues to extremes. It requests listeners to hear cacophony screams, loud sirens as sonic landscapes the informal worker navigates partly to explore ideas of toxicity. Conditions informal trade workers experience are toxic and my sound projects use metaphoric toxicities such as uttered frustrations then loop and layer such emotionally angry phrases until they evolve into noise. Sound art and poetry remain a vehicle to amplify syncopations, transport and silent volitions of vulnerable workers to validate and demand respect by the unprotected. Languages and semantic innovations are occurring amid neofascist efforts of language and sound solemnisation, both working to silence the unprotected. But sound is more than this.\n\n48:11\tKate Moffatt:\tThis panel took place almost eight months ago, but I was able to catch up with Dr. Milena Droumeva recently to talk with her about her symposium presentation. Our discussion, which revisited both the making of the project itself and the presentation of it at the panel that day with Brady Marks, evolved into a discussion about how the impact of sound projects such as hers, particularly because it is based on social media data, can be affected by the means or the frames in which we encounter them. The #MeToo movement happened more than two years ago, but by using sonification and using the battle cries of female video game characters to represent tweets, Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks both troubled and explored the affective or emotional capabilities that interpretations of data sets can carry, even when the term data itself tends to suggest affective or emotional distance. When asked if she had done any further work with the project Dr. Droumeva answered with a simple\n49:01\tMilena Droumeva:\tNo.\n49:01\tKate Moffatt:\tBut as our conversation continued, she shared,\n49:04\tMilena Droumeva:\tI want to think through it. I don’t want to just push it out somehow in somewhere. I don’t want it to be an art installation project, I haven’t pursued that avenue. How exactly, like how to put it out there in what form and how to reach a wider audience? I would need partnership for that. I would need funding. And this is not particularly recognized as a form of publication, as you know, the whole project of Spoken Web and podcasting as academic publishing is something that Hannah McGregor is working on, but it’s pretty new.\n49:41\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as it turns out, the technology currently available does not really support projects like the #MeToo project that Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks presented at the symposium.\n49:49\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo part of the idea was to, I hate to bore you with this technical details, but the program that we use, which is Max MSP, does not have, does not integrate with any browsers. And browsers typically do not do a great job of embedding audio and of embedding audio software of any kind. So we simply don’t have a way of doing that, like technologically, so it’s not, it wasn’t, that part wasn’t even a matter of funding. It’s like we don’t, we can’t. The very technological framework of web browsers does not invite these kinds of audio forms, these kinds of interactive audio forms. So that’s something to consider about technology that it doesn’t really allow this kind of sonic exploration\n50:40\tKatie Moffatt:\tThat web browsers and applications are so well suited to written work, but not to live or exploratory audio work, is particularly interesting to me, especially given the different impacts that can be had via different forms of interacting with something like the #MeToo movement. Dr. Droumeva mentioned during her presentation that our social media memories can be about three seconds long. So I asked her if she thought that projects like this one could help create a more lasting impact for movements such as #MeToo.\n51:06\tMilena Droumeva:\tMy answer is no, I don’t think it can contribute to anything more lasting. I think that’s just the nature of social media it’s just growing, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, clicking, clicking, moving onto the next thing. And this could be another thing in somebody’s feed. Now what I think it can do is I think it can create a different sort of affective relationship, like a different emotional connection to the data because it’s a really different form than the one that we’re used to seeing.\n51:39\tKate Moffatt:\tDr. Droumeva’s response was surprising to me as I’ve been thinking about the project and the presentation since I first heard the recording of it. The female battle cries are discomforting to listen to on their own, and the combination of those battle cries with #MeToo tweets was very intriguing and very powerful. And I told Dr. Droumeva so.\n51:58\tMilena Droumeva:\tI’m honestly surprised to hear that it’s kind of lasting in your mind. So maybe I was wrong and this can be something a little bit more longer-lasting. I hope I’m wrong, I just, yeah, you’re catching me on a day when I feel very bleak about social media culture an, the kinds of engagement and disengagement that it produces and the kind of numbing to impact, the numbing effect that it has on anything emotional. So I think one of the reasons why I haven’t, I mean, in addition to things like funding, one of the reasons why I haven’t moved forward with it is because it’s not very clear to me how to intercept that. Like how to interrupt that social media situation and how to most effectively put it out there. So that’s honestly, again, still not clear to me in full honesty.\n52:59\tKate Moffatt:\tI asked Dr. Droumeva if hearing the tweets, if listening to the #MeToo movement has the potential to change our perception of it.\n53:07\tMilena Droumeva:\tYeah, I mean that’s the idea. Does it, is it more impactful? I don’t know. That was the idea, I mean, I’ve been doing sonification work for a really long time and only more recently I’ve been thinking about it as a, in terms of its emotional impact. Let me tell you about the very first time that I felt emotionally impacted by a sonification. It was a sonification that I heard many years ago at a conference and it was, it was pretty simple, kind of abstract tones, not melodic tones more like almost stochastic kind of rhythmic tones. But it was a sonification of brain EKGs and this was a researcher who was working to sonify brainwaves and particularly working with epilepsy patients. So he played like the sound of a healthy brain and then he played the sound of somebody having like going into a seizure. And it was really like minimalist and abstract, but it was all of a sudden I had goosebumps because it was like hearing somebody going into an epileptic seizure. And it was very simple but very, like the lack of it, the lack of other things, the lack of pictures, the lack of texts, the lack of anything else, just kind of sitting alone with the sound, even though we were in an audience, was really, really emotionally impactful.\nAnd so years later when I started thinking about the emotional impact of sound or the possibility of emotional impact of sound, a lot of people have written, a lot of sound scholars write about the, you know, sound being a special modality and having a special relationship to our interior world and creating a special kind of intimacy, so I don’t know though, there’s a lot of factors, right? There’s, there’s that and, but there’s also the fact that you heard it as part of a conference podcast as opposed to came across it in your Facebook feed. Would it have been different if you came across this in your social media feed as opposed to in a conference? And people had a big reaction in the conference, but again they were there as captive audience, they were there for a certain, with a certain intentionality, you know? And a certain open mind. So I’m really fascinated by this idea of what can create impact, especially about things as important as the NeToo movement and any other subsequent movements that are unfolding on social media. But really they’re not about the virality of social media, they’re about real people having experienced harassment and assault and making that public and joining their stories together into a big weave of, you know, evidence.\n\n56:19\tKate Moffatt:\tI asked Dr. Droumeva to speak further about her use of the female battlecries to each tweet, each experience as that’s something that I’ve been trying to theorize since first hearing her presentation,\n56:29\tMilena Droumeva:\tIf I’m understanding correctly, and I, that’s what it makes me think of is that it kind of individuates each tweet and makes you remember that each tweet is an individual who is kinda crying out into the void in whatever way. Because when we think about the #MeToo movement, we even call it a movement, and as soon as you call it a movement, it’s like this faceless mass of, you know, it’s a event, you know, in the world. It’s not individual people with individual stories. Now this is also not really fair to say that each tweet is an individual with an individual story. That was true in the very beginning of MeToo. But so much of the subsequent activity, at least on social media, is actually a lot of retweets and a lot of meta communication, it’s a lot of meta conversations right now, it’s a lot of people saying something about the MeToo movement, not necessarily sharing a story, but it’s still part of the conversation. And I mean any sort of data visualization is a story. And I think what, I wasn’t thinking about this, but now that I heard you describe it in that way, I think what sound helps to do is kind of disentangle individuals and pull them apart from the, you know, the big mass of representation of data.\n57:59\tKate Moffatt:\tThat was an element of the sheer overwhelm that one feels when they hear the highest period of activity for the #MeToo tweets. Instead of hearing a singular movement, we hear more voices than we can perceive at once. It’s an incredibly powerful experience and it gives context to Brady Marks’ comment that at first the sonification sounded too pretty, which I mentioned to Dr. Droumeva.\n58:20\tMilena Droumeva:\tHuh, yeah, I do remember that. I mean Brady is a sound artist and I’m more of a social scientist really, so it was really interesting working together because we had slight, I mean we had different conceptions of aesthetics through our conversations. I think she, she started feeling like a different aesthetic, like an anti-aesthetic that was important. You know, we wanted a certain kind of assault on the ear, but not to such a degree that it was in comprehensible and mutually conflicting. And I think we’re different, we were definitely pushing the envelope a little bit in terms of sound density because we had, obviously every battle cry, every like battle cry file was triggered by the instance of the hashtag. But then we have echoes on it, which were the number of retweets. And then we had a kind of swelling and receding background drone which represented the reach, the reach of each tweet judged by the number of followers that that particular person has. And that’s, you know, really the maximum that I think I wanted to cram into, in terms of information, and it still wouldn’t be perceivable on the first listen, right? On the first listen you just kind of get hit with this emotional reaction and you get it on a very holistic sort of way. Like, wow, that’s a lot of MeToo tweets, like you get that there’s a lot.\n59:57\tKate Moffatt:\tHearing the #MeToo tweets is a very different experience than seeing it represented in visualizations of other kinds such as line or bar graphs, which amalgamate data in very particular ways. It was an important element of the project for Dr. Droumeva that the data she used be interpreted not as numbers, as data and its traditional connotations, but as individuals.\n1:00:17\tMilena Droumeva:\tEvery visualization, every transformation of data from numbers to something else is a form of storytelling. Even when we don’t want to believe so, and oftentimes visualizations don’t say, you know, they say this is data. They don’t say this is a story about data, but what it is, it’s a story about data because it always is missing certain elements and it’s highlighting other elements. And with more new media forms and more unconventional forms of data representation such as sound, it’s more, you can’t really get away with saying this is data. You’re kind of more on the spot to acknowledge that this is a story about data. But I really, I don’t want it to shy away from that at all. The idea was not at all to create some sort of dry scientific representation, right? The whole point was like, yes, this is a story about data, like all the stories about data that are out there. And, you know, let’s make this a really interesting story. A really impactful one.\n1:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Kate Moffatt and Michelle Levy of Simon Fraser University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. Thanks to Milena Droumeva, Lucia Lorenzi, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec for their candid discussions presented here. This episode features archival audio from the Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 and the Spoken Web Symposium 2019 at Simon Fraser University. Special thanks. Go out to Michelle Levy and the entire SFU Spoken Web team. To find out more about Spoken Web and our next symposium in 2020 visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the Spoken Web Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @spokenwebcanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web Podcast. Stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9582","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E6, SoundBox Signals presents “Is That Me?”, 2 March 2020, Sallam and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-that-me/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Nour Sallam","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Nour Sallam","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3ccdbdb9-0f96-49d2-b089-cea33234e046/sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:07\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"24,186,088 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-that-me/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-03-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.937244975827596\",\"longitude\":\"-119.3903559234036\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bill bissett’s Breth (Talonbooks):\\n\\nhttps://talonbooks.com/books/breth\\n\\nbill bissett on PennSound:\\n\\nhttps://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/bissett.php\\n\\nCut and Run Podcast by Brady Marks:\\n\\nhttp://furiousgreencloud.com/wordpress/blog/author/furiousgreencloud/\\n\\nSarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying (MQUP):\\n\\nhttps://www.mqup.ca/art-of-dying–the-products-9780773552715.php\\n\\nIan Ferrier at the Inspired Word Cafe:\\n\\nhttp://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549524316160,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a new podcast in the SpokenWeb family – SoundBox Signals – inviting us to listen in close to UBCO’s SoundBox Collection. In this episode, Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin and guests Lauren St. Clair and Nour Sallam invite us into a “close listening” of a previously unpublished poem from Canadian poet bill bissett. You can find the full-length recording of the bill bissett clip and more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n\nSoundBox Signals is a podcast that brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode features a conversation with a curator and two special guests. Together they’ll listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history.\n\nSoundBox Signals Artwork by Myron Campbell.\n\n00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. When we listen to recorded poetry, taking the time to attend closely to the recording, to tune into the rhythm, the cadence, the sense of space and place, new connections and intimacies emerge. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we’re excited to share with you the new SoundBox Signals Podcast, inviting us to listen in close to UBC Okanagan’s SoundBox collection. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close reading and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and two special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider what a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin, and guests invite us into a close listening of bill bissett’s previously unpublished poem from around 1966. Here is Karis Shearer with “Is That Me?” episode one of SoundBox Signals. [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Melodic Instrumentals Overlapping Voices] I see you. [Inaudible] What is the [inaudible] Where is this voice? Coming! [inaudible] How curious you are to me…[Click]\n \n\n02:45\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today at UBC Okanagan [UBCO] by guest curator Mathieu Aubin, who recently finished his PhD with a dissertation entitled “Here and Queer in Vancouver,” which touches on the work of bill bissett. Also joined by Lauren St. Clair, who is a Computer Science major, Data Science minor and is the president of the Quantitative Science Course Union here at UBCO. Also joined by our podcast producer extraordinaire Nour Sallam, who is pursuing her honours English degree here at UBCO. Welcome everybody.\n \n\n03:20\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping] Hello. Hi. Hi.\n \n\n03:20\tKaris Shearer:\tWe are here today to listen to a clip by bill bissett. So we’re going to rewind to 1966 and listen to that recording, which is part of our SoundBox collection here at UBCO.\n \n\n03:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Audio, bill bissett recording] This. Well. Palpitation jelly gold. Were saying [inaudible] tomato. You got that should be enough. Look like needles and what just fires. Enter greenly splotch us belly holes and ice and stitches and wrestle them water in hay wires. Is that blood on my pillow? Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle in their sitting room? Is that me on the windowsill in worm slice. Oooze. How did she do it at feet radiators. And [inaudible] unslow on my, you know. Keep wishing we were in his 40 cent bed. This is the second we left Istanbul, which is Mediterranean. [Click]\n \n\n05:00\tKaris Shearer:\tSo what you just heard is a clip from a longer recording made on magnetic tape. It’s on reel-to-reel, probably made by Warren Tallman. It was part of his collection and is by poet bill bissett. Mathieu, do you want to give us a little bit more context of this recording?\n \n\n05:19\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, of course. So in this recording, what we have is — if it is in fact from 1966 as the material, the tape, indicates — bill bissett is likely around 26 or 27 years old. It is one of the earliest recordings that we have of bill bissett reading his work and what he’s reading in the, in the recording as a whole beyond this clip is some poems that have been published later on in some format in we sleep inside each othr all, which was published by Ganglia Press in Toronto in 1966. And one of the exciting things about this clip in particular is that this poem was never published. As bill bissett indicates, lines of this poem were published in other poems such as “Veronica,” which have been, or which were previously published, now published in his new [inaudible] books called breth. But otherwise, this is an unpublished poem and what we have access to is a really raw bill bissett and a very youthful bill bissett, which you can tell by his voice. And what’s really exciting about this as well is we don’t really know where it took place necessarily. Based on bill, it possibly was recorded with Warren Tallman, but also perhaps with Doug Geissman who he recorded with a lot. And we don’t have access to any sense of audience, which is a little odd for people who are often used to going to his readings and hearing the audience banter back with him. There’s mostly silence between the poems, which gives it a different feeling.\n \n\n06:46\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, yeah, it sure does. It’s, it was an exciting recording to discover in the sense that I think the performance is quite different from bill’s typical performances today.\n \n\n07:00\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n07:00\tKaris Shearer:\tLauren, you were one of the early listeners to this recording, you helped digitize it. And it’s a strange and fascinating style of reading to encounter, isn’t it?\n \n\n07:11\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n07:11\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you talk a little bit about, like, your impressions of it, what it reminds you of in terms of style?\n \n\n07:17\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah, like it sounds almost robotic and it definitely is not based in sounding robotic because it’s from the ’60s. But, to me, when I first listened to it, it almost sounded like a literal voice translation of like sticking the poem into a machine and having it be played out. Like when he speaks, it sounds almost spliced together and not like he’s speaking in the actual moment. Like it’s kind of like a collage–\n \n\n07:49\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm!\n07:49\tLauren St. Clair:\t–of words in a way. Like if you took a bunch of words from a magazine and kind of just stuck them together and read it out, that’s kind of the impression it gave me when I first heard it.\n07:58\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, it has a kind of very chopped version of it. Nour, you were thinking about some of how the way in which the style is connected to the content of the poem and that kind of fragmentation that we’re hearing both stylistically, but then also within kind of the body of the poem. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that fragmentation’s playing out here?\n \n\n08:20\tNour Sallam:\tYeah, it’s a lot like what Lauren was saying. It’s very spliced and it does give off the feeling that it’s a little bit like a collage, which I find really interesting because the fragmentation kind of gives you that feeling of isolation that he is experiencing from the body. Like when he says, “Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle? Is it me on the windowsill? Is that my body?”, you really get that sense of fragmentation and isolation, especially in the way he reads it and the way he sounds out the words and pauses between them.\n \n\n09:02\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n09:02\tKaris Shearer:\tThere’s kind of an alienation almost from the body, isn’t there?\n \n\n09:06\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:06\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n09:06\tNour Sallam:\tYeah, an alienation from the body. I picked up on it specifically through the way he sounds out and pauses between all the words or pieces them together in a way that if you, if he was just saying them and if he was just speaking in a non-performative way, maybe you wouldn’t have picked up on that.\n \n\n09:28\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, ’cause we’re getting like, we’re getting a lot of like the blood, “Is that blood on my pillow?” Right? That’s part of him. But he’s also seeing it, right? So there’s, you know,–\n \n\n09:36\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:36\tKaris Shearer:\t–there’s the speaker looking at pieces of himself. He’s a puddle. He’s, you know, there’s blood on the pillow.\n09:44\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:44\tKaris Shearer:\tSo that contributing–\n \n\n09:45\tNour Sallam:\tAnd the form of questioning, too. He, it’s, it almost gives you the sense that he’s unsure. Is it me? Is it someone else? Like what, what am I looking at?\n \n\n09:56\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s a great observation. That’s, that kind of like uncertainty around–\n \n\n10:00\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n10:00\tKaris Shearer:\t–what he’s perceiving.\n \n\n10:01\tNour Sallam:\tYes, exactly.\n10:03\tKaris Shearer:\tSounds wonderful. Matt, I’m going to come over to you and ask you a little bit about this, you know, continuing on this question of style–\n \n\n10:10\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:10\tKaris Shearer:\t–of reading. Can you talk a little bit about how this style that we’re hearing here–\n \n\n10:14\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:14\tKaris Shearer:\t–that Nour and Lauren just talked about in terms of its fragmentation, the kind of almost computerized voice, which is so curious, you know, 1966. It’s not modeled after anything that we would necessarily, that we’re familiar with now.\n \n\n10:33\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:33\tKaris Shearer:\tHow does the style that we’re hearing here differ from bissett’s contemporary performance style?\n \n\n10:40\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. There’s so many great threads that you’ve been bringing up so far. I mean, the sense of the technology perhaps or technological voice in some sense and bill is, bill bissett’s very much interested in that idea of like, well he’s using the typewriter to write most of his poems and like that idea of like what is a tape recorder, perhaps, to bring to it too, what does it mean to become maybe like a robot in that sense? But the question of collage too is essential to his art practice. He’s often thinking about intersplicing different lines of poems in his oral performance of the poetry. And even on the page he’s really thinking about putting things together and collaging them literally, so I really liked that observation, that in sense of like what you’re hearing, which also carries over to the page.\n \n\n11:22\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat we have here in this recording is a really young bill bissett. And what surprised me when I first heard this last spring was that youthfulness. And having been to many of his readings in past few years, what surprised me was some of the elements that were perhaps different or maybe missing that I was expecting. And perhaps it’s because of it being maybe an early recording or the fact that it’s in a private context, but there’s something to be said about the private versus the public. When he’s reading in the public context, there’s an audience very much knowing his work and are able to respond to him and he’s very humourous in his performance. You still hear that a bit in this recording. However, the humour depends on obviously an audience responding to it and that’s not as present in this recording.\n \n\n12:09\tMathieu Aubin:\tThe other thing, too, that I’m surprised is there is no instrument that’s being played in this and he’s known for having maracas on stage very often, and chanting with it. And there’s no “hummina hummina”, you know, the ways of bringing different lines together. And what doesn’t surprise me though is when I found out that this is a poem that was of course never published, but has lines that have been published in other poems, is this improvisational aspect of it. And part of his performance today is still that idea of improvising and working with things. And I was rewatching some of his performances on YouTube the other day and I thought it was really interesting that he’d often start with philosophical questions, those kinds of questions that Nour is bringing up are in this poem, but of course are being asked differently. So I think there are a lot of similarities, but there’s of course a development around that idea of the public audience listening that isn’t in here.\n \n\n13:00\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I like that. So you’re seeing a kind of, or hearing a through line from this early work through to his performance now–\n \n\n13:08\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:08\tKaris Shearer:\t–but also seeing some of the differences, particularly around the live audience, right?\n \n\n13:11\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n \n\n13:11\tKaris Shearer:\tThe improvisation, the responding to the audience. We hear that a lot in his contemporary work.\n \n\n13:16\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:18\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m gonna come back to Nour and I want to ask you about, again, the question of listening. We’re hearing a lot of onomatopoeia and like real sound play here around words. We hear words like, “Oooze”–\n \n\n13:31\tNour Sallam:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:31\tKaris Shearer:\t–that are really, that really play out in a way that point to or signify the concept that they represent. Can you point to a couple other moments where we’re hearing that sound play?\n \n\n13:44\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. Specifically in the beginning of the recording that we heard, there’s a theme of liquids–\n \n\n13:52\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm!\n13:52\tNour Sallam:\t–going on and you can hear that a lot in the specific words like “oooze” and like “palpitation jelly” that he splices or stresses and so on. And “splurged” and words like that where he is really emphasizing that the idea of liquids, but also like the theme of fluidity, which is really interesting to me because of the fragmentation of the poem.\n \n\n14:20\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. It’s kind of a tension between like the chopping up of words, right? “Palpitation.”\n \n\n14:24\tNour Sallam:\tYeah!\n14:24\tKaris Shearer:\tWhich is about poking, right?\n \n\n14:25\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. And the “oooze”-ing.\n \n\n14:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, the elongation of those sounds to signify liquid or fluidity.\n \n\n14:33\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. It truly is, it’s a very masterful reading, I think, of what he’s, he’s trying to portray.\n \n\n14:40\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah, that’s nice. Matt, do you wanna say, I mean we’re hearing there’s so many, there’s so much sound play–\n \n\n14:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n14:47\tKaris Shearer:\t–in this particular performance, particular poem. Can you comment a little bit about what we’re not hearing in this particular recording?\n \n\n14:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, so again, I think the, of course we have those sounds and like the vocalization and the polyvocality and then we were talking about hearing the playing with that. But again, to return to my earlier point about what I don’t hear in the recording, is one, an audience, which surprises me because I know that based on what he shared with me, bill is not reading alone in this room. What would the person be responding to? Were they responding at all? Are they maybe having a cigarette, let’s say, or what were they doing? Were they just casually listening? If not, if there is no audience or no response from the audience because they’re likely is an audience, what does it mean for him to just be reading it this way? And it is a work in process or progress or whatever you want to call it. But he’s reciting this and I am thinking back to this close listening that we did last summer at Congress and Jason Camlot, talked about the idea of, it sounds like almost like a recitation of the poem. And knowing a bit more context about the poem, it sounds about right in that it is just him working through the poem that never ended up being published.\n \n\n16:05\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut the other part that I’m surprised that I don’t hear is, you know, the musicality and almost like a sense of, a lack of banter, which is so essential to his practice today. There’s just banter and he’ll stop and say something hilarious in the middle of the poem and then go on to read the poem. Here what you have is someone who is just reading the poem and of course emphasizing certain words like “splurge!”, but he’s also like very much going through the poem. And something that we might not hear, too, is what is the context? Are we in a living room? We kind of hear the hum in the background of the digital, not the digital, the analog technology and in the recording, but we have zero idea of where this takes place. We’re assuming that this is in Vancouver if it is in fact with Warren Tallman, but we don’t hear that. And then the other thing, too, is often when you see him on stage, he’s opening up a water bottle or all those other kinds of sounds. But this is such a crisp recording that makes you think, “Okay, what, is he just sitting here at a table reading his poem?” And in other parts of the recording, though, you hear him turn a page and that poem is from we sleep inside of each othr all and what’s interesting is the poem has even been changed.\n \n\n17:23\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo looking at the archival material, my partner Emma Middleton was thinking about like, “Okay, well, is that exactly how it sounds in the recording?” And it’s not. So what are the pages? How is he, how is he going through this? So we know at least that we can hear the page, so he has that, but we have very limited context about that.\n \n\n17:41\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. So in the body of recordings that we have of bill bissett or that are available online for listening, PennSound, for example–\n \n\n17:48\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n17:48\tKaris Shearer:\t–this becomes quite an unusual–\n \n\n17:49\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n17:50\tKaris Shearer:\t–example because of that kind of studio quality, if you will. Quite uncharacteristic of bill bissett. So it strikes me that one of the research questions that a person could pursue would be to map the arc of the recordings. And so maybe to kind of point out where we start to see some of the contemporary style that we have. Lauren, I’m going to go over to you and I want to ask you this kind of question around the difference between the studio recording and the live recording. You are a real music fan, I know. And so my question for you is, like, what is for you the difference between the studio recording and listening to, I mean, not necessarily experiencing the live show but hearing the live recording–\n \n\n18:32\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n18:32\tKaris Shearer:\t–of something. Do you have a preference and what are you listening for in those contexts and what makes those different for you?\n \n\n18:39\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah, I guess it really depends on what you’re listening for and more of like the technical way you might be listening for the studio recording, for like how the sound is balanced or whatnot between the live version. But if you’re listening to it for more of, like, the piece itself, you might be listening to the live because it feels more intimate. You might be hearing like banter that you wouldn’t be hearing otherwise.\n \n\n19:05\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n19:05\tLauren St. Clair:\tYou hear those intimate moments shared between the musician or the performer having with the audience that you wouldn’t have captured otherwise or is only shared in that specific recorded moment.\n \n\n19:17\tKaris Shearer:\tExactly, yeah. They’re event-based, aren’t they?\n \n\n19:19\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah!\n19:19\tKaris Shearer:\tSo you have that, you know, unique interaction–\n \n\n19:22\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n19:22\tKaris Shearer:\t–of that particular concert or that particular event.\n \n\n19:26\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n19:26\tKaris Shearer:\tWhich we don’t have here in this recording because of that lack of play with the audience or even as, you know, someone who recorded a lot of material, Warren Tallman doesn’t on this recording introduce it or tell us, you know, exactly what date it’s recorded or where, which was fairly typical that he, he often did do that. So even in our collection, it becomes an unusual example. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]\n \n\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m gonna fast forward now to contemporary, we’re gonna take us out of 1966 to the contemporary moment. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] I wanna ask you about any shout-outs that you have to poetry sound events that are happening, any digital archives you want to mention that are maybe inspired by or related to this archive. I’m going to start with Matt.\n \n\n20:18\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, so as I mentioned, the book breth recently published by Talon Books is a collection from basically the whole of bill bissett, including works that have never been published. So if you pick up that book, what will be great to see, too, is parts of this clip that we just listened to, some lines will be found in different poems in that book. And he’s also been celebrating his 80th birthday and tons of events in the whole greater Toronto area, including St. Catharines, Ontario, and that are just really, I guess, commemorating his career and the amount of publications that he has done. So it’s really exciting. So really make sure to check out that book.\n \n\n20:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd one thing I want to mention, too, is that idea of PennSound and another recording just 13 years later, is making sure that like there are other places that you can also access this and compare that if you’re really interested in doing that.\n \n\n21:07\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Thanks so much. Lauren, I’m gonna go over to you, a kind of event or thing you want to mention.\n \n\n21:14\tLauren St. Clair:\tCool. Yeah, I wanna give a shout-out to the podcast Cut & Run, which is run by Brady Marks, who is a computational sound artist based in Vancouver. And she also has the handle furiousgreencloud if you’re interested in following her on social media or checking out her website where you can go check out her computational art that’s usually based in sound. It’s very cool. And the Cut & Run podcast is a focus on music and specifically like experimental music usually.\n \n\n21:45\tKaris Shearer:\tCool.\n21:45\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n21:45\tKaris Shearer:\tThat is very cool. Nour, I’m gonna go over to you, wanna give a shout-out?\n \n\n21:51\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. I’d like to give a shout-out to the Canadian poet in the contemporary setting, her name’s Sarah Tolmie. I recently came across her poetry because I picked up a copy of the Griffin 2019 Poetry Prize and she was one of the shortlisted winners. And her poetry is really, is really beautiful to the contemporary settings specifically in like contemporary issues. And yeah, she’s super cool.\n \n\n22:18\tKaris Shearer:\tAwesome. Sarah Tolmie.\n \n\n22:20\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n22:20\tKaris Shearer:\tGreat.\n22:20\tNour Sallam:\tHer book is The Art of Dying.\n \n\n22:21\tKaris Shearer:\tThe Art of Dying.\n \n\n22:23\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n22:23\tKaris Shearer:\tFantastic. Thank you–\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tSounds optimistic.\n \n\n22:24\tKaris Shearer:\t–so much. And I’m gonna give a shout-out to close. Ian Ferrier of SpokenWeb and much other fame is going to be here in Kelowna on January 23rd. He’s reading with Samuel Archibald at 7:00 PM at Cool Arts studio on Cawston as part of the Inspired Word Cafe series. So that should be a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to welcoming Ian to Kelowna.\n \n\n22:52\tKaris Shearer:\tI want to thank all of you for being here today and giving some really great insights into this particular recording, doing your curated close-listening and listening and talking. That’s what this is all about. I also want to thank bill bissett for giving us permission to use this particular clip and host it on our website and to the estate of Warren Tallman for their permission as well. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]\n \n\n23:23\tKaris Shearer:\tThat was episode one of SoundBox Signals. You were listening to a recording by bill bissett from our archive called the SoundBox Collection, which is housed in the UBCO AMP Lab. You can find full-length versions of our recordings online at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. I’m your host Karis Shearer and I’ll see you next time.\n \n\n23:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab, that’s A M P  L A B, .ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Nour Sallam, and Lauren St. Clair for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9584","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E7, The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive, 6 April 2020, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/901581e1-fcf7-454a-80ff-e03417153c28/spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:35:53\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"34,524,308 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-04-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Simon+Fraser+University+Vancouver&zoom=15&minlon=-119.42087173461915&minlat=49.934207031480234&maxlon=-119.37726974487306&maxlat=49.950170586872346#map=19/49.282403/-123.108551\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.282403\",\"longitude\":\"-123.108550\"}]"],"Address":["515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bennett, andrea. Excerpt from “The People’s Poetry.” The essay appears in the book\\nLike a Boy But Not A Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary\\nto be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, fall 2019.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “SGW Poetry Remix” MP3 file, 12 Dec 2018.\\n\\nMacEwen (a performance).” Resurfacing: Women Writing across Canada in the 1970s. Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 26-28 April 2018.\\n\\n— “Performing the Archive: A Remix.” Performed with Jason Camlot. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Montreal, 5 May 2019.\\n\\nMacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.”\\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc\\n \\n\\n—  Reading with Phyllis Webb at Sir George Williams University, Nov 18 1966.\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gwendolyn-macewen-at-sgwu-1966/\\n \\n\\n— “Past and Future Ghosts.” Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose.” Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Eds. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talon, 2006). 89-104.\\n\\n— “An Archival Remix” Performance by Katherine McLeod and Emily Murphy. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association, 18 Oct 2019.\\n\\n— “Making Shadows with Recorded Sound: Dance as Criticism, in response to Gwendolyn\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549528510464,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, perhaps best known for winning the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection\nThe Shadow Maker\nand the 1987 GG, posthumously, for\nAfterworlds\n, is perhaps one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died, and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars, even as her work’s deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, SpokenWeb podcast host Hannah McGregor reflects on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt so many of us, alongside authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett, and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod. \n\n00:00\tStacey Copeland:\tOh hi, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager Stacey Copeland here. How are you? [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] I wanted to take a moment to let you know we are looking for contributors from across the SpokenWeb network to pitch and produce episodes with us for the 2020 season. All SpokenWeb team and network affiliates can submit episodes, no podcasting or audio experience necessary. Do you have a great archival find or current project you’d like to showcase? Ever wanted to interview a fellow colleague or Canadian poet? Our team is here to support you every step of the way from episode idea to editing to final production. So send us your pitch and get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. That’s spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n01:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n01:13\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. You might know poet Gwendolyn MacEwen as the winner of the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection The Shadow-Maker or the 1987 Governor General, posthumously, for Afterworlds. She’s also maybe one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars. At the same time, her works’ deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, I’m inviting you to join me as well as authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod as we reflect on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt us. Here is, again, me, Hannah McGregor, with “The Voice Is Intact.” [Theme Music]\n02:47\tHannah McGregor:\tHave you ever heard her read?\n02:48\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tNo, I’ve never heard her voice.\n02:49\tHannah McGregor:\tOh my God, do you want to?\n02:49\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tYeah!\n02:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee’s commentary] A fugitive from all those truths, which are too true, the great clawing ones and the fire-breathers,–\n03:00\tJen Sookfong Lee:\t[Gasps]\n03:00\tAudio Recording:\t–the ones that rake the flesh–\n03:01\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo much nicer with her voice!\n03:01\tAudio Recording:\t–like Pyramus,  and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bear their red teeth in the nights.\n03:09\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo melodious, her voice.\n03:10\tAudio Recording:\tMy mind emulates,–\n03:12\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI’ve never used the word melodious.\n03:14\tAudio Recording:\t–dragon, fish, and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night–\n03:18\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo ASMR, though.\n03:20\tAudio Recording:\t–or chews off the edges of continents or wraps itself around the ribs of the world,–\n03:23\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI knew it, I knew it, she had to have a voice like that. She couldn’t write these poems without that voice.\n03:26\tAudio Recording:\t–squeezes…\n03:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tSomething that will come up often when presenting about MacEwen, and certainly in conference sorts of settings, where people really wanna hear her voice. And if you talk about MacEwen and don’t play her voice, then people are really aware, like, “Wait, we want to hear her voice.” But then to also think about the layers of mediation and copyright and all the things that also are distancing us from her voice and being aware of that, too.\n03:54\tHannah McGregor:\tThe voices you’re hearing belong to academic Katherine McLeod–\n03:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tI am Katherine McLeod and I’m an affiliate researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia University.\n04:04\tHannah McGregor:\t–and author Jen Sookfong Lee.\n04:06\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI have been trolling Margaret Atwood since 1997, big props to me.\n04:11\tHannah McGregor:\tYou might recognize Katherine from earlier episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast. She’s a Montreal-based scholar of Canadian literature with a focus on sound, performance, and archives and the co-editor of the new book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. She’s also the curator of SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Week series. Jen Sookfong Lee is a Vancouver-based writer, radio broadcaster, and podcaster. She’s the author of The Conjoined, the co-editor of Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault and the co-host of the podcast Can’t Lit.\n04:44\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor’s commentary] …once the monster’s jaws unfolded fire–\n04:48\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that third voice you’re hearing is Gwendolyn MacEwen reading on November 18th, 1966 as part of the Sir George Williams poetry series held between 1965 and 1974 at what was then the Sir George Williams University and is now Concordia University. The audio recordings of this reading series are at the heart of the SpokenWeb partnership and form a rich and exciting digital archive that has already inspired significant scholarship on the history of the poetry reading. But I’m not interested in this reading series. I’m interested in MacEwen.\n05:22\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tThe first time I discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen, it was probably reading “Dark Pines Under Water” in an anthology. And I think it was, it was a green, it was Oxford University Press, edited by Margaret Atwood, of course. Because back then everything was edited by Margaret Atwood. Yeah, and it was “Dark Pines Under Water” and I think it was only one poem that was anthologized in there. And I read it, I must’ve been 17 or 18–\n05:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwan reading the first lines of “Dark Pines Under Water”] This land like a mirror turns you inward / And you become a forest in a furtive lake.\n05:52\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tAnd that poem, which people say is about Canada, right? Like I think you and I were just discussing this before we turned these mikes on, but the… They say it’s about Canada, but I read it as being this like fear of the internal and sort of the fear of the Gothic-ness that lives inside us that we only see in reflection. Upon reflection, in reflection.\n06:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading “Dark Pines Under Water”] The dark pines of your mind reach downward, / You dream in the green of your time, / Your memory is a row of sinking pines.\n06:20\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tAnd there was enough in that poem for me to want to read more of her work.\n06:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading “Dark Pines Under Water”] Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for / Although it is good here, and green.\n06:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tActually when you mentioned your master’s, that was the first time I learned of MacEwen, was during my master’s degree out at UBC, out west in Vancouver. And I was in a course with Sherrill Grace and it was a CanLit graduate course and we were thinking about autobiography. And we read the play by Linda Griffiths Alien Creature: A Visitation by [sic: should read “from“] Gwendolyn MacEwen. And in the play, Linda Griffiths uses MacEwen’s words to conjure the presence of MacEwen as this magical poet and really to think about kind of really the reflection of the self through a poet’s words and a poet’s presence. And so I actually ended up writing about that play and that was my first academic publication, was about Linda Griffiths’s play about Gwendolyn MacEwen, sort of the presence of the voice in the play and as a remediation of MacEwen in that way. But it was, it was back in my master’s, too. So it’s sort of this long… MacEwen has always been.\n07:36\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tYou know, and I took these books off my bookshelf. There’s, you know, pictures of her on it and she had these huge, like, sad eyes, big, sad… You know, like that movie Big Eyes, it’s like that kind of thing. And I realized that like every poem I’ve ever read of hers, her eyes are there. Like they’re there somewhere. There’s a lot of looking, a lot of vision, a lot of dark vision, you know?\n07:56\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt really was the voice of her poetry, the sound of her poetry, the way she’s able to conjure up a presence through the words themselves. And I think a lot of her poetry actually has to do with, it has to do with haunting. There’s this sort of this continuation that’s really evoked in her poetry and a real, a strengthened voice that you can hear from the words on the page, I would argue. Even though it’s fascinating then to think that what often captures people is hearing MacEwen herself read the poems and then whenever someone’s able to listen to MacEwen, reading her poetry–\n08:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of the first Gwendolyn MacEwen recording] …but mark now how harmless are the claws…\n08:32\tKatherine McLeod:\t–is something that just captures one’s attention and she’s able to create a real strong sense of voice in her poetry and then, when it’s read out loud, it’s even more powerful.\n08:42\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar And Drums]\n08:42\tHannah McGregor:\tI can’t remember the first time I heard Gwendolyn MacEwen’s voice, but I remember that I first heard her work read out loud by a friend. And I know that I was excited enough about her 1982 poetry collection, The T.E. Lawrence Poems, that I initially planned on writing about it in my dissertation before the practicalities of putting together a research project led me elsewhere. Actually, despite the fact that MacEwen was one of the authors who led me to the study of Canadian literature, I’ve never written about her formally. This podcast episode is the closest I’ve come. MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 and rose to fame quickly and young. She published her first collection of poetry in 1961 and won the Governor General’s Award for her fourth, The Shadow-Maker, in 1969 when she was not yet 30 years old. She died young, too, at 46, and the combination of her fascination with mysticism and the almost mythically tragic shape of her own life have turned her into a somewhat mythic figure in her own right.\n09:46\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tNo, she was deeply social and she was as famous as poets get, really, in Canada, ever. Like, she was a bit of a rock star, like she started doing things like having like a signature black eyeliner situation and like signature clothing, like loose silky things. I mean, come on, man, I wish I had like a signature look,\n10:05\tHannah McGregor:\tBut this iconic status was no accident. MacEwen came into her own as a poet in a historical moment when it was possible to be both a poet and a celebrity. And her poetic persona was very much tied to the culture of poetry readings in the 1960s, perhaps most notably at the Bohemian Embassy, an alternative club in Toronto where she would meet poets like Jay MacPherson, Margaret Avison, Phyllis Webb, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and Milton Acorn.\n10:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, I’ll start again. Like thinking about MacEwen also allows you to think about spaces for performances of poetry. Thinking about, say, the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, you know, it’s talked about how MacEwen would show up to the Bohemian Embassy and there would be the sounds of like the coffee maker in the background and all these poets maybe reading with these like loud, bombastic voices or however, however poetry, you know, the poet’s voice was thought of. And then this woman’s coming up to the microphone and she’s often talked about as appearing very quiet and suddenly just absolutely captivating the audience. And I was so drawn to the fact that somebody very sort of unassuming could have such an impact and just call everyone’s attention. And it also, then it allows you to think about what it meant to be performing as a poet, a particularly very young female poet, at the time that MacEwen started doing her readings and being up there with a young Margaret Atwood and all the rest of the 1960s poets. Just how, how she held her own on that stage, too.\n11:32\tHannah McGregor:\tIn fact, it’s impossible for me to think about the historical context that shaped MacEwen’s work without thinking about that poetry scene of the 1960s and how central it was to the invention of that thing we now think of as CanLit. And when I think of MacEwen and the poet she would become, the poet who would write The T.E. Lawrence Poems and Afterworlds, collections that have haunted me as long as I can remember, I keep coming back to those years in the early ’60s to what happened to her then. And I’m not the only one.\n12:03\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n12:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tI also think about the way that she was so determined to be a poet and there’s something about that, again, thinking of, you know, what models did she have to look to, to be a female poet in Canada at the time? Really she had to sort of forge her path of what that looked like and what that sounded like and trying to sort of find her place and her voice, the space for her voice, in that world. She was in the circles with so many of the very loudest male poets at the time and still managed, you know, she managed to be known for the strength of her voice, but it sounded incredibly difficult, too. And I was very interested in how she managed that and what she had to fight against in order for her voice to be heard. You know, who was this person Gwendolyn MacEwen? What kind of work could she have produced if she was in a more sustainable environment for her writing? You know, can we learn something from that now or are we still struggling against the very same things?\n13:04\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI often wonder sometimes when… ‘Cause she wrote a lot of her work after this was done, like most, the the bulk of her work after that marriage was over. And like there’s a part of me that sometimes thinks those things that she’s trying to access is maybe that marriage. Like I wonder sometimes, right? ‘Cause like when you get married or you’re in a relationship when you’re really young. Like, I got married really young, I got married, I met my ex-husband at 21, I was married at 24. By no means was that like an imbalanced marriage, I would never say that. But it defines you, I think. Like in your twenties, you’re exploring things, you don’t know who you are, your identity is so malleable. So what did Milton Acorn, what did he try to shape her into and what did she end up taking on and what did she end up rejecting would be my question. And I don’t think any of us will ever know this answer. But then looking at her poetry, I sometimes wonder if that darkness is there and that, and the way she would sort of like, as we were saying, she was not ever writing in the voices of men who were like loud, big, you know, masculine men. Always the opposite. And to me that’s kind of a gentle pushback against that Milton Acorn angry bear.\n14:07\tHannah McGregor:\tAs I was working on this episode, I reached out online for someone who could help me better understand MacEwen’s relationship with the poet Milton Acorn and how it might’ve shaped her work. My answer came serendipitously in the form of an essay by writer andrea bennett from their new book Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary, which is available for pre-order now from Arsenal Pulp Press. With their permission, here’s an excerpt from the essay\n14:36\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low String Instruments]\n14:43\tHannah McGregor:\tIn the early 1960s, a part-bar, part-coffee shop, part-venue space opened on St. Nicholas Street, a few blocks up from Yonge and Wellesley in Toronto. Soon after it opened, poet Milton Acorn, then in his late thirties, began to hold court there. The Embassy held poetry readings on Thursday nights, when Acorn would read, generally overstaying his welcome on the stage. Afterwards, Acorn would find himself surrounded by younger poets, many of them students from the University of Toronto. Margaret Atwood, then a student at the University of Toronto, read at the Embassy; a little later, a teenage Gwendolyn MacEwen found the spot, the community—Acorn.\n15:23\tHannah McGregor:\tAcorn was bombastic, drank a lot, often had a fat cigar sticking out from the side of his mouth. MacEwen was slight and half his age but had a compelling voice of her own. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she wasn’t at university. She was self-taught, had had a tumultuous—occasionally violent, marked by alcoholism and mental illness—home life. Many of the books that chronicle Acorn and MacEwen’s relationship come close to saying that Acorn was something of a father figure for the younger poets gathered at the Embassy—dispensing poetic advice, maybe acting more like a big brother. Acorn started off as MacEwen’s “poetic mentor,” but their relationship soon morphed and they began to date. Eventually, they married. This was something Acorn wanted and MacEwen initially did not; he’d proposed in December 1960 when she was nineteen and he was thirty-seven, and she’d said no, writing, “Milt, my love is not the same as yours… I feel no need to find myself physically, sensually, emotionally in another person… I’m still getting acquainted with life, with myself.” However, she agreed to his proposal a little later; he was in Prince Edward Island for the winter, and she was missing him while he was away.\n16:39\tHannah McGregor:\tAcorn and MacEwen’s friends speculated about why they had gotten together at all. Chris Gudgeon’s biography of Milton Acorn, Out of this World, says people referred to them as Beauty and the Beast. It was easy to see why Acorn was drawn to MacEwen—she was young, beautiful, talented, and insecure. MacEwen, Gudgeon writes, quote, “fed Milt’s lopsided vision of himself as a heroic poet-knight, battling the dragons of injustice, and leaving the fair maidens swooning.” End quote. (Another Acorn biographer, Richard Lemm, is more explicit, quote: “He had a constant companion who would listen to his political discourses. A sexually experienced man, he could teach and savour his less experienced lover.”) End quote. Although it was less clear what had drawn MacEwen, one friend from the Embassy pointed out that when they met, in contrast to later on, Acorn seemed confident, strong, clean-shaven, eccentric but put-together. Acorn and MacEwen had friends who guessed that part of the reason she’d been attracted to him was career-related—she was “ambitious” and saw him as “established,” a way to further her writing and publishing goals; Al Purdy thought, quote, “Gwen was with Milton because Milton was ‘getting attention.’” End quote.\n17:53\tHannah McGregor:\tRosemary Sullivan, MacEwen’s biographer, writes that it’s important to be careful about the way we think about MacEwen and Acorn’s relationship in retrospect. There was a power imbalance, and the relationship seemed doomed from the start, and Acorn was persistent, but there’s no evidence that he was abusive, either physically or emotionally. At least, not until the relationship crumbled. MacEwen took a solo trip to Israel a few months after her wedding; when she returned, the distance and solitude had given her a new perspective on Toronto, and her relationship. As Sullivan puts it in Shadow Maker, quote, “Almost as soon as she had married, Gwendolyn recognized that she had made a terrible mistake.” End quote. MacEwen wanted a marriage of equals, and Acorn wanted a wife. Acorn was “deeply conservative” at heart, homophobic, anti-abortion (he wrote at least one terrible poem about it), and he wanted to see “supper on the table every night.”\n18:50\tHannah McGregor:\tMacEwen and Acorn had an open marriage; he’d taken advantage of this when she was away, and she began a side relationship with a painter when she returned from Israel. Acorn gave her an ultimatum—him or the painter—and, not even a year into their marriage, she chose to leave. It was a choice that Acorn could not brook. He fell apart. He drank; he showed up on friends’ doorsteps in the middle of the night, distraught and drunk; he wrote MacEwen angry, bitter letters. Quote, (“One letter from that time begins with ‘You Dirty Bitch’ and ends up asking ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD DID YOU LEARN TO BE SUCH A LOUSE?’” End quote. Writes Gudgeon; another, quoted in Shadow Maker, sent after MacEwen told Acorn of her intentions to divorce him, quote, “accus[es] her of being ‘the Great North American Castrator.’”) End quote. MacEwen wrote back, at least at the beginning, explaining herself, trying to make him understand. Reading their biographies, the snippets of his letters that make it through, it appears as though Acorn’s life had fallen apart, and he’d set the blame squarely on the shoulders of his much younger ex, who simply wanted space, freedom, and an amicable divorce. When Acorn refused to give her a divorce—in the era before no-fault divorces—MacEwen was forced to travel across the country, to Vancouver, to gather evidence of his marital infidelity in order to petition the courts. Purdy, who’d been Acorn’s best man at the wedding, reluctantly acted as a witness to Acorn’s adultery so that MacEwen could finally break free of the marriage.\n20:21\tHannah McGregor:\tIn 1969, years later, MacEwen and Acorn were both announced finalists, alongside George Bowering, for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry or Drama. Acorn was still a mess—outstaying his welcome at friends’ houses, drinking, not bathing, suicidal, hospitalized for depression, still half hoping MacEwen might come back and blaming her for everything that was wrong in his life. When MacEwen found out her book The Shadow-Maker was shortlisted alongside Acorn’s I’ve Tasted My Blood, Nick Mount writes in his book Arrival: The Story of CanLit, quote, “She was afraid enough of him to write to the judges that if there was any change of her having to share the award with Acorn, she would rather withdraw her book from consideration.” End quote. But she and Bowering won, and Acorn didn’t.\n21:10\tHannah McGregor:\tCanLit did not graciously accept MacEwen and Bowering’s wins. Instead, poets Irving Layton and Eli Mandel co-authored an open letter protesting Acorn’s loss. The letter was in part a call for money, to be raised and, quote, “presented to Milton Acorn as the Canadian Poets Award.” End quote. Another public plea for Acorn, this time an editorial by poets Seymour Mayne and Ken Hertz in a now-defunct Montreal literary magazine, reads, quote, “Either because of literary politics or a gross ignorance of Canadian poetry on the part of the Canada Council jury, Milton Acorn has been denied the Governor General’s Award that he truly has earned.” End quote. Acorn’s supporters generally focused their ire at Bowering. One of the three jurors who’d chosen MacEwen’s and Bowering’s books over Acorn’s was Warren Tallman, an American who’d been hired to teach English at the University of British Columbia; the thinking went that Bowering’s style, which was influenced by US poets, was emblematic of a type of cultural imperialism that needed to be studiously avoided if CanLit was to be its own proper national cultural project.\n22:17\tHannah McGregor:\tFive days after MacEwen and Bowering were fêted at their awards ceremony in Ottawa, a broad swathe of CanLit, including Layton, Purdy, and Atwood, showed up at Grossman’s Tavern, on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, to witness Acorn receive a cheque for $1,000 and a medallion naming him the People’s Poet. When I think of this night—Acorn got so drunk he lost the medallion twice; his friends let him read for forty minutes; he was roundly celebrated—I immediately picture MacEwen and wonder how she felt, if she was at home in her small apartment that night, if there was anyone with her. And I wonder if anyone at Grossman’s thought about MacEwen. Did they wonder, celebrating Acorn, if they were enacting a deeper injustice by attempting to address a perceived one?\n23:06\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low String Instruments And Whistling]\n23:12\tHannah McGregor:\tIf MacEwen wasn’t quite part of that new CanLit scene represented at the People’s Poetry party at Grossman’s Tavern, maybe it was because she also wasn’t part of the project of building a thing that looked recognizably like CanLit,\n23:25\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tBut that white male sort of masculine sort of like, yeah, like the, it’s the Milton Acorn narrative. She just didn’t care. She just was like, “I don’t care. You guys go fight it out in your huts with your potatoes and axes. I’m going to go, I gotta to go to Egypt, get some bomb black eyeliner, see you later.”\n23:43\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd perhaps it’s something about her poetic rejection of accepted nationalist narratives, those “potatoes and axes” that Jen alludes to, that make her appeal to those who are a little skeptical about essentialist stories about what it means to be a Canadian or for literature to be Canadian.\n23:59\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI think there’s a lot of pressure for authenticity and I think it’s a marketing thing in many ways. I think that in my experiences writing for both big publishers and small presses, that the big publishers understand that a certain amount of authenticity sells, it doesn’t even really matter if you’re writing fiction. Like if you’re somebody, like, who looks like me and you’re writing a family story about a Chinese Canadian family, then the authenticity is easy to sell. It’s easy to sell. It’s like, “Well, Jen’s real grandfather was also a barber” or whatever. You know? It’s very much a merging of self, brand, and book.\n24:32\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd her lack of investment in those narratives can help to pry open the spaces to think about alternative ways of organizing our literary history.\n24:40\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tIn the history of Canada, for me anyway, like, I’m not a historian by any stretch. The only history of Canada that I’m familiar with, like, in any deep way is the history of Chinese Canadians. And for most of that time that there were white settlers on this, on this land, there were also Chinese Canadian, usually indentured, labourers. And I don’t think the garrison mentality, how many times can I say that on this recording?\n25:04\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, garrison mentality, for those who don’t know, is a term that was coined by literary critic Northrop Frye and kind of popularized by Margaret Atwood’s literary critical writing, which essentially argues that one of the major themes in Canadian literature is anxiety about the dangers and emptiness and threats of the Canadian landscape.\n25:25\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI don’t, it doesn’t suit their experiences of let’s just say being chased off a gold claim, doing laundry for the railway workers, being a railway worker, being abandoned by the railway and not having passage home, scouring the woods for the remains of your friends so you can send them back home for a proper burial. Where’s garrison mentality in that? It’s not the land that has destroyed them, it’s the white people. So like there’s an alternative there and I think that any sort of marginalized group who has, you know, been alongside the white settlers all this time could very well choose their own anthology that would support that narrative. And wouldn’t that be interesting?\n26:06\tHannah McGregor:\tThis isn’t to say there’s nothing CanLit-esque about MacEwen’s poetry career. In fact, MacEwen had a strong, if often largely functional, tie to the CBC. As Katherine McLeod explains, it began with a prize.\n26:18\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low Strings]\n26:23\tKatherine McLeod:\tGwendolyn MacEwen won the CBC Poetry Prize in 1965 and at that point she was very young, very young poet. And through winning the prize, she got the attention of Robert Weaver who was then the producer and editor of the program Anthology, which was a CBC literary program that, you know, ran from the mid ’50s up until 1985, so very long standing literary program. And Robert Weaver became a really strong supporter of Gwendolyn’s work. So he had her on to read on Anthology shortly after winning the CBC Prize. And she then read on Anthology numerous times, but also started to write radio plays. So the one that she’s most well-known for is the play Terror and Erebus that is all about the Franklin expedition and the Northwest Passage. And she also, she wrote two more but, which aren’t as well-known, but that, the play Terror and Erebus, was broadcast in the mid ’60s and re-broadcast. And both by writing the plays and also reading for CBC, she was able to make a bit of money, which the reading on CBC and writing for CBC ended up being a way that she was able to support herself. Again, continuing that sense of wanting to really be a poet and be self-sustaining in that way.\n27:51\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo one of the programs that I uncovered that I thought was one of the most fascinating when I was listening to MacEwen’s readings on CBC in the ’60s was a program that she produced and created for Anthology that was broadcast in 1969 and it was called Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how this program, Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces from 1969, is an opportunity for her to talk about other poets and other works that she’s interested in. So it was this moment of listening in the archives and expecting that, okay, maybe this is going to be another reading by MacEwen, which are fantastic and captivating, but in this case she was talking about other poets. It was actually a four-part series and that’s where, the last episode of that four-part series, I was most surprised by because that’s where she started to talk about flamenco.\n28:46\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Flamenco: Guitar And Clapping]\n28:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd that is where I nearly fell out of my seat because I was so thrilled and amazed that here I was in the CBC archives, listening to MacEwen, who I was fascinated by and working on, and at the same time I have been cultivating my own dance practice and flamenco throughout my academic work for the past 15 years. And here I was listening to MacEwen talk about flamenco and in this past year with Dr. Emily Murphy, who’s an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan, we’ve started a research creation project that lets me perform some of these recordings back from this 1969 piece and bring in the flamenco side, too.\n29:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo Gwendolyn MacEwen’s interest in flamenco, there’s all kinds of connections between MacEwen and music and especially the sort of the Toronto world music in the ’60s and artists that were passing through, this continues into the ’70s and is a whole other story of MacEwen and her partner in the ’70s opening the Trojan Horse cafe and connections to musicians passing through and performing there. But back to the ’60s, I’m trying to figure out where she would have heard it or how she would have first been drawn to flamenco, but it makes a lot of sense because there’s something undescribable about the sound of her voice and this feeling almost like the duende of flamenco, which is a word that refers to this undescribable sense that when you’re just really moved by something. And MacEwen’s program, part four of Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, is all focused on the duende. And she’s interested in thinking about the duende as it’s theorized in Spanish poetry and then in flamenco as this undescribable feeling of the depths of your soul and true feeling and emotion. She’s interested in how we can understand that in poetry. And she’s thinking about poetry outside of Canada, but then she starts to sort of reflect a little bit more on Canadian poetry and she asks the question, where is the duende in Canadian poetry? Which I just find fascinating because where she turns, I think, goes back to her trying to figure out where her voice sits in Canadian poetry because the person she turns to as an example is Irving Layton. And it’s so, when we’re thinking about what kind of models or what is she thinking about when she’s thinking about Canadian poetry that is moving, on the one hand, yes, I see why she talks about Layton’s poetry, but I found it fascinating that she didn’t give her own poetry as the example because I would argue that her poetry has the duende. Her poetry is the poetry that moves you and the poetry that has that undescribable feeling. So in listening to the piece, it was really interesting to hear her theorize all of this, but also not see herself in that. And then I, that’s when I started to think, okay, as a critic, how can I argue that MacEwen has the duende? And one of the ways that I feel like is most successful in arguing this is, in fact, to dance her poetry.\n32:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Reading, Overlapped With Soft Flamenco] I should have predicted the death of this city. I could have predicted it if only there had been no such pretty flowers. No such squares filled with horses and their golden riders.\n32:26\tHannah McGregor:\tKatherine’s work on Canadian poetry and flamenco and Jen’s imaginative alternative anthologies that reject the garrison mentality’s settler-colonial meta-narratives of Canadian writing both point in different ways to how MacEwen’s poetics can lead us away from perceived notions of what Canadian poetry is or can be. And as I think about ways that those of us who care for her work can keep MacEwen’s contributions alive, I come back to her voice, so powerful that it feels fully present as I listen to it.\n32:59\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tThis, this one really affected me when I was like 19: “I don’t trust you for a single second, but / My bones turned gold in your hands’ warm holding / in the dark or in the bright heart of the morning. / And suddenly the days are longer than anything, / Longer than Tolstoy, longer than Proust, longer / Than anything. / But the days are also diving into nights, and / I told you our end lay in our beginning / So we drink to our end, always remembering / that at the bottom of the goblets of Pompeii / Was the skull; we crawl / Out of the night utterly broken, bruises / All over our souls, / But this pain returns me to the world. / Even in the end your perfidy serves me, so / The cry we made when we came, love, / Will sound the same and is the same / As the cry we will make when we go.” She knew she was gonna die young, I think. I think I’ll love her forever. And I think she never, she never disappoints. Every time you go back you’re still like, “Wow.” There’s always something else there because whatever is happening in our world or the things that we’re most consumed with, there will always be an element of that in her poem. So it’s the kind of poems that she wrote.\n33:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tThey were everything and everywhere. Playing a recording of her reading, it sounds so live and sounds so present. She’s still in motion. She’s still, she’s still alive. She’s not in the archive. She’s not in a box. She’s, she’s still here in very present. Thinking of the lines from “Past and Future Ghosts”: “Look out, you who inhabit those rooms of my future. I’m coming after you. I’m starting to haunt you. I’m starting right now.”\n34:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Speaking] So listen, I had a great idea that if our voices gave out, we were just going to open up the record and bring a recorder up on stage and place the needle in the proper groove and then just let the record speak for itself. However, I guess the voice is intact.\n34:43\tMusic:\t[Intense Echoing Instrumental]\n34:53\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. I was the producer this month. Thanks so much to Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and producer extraordinaire, for all her help. A special thank you to Jen Sookfong Lee, Katherine McLeod, and andrea bennett for their generous contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9594","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E3, Drum Codes [Part 2]: Sounds of Data, 5 December 2022, Miya"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-part-2-sounds-of-data/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Chelsea Miya"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/f155a6f6-3a58-44fe-8b40-8536a7c437ab/audio/89995b0d-9cfc-4a2e-a427-ad697eb76aea/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:41\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,663,031 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/drum-codes-part-2-sounds-of-data/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-12-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"content_notes":["No transcript."],"contents":["Audio technology and audio data come in radically different forms. This month’s episode, “Sounds of Data” is a follow up to Season Two’s “Drum Codes” and takes us deeper into the sonic world of data: from the sounds of surveillance to music of the stars to the wireless transmission of drum songs. Featuring interviews with sound artist and poet Oana Avasilichioaei, NASA sonification expert Matt Russo, and speech technologist Tunde Adegbola, each offering a unique perspective on the question: what does data sound like?\n\nSpecial thanks to master drummer Peter Olálékan Adédòkun, whose music you hear in the first half of the episode. Original music and performance clips were also provided by Oana Avasilichioaei and by Matt Russo and his team at SYSTEM Sounds. Thank you, as well, to Sean Luyk, who co-produced the “Drum Codes” episode and played a significant role in conceptualising this follow-up."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"No transcript.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549530607616,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9595","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E4, Genuine Conversation, 6 February 2023, Fyfe"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/genuine-conversation/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creator_names_search":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/57d4aa97-aa60-4920-acb2-82fea5edbdc4/audio/1d809ebb-6e39-40ca-a736-16390cc90357/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e4-genuine-conversation.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:53:12\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"51,068,804 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e4-genuine-conversation\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/genuine-conversation/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-02-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Antin, David. “Talking at the Boundaries.” How Long is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin. Edited by Stephen Friedman, University of New Mexico Press, pp. 31-64. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Strauss &  Giroux, 1975.\\n\\nDiepeveen, Leonard. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception. Oxford UP, 2019.\\n\\nGoffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and Schuster, 2008.\\n\\nKreillkamp, Ivan. “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.” Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 69-88.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549530607617,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What makes a genuine conversation? And why is it so difficult to have one? Frances Grace Fyfe is on a quest to find out. This madcap talk therapy session has the SpokenWeb RA consider the literary concept of the dialogue, the verbatim transcription of speech in writing (through an exploration of—what else?—Charles Dickens’s early forays in court stenography), especially “expressive” phonemes, and david antin’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s. An investigative journalist, a peer supporter, and one especially sincere friend weigh in to help FG orchestrate the most genuine conversation of all: one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:35)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End music: SpokenWeb Podcast theme music]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Conversation. When was the last time you thought about conversations, thought about what exactly makes them conversations? In this episode, SpokenWeb research assistant Francis Grace Fife thinks about the literary concept of the dialogue, about conversations by having conversations.\n\nFife has conversations with an investigative journalist who conducts interviews for a living, with a friend whose thoughts on the capabilities of speech over writing informs how their most genuine conversations take place, with a peer supporter at Concordia who intentionally makes use of non-speech responses to create connection in conversation and even with herself, in the style of talk therapy. But Fife goes a step further delving into what happens to conversations when they are transformed from speech into writing.\n\nTaking up Charles Dickens’s foray into court’s stenography and David Anton’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s, Fife thinks about those aspects of genuine conversation like those affirmative “mm-hmm’s” in conjunction with their written representations.\n\nDigging into expressive phonemes, the pathological urge to mirror your conversation partner’s speech style, and the discomfort of silences in speech conversations. Fife reflects on when and how speech might be inescapably performative and considers what happens when speech is literally performative, but also genuine, like in David Anton’s talk poems. We invite you to listen with us to what Fife calls the most genuine conversation of all, one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form. [SpokenWeb theme music begins] Here is episode four of season four of the SpokenWeb podcast. Genuine Conversation. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n\n(02:58)\tPhone Voice 1\tHey, how are you? [clears throat] Hey, how are you? Yeah, good, thanks. Yeah, thanks, um, for agreeing to talk with me today. Hopefully this won’t take up too much of your time, but, yeah, as you know, the idea for the podcast is about genuine conversation.\nHey, [laughs], how are you? Yeah, good, good. Thanks. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me. Um, yeah. Hopefully this won’t take up too much of your time, but, yeah, as you know, the idea for the podcast is on the topic of genuine conversation, and I just thought I’d reach out cuz I thought you might have something to say about that. [Sound effect: phone rings] Oh, shhh Sorry. [Soundeffect: Answer phone] Hi, sorry. Can you hear me? [Music begins: calm jazz with high hat and piano] Um, sorry. This is kind of awkward.\n\n(04:10)\tNarrator\tIn Aldous Huxley’s short story “Over The Telephone”, a young poet mentally rehearses a whole conversation between him and the woman he hopes will accept his invitation to the opera. [Sound effect: phone  rings] But when the operator finally makes the connection, he stumbles hopelessly and she declines. Nothing, in other words, goes as planned over the telephone.\n[Music fades and ends]\n\n(04:33)\tPhone Voice 1\tSorry, I don’t really know where to start.\n(04:37)\tPhone Voice 2\tThat’s okay. Why don’t you start by telling me what it is you want to talk about?\n(04:44):\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah, I guess that’s partly what I came here to find out or, yeah. To talk about. I guess I’m seeking an occasion for the kind of conversations I wanna have or, yeah, I don’t know. I guess I could just use some practice.\n(05:01)\tPhone Voice 2\tPractice talking?\n(05:02)\tPhone Voice 1\t[overlapping] Talking [laughs]  Yeah.\n(05:06)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay. Well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way?\n(05:13)\tPhone Voice 1\tThere was, there was a period where it was hard to talk to people. You remember, I’m sure. A lot of people thought that would make it a good time for writing. I don’t know. I, I, I guess I just feel like being away from people writing began to feel so insincere and then, you know, since I’ve started this master’s degree in English, I’ve just been feeling like, I don’t know, I don’t wanna read books anymore. I wanna talk to people, actual people.\n(05:42)\tPhone Voice 2\tThat sounds difficult.\n05:44)\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah. I mean, it’s [laughs], it’s, it’s whatever. Yeah. I guess.\n(05:48)\tPhone Voice 2\tI think you might benefit from talking to a specialist. I have someone in mind. I’m gonna transfer you over. Okay? [Sound effect: phone dialing and then dial tone starts]\n(06:00)\tHannah\tI essentially had to learn how to interview people twice or maybe even three times as my working practices changed and learning how to construct conversations all over again, such that they were delivered in a human and interesting and relevant way was a really important part of what I had to learn how to do.\n(06:21)\tNarrator\t[Music begins: electronic with drum beat]\nThis is my friend Hannah talking. She’s a journalist working in current affairs and investigative reporting. As someone who has, according to her LinkedIn profile, a proven track record negotiating difficult access to people for print and television reporting, I thought she might be a good person to give me pointers on how to structure a conversation in the first place.\n\n(06:41):\tInterviewer\tI’m interested in the human aspect of it. Are there some strategies you can use to prod someone to speak in a sort of interesting or even humorous manner to get a good clip for your video?\n(06:53)\tHannah\tAbsolutely. There are ways of working that are very helpful. The first of which is most profoundly is like, just don’t be a jerk, right? Show up and be human and be present. And people like to act sometimes, like there is a way of gaming a conversation or short cutting it somehow. And there isn’t. The most important thing that you do is show up and engage with someone in the way that they expect to be engaged with. And you get very good in a slightly pathological way at mirroring people.\nYou become very good at matching somebody else’s conversation style. If they crack jokes, you crack jokes. If they take it more seriously, you take it more seriously and you catch yourself doing it in non-professional situations and you realize that it is really quite a creepy thing to do. But we’re responding to someone as they hope to work is a really important part of what I do.\n\n(07:55)\tInterviewer\tI have written in my notes, “don’t be a jerk”, which seems like a good maxim, generally speaking.\n(08:00)\tHannah\tIt’s a good rule in life.\n(08:02)\tInterviewer\t[laughs] Yeah, I’m interested in what, and maybe it’s not a good question, but maybe you can answer it to the best of your ability. What is it that makes a good question to ask?\n(08:19)\tHannah\t[Music begins: electronic and spare] So I have a couple of answers to that. The first and most obvious one right, is open-ended questions. We like open-ended questions. What you want, again, it’s that people are more comfortable expressing their experience, which is something that they know to be true rather than an opinion or even a fact that they just think to be true.\nAnd beyond that genuine engagement and that genuine sort of interface, there are a couple of things that are helpful. The first of which is being genuinely passionate and curious about people’s own personal experiences. People are uncomfortable talking in hypotheticals, talking about things that they may not be sure about, all those kinds of things, but people are always secure in their own experiences and their own perceptions. I think the other thing that you always want to do when you’re asking someone questions is, again, so where people are more comfortable expressing their own experience, make it clear that that is what you value and that is true for personal stuff as well as for professional stuff.  What you value is them as people and what they bring to this conversation and not what they think or what they know. They’re not quantities to be known to you.\n\n(09:36):\tInterviewer\t[Music ends] Well, I value your skill as a journalist, [laughs], just so you know. [Hannah laughs] And you know, and keeping with the kinda self-reflexive nature of question asking and the open-endedness. Maybe you could tell me like, how do you feel this interview has gone so far?\n(09:54)\tHannah\tI think it’s gone really well. I think, so what you’re trying to do here is something really difficult, right? Which is that you’re trying to record for academic content fundamentally and record the building blocks of something that will prove an academic point, but in a performative way. And that’s actually a very difficult thing to do.\nAnd I’ve said this before, but, you are doing now what I do professionally, and I am both paid money to do it and given a lot of time to do it in, and I still find it difficult. [Music begins: soft tones] So I think you should be proud of this interview and I think you’ve done a good job with those questions in as much as they’re reflective from me, they’re interesting for me, and it’s a selection of questions that I don’t think I remember being asked before, which makes this feel like a contribution that you value, which is good.\n\n(11:00)\tInterviewer\tI really was not fishing for anything. I just wanted a sound bite. But [Interviewer and Hannah laugh], I appreciate- [Soft tones music fades into jazzy piano music]\n(11:05)\tHannah\tHappy to provide.\n(11:15)\tNarrator\tNow that I had some formal training from Hannah, I figured it was time to test out some genuine conversation skills in real time. So I called up one of the best conversationalists I could think of, my friend Ben. Remembering Hannah’s advice I try to ask open-ended questions and show a genuine interest in the subject matter. Here’s me asking Ben about his own relationship to making conversation.\n(11:40)\tBen\t[Music ends] It used to be that it would happen on the fly. And then I was introduced to the phenomenologists and that really made a difference in the way that I speak. I can’t remember what made me stop and then start to hesitate before speaking, but there was some shift in second year university where all of a sudden the words that I was using, um, got caught.\nUh, and I started to have more trouble just speaking off the cuff. And then with Sarah Ahmed she writes about, and Alia Al-Saji both write about, uh, hesitating and stopping and how that might interrupt, uh, some unconscious sort of, well, racism that can, that can come out in speaking and just that has really, uh, that has really impacted the way that I have conversation with others. I think I hesitate, um, out of a fear of stepping into, out of a fear and also a care.\n\n(13:07)\tInterviewer\tI mean, that was a great answer. I really wasn’t expecting anything [laughs]. And because I, you know, the final form of this podcast is interested in the relation between speech and writing. It’s interesting to me that you’re kind of telling me you’re getting some of these ideas about how to speak from texts that you were encountering. Well, did you feel like it, this kind of fearful and careful speech is an imitation of text, or is that maybe not,\n(13:41)\tBen\tHuh. Huh.\n(13:43)\tInterviewer\tYeah.\n(13:44)\tBen\tI wonder, that’s a good question. I mean, as a, I mean, I think, I imagine that you are someone who, are you someone who is more comfortable with text then speech for that reason because of the hesitation? [Interviewer gasps]\n(13:59)\tInterviewer\tUm, I don’t know. I just, I also feel  similarly to you in that speech and speech patterns were molded so much from being in university and studying writing and, but, you know, there’s also, I think that the writing that happens in the classroom and also the kind of teaching in and outside also equally inform modes of speech. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t know, but interesting too that you’re using this metaphor too, of like the words getting caught, this sort of, yeah. Yeah. Interesting image of-\n(14:37)\tBen\tYeah. And I think mm-hmm. I think that when I am too thoughtful about what I say, well, I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking more about speaking from the heart, as opposed to speaking from my head. I think a lot of times I’m speaking from my head, especially when I’m having a higher level theoretical conversation with someone. But also, when I’m having an uncomfortable conversation with someone or a conversation where there’s a, there’s a power asymmetry, or we’re talking about a power asymmetry. [Music begins: calm tones] But oftentimes if I can manage to surrender that and speak from the heart, then I surprise myself with what comes out of my mouth. And, sometimes that can be a good thing.\n(15:41)\tInterviewer\t[Music ends] So beautiful. [Interviewer and Ben burst out laughing] It’s so weird. It’s like, I’m, I’m, I’m conscious thatI’m trying to interview you and I’m thinking about how this is gonna sound on the podcast, and also thinking about Yeah. Syncing up this audio and not wanting to interject too much [laughs] Like, woah, it’s such a great conversation. I wish I was just jumping in a little more, but, well, yeah. Let’s see.\nWe can, that can be an interesting reflection, I guess, later.  But, um, I, I also wanted to ask part, the reason why I wanted to interview you as well was I know that you spend a lot of time by yourself or at least last year when I knew you, you were kind of spending maybe two weeks at a time in your kind of cabin in the countryside. And I’m just curious, like if you spent, well, if you consider that time alone and if you spent any of that time talking to yourself?\n\n(16:45)\tBen\tMm-hmm.  I did spend a lot of time alone last year, and I haven’t spent very much time alone this year. And I almost feel a little bit lesser for it. I think it’s because of the conversations that I’m not able to have, but I don’t talk with myself too much when I’m alone. [Music begins: soft tones] I have really appreciated speaking to the non-human environment around me. [Sound effect: birds singing]\nThat was something that I think I got into a little bit more. And it has brought me  a lot of joy to be in, like a conversational relationality with the birds and the squirrels and the trees. And yeah. So it’s not something that I do regularly, but when I do do it, it feels pretty good. [Music and sound effects end]\n\n(17:45)\tInterviewer\tI mean, are you also writing down the things that you’re speaking aloud?\n(17:49)\tBen\tNot very often. Yeah. Not very often because I get, um, sometimes the hesitation. I feel that stronger when I’m writing. And oftentimes, like, this has happened a couple times recently where I’ve had friends request significant conversations over text. So, you know,  there’s a difficulty in our dynamic, and I’d like to attend to this with you in this text messenger format. And I’ve had to set a boundary and say it like, let’s call on the phone or  speak verbally because  when it comes to expressing myself, I really have a block  textually. I can write an essay, but  if I want to, um, yeah. If I want to articulate how I feel  I really struggle. I, it’s like pulling teeth, to get that into a paragraph that, that I can then read back and think, yeah, that’s, that’s how I felt.\n(19:06)\tInterviewer\tHmm. I’m trying to think about what question to ask you then about the relationship between speech and writing. Is it because?\n(19:17)\tBen\tWell, I-\n(19:17)\tInterviewer\tSpeaking is- no, you go.\n(19:20)\tBen\tThere’s just so much that I, I mean, I say this with trepidation to an English student [laughs].\n(19:28)\tInterviewer\tI really don’t know anything, don’t worry about it.\n(19:29)\tBen\tBut, okay. Well, just that, there’s a lot that I haven’t, there’s a lot that I can’t capture in writing, like the medium of writing doesn’t deal well with silence, [Music begins: instrumental and electronic] with pauses, with those little ums and ahs. And yeah. And that means that I think I really depend on those to express myself. And without them, there’s sort of a certainty that I don’t think is genuine to where I’m coming from.\nAnd there’s also, I’m just realizing this now as I’m thinking while speaking, there’s also a tugging that happens when you are in conversation like a requirement to finish the sentence. Whereas you can take however long you want to finish a sentence on paper.\n\n(20:42)\tInterviewer\tYeah. Well, there’s, I guess it’s something riskier about, I mean, this is a bit basic, but about speech in that it can’t be edited. But maybe that also speaks to, I think, your desire for it to feel. Hmm. Yeah. The real possibility-\n(21:00)\tBen\tYeah-\n(21:02)\tInterviewer\tOh, no, go.\n(21:04)\tBen\tIt’s the question of like, when you’re thinking of the art of talk, is the talk or the conversation, is the conversation the medium of the art? Or is it the object of the art? And, you know, maybe it’s the object of the art if you are featuring a conversation, a powerful conversation. But if it’s the medium and it can’t exist in any other, like by putting it into a podcast takes away, that’s something that, yeah, that’s something that really interests me is what is possible within the medium of conversation that isn’t possible in text or in recordings or in an image?\nYeah. Which is why I love, which is why I love live radio as opposed to a podcast, [Sound effect: radio voice talking and ends] because live radio seems to me it’s slightly more conversational and, huh. I love silence and radio silence, and the awkwardness of radio silence. I hope that you include it at least somewhere in your piece.\n\n(22:20)\tInterviewer\tYeah. What do you mean by radio silence?\n(22:23)\tBen\tOh, just this idea of dead silence and in an audio format that is to be avoided at all costs. Like, you know, you’re just, at least with radio, you’re just supposed to talk, you know, it doesn’t matter what you say, just don’t let it get silent, because that silence is so discomforting to someone who’s listening. Um, but I really, I really love that discomfort. [laughs]\n(22:51)\tInterviewer\tYeah. Well, I’m curious about that because most people don’t. In real life do you also like that discomfort?\n(23:01):\tBen\tUm, if there’s, [long pause]  depends on how it ends. It depends on how it ends. Sometimes it ends in conversation with an inability to find the other person, to attune yourself to them again. And the conversation falters and then it ends awkwardly. And that’s a horrible feeling. [laughs] But on the flip side, some of those uncomfortable silences have opened a space for a really deepened, beautiful connection. [Music begins: soft tones] And so maybe you can’t have one without the other.\n(23:58)\tNarrator\tBen’s conversation left me thinking much about the differences between conversation and the written word. For Ben, the genuineness of the encounter, or in his words, a deep and beautiful connection is made possible only because of the failings of conversation. The fact that it can hesitate, stumble, or lag into silence. Writing feels disingenuous to speech then, in Ben’s terms, because we don’t have the notation to represent these hesitations in the first place.\nIt’s the same way Isaac Pittman, a British teacher felt when reading the London journals in the early 1900’s. Reporters at that time, he felt, didn’t accurately transcribe parliamentary speeches they were reporting on. Rather, they recorded them in the way they were accustomed to writing. That is to say, in grammatical English, but spoken English, as Ben gestured to, isn’t grammatical. People “um” and, “uh”, or more accurately to the Britain of the time,” irm” and, “uh”. In order to better capture these noises, Pitman invented phonography, a new system of shorthand that would allow for a more exact registration of speech than ordinary writing could claim.\n\nAs Ivan Kreilkamp writes, “shorthand promised not simply an efficient system of information storage, but a means by which writing might be infused with orality and the living breath of vocal articulation.” One photographic manual went so far as to claim that phonography would indeed render a greater service to mankind than the discovery of a new world.\n\n(25:23)\tNewspaper Boy\tExtra, extra! Read all about it!\n(25:26)\tNarrator\tPhonography was interestingly enough, essential to the writing career of one Charles Dickens, who learned the craft first as a court stenographer, and later as a newspaper reporter of public speeches. As Kreilkamp writes, “Dickens characteristic style, the vivid immediacy of his character’s voices owes a significant debt to the shorthand mastery that meant so much to him.” Indeed, Dickens’ experience with phonography was essential to pioneering a new type of Victorian realism. Where before a novelist like Jane Austen might present a highly stylized representation of conversation, as in some sense, speech itself, Dickens shorthand could more accurately represent conversation generally. All the speech patterns and mannerisms of the characters in his novels have a corresponding sign where every sign represents a real life sound.\n(26:12)\tScrooge\tBah humbug!\n(26:13)\tNarrator\tDickens’ mastery of phonographic shorthand led some people to consider him something of a writing machine. Here Dickens describes the mechanical movement of his writing hand when listening to a dull speech.\n(26:25)\tCharles Dickens\tI sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old way. And sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the tablecloth taking an imaginary note of it all.\n(26:37)\tNarrator\tDickens’ idea of a mimetic representation of speech in writing mirrors my own experience putting my conversation with Ben through my computer’s automatic transcription software. Going over the transcript I noticed the prevalence of one word over any other one my computer spells h-m-m.\n(26:55)\tBen\tHmm.\n(26:56)\tNarrator\tIf automatic transcription exists in Pitman’s words, to eliminate all ambiguity from language by creating a one-to-one correspondence between sound and sign, what exactly does this sound signify? Let’s replay the tape. [Sound effect: tape rewinds]\n(27:11)\tInterviewer\tI know that you spend a lot of time by yourself-\n(27:16)\tBen\tHmm. [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:16)\tInterviewer\t-or at least in the classroom, and also the kind of teaching in-\n(27:20)\tBen\tHmm. [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:20)\tInterviewer\tAnd it can’t be edited.\n(27:23)\tBen\tHmm.  [Sound effect: tape fastforwarding]\n(27:25)\tNarrator\t[Music begins: jazzy piano] On its own I find the “hmm” sound has a soothing quality unto itself. It seems I’m not the only one with this mysterious intuition. In his book, What Makes Speech Patterns Expressive, for example, the linguist Reuven Tsur looks at sound patterns in six “especially tender” poems by the Hungarian poet, Sándor Petőfi, and finds that what they have in common is an unusually high frequency of the “m” phoneme.\nThere’s this 1995 study by British linguist David Crystal that seems to confirm the poetic mode of speech perception Tsur writes about can’t be separated from the way we perceive speech more generally. What Crystal did was pull a whole bunch of writers alongside the general population, and found that they all agreed one of the prettiest and most relaxing consonant phonemes, at least in received British pronunciation, was the M Sound.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nAt the same time, I also read this M or “mm” sound in my conversation as a sign of responsiveness or attention to the conversation at hand. Here’s Irving Goffman on the discursive power of this word: [Music begins: electronic]\n\n“In conversation, there are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works, to attract the attention of the interlocutor, or to confirm his continued attention. Are you listening or in Shakespearean diction, lend me your ears. And on the other end of the wire mm-hmm.”\n\n(28:47):\tPhone Voice 2\tCan you hear me?\n(28:48)\tNarrator\tThis sound, in other words, is an expression of the state of a social relationship, one in which one participant consents to their continued participation therein. I noticed in my conversation with Ben that the sound also acts as a way of vocalizing or making legible what would be an otherwise silent listening practice. To learn more about this noise and its relationship to listening more generally I decided it was time to consult another expert.\n[Music ends] [Sound effect: phone number dialing]\n\n(29:15)\tMirdhula\tI’m Mirdhula and I am a peer supporter at the Concordia Gender Advocacy Center.\n(29:22)\tInterviewer\tPerfect. That’s great. And just for people who maybe don’t know, what does a peer supporter, what does that role look like?\n(29:29)\tMirdhula\tSo, as a peer supporter, you can actually come in and we can provide you with a space where you can feel validated and where you can experience any feelings that you’re feeling and maybe not feel so alone in those feelings. Because we’re not certified professionals, we don’t offer advice. But that’s kind of the concept of peer support.\nIt’s to offer validation and to remove that power struggle between a mental health professional and the person seeking support. So the way we even out that power struggle is by being  a person who doesn’t lead the conversation, doesn’t offer advice. We purely let the person navigate their feelings in however way they would like to. Whether it’s in silence, whether it’s just going on a rant, we don’t control the conversation in any way.\n\n(30:30)\tInterviewer\tYeah. I’m so interested in this really particular form of conversation because it’s a different form of conversation than we’re used to. What does it look like for you as a peer supporter to not lead a conversation? What actual kind of methods are you employing to signal to the other person that it’s their time to talk?\n(30:50)\tMirdhula\t[Music begins: quiet drum beat]\nBasically, as a peer supporter, we specifically received training, because it’s not something that comes very natural to everybody. We’re taught to constantly kind of riff off of what people are saying and to keep a conversation going. The importance of keeping a conversation going is really important in our society. But what I had learned personally, what really was like, so jarring to me in this training was how much I felt like I needed to quickly respond to things and not actually listen to what people were telling me. And to exist in the silence that is required to really think about what people are telling me, you know?\n\nBut some methods that we use, including [laughs] incorporating some silence to give people time to think is reflection. So we reflect what the people are telling us. And what that is, is like not assuming any emotions that somebody may be feeling unless they explicitly express that they’re feeling those feelings, and to kind of mirror what they are telling us in order to validate what they’re telling us. So that they don’t feel any pressure to feel a certain way or to even figure out how they’re feeling, but to really just live in that moment.\n\n(32:14)\tInterviewer\tAre you conscious about other kinds of gestures or things like nodding your head, like, I’m really interested in, in the technical aspect. What other kind of signals besides sitting in silence can you show to somebody that you’re paying attention to?\n(32:28)\tMirdhula\tSo, this has been my saving grace as for my impulsivity. Like, basically the replacement for every single interjection that I wanna insert, because I always wanna, I’m very expressive in the face, vocally. Anything you were just saying, every time I nod my head, it’s me preventing myself from being vocal about it. And that’s also a skill that we learned. We learned about different ways of expressing your validation, or sorry, expressing your validation by nodding your head. And for me, that’s a big one. And then the “mm-hmms”. And the “oh, yes, of course”. Like, I try not to use too many cop outs. So there are some, there’s some terminology that could be seen as surface level, like, oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about that. They really tell us to avoid terms like that just because it can come off as insincere.\nAnd sometimes we just say that. So sometimes when we apologize for somebody and offer them our pity, it could be seen as us trying to get through our discomfort with their feelings. So I try to stick to the “mm-hmm” and “yes”, like just very simple terms for validation. But the head nodding is big for me. It’s my, one of my biggest ways of validating what someone is saying to me. [laughs]\n\n(34:06)\tInterviewer\tIt’s interesting to me that you’re talking about how you’re such an expressive person. I mean, it’s coming through just in the interview. It seems to me like part of peer support isn’t getting rid of that personality. It’s about mobilizing expression in a way that feels really conscious and sincere. And yeah. This is something actually, I think a big part of the podcast is that I’m really interested in words like “mm-hmm” or sounds that we signal to someone that we’re paying attention, that aren’t necessarily words, but they do signify something. Do you feel like you’re using those more in your everyday speech now?\n(34:44)\tMirdhula\tDefinitely.I’ve noticed, like with this training, I’ve noticed more how much I was rushing through conversations in my day-to-day life. So these are my tools to stay more grounded and to be more present in those conversations. So I definitely, like, even my friends have actually noticed a difference. They’re like, I’ve really felt heard, and I thought that was so amazing. It’s really validating to feel like you can give someone, you can give someone a safe space with just a head nod and a few, like, sounds, you know, like validating sounds, and I think it’s really powerful. Um, but the “mm-hmm,” that’s like my big one, that’s my big validation sound. [laughs]\n(35:33)\tInterviewer\tAnd it also makes me think about, you know, the particular dynamics of talking on the phone with someone, like in peer support, it seems like body language is really important, but in a context like this, you know, especially if we couldn’t see each other, then those words become a lot more helpful.\n(35:53)\tMirdhula\tThey’re an anchor.\n(35:54)\tInterviewer\tHmm. Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it.\n(35:56)\tMirdhula\tLike that! There you go. Yeah. You got it. [Mirdhula and Interviewer laugh]\n(36:02)\tInterviewer\tOkay. Great. Thanks. Well, that was super helpful. I won’t take up any more of your time unless there’s one nugget of wisdom you wanna share us with me? [Music begins: soft tones]\n(36:09)\tMirdhula\t[laughs] Nugget of wisdom. That’s a lot of pressure. [laughs]. Um, honestly, this training alone, I’ve felt transformed. I know that’s so dramatic, but I’ve truly felt transformed. It was very difficult to face these things because they feel like failures at first. But when you can face them, and that’s what they teach you to do, to face these things that are so ingrained in your person, these dynamics of conversation that are so drilled into us, like from a young age, to face that and to realize that I can change, it’s like, it’s, it’s a different kind of education that I’ve received in my lifetime.\nIt’s a different type of learning. And I really had to accept that I wouldn’t be comfortable in it. I had to accept the discomfort of changing the way that I communicate and connect with people. And I think that is so powerful and so important for people to experience in life. So what they’re doing at the center is just amazing. I am so happy to be a part of something, something so groundbreaking.\n\n(37:22)\tNarrator\tMirdhula’s conversation helps me reframe this noise, not just as a signal of responsiveness, but of genuine responsiveness. Interestingly, it seems to me that the authenticity of this responsiveness comes from a failure to speak or find the appropriate words to say in the first place.\nIndeed, both Ben and Mirdhula talked about silence’s ability to create a sense of meaningful connection between speakers when faced with a difficult conversational situation. Maybe then, what we can say of this noise is that it’s a sonic representation similar to what Goffman writes about eye contact. It allows us to quote, “monitor one another’s mutual perceiving and develop a heightened sense of moral responsibility” for both participants’ speech acts.\n\n(38:03)\tPhone Voice 1\tI have a confession to make. I’ve noticed that ever since talking to Ben and Mirdhula, I’ve been making this hmm humming noise more often than I ever have. [Music Ends]\n(38:14)\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, that sounds like a good thing, right?\n(38:16)\tPhone Voice 1\tYeah. Although I have to wonder, how can I be sure it’s not just an imitation of responsiveness? Or like, I’m worried I’m modeling my own speech patterns on them because I wanna be read as someone who’s responsive. Didn’t Hannah say something like that? Hang on, let me find it. [Sound Effect: Tape rewinding]\n  (38:34):\tHannah\tAnd you get very good in a slightly pathological way at mirroring people. You become very good at matching somebody else’s conversation style. If they crack jokes, you crack jokes. If they take it more seriously, you take it more seriously, and you catch yourself doing it in non-professional situations and you realize that it is really quite a creepy thing to do. [Sound Effect: Tape fastforwarding]\n(39:02):\tPhone Voice 2\tIt still surprises me that you know how to do that.\n(39:05)\tPhone Voice 1\tOkay, but can we get back to this issue? How do I know if I’m being genuinely responsive and not just mirroring responsiveness in a performative or worse still, pathological way? I’m thinking of something Isaac Pitman said about phonographic shorthand, that it would eliminate all ambiguity from speech and writing by creating this kind of perfect correspondence between speech and science.\nBut doesn’t the hmm noise evade signification in some way? Or like, isn’t it a representation of the ambiguity of the silence generated by awkward or difficult conversation? I just worry I’m imitating Ben and Mirdhula becoming like Charles Dickens, but instead of a writing machine, I’ve become this speaking machine, a kind of automatic generator of conversational noise.\n\n(39:48):\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, let me ask you this. What is genuine anyway?\n(39:52):\tPhone Voice 1\tOkay, Socrates, take it easy.\n(39:54):\tPhone Voice 2\tNo, for real. That was a real question or object of scholarly inquiry. I was just reading about the invention of the typewriter and its relationship to the development of the aesthetics of modernist poetry. It made it so that language could be edited down to seem artificial, and it also at the same time made the mechanical reproduction of poetry easier. So it was this kind of generation of distance and proliferation that made poetry’s intent… Hmm… Unclear. It’s what led people to think of modernist poetry as insincere. They thought they were being duped somehow.\n(40:25):\tPhone Voice 1\tIt’s funny, the ambiguity surrounding the intent of modernist poetry reminds me of some conversations I’ve had about David Antin. Have you heard of him? [Phone Voice 2 affirms with a “mhmm”]\nHe was this conceptual artist who in the 1960s started performing these improvised talk poems at readings and exhibitions. What he would do is come up with a theme beforehand, or sometimes whoever was getting him to perform would give him the preassigned topic, and then he would talk off the cuff sometimes for an hour, hour and a half at a time.\n\nMeanwhile, he would use a tape recorder to record the whole thing, then go home and transcribe the work onto the page. But even before the transcription, Antin was really adamant that what he was doing wasn’t just talk or like a means to communicate something else through it. Rather, his talk was actually poetry. It had this distinct aesthetic quality.\n\n(41:09)\tPhone Voice 2\tLet me get this straight. The talk itself wasn’t necessarily adhering to a regular meter or rhyme? So what is it about the practice that makes talk poetry?\n(41:18)\tPhone Voice 1\tWell, that’s part of it, right? What enabled Antin to define his talk as poetry was that he had defined himself as a poet from the outset. You know, someone who gets contracted to perform poetry allowed at universities. And actually most of his poems are preoccupied with the institutional forces that make something like poetry happen or legible in the first place.\nLiterally, the opening lines from the written text of “Talking at the Boundaries” starts with him recounting getting contracted to perform the poem. Antin writes, “when I agreed to come here to Indiana, Barry Alpert didn’t have a title for what I was gonna talk about. I think maybe he forgot to ask me, which was I suppose just as well.” And on and on and on. [Sound Effect: Take being put in player and someone pressing start]\n\n(42:01)\tClip of David Antin  from “Talking at the Boundaries”\tWhen, uh, I agreed to come out here to talk, Barry didn’t have a title for what I was going to talk about. I think maybe he forgot to ask me, and I think it probably didn’t make a terrible great difference. Uh, it was probably six or one half dozen or the other, whatever you called it. But, uh, he did wind up with a title, which somehow reached me, some voucher form came back to me in the mail that I had to sign, and then I signed in the wrong place and I had to sign it again.\nBut on it, it said what I was gonna talk about. And I was very relieved because, uh, until then I thought I would have to find out myself. But it said, “talking at the boundaries.” And, uh, I think in a way it was kind of a great piece of good fortune to encounter my subject on a voucher and in a sense… [Audio fades] [Sound Effect: Tape stops]\n\n(42:55):\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. That’s interesting. On one hand, I can see how Antin’s self-consciousness about the institution of poetry can be read as kind of maddening or self-indulgent. On the other hand, well, I don’t know, like, do you consider the talk poem a genuine work of poetry? Or-\n[overlapping]\n\n(43:10)\tPhone Voice 1\t-Well, I guess-\n(43:12):\tPhone Voice 2\t-I dunno. Oh, no, sorry. You Go ahead-\n(43:13)\tPhone Voice 1\tNo, I was just gonna say, well, yeah, I guess the proliferation of new recording technologies like the typewriter in the case of modernist poetry or the tape recorder Antin used to record as poems generate a kind of multiplicity of artworks in our society that don’t necessarily allow for the focus or time or one-on-one interactions required to establish sincerity.\nLeonard Diepeveen argues that because of this in the 20th century, people had to come to rely more and more on news signs of sincerity, like the professional certification to attest to a person or a work’s genuineness. I think Antin’s playing with this idea, his poems are sincere in so much as they’re insincere. He knows he needs to market himself as a professional poet or performing artist to get the university to pay him to perform in the first place. But then again…\n\n(44:01)\tPhone Voice 2\tThen again?\n(44:02):\tPhone Voice 1\tI don’t know, it seems to me like the talk poems portray so much an interest in conversation in the first place. Like, there’s this funny conversation, Antin recounts between him and his cab driver in “Talking at the Boundaries”. Here, I’ll play the clip. [Sound Effect: Tape being put in player and starting]\n(44:18):\tClip of David Antin from “Talking at the Boundaries”\tAnd he said things were like that then. He says, it’s not like that now. He says, now everybody’s got money. He says, I don’t have money. He says, everybody’s got money. My children now have money. He says, so much money. He told me they sent me to Israel for my vacation. I said, they sent you to Israel for your vacation. I said, was it dangerous? Uh, he said, um, he said, well, dangerous. He says, like, they said to me, what do you want? Do you want to go to the islands? What do you want? They’ll send you, they’ll send you anywhere. What do you want? And he said, I’ll go to Israel. So I went to Israel. I said, for long? Did you get a good look at it? What was it like? He said, well, he said, I really saw it. He said, I was there for five days. He said, one of those tours you got at Athens and Rome, and then you go to Israel. And I said, that’s great. I said, you know, like, uh, did you stay in one place for the five days? He said, no. He says, I went all around. He says it’s a very interesting place. [Audio fades] [Sound effect: Tape ends]\n(45:09):\tNarrator\tNotice how many times in this clip Antin repeats the word, said, his recollection of verbatim dialogue signals to me, this kind of sincere interest in the poetics of talk more generally, the way it generates this rich, sad, and often funny social life we co-create or yeah, I guess it returns to talk this kind of especially poetic quality.\nAnd for me, these rambling kind of elliptical accounts of other conversations that populate Antin’s work, they’re doing something like Erving Goffman’s idea about eye contact. They don’t mean anything but a desire to participate in social life in the first place. I see in Anton’s preoccupation with representing conversation in literature, my own preoccupation with the study of literature. I’m interested in books the way I’m interested in people.\n\n(45:57):\tPhone Voice 2\tThat’s nice. [laughs] A little cheesy, but nice.\n(46:02):\tPhone Voice 1\tDo you want me to open up to you or not? [laughs] No, that’s actually fair of you to make fun of me for that. I maybe wasn’t being totally sincere. And by that I mean I was actually quoting someone else. This book critic Parul Sehgal. I’m thinking about an interview where she’s asked about the initial process of marking up a book for review. Here, let me pull it up. [Sound effect: Old Dial Up sound effect]\n(46:25):\tParul Sehgal\tMy inclinations are so much, I think maybe a little eccentric in the sense that I’m interested in the way that texts can be like people, you know, they can falter, they can fumble, they can have secrets from themselves. They can be very flawed and very, very beautiful and very, very noble. All of these adjectives, I think, are more interesting to me than good or best even.\n(46:45):\tPodcast Host\tSo, you’re, you’re sort of like figuring out what you think as you write.\n(46:48)\tParul Sehgal\tYeah, I think that I only think when I’m writing, I think it just goes blank when I’m not writing. [laughs]\n(46:53)\tPodcast Host\tLike you’re not taking like, uh-\n(46:54):\tParul Sehgal\tNo, I take notes. I take notes and I’m like in the margins and it’s just like, you know, all my gormless checks and, you know, um, sad faces and all that’s happening there. But-\n(47:01):\tPodcast Host\tWait, you use sad faces.\n(47:03):\tParul Sehgal\t[laughs] All kinds of embarrassing marginalia.\n(47:07)\tPodcast Host\tBut tell me about it. No, but it’s, I want to know how you do your job!\n(47:08)\tParul Sehgal\tI mean, I, I talk a lot back to the book in the margins. You know, um, there’s definitely a lot of, I mean it’s stuff some, some of it, I’m flagging it for myself, but there is also a real way that, yeah, you’re reading this book and you’re reacting to it constantly, you know? I’m not gonna give you any more embarrassing stories about you. No [laughs]. I know, but yeah. But it’s, I mean like it’s-\n \n\n(47:32):\tPhone Voice 1\tI’m interested in the way Sehgal frames the initial critical impulse as a kind of conversation, what she refers to as “talking back to the book in the margins.” Funny too, that this marginalia, really the work of the book critic, should be seen as something embarrassing, maybe because it’s too sincere or impressionistic to be taken for a professional practice. Or maybe because talking back to the book in the margins too closely resembles talking to yourself, which at least in our society is kind of a faux pas.\n(48:02)\tPhone Voice 2\tIs it? I wouldn’t know.\n(48:05)\tPhone Voice 1\t[laughs] [And then sarcastically] Oh my God, so funny. Haha.\n[Seriously]\n\nNo, but I mean, speaking about things that are embarrassingly sincere, talking to Ben and Mirdhula reminded me of the way I sometimes markup favorite passages for my own text with this kind of shorthand,  m m m, which stands for hmm. But when I think about it, I only really do it for passages that really moved me, but I can’t quite articulate why.\n\n(48:34)\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. This kind of initial sonic or onomatopoeic response to text you’re talking about is reminding me of a passage from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. I’ll pull it up. Although be warned, it’s kind of sexy, [laughs] Ahem, here it is:\n[Music Begins: soft electronic tones]\n\n“Writing aloud is not phonological, but phonetic, its aim is not the clarity of messages. What it searches for are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh. A text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal\n\nstereophony.”\n\n[Music ends]\n\nI guess I take Barthes’ idea of reading aloud as a kind of metaphor for the sonic aspect of the way text elicits a bodily response. I read into your own marginalia a kind of textual representation of the sonic expression of the way text moves you. That hmm, is articulated as a kind of expressivism incident, to use Barthe’s terms. It makes me think too of Wordsworth, you know, for him what sincerity was, was expression itself, which is interesting, right? Because that word means two things. There’s artistic expression and then expression as vocalization.\n\nThe romantic idea of expression is tied mostly to a sense of overwhelming emotion that needs to be expelled from the body somehow. And they developed conventions for this in writing that epitaph or the elegy were seen as more sincere because they were tied so strongly to this overwhelming emotion. But I guess from Barthes, we also get the sense that emotion is so overwhelming it can’t necessarily be bound by any form.\n\nThe response that elicits from you is totally bodily. I see a parallel to this idea in Ben’s sense that conversation is more sincere than writing because it’s less conventional. It can’t be edited in real time. Or maybe the lack of the edit is its own convention, which is symbolized for me, at least by this hmm noise. [Music Begins: jazzy piano] And to return to Barthes, there’s pleasure in that, I think.\n\n(50:31)\tPhone Voice 1\tWait, what do you mean “there’s pleasure in that”?\n(50:34)\tPhone Voice 2\tWell, for me it’s the pleasure of recognition. I see my own ability to hesitate in speech in someone else’s, and that suits me. You know, this version of me that’s always rehearsing what I’m gonna say and then inevitably fumbles when the time comes.\n(50:46)\tPhone Voice 1\tNow, I didn’t think you did so bad there.\n(50:49):\tPhone Voice 2\t[laughs] You mean that?\n(50:51)\tPhone Voice 1\tI do. I really, really do.\n(50:58)\tPhone Voice 2\tHmm. [laughs] Hmm.\n(51:01)\tNarrator\tOkay. Time to cut the tape. Enough of this genuine conversation. I talk about this too much. [Music ends]\nSpecial thanks to Hannah Cogan, Ben Heywood-MacLeod and  Mirdhula Kannapathapillai. Although their audio didn’t make the cut, my conversations with Alia Hazineh, Barbara Saldana, and Matt Fyfe informed a part of my thinking for this podcast. [Music Begins: Soft tones with the sound of wind rushing through trees]\n\nThe inimitable Matthew King performed the voice of Charles Dickens.\n\n(51:31)\tScrooge\tBa humbug! [Music ends]\n(51:47):\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music Begins: SpokenWeb outro music]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Francis Grace Fife, an MA student at Concordia University, and a research assistant on the Concordia SpokenWeb team.\n\nOur supervising producer is Kate Moffatt, our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to the interviewees and voice actors of the episode, Hannah Kogan, Ben Haywood, Mirdhula Kannapathapillai, and Matthew King. And thanks to Jason Camlot for providing early initial script and audio feedback.\n\n[Music fades into the SpokenWeb theme music]\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades and ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9596","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E5, The Affordances of Sound, 6 March 2023, Eastwood"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-affordances-of-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/b3e0dc23-17dd-48c0-baf1-37efbe9e6ac2/audio/b69f4a17-24df-4ac2-b188-4b76a967ed1f/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e5.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:53:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"51,756,765 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e5\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-affordances-of-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-03-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. 1992. ‘General Introduction’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.\\n\\nBrinkmann, M. (2018) The ‘audio walk’ as a format of experiential walking, Phenomenological research in education. Available at: https://paed.ophen.org/2018/06/25/gehen-spazieren-flanieren-das-format-audiowalk-als-erfahrungsgang/\\n\\nCardiff, J. and Miller, G.B. (no date) Walks, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Available at: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/\\n\\nGrint, K. and Woolgar, S. 1997. The Machine At Work. Cambridge: Polity.\\n\\nHutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42856294. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.\\n\\nKellough, Kaie, et al. “‘Small Stones’: A Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography.” “Small Stones”: a Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography – SpokenWeb Archive of the Present, https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/small-stones-a-work-in-poetry-sound-music-and-typography/.\\n\\nLevine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine, host. “The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts, Season 3, Episode 5.\\n\\nMills, Mara. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015. “deafness” p.45-54.\\n\\nRicci, Stephanie. The Making of “Small Stones” (2021) SpokenWeb Archive of the Present. SpokenWeb.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549535850496,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What is sound design? This is the question Miranda Eastwood, current Sound Designer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, is looking to find out. Exploring soundscapes of all shapes and forms, Miranda draws from interviews with friends, colleagues, and academics, as well as Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network to tackle this particularly tangled question. From sonic literature to audio walks, podcasting to music, this episode is a deep dive into what it means to “sound out” any and all audio texts, and the affective power afforded to sound as a medium of art and communication.\n\n(00:05)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\n(00:34)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Back in 2019, when the first episode of the SpokenWeb podcast was coming together, a big question for our team was, what do we want the podcast to sound like? We ended up deciding that we didn’t want to be prescriptive.\nWe wanted SpokenWeb researchers listening to the podcast and thinking about pitching an episode themselves to really know that the podcast welcomes all approaches when it comes to what your research about sound sounds like, and that we are there as an editorial team to collaboratively shape the sound design of each episode. But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about sound design? Fast forward to the fall of 2020 in Jason Camlot’s grad seminar at Concordia University on sonic approaches, where current spoken web podcast, sound designer Miranda Eastwood, was faced with the question, what is sound design?\n\nThe question of sound design sent Miranda Eastwood on an epic sonic journey, armed with their own experience, scholarly literature on the topic, and interviews with a wide ranging cast of individuals engaging in sound design in their own work. This episode, whens its way through both the theoretical and the practical.\n\nThe episode itself is exploring the affordances of sound, including how the medium is both a form to be used and a space in which to play. What does it sound like to ask the question, “what is sound design” on a podcast all about literary sound? Well, that’s what you are about to hear. Here’s episode five of season four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, The Affordances of Sound. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music plays and then fades]\n\n(2:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[deep breath] Yeah, okay. [Piano music begins]\n(02:45)\tElevator\tSixth floor.\n(02:47):\tMiranda Eastwood\tAlright, come on. Here we go. [sound effect: footsteps walking]\nWe’re in the English Department right now at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal. I’m Miranda, by the way. I’m also currently the sound designer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and right now I’m taking you to Professor Jason Camlot’s weekly seminar course, Sonic Approaches. [sound effect: door opens] [piano music ends]\n\n(03:12)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSo I was doing my presentation on podcasting in Jason’s seminar.\n(03:16)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI just finished one of our assignments, a presentation.\n(03:20)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd I kept throwing around the term sound design.\n(03:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI volunteered to go on the week in which we covered scholarly podcasting.\n(03:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tLike, remember to start thinking about sound design early on, or you might want to consider sound design before you start recording, you know, stuff like that.\n(03:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBig surprise.\n(03:39)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tThen Jason says something along the lines of we’re going to move on, but we’ll circle back to that term, Miranda, and we’ll get you to tell everyone what sound design is. And I just blanked, I just blanked for 30 seconds because I was sitting there like, I don’t know what sound design is.\n(04:01)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[Piano music begins] Oh boy. The sound designer doesn’t know what sound design is.\n(04:05)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOr at least, I know what it is, but I don’t, I don’t know how to describe it. Not in a way that makes any sense.\n(04:13)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo I did some research.\n(04:15)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tYou know, Google doesn’t count as research, right?\n(04:18)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd I got some definitions.\n(04:21)\tMultiple Voices\t[Piano music fades and ends] The art and practice of creating soundtracks for a variety of needs, creating the audio, the craft of creating an old term, which describes….\n(04:31)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tThese definitions. They don’t tell you anything. Some of them are too specific or too vague or they focus in on one aspect of the process. They describe one design choice rather than the series of choices as a whole or, or these definitions don’t even begin to cover the question. It’s too big. This…\n(04:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis could be a podcast episode.\n(05:02)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\t[Piano music begins and ends] Ah, okay.\n(05:03)\tJason Camlot\tSo where are you at with things?\n(05:05)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWell, maybe I’ll just, I’ll do like a quick speed run of my outline. It’s no,t like this is really…\n(05:11)\tMiranda Eastwood\tReally fast forward a week or two or three. Let me get the syllabus.\n(05:16)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThere’s gonna be a lot of back and forth. There’s a lot of overlap between…\n(05:20)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSee, part of the seminar course was the option to tackle a long form podcast.\n(05:26)\tJason Camlot\tAre you doing short form, longform?\n(05:27)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYes.\n(05:29)\tJason Camlot\tOkay.\n(05:29):\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAbsolutely. Why on earth would I write an essay when I could make a podcast?\n(05:33)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Laughs] So like, would any good student I pitched my idea to Jason.\n(05:37)\tJason Camlot\tOn air! [Laughs]. Hi, I’m Jason. I’m a professor in the department of English at Concordia University and a Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound studies.\n(05:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tDo you have that, is that like a script in your head that you just like…\n(05:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tLike I mentioned, this all started with his seminar.\n(05:55)\tJason Camlot\tPutting your key concepts front and centre…\n(05:58)\tMiranda Eastwood (05:58)\tSo I got some feedback and he gave me a book. Forms: Whole. Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Carolyn Levine. Good book. Great book. And I’m going to be using it to build a roadmap, so to speak, based off Levine’s concepts of forms and of affordances.\n(06:19)\tJason Camlot\tAnd reminding us of them, you know and sort of making it almost like a quest narrative for…\n(06:26)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tA quest narrative. I like that. I like that a lot.\n(06:33)\tMiranda Eastwood\tA quest! [Videogame music plays and ends] Here’s our game plan. [Soft electronic music begins]\nWe’re going to rely on Levine’s five main ideas about forms in order to navigate different genres of sound. What are the five ideas?\n\n(06:44)\tMultiple Voices\tForms. differ, forms do political work in particular historical context, forms travel, forms, constraints, various forms, overlap and intersect.\n(06:55)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhat are the genres?\n(06:56)\tMultiple Voices\tVoice, podcasting, music, audio walks and sound effects.\n(07:01)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDid you get all that?\n(07:02):\tMultiple Voices\tUh no.\n(07:04):\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’ll come back to them. Tackle them one by one. Our weapon of choice: affordances. Paraphrasing from Levine, who’s borrowing from design theory, “Affordances are the potential actions or uses of a material based on, well, the object itself, the teapot, for example, is very good at what it does because its form and material lend themselves to pouring tea and keeping hot liquids contained. This is due partially to the ceramic and partially to the fact that the teapot has a spout and a handle.”\nAnother example, this one’s from Levine, is the doorknob. A doorknob affords not only hardness and durability, but also turning, pushing and pulling. Outside of its design, certain materials and forms can also have unexpected affordances, like using a chair to get to that top shelf or substituting a mug for a flower pot. Likewise, forms also have limitations, but we’ll get to that later. For now, we’re going to use this idea of affordances as a blade.\n\n[Sound effect: Sword unsheathing]\n\nYes. A sword that will help us cut through the jungle of interconnected forms and navigate the landscape of genre, right up to the moment where we face the ultimate question. Our proverbial dragon. What is sound design? [Music fades and ends]\n\n(08:46):\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[People talking in the background] Excuse me. Pardon. Scusez. Merci. Sorry. Phew.\n(08:49):\tMiranda Eastwood\tHey, how’s it going? I’m not late, am I? Good? Good. We’re sitting in the crowd at the Casa del Popolo. It’s March, 2020. Kaie Kellough, Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and Jason Sharp are performing their piece tonight, Small Stones. While they’re setting up, I thought we could talk a bit about forms. Yeah. I’ve been throwing the concept of form around like a hacky sack, so I figured I should explain beyond the main ideas. Going back to Levine… Forms are a sort of indication, an arrangement or pattern, a shape, something identifiable. Sounds vague? Yeah, it kind of is, but this inclusive definition allows us to break down Levine’s ideas and use them to our advantage. The first main idea we’ll look at is this:\n(09:51)\t(onstage) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking on stage] Forms differ.\n(09:53)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDistinct forms are different from each other. Easy enough, right? Right. [Sound effect of mic feedback] Oh, they’re just about ready to start. [background talking spots]\n(10:05)\tJason Sharp (off mic, barely audible)\tSo like we, we do what we were just doing…\n(10:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI thought it’d be nice to start here with Kellough, with voice, the voice as it’s featured in poetry, music, podcasting, everywhere and anywhere in audio texts. [Sound effect of mic feedback] [Calm electronic music begins]\nI think it’s a good way to explore this idea of forms differing from one another because this voice, this performance, we’re about to hear… this never happened. [Music ends]\n\n(10:37)\t(onstage) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking on stage]\nHi. Hey. Yeah. Does anyone remember March, 2020? COVID 19. “Small Stones” was originally planned as a live performance.\n\n(10:49)\tKaie Kellough\tThis work was supposed to be a performance, like a live in-person performance.\n(10:53)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Kaie Kellough, from an interview from “The Making of Small Stones”.\n(11:00)\tKaie Kellough\tBut because of COVID, that was no longer possible because this was originally scheduled, I think for 2020.\n(11:06)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis migration of form, from a physical space to a virtual space. I mean, it begs the question: how does this change the nature of the piece itself?\n(11:17)\tKaie Kellough\tIt was generally decided that an in-person performance wouldn’t work as well, and it would be very complex because we would need to rent a venue if we wanted to present a live performance.\n(11:31)\tMiranda Eastwood\tKatherine McLeod, current host of the podcast actually had a talk with Kellough about this exact topic, but from an alternate angle. In ShortCuts Season 3, “The Voice That Is The Poem”, Katherine and Kaie revisit a piece he performed as part of an online Words and Music show. In that interview, he talks about the difference between a live piece and a studio-produced piece, the exact opposite of what we were just discussing.\n(11:58)\tKaie Kellough\tThere’s a raw, rawer quality to it than… Like, if this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio, right? It would’ve been created exclusively as an audio piece, and there would’ve been really limited emphasis on the visual aspect of performance and that communication with an audience, it would’ve been a much more, it would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object.\n(12:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Quiet string music begins]\nThe voice, manifested in these separate situations has its own set of affordances, even if as Levine tells us, no one has yet taken advantage of those possibilities and also to their limits, the restrictions intrinsic to particular materials and organizing principles.\n\n(12:41)\tKaie Kellough\tIn the studio, it’s a bit different. You wind up assembling the piece part by part.\n(12:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou can manipulate the voice in different ways.\n(12:49)\tKaie Kellough\tAnd then if you can overlap them or layer them or have them speak across one another and sometimes sync up and sometimes diverge, then it becomes not just multiple voices, but it becomes an interplay among multiple voices, sort of directed movement. [String music ends]\n(13:09)\tJason Sharp\tDoing so in the studio gives us a really unique opportunity to use the studio as an instrument.\n(13:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Jason Sharp, the musician behind “Small Stones”.\n(13:19)\tJason Sharp\tIt allows us to kind of, to compose using a wider sonic palette while still being sourced with just a saxophone and voice.\n(13:30)\tMiranda Eastwood\tRestricting the performance to a studio, then, can open or widen the soundscape of a piece.\n(13:36)\tKaie Kellough\tAnd then what happens when you have multiple voices? What do you do with them?\n(13:39)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAn affordance, born of limitation.\n(13:42)\tKaie Kellough\tWe’re trying to take a very broad approach to sound. So everything from sharp high screams to low brassy pulses like you’re hearing now. [Low electronic music begins] We’re trying to explore sound. So sound, to me, also relates to exploration and listening.\n(14:04)\t[Beginning of\nSmall Stones plays]\t[Audio fades in] The chronicles of [inaudible] relate that in remote times… at the auction of a circus. [Audio fades out]\n(14:22)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to shortcuts. [ShortCuts theme music plays briefly and fades]\n(14:27)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis concept of multiple voices is very interesting to me. Digitally we can layer voices. Similarly, with effect pedals, we can loop and layer vocals to, in Kellough’s words, “make the sonic field a little bit richer”. But what about your voice, the quality of a single voice working in different ways?\n(14:51)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn that summer I had the opportunity to work on the first episode, so…[Laughs] [Sound fades}\n(14:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis Is From a very lucky interview I had with Katherine Mcleod, current host of the podcast, longtime host of Shortcuts, and the producer of the SpokenWeb podcast’s very first episode.\n(15:10)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWe’re, we’re here at the podcast studio at Concordia University.\n(15:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSomething I would hear a lot during Jason Camlot’s seminar on sound was the phrase, “I hate listening to myself. I hate the sound of my own voice.”\n(15:25)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s, everybody hates the sound of their own voice. It’s just you hear yourself and, and there’s that, it’s weird. It’s like, ooh, is that, is that what I sound like? [Laughs]\n(15:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt’s a common expression, but the real statement here is: “I don’t sound the way I want to sound.” [Soft piano music begins to play]\nBut then… What would you like to sound like?\n\n(15:48)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tFilling slots for season one, you mentioned that there was a struggle for that, and I think you mentioned that part of that was that apprehension to working with sound and to going into what is perceived as a very technical field and then putting your work out there. And, and there’s that common question that comes up is like, I don’t, I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, and it’s like every idea is a good idea. [Laughs]\n(16:13)\tKatherine McLeod\tBut knowing that, that that idea is gonna be in public is it, is there’s, there’s apprehension about it. Also, something that often first time producers will comment on is that hearing themselves speak, hearing a recording of themselves speak… It will just be such a sort of process of just letting go of a lot of the ways that we hear ourselves and often really judge ourselves.\n(16:43)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, yeah, I don’t know how many…[Piano music ends]\n(16:45):\tMiranda Eastwood\tThere seems to be an immaterial standard of voice. A voice towards which we all reach or compare ourselves to. It’s different for everyone, you know, based on ourselves. But that standard can get in the way of artistic creation.\n(17:02)\tKatherine McLeod\tThis is something that Hannah McGregor has talked about quite extensively around voice, is the idea of like, how does the voice have authority and what or what do we think of when we think of a voice that has authority? And I think that sometimes when we hear ourselves if we don’t think that we sound authoritative, we can think, oh, oh no, I don’t, I don’t want this to be in public.\nBut then realizing that, well, I think we, we just, we have a… [Laughs] When we evaluate our own voices, we often don’t think that they sound authoritative. Whereas we’d be very, you know, easily I could say, oh, you, you, you sound like you know what you’re talking about. [Laughs] But it could, it might, we might be much, again, harder on ourselves.\n\n(17:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tNot just in relation to the voice, but in podcasting itself.\n(17:50)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, I was gonna ask about that. Like doing the first podcast episode. Like to me, like, that sounds like a lot of pressure, [laughs] that sounds, that sounds very, like, did you have, going into that, did you have a notion, like a sort of standard that you set yourself for that episode? Did you have an idea in mind going into it, or was it sort of just like, I don’t know what I’m doing and we’ll see what happens? [SpokenWeb theme music plays]\n(18:17)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n(18:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYes. Podcasting! Finally, we get to take a look at podcasting, academic podcasting ,to be specific.\n(18:33)\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, for the, for the SpokenWeb podcast, I would say that the idea has always been there from the beginning, in the sense that when SpokenWeb became a Cross-Canada partnership in 2018, that there was really an interest in making literary criticism that was also exploring sonic possibilities. So there was discussion right away from the beginning about having a podcast as part of the research dissemination.\n(19:03)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhich makes sense, right? I mean, SpokenWeb. Spoke, speak, sound. It seems obvious, but maybe it wouldn’t be as obvious just a few years ago. [Low string music begins]\n(19:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tI remember in 2019 when we had our first SpokenWeb institute at SFU, Hannah gave a presentation to try to show the SpokenWeb researchers in the room how podcasting was very accessible. We had to, you know, gather into groups and come up with a pitch for an idea for an episode. And it was really exciting to see everyone kind of thinking about this possibility, ’cause I think that it was, it was something at that point that nobody had really thought about.\n(19:51)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn my interview with Katherine, we touch on and explore a second idea relating to forms. That is, forms do political work, in particular historical contexts.\n[Music swells and then fades]\n\n(20:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. And even the way that the podcast forum is rooted in more of like a DIY culture where you know, it’s not necessary, it’s not something that is supposed to be made sort of at the sort of top down. It’s supposed to be coming from a grassroots place of just being able to record a conversation or work with some sounds and make it yourself, basically. So that sense of it being accessible and something that, again, doesn’t have to sound perfect. [Laughs]\n(20:44)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn Levine’s words, “forms […] shape what it is possible to think, say, and do, in a given context.” This idea provides somewhat of an answer to Grint and Woolgar’s question, “Does technology determine, or is it determined by the social?”\n(21:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tAs you know, as academics, there’s such a push for the finished product to be really polished, as polished as possible. And again, the podcast can still be rigorous places for thinking, but they don’t have to sound the same as an academic paper.\n(21:23)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSurprise! It’s both.\n(21:24)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tLike, that was a decision that you, you sat down and you were like, do we wanna set a structure for the podcast, or do we just invite anyone to come in and, and do what they wanna do?\n(21:36)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet electronic music begins] The decision was to be as open as possible in terms of the kinds of sounds that people wanted to bring to the table and the kinds of approaches that they wanted to take with their episode.\n(21:45)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThe idea was to build a podcast that reflected the ideas of researchers, rather than suggesting a rigid structure for episodes to follow, producers can arrange each episode to reflect their research strategies. Audio essays, panel talks, and interviews, all make an appearance in the SpokenWeb podcast. Just recently, we’ve released an episode based on a dramatic script.\n(22:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tI think that we also kind of by chance in terms of which episodes we were pitched the first season, really does show that very well too, because we have an episode that Kate Mofatt made with very raw audio that was recorded at that SpokenWeb symposium and institute in 2019, not knowing that it would become part of a podcast, but it did. And she was able to edit the audio, but also then interview one of the panelists afterwards.\nAnd so there was both a sense of hearing the raw audio and then also adding an interview to it. But that episode is a great example of being able to work with what you have and make something really exciting out of it. [Music ends]\n\n(22:55)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut these, these genres of podcasting, they’re still established forms. There is a right way to do an audio essay as well as an interview. There is a version of a podcast episode that works or does what it’s supposed to, what it’s designed to do.\n(23:15)\tKatherine McLeod\tThere’s a responsibility and a creativity to that process.\n(23:20)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIf your episode doesn’t end up doing what it’s supposed to do, is that a failure in sound design? A lack, maybe, of design? Or maybe even overly designed, overly produced? [Sound effect of someone walking on gravel] What would that even sound like?\n(23:44)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThis.. is not an audio walk. I mean, depending on the definition. I’m walking. You might be walking too. If you are walking, does that not make this whole episode an audio walk?\n(24:00)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’re up to our third idea about forms.\n(24:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tI’m on Mount Royal, by the way.\n(24:09)\tMiranda Eastwood\tForms travel.\n(24:11):\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tLevine’s point with this one is that, that forms travel across time and space.\n(24:18)\tMiranda Eastwood\tCheesy. I know. Introducing this concept with an audio walk.\n(24:22)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tYou’ve gotta start somewhere.\n(24:24)\tJason Camlot\tI think that’s a great place to start.\n(24:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tHopping on back to office hours with Professor Jason Camlot.\n(24:30)\tJason Camlot\tBut there are audio walks that don’t require technologies, right?\n(24:35)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(24:36)\tJason Camlot\tYou can just go walking and listening.\n(24:38)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(24:38)\tJason Camlot\tAnd that’s a sound walk, right? You might say, we don’t hear much more when we’re walking without headphones than we’re here with headphones.\n(24:46)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(24:46)\tJason Camlot\tIf we’re not actually trained or intentionally trying to listen, right?\n(24:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMm-hmm.\n(24:50)\tJason Camlot\tSo that it might be, I think it’s important… No matter what you’re talking about in terms of sound design, remember that our hearing is already mediated, right?\n(25:04)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(25:04)\tJason Camlot\tEven without using technology extensions, right? You know…\n(25:08)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Plucked strings music begins to play] But a unifying function of most audio walks, to paraphrase Malte Brinkmann, is an effort to reframe the individual, the walking subject, and to draw our attention to our own perception and observation of what surrounds us. That being said…\n(25:26)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThose walks, you don’t, you don’t really want to be following a map when you listen. It’s overwhelming. For a reason. Of course, they’re meant to be immersive. Maybe that’s just the way this form of the audio walk is evolving.\n(25:45)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI’m quoting Bijker and Law here, “Technologies do not have a momentum of their own at the outset that allows them to pass through a neutral social medium. Rather, they are subject to contingency as they pass from figurative hand to hand, and so are shaped and reshaped. Sometimes they disappear altogether. No one felt moved or was obliged to pass them on. At other times. They take novel forms or are subverted by users to be employed in ways quite different from those for which they were originally intended.” [String music ends]\n(26:26)\tJason Camlot\tAnd what else do you see here that’s really weird?\n(26:27)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah.\n(26:28)\tJason Camlot\tOh, two headphone jacks. That’s a really great device. All metal casing. [Laughs]\n(26:34)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah. Nice, nice brick in your pocket.\n(26:35)\tJason Camlot\tYeah.\n(26:36)\tMiranda Eastwood\tJason showed me a button on the original Walkman.\n(26:39)\tJason Camlot\tI actually have one still. It doesn’t work anymore, but I may get it repaired one day.\n(26:43)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah. Well, what’s the big yellow button?\n(26:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOn his computer. Not in real life.\n(26:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, that’s a mic.\n(26:49)\tMiranda Eastwood\tUnfortunately.\n(26:50)\tJason Camlot\tSee That? So there’s a mic on it.\n(26:53)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. Just for the podcast to know, I’m at an angle from Jason’s computer, [laughs], like, this isn’t me being-\n(26:57)\tJason Camlot\tAnd we’re zooming in on an image of the first Walkman TPS- L2 model.\n(27:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut it is a button that allows you to switch from listening to your tape, to your surroundings. A sort of anti-isolation.\n(27:15)\tJason Camlot\tThere was a fear of one’s listening being blocked out from one’s actual environment. And if you press this button, it would pick up sound from the outside through this microphone. It could not record, but it was designed to hear the outside world.\n(27:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tDespite this being “old” technology, we’ve recently seen a resurgence in demand for headphones that offer an ambient noise function. That is, they let you hear your surroundings with the push of a button.\n(27:47)\tJason Camlot\tBut it went away after-\n(27:47)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tI did come back-\n(27:48)\tJason Camlot\tWell- Did it come back?\n(27:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tIt has come back.\n(27:50)\tJason Camlot\tAnd why…?\n(27:50)\tMiranda Eastwood\tTechnologies travel. Sometimes they go in circles.\n(27:56)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of someone walking in gravel]\nOh, should’ve… Okay. I should have went left. I think I’m caught in a loop.\n\n(28:09)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAll right, kiddos, we set?\n(28:10)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah, I think so.\n(28:12)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOkay. So here’s one thing about those definitions from the beginning, those definitions on what sound design is. A lot of them, for me, only capture a part of the process, a moment.\n(28:25)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tAs opposed to having to go up. Because I, I like, I don’t know, it just feels like there’s more abilities here than there is…\n(28:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd it’s true. Sitting down with an arsenal of sounds and trying to make them into something cohesive can and usually is the most time consuming part of the process. But what about recording?\n(28:44)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAre we set?\n(28:47)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah, I think so.\n(28:48)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is Kaitlyn.\n(28:50)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t[Laughs] Do you wanna, do you wanna take a moment?\n(28:51)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tNo, I think I’m good.\n(28:53)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay.\n(28:54)\tKaitlyn Staveley\t[Piano music begins to play]\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn and I am Miranda’s friend.\n\n(28:58)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tUh, No. [laughs]\n(28:59)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tWait, we’re not friends? This is news to me. [both laugh]\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley, and I’m a full-time cat servant. [both laugh]\n\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley and I’m gonna sing a song. [laughs]\n\n[Music fades and ends]\n\nHi, my name is Kaitlyn Staveley. I am a hobbyist musician, singer and artist.\n\n(29:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThis is us in my home studio working on some vocals for a Christmas collaboration.\n(29:31)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tAnd it was just giving me…\n(29:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt took us about two hours for two minutes.\n(29:38)\tKaitlyn Staveley (singing)\tDecorations of red.\n(29:41)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tIt’s clipping.\n(29:42)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, it’s definitely… Alright, we’re gonna tune it down.\n(29:44)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThe majority of those hours being spent on decisions.\n(29:48)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tCan we perhaps scoot this one over because I need to be able to see the lyrics? Can we lower this just a little?\n(29:55)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOh yeah.\n(29:56)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tDo you have like a little, like a little seat? Because I feel more comfortable with my diaphragm down a bit as opposed to up, because… I was curious if maybe we could lower it all together and I can sit and sit maybe just a tiny bit lower? I’ll have a little sip of tea.\n(30:09)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tYeah, let’s have a sip of tea.\n(30:11)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tSorry.\n(30:12)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tNo, no, no. That’s why, that’s why this is…\n(30:13)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSound design begins long before you sit down at the computer.\n(30:18)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tExactly. If you’re gonna do it, just do it. [Piano music ends]\n(30:26)\tJames Healey\tSo it’s like the truest representation of the sound field at that time.\n(30:30)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThat, that statement just corroborated, ugh, Corroborated…. I’m gonna cut that one out. [laughs]\n(30:36)\tJames Healey\tCrimina!\n(30:36)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\t[Laughs]. Just, I keep saying-\n(30:37)\tJames Healey\tSound criminal.\n(30:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSometimes it starts at the studio at Concordia University. Again.\n(30:46)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAll right. That… Shouldn’t be humanly possible. [laughs] That’s the real mark of a musician. You can snap with all four fingers.\n(30:52)\tJames Healey\tThats. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how they know.\nMy name is James Healey. I work with sound and music. I specialize as a sound recordist in like, ambient music.\n\n(31:05)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThere’s no right way to set up a microphone. I mean, there are definitely wrong ways, but talking with James…\n(31:12)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since last week about your setup on that record we were listening to. Which was insane. There was a name for it…\n(31:23)\tJames Healey\tYeah. Yeah. So there were four microphones.\n(31:27)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI realized that sound design begins even before you set foot in the studio. Or wherever you happen to be recording.\n(31:35)\tJames Healey\tThree of the microphones were in an array known as a double mid-side. You can do an abbreviation M-S-M, so mid side mid. We’re gonna, as you say, unpack this a bit, and we’re gonna do a little bit of wave physics.\n(31:54)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOh boy. My favorite. [laughs]\n(31:56)\tJames Healey\tHa, yes.\n(31:57)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo, I realize this isn’t the podcast to air a 20-minute conversation about wave physics, so we’ll fast forward through this one.\n[Sound effect of conversation fastforwarding]\n\n(32:09)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay. But like, like what… That sounds like so much work. What’s the advantage here?\n(32:15)\tJames Healey\tSome stuff suffers for the good stuff. I mean, whatever turns out good is the good stuff, but then some stuff suffers and then if you don’t do it justice, you’ll find that in post you’re fighting against it in the mix rather than working with it. It’s very risky.\n[Electronic drum music begins]\n\nAnd the advantages, I think, kind of outweigh that. Using one mic configuration to pick up several sound sources live off the floor, essentially causes a compression of the sound sources together, kind of like a glue to your mix that is natural to the acoustics and the spacing.\n\n(33:02)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tNatural to, like, our hearing?\n(33:05)\tJames Healey\tIt’s, it’s natural and true to the room. It’s natural and true to how the sound sources are placed. It’s natural to their amplitude according to each other.\n(33:14)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd although James works in music, these recording setups could be applied to the design of any sound-based text. Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks, for example, use binaural recording; a method that more accurately captures the way we perceive sound. [Music ends]\n(33:32)\tJames Healey\tLike. I’m just like, I’ll hear the music and I’ll think of the record as like a whole. And I’ll think of the vibe to say something very not technical.\n(33:40)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tAre there sound shenanigans that you’ve pulled off? Like similar, really interesting, I guess noteworthy?\n(33:47)\tJames Healey\tSo-\n(33:48)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tDo, do a rapid fire.\n(33:50)\tJames Healey\t[‘Soulless Days” by James Healy begins to play]\nOkay. The first record I ever made for a band would be a band called Dumpster Juice. And we just committed eight channels to four track cassette tape. I ended up doing some records in Dawson City Yukon, where I was running a recording studio over the winter up there doing some cool EPs in like, sort of this barn workshop in my friend’s loft of this like barn workshop in the woods there. And did some records in like negative 50 outside. It was, it was crazy. T\n\nhere was another one, the Wakefield session where I was studying the record, “The Trinity Session” by the Cowboy Junkies. So I did the same thing, but in a church in Wakefield, with the sound field microphone, and that’s the first record, I think, that was like really a professional piece of audio, but when I finally did it, I was like, wow. Like, it was not all in vain. It was very stressful. [Miranda laughs]\n\nYou know, I made a record. I have like some, an ambient project called Jupiter Machine where I made a record all to cassette tape.\n\n(34:52)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe’re listening to it right now. This is “Soulless days”. You can check out the show notes for a link to the rest of the album. [“Soulless Days swells and fades]\nThe idea of an organic or natural sound… That’s not going to be the same across cultures, industries, or individuals. Sometimes you’ve just got to keep the context in mind.\n\n(35:26)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tI feel… maybe like one more take cuz it’s… I’m drying out.\n(35:31)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSo, in terms of what form is doing here.\n(35:38)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tOkay, I think we’re good. All right. Are we ready-Eddie-setti?\n(35:39)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah.\n(35:40)\tMiranda Eastwood\tOr what idea the form of recording represents.\n(35:43)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t3,2,1…\n(35:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tForms constrain.\n(35:50)\tKaitlyn Staveley (singing)\tI’ll have a blue Christmas without you. I’ll be so blue just thinking about you. You’ll be doin’ all right, with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.\n(36:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t[Miranda claps] Yay!\n(36:29)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tThank you. How was that? How does that sound? I didn’t hear it in the headphones.\n(36:35)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tWait, so what does that mean? Forms constrain? That doesn’t sound positive.\n(36:40)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhen we designate something as a specific form, we also designate its limits. The teapot includes the lid, but not the mug next to it. The sonnet is made of 14 lines, no more, no less. Or it isn’t a sonnet.\n(36:58)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tRight. Right.\n(36:58)\tMiranda Eastwood\tLet’s go back to affordances. Remember? What a form can do and what it can’t do or what it does badly. [Piano begins to play]\nTo quote Ian Hutchby: “the reason is that different technologies possess different affordances and these affordances constrain the ways that they can possibly be written or read. While a tree offers an enormous range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a river can afford, which the tree cannot and vice versa.”\n\n[Music ends]\n\nI mean, it seems obvious when you put it like that, right? The thing is, we don’t really decide what forms are. If I put a sonnet in front of you and you refused to acknowledge it as such, the form of the sonnet wouldn’t seize to exist. That poem wouldn’t stop being a sonnet.\n\n(37:53)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tNo. If only I were that powerful.\n(37:57)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIdentifying forms is the first step to understanding how they work and what their affordances are. This might seem straightforward. After all, is sound not a form? Could we not simply explore the affordances of sound?\n(38:14)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tThat’s a bit ambitious, isn’t it?\n(38:17)\tMiranda Eastwood\tImpossibly ambitious. Sound is made up of multiple, countless other forms, or rather multiple countless other forms are made up of sound. Which, by the way, leads us to our final idea about forms.\n(38:32)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tForms overlap.\n(38:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd intersect.\n(38:39)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…Because it’s not… Yeah, no, Like that’s a nice sound. Wait, wait, just do. Oh-oh-oh yeah.\n(38:47)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThat’s me.\n(38:49)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWe look like fools. [Laughs]\n(38:50)\tMiranda Eastwood\t[Laughs]. Oh yeah. And Ghislaine.\n(38:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tThis is fun. Hello, my name is Ghislaine Comeau and I am a PhD student at Concordia University where I study early medieval English literature.\n(39:04)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWe spent a morning at Concordia University collecting sound effects for our short form podcast assignment.\n(39:10)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[String music begins]\nAnd secretly I am also an amateur artist.\n\n(39:16)\tMiranda Eastwood\tShe was also in Jason’s seminar.\n(39:19)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWith the clacking of the feets and the doors and an occasional plexiglass slider and keys.\n(39:28)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAnd she was after very specific sounds.\n(39:31)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tWe can take the zoom recorder and we can get footsteps like literally in the hallway.\n(39:34)\tGhislaine Comeau\tYeah, in the hallway.\n(39:35)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s Thursday morning-\n(39:36)\tGhislaine Comeau\tYeah. And it’s gonna, we’re gonna make it sound like a big fancy schmancy archive place in the hallway.\n(39:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou could call what we were doing Foley art.\n(39:49)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tRemember it’s not about like how-\n(39:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIt’s about all of it.\n(39:55)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tIt’s not about how leather actually sounds. It’s about how you think, how we would think leather sounds, you know, decontextualized from its environment. [Music ends]\n(40:06)\tMiranda Eastwood\tFoley art brings an environment to life through sound. From big things like thunder… [Sound effect of thunder plays]\nTo small things, like brushing dust off a hardcover book…[Sound effect of someone brushing dust off a book]\n\nFoley started in radio, but has since evolved into a term used primarily in film.\n\n(40:26)\tJames Healey\tThe concept of Foley plays with sort of this perception of source bonding.\n(40:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI talked a bit about Foley with James.\n(40:37)\tJames Healey\tI’ve done some post for a handful of short films, as well as one feature where there was some Foley involved, sort of like informal, you know, using rubbing on a table if they’re rubbing on something else or you know….\n(40:56)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tMhmm.\n(40:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIn Foley, what you record is rarely the object you’re trying to imitate. The sound you capture will be more exaggerated, sharper, more focused. There’s a difference between sound as we experience it and sound effects.\n(41:13)\tJames Healey\t[Upbeat electronic music begins] So source bonding in electro acoustics is basically relating a sound to the context of its source, like attributing sonic characteristics to a certain sound source. And that is enforced by the visual on the screen and therefore sound also enforces the visual context as well. So they’re sort of acting in resonance.\n(41:40)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tI guess that’s why they call it Foley “art”. [Music ends]\n(41:42)\tMiranda Eastwood\tIt’s although I will say that thunder from before? [Sound effect of thunder plays]\nI did get that one right outside my apartment. So not that it’s my goal to cover everything, because as mentioned, that would be insanely ambitious. But we do need to talk about… [Spooky music plays and ends]\n\nThe dark side of affordances. Affordances, remember, are a double edged blade.\n\n(42:21)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\t[Sound effect of sword being unsheathed]\nBy the way, this sword sound is actually me dragging a spoon across an empty travel mug. Isn’t that cool?\n\n(42:29)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAffordances are useful in describing what a material does well, but also what it does not so well. It’s limitations, it’s failures, which brings us to a difficult question. How does sound fail? [Spooky music plays and ends]\n(42:49)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThe only anecdote I can think of, like where, where sound, at least sound design has really failed personally for me is I… That workshop with Oana… Avasilichioaei?\n(43:00)\tJason Camlot\tYeah.\n43:01)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood (\tYeah. So we submitted a short piece and I thought I was doing something very nice and artistic by ending my piece with, you know, footsteps on gravel walking off into the sunset, she marked the, she timestamped that moment with a little comment, why is somebody chewing? [Jason laughs]\nAnd I was just like… where does that come from?\n\n(43:23)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tWould this sound like walking to you if you didn’t have any context? [Sound effect of someone walking]\n(43:34)\tMiranda Eastwood\t“In any given circumstance, no form operates in isolation.” That’s a quote pulled directly from Levine. When we immerse ourselves in sound, we’re not coming to the table empty handed. We all have our own personal and cultural experiences that can and will shape the way we hear. You could argue for the affordances of sound as… Immersive, transformative, but what happens… [Sound effect as though Miranda is speaking in an echoey hallway]…when sound can’t reach you?\nFrom Hutchby again, “it is important to see that affordances are not just functional, but also relational aspects of an object’s material presence in the world.” [Sound effect of someone walking] You could say sound offers us immersion, but who’s the us in this case? More importantly, who are we excluding here?\n\n(44:34)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\t[Breathes deeply] 51, almost at the top. You know, it’s, it’s funny when, when people ask for directions to the chalet, they don’t call it the chalet. They say ‘the view’. Which way’s the view? Oh, right. We were, we were talking about deafness, right?\n(44:56)\tMiranda Eastwood\tTwo technologies clashing.\n(45:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tIs it ironic to talk about deafness on a podcast?\n(45:10)\tMiranda Eastwood\t“The ear itself is a composite organ which hears by mechanical and electrical means.”\n(45:16)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tOr is it of the utmost necessity?\n(45:19)\tMiranda Eastwood\tThat was a quote from Mara Mill’s chapter from Keywords in Sound. And I believe it’s useful to think of our own hearing as a sort of technology, but one that’s unfixed, subjective. There are different degrees of deafness, paraphrasing Mills, which can be conceived as a pre-condition of hearing, or as the resistance to hearing.\nAs we age, we often lose our ability to hear. Exposure to loud environments over time will wear down our ability to hear sounds at certain frequencies. Acknowledging the inherent differences in an individual’s hearing can reshape the way we design sound. If I were to design a piece for a friend that could only hear low frequency rumbling, I’d likely come up with something that would be physically difficult to listen to for someone with a wider frequency range. But beyond that, acknowledging limitations can also invite quite literally, invention.\n\n[Electronic music begins]\n\nThomas Edison identified as deaf, once remarking, “I have not heard a bird since I was 12 years old.” Quite the anecdote from the guy who invented the phonograph. Mills mentions other audio-notable figures in her chapter who similarly identified as deaf or hard of hearing. To quote Mills, “deafness has afforded insights into etology, acoustics, and phonetics, and in turn given rise to new psychotechnical devices.” All this to say that the affordances of sound are not isolated to sound itself, but emerge from a relationship between the listener and the audio text. Sound design insinuates that the piece is being designed with a subject in mind. Considering the subject as an open position encourages us to reconsider the role, function, and form of sound.\n\n[electronic music ends]\n\n(47:28)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAlright, um…\n(47:28)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWell, we’ve been all over the place.\n(47:34)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tThis is… this is a box [laughs], and it’s got a little latch.\n(47:41)\tMiranda Eastwood\tI hope this has been as much of a journey for you as it has been for me.\n(47:45)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd inside the box is another box. A music box. It is, yeah, that’s, yeah. It’s a music box that is literally, [sighs] It’s a box that makes music. Um…\n(48:02)\tMiranda Eastwood\tBut what about our question?\n(48:04)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tAt the top. Can you hear that? Can you hear the, the flag?\n(48:10)\tMiranda Eastwood\tMy question, Really.\n(48:12)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tThe flag hitting the metal pole in the wind.\n(48:16)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…And you run the strip of paper through it, and the idea is that the paper, you can make little holes in the paper and the holes dictate where the notes go because it’s a music box. It makes music.\n(48:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAfter all this, all this talking.\n(48:36)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd yelling and screaming! And stomping down hallways. [laughs]\n(48:41)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWhat do we think?\n(48:42)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tAnd there’s a little crank. You have to.. I’m gonna turn the, turn the crank. Like-\n(48:49)\tMiranda Eastwood\tWhat is sound design?\n(48:52)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSo it’s this, it’s [laughs]. It’s a, it’s a neat little, little machine. I love it. The thing is about… So there are rules, you, well rules. You can’t play the same note twice. It’s just because…\n(49:09)\tMiranda Eastwood\tSomething, I think, that has summed up every step of the way, every mark on our map. It’s been this…reaching for something…\n(49:14)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\t…Fast Enough. There’s no way it can go fast enough reaching for something for the same note, hit twice, two beats in a row. Also. it’s got a weird scale.\n(49:26)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYou’re aiming for something when you begin that process of design. You’re practicing intention.\n(49:34)\t(audio walk) Miranda Eastwood\tI made it. There’s, there’s the view.\n(49:38)\tMiranda Eastwood\tAt the end of this podcast episode, I’m making the argument for sound as a means of transport and creation. Sound design is, well, design. Design is creation. Creation is storytelling. And stories take us places. [Music box music begins to play]\n(50:04)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tI’d… Like you to meet my imaginary friend..\n(50:11)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tWhat does sound design mean to you?\n(50:17)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tWe stay up late…\n(50:17)\tKatherine McLeod\tSoundscape.\n(50:18)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tSoundscape. Let’s narrow that down a bit.\n(50:21)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd thinking that when one, say, has a recording of something that one wants to work with…\n(50:28)\tJason Camlot\tIt’s about thinking through the affordances of, like, hearing and listening.\n(50:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tSo how does the Hunched Wizard sound like when he walks? [Laughs]\n(50:40)\tJason Camlot\tAnd the media technologies through which one is actually manipulating sound.\n(50:46)\tMiranda Eastwood\tMarvelilicious!\n(50:47)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tYeah? Was that better than the last one?\n(50:48)\tJames Healey\tFor me, it’s like, almost sculpting.\n(50:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn an episode or in a, you know, a performance or what have you.\n(50:56)\tJames Healey\tYeah, you really are, you’re sculpting like a stereo field.\n(51:00)\tJason Camlot\tAnd coming up with a sonically formal configuration of those sounds…\n(51:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat is gonna be the, the sort of the sound that holds that sound.\n(51:11)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tSaid, you were mine, mine, mine. Gimme, gimme, never get. I know the going’s tough, but we can’t give up just yet. So breathe on 1, 2, 3.\n(51:22)\t(Interview) Miranda Eastwood\tThe sound that holds the sound.\n(51:23)\tJason Camlot\tA particular listening model in mind in order to achieve specific effects.\n(51:30)\tKaitlyn Staveley\tShould we listen to it with music?\n(51:32)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tSure.\n(51:33)\t(off-centre) Miranda Eastwood\tMusic to me is, you know, kind of the highest form of sound design you can say, because it’s so.. Difficult.\n(51:43)\tKaitlyn Staveley\t[laughs] Yeah, exactly. You’re right.\n(51:44)\tJames Healey\tRight. Becomes this glue to the work, which actually sort of makes the viewer or the listener feel like those elements have always belonged together.\n(51:55)\t(singing) Miranda Eastwood\tOh, I said that you were mine. You said that you were mine. I’d like to keep my imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. [Music box ends]\n(52:26)\t(off-mic) Miranda Eastwood\tUgh. Good. One more take? One more take.\n(52:32)\tMiranda Eastwood\tYeah, okay.\n(52:46)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Spoken Web] heme music begins] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nOur producer this month is Miranda Eastwood, an MA student at Concordia University and our very own sound designer for the SpokenWeb podcast. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. A special thanks to Professor Jason Camlot, professor Katherine McLeod, James Healy, Kaitlyn Staveley and Ghislaine Comeau for lending this episode their original voices.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [Theme music ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9597","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E6, Revisiting “Mountain Many Voices: The Archival Sounds of Fred Wah”, 3 April 2023, Shipton and Brock"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-mountain-many-voices-the-archival-sounds-of-fred-wah/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Don Shipton","Teddie Brock"],"creator_names_search":["Don Shipton","Teddie Brock"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Don Shipton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Teddie Brock\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0bf2a7c7-ddac-40e7-8106-659d4438a7d5/audio/55dfa8f4-b0b8-4048-bc33-a1f90eed0fdb/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e6.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"38,194,826 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-mountain-many-voices-the-archival-sounds-of-fred-wah/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-04-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Makarova, Liza. “The Night of the Living Archive.” Season 4, Episode 2, The SpokenWeb Podcast, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/.\\n\\nArchival Audio:\\n\\n“Ed Dorn reading in Albuquerque on October 30, 1963 Side 1 #109b.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Lionel Kearns, Mike Matthews, and Fred Wah reading poetry at UBC #258.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Charles Olson on August 14, 1963 #48.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Louis Zukofsky reading at Library of Congress on November 3 and 4, 1960 Tape 1 of 2 #260a.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Avison, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, and Levertov on August 7, 1963 #45.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Avison, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Levertov on August 9, 1963 #46b.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Around New Sound Daily Means: Selected Poems by Larry Eigner and Gary Snyder, Tape 1 of 3 #500a.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549538996224,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.\n\nThis sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices’ that constituted Wah’s listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah’s conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.’ The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.\n\nSpecial thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[SpokenWeb Theme music ends]\n\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. For each episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, the producers and production team are always thinking about recording; the microphones, zoom recorders, sound quality, from voiceover to interview to archival audio clips. And this month’s episode is all about recording and how recording shapes the way we encounter sound, particularly poetry.\n\nThe poet at the center of it all, Fred Wah, is known for both his poetry and also for his recording. Did you know that the sound recordings of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference were thanks to Fred Wah being the guy who carried the tape recorder around? And let’s remember that tape recorders were not easy to carry around back then. And because he had the tape recorder, he was able to have it running during so many of the sessions, and there ends up being an audio archive of that now famous event in Canadian poetry.\n\nSo keeping that in mind, let’s jump to another event in 2022, when Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted an event called Mountain Many Voices: the archival sounds of Fred Wah. That event was a round table discussion with Fred Wah himself, student researchers working on Wah archival materials, both from SFU and from Concordia, and moderated by Dr. Deanna Fong.\n\nBy the way, Fong leads the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project, which you can hear more about by listening to the episode “Night of the Living Archive” produced by Liza Makarova and aired on the SpokenWeb Podcast in November, 2022. And yes, Liza is also part of this round table discussion Mountain Many Voices. In this month’s episode, Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, two of SFU’s research assistants, who also contributed to that round table revisit the event and they revisit its many voices along with recordings of Wah speaking about what he calls “the materialism of the voice”.\n\nYou’ll also hear recordings of other poets referenced during the event, such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn. When making this episode, Teddie and Don were inspired by live radio, and this episode has our producers becoming hosts themselves, curating, introducing, and sharing a rich selection of archival audio. Here’s the sixth episode of season four, Revisiting Mountain Mini Voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah.\n\n[SpokenWen Podcast theme music begins and fades]\n\n(03:28)\tTeddie\t[Sound effect of static swells and fades]\nIn June of 2022, Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted a round table event titled Mountain Many Voices, which centered on the audio archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah.\n\n(03:42)\tDon\tIn the following recording an excerpted conversation between Fred Wah and post-doctoral researcher Deanna Fong, you’ll hear the story of Wah’s first encounter with portable tape recording and how the social and technical practices associated with emergent audio technologies in turn shaped his own relationship to the reading, writing, and listening of contemporary poetry.\n(04:03)\tTeddie\tNext, we will play a selection of archival recordings, bringing together the sounds of the many voices of Wah’s personal literary history.\n(04:24)\tTeddie, Don, Deanna Fong, and Fred Wah all talking as they set up for the interview:\t[Somber string music plays while indistinguishable voices talking to one another.]\n(04:56)\tDeanna Fong\tI think we’re just gonna go in alphabetical order… Fred and I will have a little quick introduction here first. So I think the reason for our gathering is that we’ve all sort of been encountering Fred’s many voices through the archive through these many years of recordings that are held at different institutions which are being collected digitally in Fred Wah’s Digital Archive. I’m here at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. So given that you’re the voice and your voice is kind of the reason for us gathering for today in that we’ve all done some work with your archival voice in one way or another. I thought we could just start off by having a quick discussion about your recording practice and how there came to be so many tapes [all laugh].\nBut in terms of, you know, just having a quick discussion about recording, I just wanted to start by asking you, so when did recording come into your life and when was the first time you saw a portable recording device? [Don laughs] And when was the first experience of hearing your own recorded voice?\n\n(05:56)\tFred Wah\tUh, yes. Let me contextualize my interest in recording, which is back around 1962. The poetry that we were involved with then with the Tish Group in Vancouver was this whole movement in poetry towards working around Charles Olson’s project first for us. And, the whole notion of the head by way, the ear to the syllable, the heart by way of the line to the breast or the breast to the line. So the formality, the materialism of the voice was very much a new thing then. Most of us had grown up with poetry on the page, and  with a silent experience, kind of conversation with oneself silently. So this was new. So the whole notion of making something oral was exciting to me. And, I was primarily a musician or was interested in music, so sound was prominent. And Robert Creeley showed up at UBC as a new American poet, and he at one point brought out his tape recorder.\nWow, what’s that? You know, it’s a machine and it was a kind of stainless steel machine. It’s a Wollensak Reel-to-Reel. And he had tapes that he had made of radio interviews he had done for a radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he lived and worked. And so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky and Ritter Binner, Ed Dorn.\n\n[Low electronic string music begins to play]\n\nI was fascinated by Ed Dorn’s poetry and I heard Ed Dorn’s voice. In those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading on the, off the page. [Low electronic string music ends] So I traded in my Marimba vibes and my trumpet for a Wollensak tape recorder [All laugh]. The first time I heard my own voice, I think, was a reading I did with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews at UBC, a Noon Hour Reading.\n\nAnd I must have taped it cuz I have the tape.\n\n[All laugh] I can’t remember doing it. And then, so I heard my voice that way, but we weren’t interested in necessarily recording everything. Like I don’t, I have no tapes of the Tish Poets reading or George or Frank or any one of those people reading. And then in 1963 we had the Vancouver Poetry, so-called Vancouver Poetry Conference, which was in the summer of 1963 out at UBC. And Warren Tallman, his father-in-law, gave him this beautiful big console tape recorder. And so he wanted to record the whole conference and he was really interested in recordings.\n\nAnd he asked me, because I knew a little bit about, was learning about tape recordings. He said, could you learn to run this and do that? So I did. But one of the very first sessions we had in the 63 conference, the take up reel broke.\n\n[Sound effect of tape breaking and falling on the floor] It broke down. So I sat there through the whole meeting winding, [All laugh] taking up, taking up the tape, and then I ended up using my own recorder, the Wollensak, to record the rest of the conference.\n\nSo I got into recording and I really enjoyed the notion of not so much documenting, but having the voices of these poets who, you know, a lot of us were interested in, sort of around and available. And they became kind of, it’s a kind of a precious thing and it, and it kind of melded with the whole notion, the whole technology that was going on there. Cuz Reel-to-Reel tape recording was relatively new in the late fifties, early sixties in North America. And eventually it led to other tape recorders and other forms and, and it’s gone on ever since. And I’ve always used tape recording as a, or audio recording as a way of registering more accurately the oral nature of how poetry is being made. [Light piano music begins to play]\n\nAnd I studied linguistics. I was really interested in the kind of nitty gritty of how language is its rhythm and stress is, is there. [Piano music fades and ends]\n\n(10:16)\tDeanna Fong\tI find that such a fascinating response because I think like one of the follow up questions I had was this question of, you know, what this sort of impetus to record was and in the way that you speak of it, and not necessarily a documentary sense, like not as a kind of living proof that you were there or whatever, but more thinking about it as a sort of tool that aids or at least says something about, you know, the affective register of the voice and, and a sort of tool towards composition, it seems like. Is that what you’re talking about?\n(10:47)\tFred Wah\tYeah, I think that recording was a way to sustain the notion of poetry as oral. It just helped. I know I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing. I wasn’t doing it for any specific, other than to collect the ‘63 conference, was basically documenting that. And I remember when we finished, UBC said they owned the tapes, so we gave them a set of the tapes and within a few months they had lost them [Deanna laughs]. And, and I said, do you want another set? No, we’re not, no nevermind. Just don’t bother [Fred laughs]. So it was kind of, you know, it’s kind of a disregard for what we had done in terms of the poetry.\n(11:34)\tDeanna Fong\tHmm. And it also sounds like it becomes a means of circulating poetry that you might not otherwise have access to, or at least not like certainly in oral form. Right?\n(11:45)\tFred Wah\tThat too. And it became, as you know, a way of sharing poetry and voices all over. So you could, you know, like the notion of pen sound or spoken word, all these efforts to get the voices out there has changed, I think, the context for making poetry, because it’s so shared, if you want to. You know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. [All laugh] [Soft piano music begins to play]\nThat was just so, it was so different and so new. So poetry was made new in us, at least for myself and, I think, made others because of the voice. [Piano music ends]\n\n(12:36)\tDeanna Fong\tAnd also I was, cuz I know that you found a home for the Reel- to-Reel recordings, which include the original 1960s poetry conference recordings at Karis Shearer’s UBCO AMP Lab. And she mentioned that in that collection there’s also a tape that’s like an audio letter, which is either to you or from you, [Deanna laughs]  from Gladys Hindmarch.\n(12:59)\tFred Wah\tI think it’s from her. Okay. I haven’t listened to it because my tape, I didn’t have the tape. I don’t have a tape recording, so I asked Terrace to transcribe it. You know, the technology shifted. So we were able to get portable tape recorders that we had this small tape recorder that did small, could do small three inch reels. Right? And so we shared some letters with our friend Gladys Hindmarch, and, and I don’t know how much we did that with others. Actually, Louis Cabri was with me in Calgary when his friend Aaron [inaudible] from Philadelphia came up. We, Aaron came up and sat and recorded or transferred those old seven inch reels, which by then were 45 years old into mini disks [All laugh]. Right?\nAnd he sat there for a week doing all these transcripts, not transcriptions, but transferring into, into digital format. And luckily the tapes, because they had just been put away in a basement, were still okay. And in fact, I listened to some before I gave them to Karis, that they still seemed to be okay.\n\n(14:14)\tDeanna Fong\tYeah. Because sometimes we really only get the one shot. Hey?\n(14:16)\tFred Wah\tYeah.\n(14:16)\tDeanna Fong\t[Deanna laughs] So when you, when you were recording these things, did you have a sense of a future audience in mind?\n(14:25)\tFred Wah\tNo, not particularly. I was interested in recording, I guess for academic reasons. All through my tenure as a teacher, I would record visiting poets as a way of replaying them for students in classes and that, and I found being able to play recordings of someone reading something that they had read in a book was a valuable experience for students.\nSo pedagogically, they were useful. I didn’t have any other sense of where they might, [Fred laughs] what might happen to them or I, there was a kind of, they were valuable, they were precious things, these tapes. And when I put together these boxes of cassettes to give to Tony that, you know, to deposit up here in the archives there’re just hundreds of, I don’t know how many of there are, but there are a lot of cassette tapes of readings of, you know, particularly Canadian poets that came to Selkirk College or the University of Calgary area, or at least 300, I think.\n\nAnd, you know, so a lot of them probably aren’t of great quality. Just sticking a, I remember the ‘63 conference, we had one microphone. So we have a panel of, you know, six people and this one little Wollensack microphone and the cord wouldn’t reach that long [ All laugh], so people like Robert Dun would grab the whole machine and bring it so he could speak. [All laugh] But distant people sitting at the table, you know, like Phil Win, sitting at the table, you can’t even quite hear him.Things like that.\n\n(16:11)\tDeanna Fong\tYeah. So, what does that mean as like, maybe as a final question, what does that mean as a reader slash listener slash amateur of poetry? That all of these things are all of a sudden just kind of right available at our, our fingertips, our eardrums?\n(16:27)\tFred Wah\t[Somber electronic music begins to play]\nI think it grounds them a little bit more. It makes them, the materiality of them, brings them sort of closer to a different understanding of the event of the poem.\n\n(16:46)\tDon\tDuring their conversation, Fred Wah mentions numerous authors whose voices were instrumental in the development of his own. First among these writers is Charles Olson. From memory, Wah quotes a line from Olson’s now famous essay “Projective Verse”.\n(17:01)\tFred Wah\t“The head, by way, the ear to the syllable of the heart. By way of the rest of the line.”\n(17:06)\tDon\tThis idea of breath, providing the foundation for one’s poetry was influential to many poets writing throughout the 1960s, including a young Fred Wah. [Electronic music ends]\nWe’re gonna play Charles Olson reading “Maximus from Dogtown 2,” recorded at the so-called 1963 poetry conference. But before we do that, let’s begin with that UBC noon hour reading that Fred Wah gave with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews. The recording he cited as the first time he heard his own voice.\n\n(17:44)\tTeddie\t[Electronic music begins, interspersed with the sound of radio waves]\nYou are listening to “Revisiting Mountain Many Voices”, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. [Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player and beginning to play]\n\n(18:04)\tArchival Audio of Fred Wah\tNo particular poetics today, except that I think you’ll probably hear the voices of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Robert Creedey and Robert Kelly. That whole Black Mountain group coming in as I don’t think I’ve found my voice yet.\nThe cold and brisk breeze whipped today the cold and brisk breeze whipped today. But no snow comes such ardor, pure and freeze the muddy water on the streets. Me and my love, seraphic pride walked windward, smiling faces. A quiet morning, early morning and fog my darling, you are sleeping warm with sleep. Cold floor stretches in the dark boulevard and headlights past the glass, the start of day, eggs, coffee, cigarette. I walked before you already in the tired morning, no beginning, but our sleep and love, deep rhythms in our breathings. [Electronic music plays and fades]\n\n  (19:30)\tArchival Audio of Charles Olson\t“Maximus from Dogtown number 2”, or December 5th, 1959. Which I will open with.\nThe sea. Turn your back on the sea, go inland to Dogtown, the harbor, the shore, the city, are now shitty as the nation is, the world tomorrow. Unless the princes of the husting, the sons who refuse to be denied the demon. If Madea kills herself, Madea is a Phoenician wench, also daughter of the terror as Jason Johnson Hines son, hindsight. Charles John Hines, whole son, the Atlantic Mediterranean Black Sea. Time is done in Dun for gone. Jack Hammond put a stop to surface underwater galaxy, time. There is no sky, space or sea left. Earth is interesting. Ice is interesting, stone is interesting. Flowers are carbon. Carbon is Carboniferous, Pennsylvania age under Dogtown, the stone, the watered rock, carbon flowers, rills Aquarium time after fish, fish was Christ. Oh Christ picked the seeds out of your teeth. How handsome the dead dog lies horror X the migma is where the seeds Christ was supposed to pick out.\n\nW sh wunk grapevine Hok, the Dutch and the Norse. And Algonquins. He with a house in his head. She who lusted after the snake in the pond, Dogtown berry smell as the grub beaten fish. Take the smell out of the air. A you’re the tar of Dogtown, the tar matas. Here is the angel matter not to come until R 3000. We will carry water up the hill, the water, the water to make the flower hot. Jack and Jill will up Dogtown Hill on top. One day the vertical American thing will show from heaven. The latter come down to the earth of us all the many who know there is one, one mother, one son, one daughter, and each the father of him self. The genetic is ma the morphic is pa, the city is Mother Polish. The child made man, woman is Mary’s son Elizabeth Mangen the mangen in collagen in collagen time leap onto the leap onto the lamb.\n\nThe aquarium time. The greater the water you add, the greater the decomposition. So long as the agent is protein, the carbon of four is the corners in stately motion to sing in high voice the fables of wood and stone and man and woman love and loving in the snow and sun. The weather on Dogtown is protonic, but the other side of heaven is ocean filled in the flower, the weather on Dogtown. The other side of heaven is ocean Dogtown. The under vault heaven is carbon ocean Quam Dogtown. The under vault, the mother rock, the diamond coal, the Pennsylvanian age, the soft coal love age, the soft coal love hung up burning under the city. Thet is heart to be turned. Black stone, the black cri is the throne of creation. Ocean is the black gold flower.\n\n(23:32)\tTeddie\tNext you’re going to hear poems by Larry Eigner, Louis Zukovski and Ed Dorn. As well as a short clip of Robert Creeley from a panel at the UBC Poetry Conference. Each of these poets, while a part of their own literary coterie were associated with schools and states, were included in the 1960 anthology, the New American poetry edited by Donald Allen. It was this work which Wah referenced earlier when he mentioned the new American poets.\n(24:01)\tFred Wah\t[Echoing sound effect is added to Fred’s voice]\nYou know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. That was just so, it was so different and so and so new. So poetry was made new in that sense.\n\n(24:28)\tArchival Audio of Larry Eigner\tLanguage is temporary king poetry, the mask on everyday life. What time of the day is it land? What have you to do with or gotten done? Love to poems, the unexpected, the magnetic power. The speed, the ocean drop, dry drop. If there were time they go drawn after us. The city is music is human in the events. The seas drag light in the earth. The greatest thing is orchestra. With men, the wind and the waves are fixed. Open road. You look in hundreds in the night sky, any place the drone would this time enough new each day. Bruce is enough of the old, the dying of oppos to the present contact communication. Explanation. Enough not we keep on.\n(26:31)\tFred Wah\tAnd so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky.\n(26:38)\tArchival Audio of Louis Zukovsky reading\tSong Three from 55 poems, compute leaf points water with slight dropped sounds. Turn coat sheet facts say for the springs, blooms fall the trees trunk has set the circling horn branch to cipher each drop the eye shot and the rain around. So cheated well let the fallen bloom wet clutter down and into and the heart fact hold Nothing. Desire is no excess. The eye points each leaf. The brain desire the ray, she recites their brief song. 13 in that this happening is not unkind. It put to shame every kindness mind mouths their words. People put sorrow on its body before sorrow had came. And before every kindness happening, for every sorrow before every kindness song 18, the mirror oval sabers playing the chips in the room next door. The voices behind the wall will be lit by highlights in the morning, in bed. A wall between continuing voices, chips stacking instead of bales, the water sounds extending a harbor, one sleepless, one sleeper on the fourth floor. In that this happening is not unkind. It put to shame every kindness mind mouths their words. People put sorrow on its body before sorrow. It came. And before every kindness happening, for every sorrow before every kindness Song 18, the mirror oval sabers playing the chips in the room next door. The voices behind the wall will be lit by highlights in the morning, in bed, a wall between continuing voices, chips stacking instead of bales. The water sounds extending a harbor, one sleepless, one sleeper on the fourth floor.\n(29:39)\tArchival Audio 5\tHow can you be other than where you are?\n(29:45)\tFred Wah\tI was fascinated by Ed’s poetry and I heard Ed’s voice in those days. That was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(30:02)\tArchival Audio of Ed Dorn\tI sure never tried to do this without smoking [audience laughs]. This one is called Hawthorne. End of March, 1962. That day was dark fog fell down our mountain. The snows were wet patches and around the legs laid as like and around the barn, dark red shadows the day he died. The slow quiet break. What an odd person to die beside. Franklin Pierce never go to the mountains. Near the end, the air is spoken for. I thought how just Americans still love morality. With many preliminary question, he was fierce for the slight connection back to what there was. This poem is, uh, completely abstract, as far as I know. It’s called an inauguration poem. And I wrote it during the last inauguration. Unasked, of Course, [Audience laughs] Out of the zone of interior armies, the Nebraska of our terror flies pro gating the statistical laws of our starvation, where on the spinning habitation men’s eyes see the regiments of vegetation. And one man is the mouth of all and a narrowing harrowing rib in Denmark that dope delivered country is not starker than the staple deprived herdsman of the African. Who’s it? Out of the zone of interior armies come the advocates of nations where none can breathe outside the given crush, forsaking even established ignorance. Promo gating desire born against the honed knife of one secretary or another. Out of the zone of interior armies. The trains of El Presidente shoot laden with food for no destination anyone has charted because in a storage bin in the Midwest was held the grand conference on the grammar of scarcity. And the farmer stands beside the senseless soil and mumbles that this far starvation is named parody. Out of the interior skulls of our rulers stepped slim hygienic elegance of patrons of painted walls and bushman’s haircut, gut full with the art of wishing rice upon the multitude to make marriage of new nations to be ridiculed by coronets of old jazz. Like, don’t have too many babies unless you have the viles.\n(32:53)\tDon\tThat was Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn. Next you’re going to hear a conversation between Denise Labov and Margaret Avison taken from a panel at the 1963 Poetry conference before coming back to that first tape of Fred Wah.\n(33:15)\tDenise Labov\tWell, I I think that if you’re, if you’re worrying about whether you are communicating while you’re writing it’s absolutely undermining. Well, to whom are you communicating? Are you communicating to, to someone you know who who who has, who’s who, whom you know to be your peer? Are you communicating to your landlady who isn’t gonna read it anyway? Are communicating on what level are you communicating? So you can’t possibly think about Tom about communication while you’re writing forth. But if you think about precision, if you really try to be absolutely accurate to what you know then chances are that you will communicate. Cause there seems to be a level of of, of communication that that comes about through through precision to one’s own knowledge.\n(34:10)\tMargaret Avison\tI used the word conversation earlier about the early stage of writing when you imitate. And I think that is a real communication of poetry you’re reading and it possesses you in a sense and you murmur back at it. You don’t do it intentionally. You usually feel bad when you discover you’ve done it. But I think most writers, at least when they’re 12 and 15 and so are doing that, aren’t they? And then you get away from that kind of communicating as you begin to find, yes, I have a voice.\n(34:55)\tArchival Audio of Ed Dorn\tOne last poem I’m going to sing in this one. So laugh if you want to. My voice is very good. But this is with lots of voices. Pound and especially Duncan Olson coming in. I can’t get away from it. But here it is a poem appealing for a life of pla passion and a place on earth where poetry is wanted are variations on a voice from Duncan. And if I live, I live for love of you. All things come together. So they say, and the way which one will show us which time it is in place of memory. I live for love of you. My life becomes the pin through the nude. Kneeling and worship becomes my wall. My white PHUs becomes light, strikes the beat. Time takes up making up remembrances. I call out ahead into the dark. Who is it? Who would love me? On the mountain side, the snow still falls and her glowing cheeks hang low ahead of me. The tracks are filling. I follow unanswered with the snow falling in my dream of love. And stay this place a while. Press her hanging to my breast. The lovers test, fragments of music ripple in my head. Unsteady notes in the lake light fall themselves into my eyes. Vow glides of water. Sing. Sleep. Sleep. Peel of poem from my memory. Sleep. Sleep. And if I live hold, let me live. Which also calls this place of passion speaks as it is poetry to me. And make it new reader. Strike out new you become old. In remembering, recall, I reproached you two summers ago at your excretions. I could only look at you that way. I can only speak to you now with your pants down. Those first few words are still as costly to my passion. Who would make life new when love grows old? Oh, show me the way to the next listener’s ear. Oh, don’t ask why. Oh, don’t ask. Why for I must find the next listener’s ear for if I don’t find the next listener’s ear. I tell you, we must die. I tell you, we must die. I tell you, I tell you. I tell you we must die. And if I live, he’ll let me live and sing. My poems a spool of passion. Ill let me live. We’re loved ones, but I reach with the hand for the new moon. And if I live, they’ll let me live in love of you. The song still sings And further on, that’s time King, queen of the Summer, throne of love in the sand stained the pins in tired, she floats backside in the lake water ripples in smooth furs about her nipples, breaking the sleek moon surface that summer night. And if I live, I’ve lived for love in full time. The beat strikes on time dances the memory to the full tune. Thank you.\n(38:19)\tTeddie\tThis has been Revisiting Mountain Many voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. If you want to hear more from Fred Waugh’s audio archive, check out the episode “Night of the Living Archive by” Liza Makarova.\n(38:48)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, MA students at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for Shortcuts, with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9598","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E7, Audiobooks in the Classroom, 1 May 2023, Levy and Schwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/58cbf262-da12-45e9-9dd7-822f98fa2de2/audio/819beef1-71ae-494f-8194-25b545bae90c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,667,080 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-05-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Baron, Naomi S. How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. Oxford University Press, 2021, https://academic-oup-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/book/41098.\\n\\nCarrigan, Mark. “An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/12/17/an-audible-university-the-emerging-role-of-podcasts-audiobooks-and-text-to-speech-technology-in-research-should-be-taken-seriously/.\\n\\nHarrison, K. C. “Talking books, Toni Morrison, and the Transformation of Narrative Authority.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011, p. 143.\\n\\nSarah Kozloff, “Audio Books in a Visual Culture.” Journal of American Culture, vo. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 83–95, 92.\\n\\nMorrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.\\n\\nPergadia, Samantha. “Finding Your ‘Voice’: Author-Read Audiobooks.” Public Books, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/finding-your-voice-author-read-audiobooks/.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. “Introduction: Talking Books.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011.\\n\\n–––. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Harvard University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1890, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/cabinet_kiosk_16_march_2021_rubery_matthew_audio_002.mp3.\\n\\n \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549542141952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does it mean to “read” an audiobook? What happens when we teach literary audio in the university classroom? How can we prepare our students for success in reading and listening to audio literature?\n\nFeaturing a round-table conversation with graduate students Ghislaine Comeau, Andy Perluzzo, Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris at Concordia University and an interview with Dr. Jentery Sayers from the University of Victoria, this episode, hosted by Dr. Michelle Levy and SFU graduate student Maya Schwartz, thinks through the challenges and opportunities of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music fades] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Imagine sitting down to read a book for your literature class. When I said that, you probably pictured yourself opening a book, maybe a Toni Morrison novel, or a poetry anthology. But what if reading a book for your class looked like putting on headphones and pressing play? What happens if we consider the audio book pedagogically? What does the medium of the audiobook allow for in the classroom? How do students respond to listening to books?\n\nIn this episode, styled like an audio essay, producers Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz ask these very questions, putting current scholarship and personal reflection in conversation with interviews with professors and students alike in order to think through how literature sounds when it comes to audiobooks. Put on those headphones and turn up those speakers. Here is episode 7 of season 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Audiobooks in the Classroom. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins to play and quickly fades]\n\n(02:01)\tVoices Overlapping\tIt’s like, listen, ear skimming-\nYou kind of just like-\n\nBlank Out listening-\n\nIs attention by treating-\n\n-artifact myself-\n\n-Oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the books, so it must be a quarter of—–\n\nThe way the author enters the room. And I often, uh, when I’m teaching…\n\n(02:17)\tAI Generated Voice\tYou’re listening to “Audiobooks in the Classroom” by Michelle Levy, narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz.\n(02:28)\tMichelle\tThis podcast asks a seemingly simple question; how are we harnessing new audio forms to teach literature in the university classroom? According to Casey Harrison writing in 2011, “there is a dearth of scholarly literature on the medium of the audiobook.”\nFrom this, she concludes that this widely popular form is not being taken seriously by the academic establishment. With some important exceptions, the lack of research on the audiobook persists, even though as Harrison writes, “academics and avid readers happily avow their enjoyment and appreciation of recorded books.”\n\n[Light electronic music begins to play]\n\nAs you will hear throughout this episode, we are getting a lot of dishes washed with all of our listening. But are we taking advantage of the pedagogical potential of literary audio? This episode addresses the challenges both real and imagined that are shaping both the use of and the resistance to the incorporation of literary audio in teaching. [Electronic music ends]\n\nIt explores some of the ways in which college instructors are taking advantage of the wealth of literary audio now available to us.\n\nIt also offers reflections from students about how they are experiencing these experiments with literary audio. Ultimately, this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast seeks to offer some practical guidance to instructors and to elucidate how the use of literary audio can enhance connection, understanding, and enjoyment for our students. [Quiet string music begins to play]\n\nTo address these issues from the perspective of both the instructor and the student.\n\nThis podcast will interweave my own commentary with that of Professor Jentery Sayers of the University of Victoria, an expert in sound media and literary history, who Maya interviewed for this podcast. You will also hear an interview conducted with four graduate students from Concordia University who have recently taken a course with Professor Jason Camlot, that centered audio literature PhD students, Ghislaine Comeau and Andy Perluzzo, and MA students Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris were asked to set up questions similar to the ones I asked Jentery, and I’m delighted to include their responses to provide a range of student perspectives on the use of audio literature.\n\nI’m also joined by Maya Schwartz, an MA student at SFU, who helped to produce this podcast episode and who joins me in voicing some of the narrative commentary in this episode. [String music ends]\n\nAs an avid listener of literary audiobooks and podcasts for over a decade, it was the pandemic that finally prompted me to teach audiobooks. Jentery had decided to take the plunge before Covid.\n\n(05:07)\tJentery\tIf I recall correctly, I think I proposed it prior to the shift online for the pandemic. We shifted in March, 2020. But what I did as I was preparing it is I took advantage of some aspects of that dynamic. The fact that, I think, increasingly people were listening to podcasts, people were listening to literature, and, you know, a lot of people were inside for [Jentery laughs] doing a lot of their work.\nSo I taught, I ended up teaching the seminar online, and doing what I can or doing what I could to integrate audio into the teaching, into the dynamic that way. And I think on the whole, it worked out quite well. It was a joy to teach.\n\n(05:45)\tMichelle\t[Low string music begins to play]\nAs Jentery says, the shift to online teaching during the pandemic meant that students were receiving their instruction through audio and video, and apart from others in their home, which seemed to support the incorporation of literary audio into our courses. When teaching audiobooks and literary audio as instructors, we face a number of practical considerations.\n\nShould we require students to buy both the audiobook and a print copy of the book? Assuming the audiobook is not freely available, will they need a print copy of the book for their assignments? And if we require them to purchase both, can we justify the cost, particularly given that audible.ca unaccountably fails to offer a student membership? Could we assume that every student had a device from which they could access an audiobook or a podcast?\n\nThere were also questions about which audiobook or podcast to select and how much performance and accessibility should drive our selection. In some cases, such as canonical novels like those by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, there may be dozens of audiobook versions to choose from, and much like the decision about which print edition to ask our students to purchase, selecting an audiobook requires thoughtful deliberation of the various options. Accessibility also plays a role. Most of our students have spent their academic careers silently reading. How do we prepare them to listen? [String music ends]\n\nOne of the audiobooks I have assigned, Anna Burns’ novel Milkman, is narrated by a character known only as “middle sister”. It is performed by Belfast actor Brid Brennan in a thick northern Irish accent. For me, the voicing brought the novel vividly to life. It also helped me to make sense of the stream of consciousness narration and the disorientation that comes from none of the characters being assigned proper names. [Quiet electronic music begins to play]\n\nBut some of my students struggled to hear the words and the story through the accent. Thus, a feature of the voicing that enhanced the story for me was a barrier to some. I begin, however, with one of the most fundamental questions that has vexed the use of audiobooks for teaching and research; whether listening is reading.\n\n(08:01)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter One: Is listening reading? [Electronic music ends]\n(08:07)\tMichelle\tThere is an entrenched suspicion that listening to an audiobook or a podcast is a passive activity, and hence not really reading. Jentery describes how this issue arose in a contemporary American fiction class he taught about a decade ago. One of his students kept referencing, having listened to a novel assigned for the course.\n(08:28)\tJentery\tThere was one student in particular that talked about listening the whole time when answering questions and just having class discussion. And I was fascinated by this. So I just said, do you mean just to be honest, do you mean this literally? Are you, are you listening to the book? Are you using this as a way to talk about the novel as a living text, as language, as discourse? And he’s like, no, no, I’ve listened to audiobook versions. And then, and he is like, is that okay?\nAnd so it became this discussion around the popular student perception, I think, that listening was cheating, right? And so I was like, oh, this is, this is a fascinating topic, but also more important, like it is not, and I want to think through why, for a number of reasons, including accessibility, we might want to, for good reason, debunk the that listening is cheating or that books are not meant to be listened to.\n\n(09:19)\tMichelle\tIn our conversation, this question of whether listening is reading and more pointedly and judgmentally, whether listening is cheating, resonated with Jentery who began to think about how these ingrained biases impacted his scholarly approach to and valuation of literary audio.\n(09:38)\tJentery\tI’ve always been interested in the kind of cultural dimensions of listening, the cultural dimensions of sound, but only recently, like in the last eight years or so, started to think about that in literature. And I think partly because I too had inherited this idea that if I started to do that work in literary studies, I’d be cheating my discipline.\nSo it kind of brushed against the grain of how I had been taught literary studies, how to read text with a capital T as a methodological field, but also, yeah, just plainly the sensory work I was doing and why I was parsing it. Like why was it that when I was listening I was like, oh, this is my media studies work. And why when I was reading, I was like, oh, this is media studies and or literary studies depending on the content.\n\n(10:16)\tMichelle\t[Quiet string music begins to play]\nIn his introduction to the essay collection, Audiobooks, Literature and Sound Studies, Matthew Rubery, an historian of talking books, examines some of the assumptions that feed into assertions that listening as opposed to reading on the page, offers a compromised cognitive experience. According to Rubery, there is a belief that audiobooks do not require the same level of concentration as printed books, or that one can be inattentive while listening to an audiobook. He explains how the very features promoted by audiobook vendors as selling points; their convenience, portability, and supplementary status to other activities are the same ones used by critics to denigrate the format as a diluted version of the printed book.\n\nAudiobooks are chiefly marketed as or conceived to be entertainment, and this is another reason why they’re considered derivative of or subordinate to the printed book. What, however, other than marketing pitches underlies the belief that listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading, and why is it considered even more punitively a form of cheating?\n\nOne possibility relates to what is called, and this is a quotation from Rubery, “the reader’s vocalization of the printed page, which has been taken by many to be a fundamental part of the imaginative apprehension of literature. When we read on the page, it is thought that we voice what we are reading in our head, and thus are more actively involved in meaning making than when a text is read to us.” The implication again is one of listening being passive, that instead of voicing in our minds, we are merely receptors when we listen.\n\n[String music ends]\n\nA similar objection is often made to watching a film version of a book before reading the book. The belief, again, is that it robs us of our imaginative reconstruction of the world the author creates through words alone. Reading on the page, so the theory goes, demands one’s undivided attention and imaginative powers, whereas listening does not because it allows and even invites us to perform other activities. And the fact is that many of us do turn to audiobooks in the hopes that we can accomplish other tasks while listening, but what in fact happens when we listen in order to or because we think we can multitask?\n\n(12:43)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter two: Listening As Overwork\n(12:49)\tMaya\tAs you will hear in the conversations throughout this podcast, many of us turn to audiobooks and podcasts as an attempt to maximize productivity, to fill intellectually the downtime of commuting or driving across the country, of doing chores or other forms of physical labor. Here is Jentery speaking about why he began to listen.\n(13:09)\tJentery\tAnd at first I took this as just basically a way of multitasking. Maybe it was like a form of overwork. If I’m being more reflective about it, I’m like, okay, so I might be going for a walk or I might be gardening or I might be doing the dishes, so I’m gonna put on a podcast that’s about, you know, literary criticism, literary culture or games culture, or I might listen to an audio book.\n(13:29)\tMaya\tMaia, an MA student from Concordia similarly explained that her desire to listen while doing other things was a coping mechanism meant to address overwork.\n(13:39)\tMaia\tI also have a similar experience. It was during my undergrad and I was really overworked, so I thought I’d get, I think it’s called scribd, an account on there. And I downloaded Milton’s Paradise Lost and I thought, this is great, I can do this while I work out. Two birds, one stone, and I, I think I missed about half the novel that way and it was a really unpleasant time.\n(14:00)\tMaya\tPhD students, Andy and Ghislaine also spoke about their experience with audiobooks before the course and how they attempted to listen while working and driving, cleaning and crafting. They also found that they could not concentrate on what they were listening to when doing these other activities and mostly gave up on audio books.\n(14:21)\tAndy\tI started listening to audio books. I got an audible membership to trial because I was working in a warehouse and so I had a lot of time moving my hands, but my brain was idle. So I remember I bought The Brothers Karamazov and I thought that that was gonna be the book and then honestly totally just distracted me. I never listened to audiobooks after that. I found it pretty unpleasant and I couldn’t focus. It was really hard for me to focus. Yeah, otherwise maybe driving. I drove cross country twice last year, so I definitely listened to some audio books, but, same thing, totally zoned out most of the time.\n(15:01)\tGhislaine\tYeah, I have kind of a similar audible trial experience where it’s like, yeah, I’ll try this out. And I downloaded the entire works of Poe and I’m like, yeah, I can listen to this at night or whatever. And after maybe 5, 10 minutes, I couldn’t focus on it, I just fell asleep. So I [Ghislaine laughs] since then, didn’t try to listen to other audiobooks cuz it just didn’t hold my attention.\n(15:29)\tMaya\t[Quite electronic music begins to play]\nEven after the course, the students reported that their ability to multitask while listening almost entirely depended on the content of the audiobook and the nature of the task at hand.\n\n(15:40)\tGhislaine\t[Electronic music ends]\nOn your note, Ella, of listening to non-serious books after the class ended, and it was like winter break and I still had this Audible subscription that I had to renew [laughs] because of the class and I forgot to cancel it. So I’m like, you have one credit. So I got this very unserious book called The Housemaid and all through the break, well not all through because it just took me a couple of days, I listened to it nonstop and I had a really good time listening to it, doing menial tasks, like dishes and, you know, little crafts.\n\nSo not for sleep and not for any serious work and not serious books, I could see myself maybe getting into audio books now, but yeah, I don’t know.\n\n(16:26)\tElla\tYeah, I mean I mostly listen to audio books if I’m walking or doing the dishes, like nothing that takes any more brain power than walking or doing the dishes. There’s a very fine line, like the harder the book, the more specific the task has to be to be like the right task to listen to an audiobook.\n(16:42)\tMaya\tThese conversations challenged the belief that listening is passive. Maia likewise spoke to her surprise at how much attention listening required and how this challenged her assumption about the primacy of the written.\n(16:55)\tMaia\tI wasn’t anticipating, as you’ve said as well, the amount of attention or even treating the audio as an artifact in and of itself. I didn’t realize coming into this class that I thought about it as a secondary modality to like a written form, especially from my past experience of really struggling with the audiobook and more complex wordplay that didn’t really amplify the porosity of what I was reading at all.\n(17:21)\tMaya\tAnd Jentery related that when he attempted to listen while doing chores, those chores often took a very long time.\n(17:28)\tJentery\tTo use one of my everyday examples, I often listen to a podcast while I’m doing the dishes in the evening and it’s always striking to me that there’s something said or something I heard that I will stop and go take a note. I’ll write that down on my phone or I’ll have a notebook next to me and I’ll make a note of it to return to later cuz I’m worried I might forget it, perhaps, just due to age at this point, but I go and I make a note and then I go back and then all of a sudden I’ve been doing dishes for two hours. It’s such a…it’s almost ritual at this point.\n(17:55)\tMaya\tFor Jentery, careful listening did not necessarily lend itself to multitasking, or at least to efficient multitasking. Ella described how even though she had been listening to readings in other courses and thought she was prepared, the reality was very different when confronted with the kind of listening she was asked to do in her Concordia class with Jason.\n(18:16)\tElla\tI was sort of primed for the class. I was like, great, now it’s just official, I’m going to be listening instead of reading. But I guess some of the things that we ended up having to listen to for the course required a lot more attention than I usually gave to my listening. And so I’d have to sit and listen rather than walk or do the dishes and listen, which I find a lot more difficult. I don’t know, I lose track, I lose focus if I’m just sitting and listening.\n(18:42)\tMaya\tAlthough we sometimes turn to an audio version of a book as a time-saving mechanism, thinking we can do chores when listening or as Maia says, “two birds, one stone”. It is not always possible. Often the listening or the chore or both are compromised. Further, we should bear in mind what Mark Kerrigan calls auditory fatigue; the analog to screen fatigue. Which he describes as experiencing a limit to listening, which is increasingly familiar, a sense of being oversaturated and unable to hear myself think.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nIn the conversation with Jentery, he talked about the challenges of asking people to take listening seriously and understanding the obstacles to attentive listening are part of that conversation. But to bring listening more fully into the classroom, we also need a better understanding of the processes of reading on the page. If listening is relentlessly and usually negatively compared to reading, we should first make sure we know what we mean by reading in the first place.\n\n(19:46)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter three, what is reading anyway?\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(19:52)\tMichelle\tI asked Jentery about how dismissals of listening are often informed by idealized notions of reading, particularly reading in print what you read.\n[Audio from interview with Jentery begins]\n\nBut I wanna go back to what you said earlier about often listening while multitasking, and I guess that just strikes me as so interesting and important and I think it is one of the reasons why lots of us do listen to a lot of different things, but I guess what I’m wondering is can we again maybe muddy that and say listening doesn’t just have to be deep or intense or close, that sometimes we don’t listen with that kind of intensity and that’s okay.\n\nSo one thing that has come up with my students and I’ve heard this in the interview with Jason Camlot’s students, is that they kind of go in and out of attention. Certain audio texts are much easier to listen to, some are harder, but I also think that’s what we do when we read.\n\nWe just have this fantasy that when we read, we’re just wrapped and we’re reading every word, and we’re taking it all in. I think that waning of attention is common to both acts.\n\n[Quiet string music begins to play]\n\n[Interview audio ends]\n\nEven though we often treat reading as if it is one thing, it is in fact a multitude of practices and cognitive experiences. Sometimes we read every word, but very often we scan or skim or surf when reading or simply fail to take in the words in front of us due to incomprehension or boredom or fatigue. And the same thing happens to us when we listen. Andy coined the phrase “ear skimming” to describe a similar experience that happens when listening.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(21:22)\tAndy\tYeah. That makes me think of skimming. When you skim readings that you’re not interested in, it’s like, listen, ear skimming [laughs], you kind of just blank out or, you know, distract yourself and then tune in when something picks up your interest.\n(21:38)\tMichelle\tThe contemporary neuroscience of reading as popularized by writers, including Maryanne Wolf and Stanislas Dehaene has shown us the complexity and variety of the neural processes that we designate by the single term reading.\n[String music begins to play]\n\nAnd notwithstanding the strong opinions about listening as compared to reading, there is a surprising lack of empirical research that directly evaluates how modality of presentation impacts comprehension and what little research there is has yielded conflicting results.\n\nNaomi Baron’s 2021 book, How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio, surveys current research and reports that although some studies suggest that comprehension may be improved when texts are read on the page as opposed to heard, these studies are limited and other empirical evidence suggests no difference. Some research, for example, shows that with listening, multitasking and mind wandering may be more prevalent.\n\nHowever, these effects appear to be lessened when what is being listened to is a narrative as opposed to an expository text. Some of the experiments involve listening to textbooks where depending on the subject matter, mind wandering is perhaps not surprising. My takeaway from her book is that the difficulties that are detected with oral comprehension and retention in some of the studies are more likely to be learned rather than innate. This interpretation aligns with research that shows that younger children are more effective listeners and that they lose these skills over time, becoming better readers than listeners.\n\nPerhaps this is because younger children are rewarded for and taught to value listening and this capacity wanes as emphasis on reading written materials intensifies. At the college level, we need to ask whether students put the same mental investment and time into their listening as they do into their reading. Baron helpfully points out some of the specific ways in which audio texts, including podcast and audiobooks, can prove challenging in terms of comprehension and recall.\n\nShe notes that audiobooks often lack certain elements that appear in or are endemic to print and that have been proven to aid learning when reading written texts. Podcasts, she points out, usually present undifferentiated sound and emit what are called signalizing devices such as bold or metallics that emphasize what is particularly important, as well as other visual landmarks such as headings and page breaks that can help readers chunk material into more comprehensible pieces.\n\nAudio texts also do not provide visual aids such as charts or graphs or images, all of which can enhance learning. Finally, annotation of written materials is a practice that has been proven to help readers understand and retain material, but annotation of audio can be more challenging. One of the reasons why the physical book has been such an enduring medium is because it enables annotation, whether in the form of handwritten notes, underlining or highlighting or adding sticky notes.\n\nBut performing any of these tasks with audio is, if not impossible, then less familiar, as our students are usually asked to speak or write about what they have read or heard. And as that is our work as scholars, we need mechanisms for marking audio to help us emphasize and find those passages we wish to return to. When listening to an audiobook or a podcast, we are often compelled to keep notes in a separate medium as Jentery did while listening by taking notes on his phone or notebook. This is one of the challenges we discussed.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(25:12)\tJentery\tYeah, so the only audiobook I taught in that particular class was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I recommended getting it in print as well, and I gathered probably somewhere between two thirds and three quarters the students did. So I did not, however, I demonstrated the use of annotation in the online class, like by showing how I annotate my own audio, you know, sharing a screen essentially, but I did not, and I should have, but I did not teach annotating audiobooks or annotating sound more generally.\nIn hindsight, if I had done it again, I would probably do something like that or figure out a way to integrate some kind of software or a mechanism to make it more approachable to students. But it kind of sparks my imagination here and I’m wondering how it is that when students were listening, how it is that they took notes and how that might correspond with and differ from how helped students take notes, say in the print novels that I teach, that would be a fascinating question. I’m sure people have studied this, but it’s not in my wheelhouse.\n\n(26:06)\tMichelle\tFortunately, annotation tools for audio do exist. Audible has a bookmark function that saves your place with a timestamp and in the digital file and allows you to enter notes. Tanya Clement, a scholar from the University of Texas, Austin, who is part of the SpokenWeb network, has been working with her team to create Audi Annotate: a web-based open source tool that supports audio and video markup.\nThese tools are needed to enable us to engage with audio in ways that are analogous to how we mark up text and print and now digitally audio annotation tools therefore seek to provide us with a set of options to approximate what we do with a printed book, such as turning down the corner of a page or adding a handwritten note.\n\nAnnotation can also support our spatial sense of where we are in a digital audio file, an aspect of reading that is normalized when we read a physical book, even if we don’t mark it up as we read, we tend to have a sense of what comes where, but this recall can be harder to replicate in an audio file. [Light electronic music begins]\n\nElla similarly reported needing to reference a print edition in order to anchor herself when listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(27:16)\tElla\tSo I ended up having to look at a print version just to anchor myself, you know, I’d look, oh, oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the book, so it must be a quarter of the way through the audiobook. I mean, that was difficult, taking a long form audio piece and being like, somewhere in here I remember listening to a fun thing, now I gotta find where it is. So I would use the print for that, but then I was, again, just using like the free Gutenberg version of that.\n(27:39)\tMichelle\tThe printed book offers us navigational tools and opportunities for annotation that support the comprehension and retention of written texts, but they are not reading per se. As Ella points out, books can also provide images and other formatting and formal features that help us to make sense of the words on the page.\nAudio is in need of tools that help us to anchor ourselves for the reasons mentioned and also because listening almost always takes longer than reading. I noticed that on the syllabus Jentery quantified the length of time students were expected to listen to the material he had assigned. [Light string music begins]\n\nThat was one of the aspects of teaching audiobooks that I struggled with as the audiobook of the novel, Milkman comes in at 14 hours, 11 minutes, and the two other audiobooks I assigned, Cersi by Madeline Miller and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evarist clock in at just over 12 and 11 hours, respectfully.\n\nAs we do not want to encourage our students to listen at faster speeds, and as we must acknowledge that re-listening may be needed, we must factor in the time it takes to listen, which is almost certainly longer than it takes to read on the page. Jentery explained that he had been quantifying expectations for how much prep time students would need to listen since the pandemic. [Electronic music ends]\n\n(28:56)\tJentery\tSince the pandemic, issues related like when, you know, your sense of place and your sense of campus changes, and the campus is kind of in your house now or in your domestic space. I think time management is affected pretty deeply and I gather research supports that assumption. So that was part of it, just making clear and or transparent labor expectations, while noting that mileage may vary.\nBut it also comes actually out of doing a lot of work with digital media and just more generally in digital studies, where in my own training and in my own education, I had gleaned a pretty concrete sense of how long it would take me to read a 200 page novel and I could assign that accordingly and we could talk about that in terms of time.\n\n(29:38)\tMichelle\tWhat I hope these conversations have illuminated are the ways in which we as instructors can help our students. By recognizing that effectively reading written text encompasses a range of practices, we can think about how best to provide a set of comparable supports to enable our students to succeed in listening.\nIn the pedagogical audio we create, such as this very podcast episode, we can enact some of the signalizing devices that readers of printed material are accustomed to and rely on to make sense of what they’re reading, by adding section breaks, as I’ve endeavored to do in this podcast.\n\nAlthough a podcast is in oral media, we can enhance it with visual aids and transcriptions as again is attempted in the blog post that accompanies this podcast. [Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nOne of the other immediate demands of teaching literary audio is providing students with a framework for understanding what they are hearing.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nWhat is an audio book or a podcast anyway? A genre? A medium? According to Jentery, the critical conceptual category is format, and a podcast or an audiobook are both formats within the medium of audio.\n\n(30:52)\tAI Generated Voice\t[Electronic music begins to play]\nChapter four: Format matters.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(30:58)\tMaya\tOne of the most riveting exchanges with Jentery was about the conceptual categories he offered to his students to describe and distinguish between different forms of literary audio, from audiobooks to podcasts to radio dramas. Format occupies the zone between the more abstract category of media, on the one hand, and the more content specific category of genre, on the other. To break down the three conceptual categories, a familiar example may be useful.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nLet’s take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was first published in London in 1813 in three volumes. We begin with the most abstract category, that of media, which is usually divided into text, audio, video, and image. The medium of the novel’s first public appearance was text, but before its publication it lived in audio form as Austen is said to have read the novel aloud to her family in advance of publication. After its publication, it would’ve continued to be read aloud in countless homes across Britain and abroad, especially after its publication in Philadelphia In 1832.\n\nIn 1833, an illustrated version of the novel was first published, bringing the novel into a visual medium in 1940, just over 100 years later, it entered another medium; video. As we can see, a work like Pride and Prejudice exists in multiple media at the same time, and simply because it was first presented to the public as a text does not mean that that medium should necessarily have primacy.\n\nThe next conceptual layer is that of format, for example, within video there are different formats such as feature length film adaptations and mini-series, as well as many, many others. With the concept of format referring to how our particular media is structured and delivered. We may also create a typology of audio formats in which the novel has been presented, from the handful of amateur readings on Librivox to audiobooks narrated by celebrities.\n\nThe final conceptual category is that of genre, which describes content. Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction, a novel, and we could historize it further by calling it a domestic novel or a comedy of manners.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nIn discussions with Jentery, he explained that with his students, he lent heavily into the concept of format, asking students to listen to a variety of audio formats, radio plays, serialized drama, voiceover narration, and first person video games. Using the concept of format to ground their understanding of what they were hearing, historically and technologically.\n\n(33:35)\tJentery\tI think one of the really useful aspects of that approach was that we could, in very kind of concrete ways and in palpable terms, talk about the ways in which audio achieves a context, if you will, and brings material together, brings together, for example, aspects of narrative and story with art and design. And since it’s so much about situation and context, you know, not taking for instance the kind of formalist approach to media where we kind of unmoor it from time and space and talk about it abstractly.\nI think one of the consequences of that was we were also able to look at moments when this work was made and this work was produced. Actually look at the specificity of context in each case and talk about how format, genre, and audio production, just writ large is always kind of grounded in particular situations.\n\n(34:28)\tMaya\tThroughout this podcast episode, we will return to one of Jentery’s key insights that thinking about literary audio through the lens of format helps us to situate it in place and time and allows, as he puts it, for audio to achieve a context.\n[Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nWith all of these efforts needed to support listeners, it might reasonably be asked whether listening is worth it? If we need to provide new media frameworks for students, if listening requires as much, if not more attention than reading on the page, if it takes longer than reading a physical book, if it can induce auditory fatigue, and if in order to write about it, you still need special tools to annotate or a print version anyway, why bother?\n\nAvid listeners of audio books, however, answer this question by noting that they often listen to books that they have already read in physical form, and yet always they hear something that they didn’t see. What are some of the ways in which listening enhances comprehension and enjoyment? What do we hear that we did not see and what questions or insights does listening give rise to that we would not otherwise have from reading the book in written form?\n\n(35:40)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter five: Hearing What We Cannot See.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(35:45)\tMichelle\tMatthew Rubery, author of the foundational history of audio literature, The Untold Story of the Talking Book speaks to the different perceptions that come from listening and reading on the page. [String music begins to play]\nNearly all readers, he writes, report understanding identical texts differently in spoken and silent formats as various elements stand out depending on the mode of reception. He notes that the narrator who performs the story can be especially useful in giving voice to unfamiliar accents, dialects or languages. The vocalization of such distinctively oral text would otherwise be impoverished for many readers poorly equipped to sound out the linguistic effects for themselves.\n\nAn audiobook is a performance, an interpretation of the original text, often accentuated with the narrator adopting different voices for different characters and enhanced with sound effects and music, all of which bring the audiobook closer to theater or film even when it offers absolute fidelity to the written text, as is the case with most unabridged audiobooks. Jentery and I explored the performative aspects of the audiobook he assigned, Toni Morrison’s reading of The Bluest Eye. I asked him whether he attempted with his students to disambiguate the text as written from the text as performed by Morrison.\n\n(37:07)\tJentery\tAnd that, so we tried just that and actually I think it was a bit of a setup because when we went through and listened to it, and in many cases read alongside what we were listening, we did our best to think about the various roles, if you will, that Toni Morrison is playing in that audiobook of The Bluest Eye. So Morrison as author, Morrison as narrator, as reader, as voice actress, even as character voices.\nAnd we went through and tried to mark how we would understand that differently. So I remember this exercise and yeah, and ultimately probably without a shock, we determined it was very obviously difficult to make a clean demarcation between one and the other when it would happen in a sentence and whatnot.\n\n(37:48)\tMichelle\tAs Jentery explains, there are many different rules that Morrison takes on in reading her novel aloud. Rubery distinguishes between different models of audiobook performances. The narration may be read by the author, by a professional voice actor, by a celebrity, or even by an amateur. Characters may be voiced by the narrator, sometimes in different voices or different actors may be cast to play different roles.\nAn extreme example of this is the audiobook version of George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is performed by over 160 actors. Toni Morrison reads The Bluest Eye herself, performing the third person narration and also giving voice to different characters in the novel. Morrison also narrates another book that is embedded in the novel, one of the Dick and Jane Reading Primers, a series intended to help new readers first published in America in the 1930s.\n\nThese primers, with their idealized characters living seemingly problem-free lives, are white and middle class, setting up a potent contrast with the character’s Morrison depicts in her novel. Morrison’s novel begins with a Dick and Jane story of about 150 words. The Dick and Jane story is reprinted at the very beginning of the novel and it appears in its entirety three times, each time with different typographical features.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe first time the story is printed, there are spaces between the lines and the words, and the story takes up most of a page. The second time the spacing between lines and words is reduced, shrinking the presentation of the story to half a page with all punctuation removed. The third time the story is printed, all spaces between the words have disappeared with each word bleeding into the next.\n\nTo help you visualize this, please refer to the blog post for this episode on the SpokenWeb website, which includes images taken from these two first pages of the novel. Morrison’s repetition of the story three times in printed form seems to mimic a young child becoming proficient in reading, from one who slowly sounds out each word to one who becomes so fluent that she can run each word into the next, but the blurring of words into one undifferentiated mass has other implications.\n\nAs Morrison reads the three versions of the story in the audiobook, she speeds up the pace of her reading as might be expected, but a more sinister element also presents itself. Here is Morrison reading the first part of the story at three different speeds.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(40:22)\tToni Morrison reading from The Bluest Eye\t[Morrison reads the text slowly]\nHere’s the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They’re very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text again, faster this time] Here is the house, it is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text even faster]\n\nHere’s the house. Green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come and play with Jane.\n\n(41:46)\tMichelle\t[String music begins to play]\nWhat Morrison’s voicing brings to life is both how the child learns to read, but also how through the rote rehearsal of the story at a speed that renders it mostly unintelligible the white family living in the green and white House becomes internalized as the norm and the ideal.\n\nIn the forward to the printed version, which interestingly becomes an author’s note at the end of the audiobook, Morrison reports that the story originated in a conversation with a friend from elementary school who confided in Morrison that she wished for blue eyes. [Electronic music ends]\n\nWithin the first four minutes of the audiobook, Morrison’s pointed reading of the Dick and Jane story at three different tempos draws out the menace lurking within these stories for Black children; the Dick and Jane stories provide just one potential explanation for a central question the novel poses: How does Morrison’s childhood friend and the character in the novel who asks for the same thing, learn to wish for the bluest eye? What Morrison describes as racial self-loathing.\n\nFor me, the meaning of Morrison’s rendering of the Dick and Jane story in the print novel is enhanced by her performance of them. I might have had an inkling of her meaning by reading it on the page, but it is amplified by her reading as seeing and hearing her translation of the embedded story intensifies and crystallizes her meaning.\n\nAt the same time, any attempt to read authorial intention into the audiobook performance must be interrogated. To return to Jentery’s suggestion that by listening and situating the audio recording within the time and place of its production, audio achieves a context. We might want to ask students to reflect on the fact that Morrison is reading the novel in 2011, more than 40 years after its first publication in 1970. Morrison also makes changes to the presentation of her peratext, moving, as I said, the forward from its position prefacing the printed novel to the end when she reads the novel for the audiobook.\n\nThe reason for this shift seems likely to do with the difference in media and format. Readers can and often do skip preparatory material in print, but this action of skipping ahead is perhaps less natural with an audiobook. Beyond these changes, what does seem consistent over this 40 year period is Morrison’s belief that her books were meant to be heard.\n\nThus, she describes the language she uses in the novel as speakerly, oral, colloquial. And it is perhaps for this reason that her audiobooks are so powerful. Indeed, Morrison performed all of her books as audiobooks, demonstrating her investment in aurality. Sarah Kozloff has argued that audiobooks create a stronger bond than printed books between storyteller and listener by invoicing the narrator, and many listeners in particular enjoy hearing authors perform their own works.\n\nAudiobooks, particularly when read by the author, seem to bring us closer to the source of the words and the story, much in the same way a handwritten manuscript seems to bring us in proximity to the hand and body that inscribed it. Jentery related to me how he found it effective, as he put it, to bring the author into the room in assigning an audiobook read by the author like Morrison’s Bluest Eye and by playing interviews with or speeches by authors.\n\n(45:03)\tJentery\tWell in American fiction courses, I love including videos of James Baldwin’s speeches in a lot of material. I think that’s fascinating to bring the author into the room and I often when I’m teaching primary source, a novel for example, love to include and play in the class podcast interviews with those authors, in a way that allows students to think about the kind of context around the book, but also just kind of what went into the book and some of the motivations for it.\n(45:29)\tMichelle\tJentery and I discussed how changes in digital technology make it much easier too, as he put it, bring the author into our classrooms. We have a wealth of freely available audio and video such as the New Yorker Fiction podcast, which makes hundreds of stories from the magazine’s archive and current issues available to listen to, some enhanced by extended conversations about the stories.\nIn addition to improved access to primary source audio material, Jentery also points to how changes in accessibility to technology and equipment for playing and recording audio are transforming what is now pedagogically possible.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe final section of this episode considers how technological developments have changed both what we and our students can do with audio.\n\n(46:22)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter Six: Teaching with Audio Now.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(46:28)\tMaya\tIn the conversation with Jentery, he reflected on how much has changed in just the past decade of teaching audio.\n(46:35)\tJentery\tWhen I was teaching sound studies at the University of Washington and the University of Victoria between like 2010 and 2012, the accessibility of material there, like what I could circulate and what I couldn’t, what I had just to play, say, on a desktop computer in the classroom, but also what students could record and what with, I’m always careful not to assume that students have access to technologies and computers.\nBut I can say just matter of factly, the degree to which they would need to, say, rent or go to the library to acquire an audio recorder has dramatically changed, just given the ubiquity of mobile phones at this point. So there’s that angle, which recording is, I think, on the whole, it’s not universally accessible, but it’s more accessible to students now than it was then. I think just being able to hit “record” is more ready to hand.\n\n(47:17)\tMaya\tRecording equipment and podcasting software also open new forms of assessments. As Jentery explains, when working with sound, it often makes sense to sample the sounds being analyzed and hence an audio essay is often the best way for a student to fully engage with the material.\n(47:35)\tJentery\tA thing that really struck me as compelling and did gain traction among students in the seminar was the idea of composing in such a way, composing an essay, an audio essay if you prefer a podcast, in such a way that makes room for your primary sources to speak and to be dialogic in that sense. So, the inclusion of samples of authors reading their work, of hearing the author’s voice in a way that I think, again, you don’t need to adhere to a metaphysics of presence to find this interesting.\nYou can just think of it in terms of honoring other people’s work and what it means for you to hear other people’s work in your writing and your composition in the production of space and time. And so I liked that too, the threading through other people’s work into your material in a way that might be a little different than reading a block quote or seeing an image on the page.\n\n(48:22)\tMaya\tJason Camlot’s student Ella explained that she chose the podcast format for her final assessment because it seemed more natural and easier than writing and attempting to describe her object of study, which were recordings of poetry readings.\n(48:37)\tElla\tI chose to do the long form. I mean, I simplified in my head the long form. I told myself I’m not gonna do interviews or anything, I’m just going to essentially record myself reading this essay and then insert the sounds I’m talking about because I think this might actually be easier than trying to transcribe those sounds in a way that I can then analyze them in writing.\nIn this case, I could just play the sound for you and you can hear it and then I can talk about my thoughts on it. That seemed like an easier process, actually, because I was going to be working with a bunch of different old recordings and newer recordings and poetry readings and stuff and, it just, I don’t even know how I would’ve approached describing some of this, especially cuz I was working, for instance, with experimental poetry from the eighties and I was working with really old recordings on wax cylinder of Tennyson and like, how do you describe those kinds of experimental or super old degraded sounds to people in order to then really get into a conversation about it? So it just made sense to have people hear them.\n\n(49:36)\tMaya\t[Soft electronic music begins to pla]\nElla’s observations about the need to incorporate the different sounds she was working with,once again return us to Jentery’s idea of audio achieving a context.\n\nIn order to describe and situate 19th century wax cylinder recordings within their particular historical and technological moment, it is necessary to hear them in the same way that we say a picture is worth a thousand words. A short audio clip, here, the Tennyson recording on wax cylinder that Ella refers to is likewise easier to understand when heard.\n\n[An audio clip of Tennyson reading poetry plays]\n\nIn addition, Ella explained her preference for the audio essay format by echoing Jentery’s sense that there might be something more dialogic and open about it.\n\n(50:32)\tElla\tI do think it was faster for me to write for this podcast than it was for me to write what could have been a conference paper because I don’t like the structure of the academic paper where you say your thesis statement in the beginning, prove your thesis statement, and then restate your thesis statement. I prefer a structure where you sort of go from a starting point, like essentially more of like a thought process, like, here’s my starting point and by the end of it you’re like, here’s where I got from that starting point.\nI had the option to do that with the podcast. Whereas usually when you’re writing an academic paper for a class, they don’t give you the option to just run with things. So it just went a lot faster cuz it was a form that made more sense to me.\n\n(51:11)\tMaya\tJentery also spoke about how crafting an audio essay is different than writing for the page and reading it aloud, or even reading a conference paper, which might be designed for oral delivery. An audio essay perhaps because it is modeled on the podcast may be more audience oriented. Maia reflected that having the opportunity to listen to each other’s podcast or audio essay assignment distinguished the course from others she had taken where a student’s writing is primarily directed towards the professor.\n(51:38)\tMaia (51:38)\tIt was also interesting to hear everyone else’s podcasts because in a normal normal class in, a more traditionally like written assignment based class, you don’t read everyone’s essays and get to interact with your classmates like that. And I think, for me, it was a really interesting atmosphere that I don’t know that I’ll ever have again. It was really, really special in the way that we all interacted and I don’t know to what part of that was the sharing in a medium that is more shared, listening of togetherness rather than kind of an individualized personalized reading.\n(52:13)\tMaya\tFor Andy and Ghislaine, the audio essay felt different than in-class presentations, which are to a great extent formalized. By contrast, the audio assignments were diverse, fresh, and engaging.\n(52:27)\tAndy\tEveryone took it in such a different direction. So it was like when you have a presentation, I feel often they follow a similar format and structure, but with this it was completely different in every kind of way. Genres across the board, like kind of there were no limits of what you could really do and I think that’s what for me made it different than just a typical class presentation. [String music begins to play]\n(52:51)\tGhislaine\tRight, that makes sense. So it’s like with regular normal class presentations, it would have been as if, you know, someone came in singing and dancing versus, you know, just with their PowerPoint. [laughs]\n(53:03)\tMaya\tWe will end with Ghislaine’s words, as her comments should inspire both instructors and students to turn to literary audio, both as a source of teaching material and as a form for student work. We believe she speaks to what we all could use in our classrooms. A little more singing and dancing and a little less PowerPoint.\nYou have been listening to “Audiobooks In the Classroom”, a SpokenWeb podcast episode by Michelle Levy and narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz. Thanks for listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(53:54)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\nOur producers this month are Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz, both based at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca, subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9599","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E8, Ambient Connection: The Sounds of Public Library Spaces, 5 June 2023, Trotter"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ambient-connection-the-sounds-of-public-library-spaces/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Trotter"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Trotter"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Trotter\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://the-spokenweb-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/ambient-connection-the-sounds-of-public-library-spaces\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:48:40\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ambient-connection-the-sounds-of-public-library-spaces/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-06-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Listed on site as S4E7. Not downloadable, so some entries (file name, size) are left empty.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"EPL Makerspace\\nhttps://www.epl.ca/makerspace/\\n\\nEPL Gamerspace\\nhttps://www.epl.ca/milner-library/gamerspace/\\n\\nShelley Milner Children’s Library\\nhttps://www.epl.ca/milner-library/childrens-library/\\n\\nKatherine McLeod, “Listening to the Library”\\nhttps://labs.library.concordia.ca/listening-to-the-library/\\n\\nValentine, P. M. (2012). A social history of books and libraries from cuneiform to bytes. The Scarecrow Press, Inc.\\n\\nPeesker, S. (2019). Sounds like hard work: How the right noise can help you focus and be more creative. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-sounds-like-hard-work-how-the-right-noise-can-help-you-focus-and-be/\\n\\nBuxton, R. T., Pearson, A. L., Allou, C., Fristrup, K., & Wittemyer, G. (2021). A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(14). https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1073/PNAS.2013097118\\n\\nHan, Z., Meng, Q., & Kang, J. (2022). The effect of foreground and background of soundscape sequence on emotion in urban open spaces. Applied Acoustics. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.109039\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549660631040,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, Maia Trotter—SpokenWeb research assistant and recent graduate of the MLIS program at the University of Alberta—explores what libraries actually sound like. Featuring interviews with three staff members at the Edmonton Public Library Stanley A. Milner branch and her own personal reflections, this episode considers how the sounds of library spaces have changed over time, and the connection between those sounds and the ways that libraries can make us feel.\n\nDuring the COVID pandemic, before she had ever set foot in a classroom dedicated to learning about libraries, Maia Trotter discovered a YouTube video titled “Library Ambiance.” This video didn’t contain the typically fabricated sounds of a library that someone had layered over each other like book pages turning and a fireplace crackling in the background, but a live recording of the sounds of a public library out there in the world. These sounds are what helped her to get through the isolation she felt during those long months at home.\n\nHaving now been surrounded by ideas about libraries for the last two years, Maia decided to investigate the different sounds of libraries, how they have changed over time, and how they make people feel. For this episode, Maia interviews three staff members of the Edmonton Public Library Stanley A. Milner branch who work in unique spaces to get their perspectives on the way sound affects patrons and staff members alike. She interviews staff members who have worked in the Makerspace, Gamerspace, and the children’s library in order to explore the relationship between feeling and sound in libraries, and how the sounds of libraries have changed over time.\n\nSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music ends]\n[Katherine talks softly] In this episode we are in a library. [Katherine makes a shushing noise, “shh”]\n\nI’m talking quietly because I’m in a library. I’m in a library at the University of Toronto and I’m here in the stacks talking quietly because a library is a place where you are supposed to be quiet, a place of silent reading. But libraries are also full of sounds. Not just the sounds of the library, the entrance, the beep of the book checkout, hushed voices, pages turning, but also the sounds of audio materials held within the library.\n\nIn 2021, I was the researcher in residence at Concordia’s Library. And my project, Listening to the Library, linked in the show notes was all about exploring sound materials and sites of sound within the library. The library is full of sound and that’s why at the SpokenWeb Symposium last year when SpokenWeb research assistant Maia Trotter pitched an idea about a podcast episode about the sounds of public libraries, I was so keen to hear what you would come up with.\n\nMaia takes us into a public library in Edmonton and she takes time to really listen to its sounds and what sounds it makes. The library has never been noisier, but noisy in a positive sense. The library as a place of making, of listening and of community. Here’s this month’s episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, live from the Library and produced by Maia Trotter: Ambient Connection: The Sounds of Public Library Spaces. [SpokenWeb Theme music swells and then fades out]\n\n(02:18)\tAmbient Library Audio\t[Indiscernible voices talking over one another]\n(02:22)\tMaia Trotter\tWhat do you hear when you close your eyes and think of a library? Do you hear pages turning, books being reshelved, perhaps some hushed whispers or maybe even the infamous librarian “shush”? [Sound effect of a person shushing plays]\nHow much of that is real and how much of it is just an idea or an expectation of what a library is and sounds like?\n\nHi everyone, my name is Maia and I am a metadata assistant for the SpokenWeb University of Alberta team. I recently finished my Master of Library and Information studies at the University of Alberta, which was a two, two year program that introduced me to a world of libraries, so different from my original perceived notions of what libraries are and what they sound like.\n\nMy interest in the sounds of libraries originated during the Covid Pandemic when everyone was in lockdown and I was working from home. I was fortunate enough to still be living with my family at the time, so I wasn’t completely isolated, but I remember long stretches of silence with just the sound of my hands typing on my laptop. As many people did, I felt lonely, but even phone calls with my friends didn’t feel like enough sometimes.\n\nI tried to listen to music while I worked or shuffled around at home, but the music either distracted me or failed to help ease the loneliness I felt. One day as I was searching YouTube for some lo-fi beats to listen to, I came across a video titled Real Library Ambiance. I could hear books, people’s lowered voices, the dull thud footsteps, pens scratching across paper, chairs pushing in and out, and the low hum of the traffic outside. I listened to this video many, many times throughout the pandemic as I attempted to feel closer to the world outside our house.\n\nI found comfort in hearing the everyday sounds of people using these spaces, and there was something about libraries in particular that made me feel calm and connected. The sounds of that video hadn’t necessarily been what I was expecting when I clicked on it, but that difference was exactly what I needed to hear.\n\nIt was about a year and a half later after I’d already begun my master’s program that I discovered I wasn’t the only one to find comfort in the sounds of real libraries during the pandemic. I read an article in The Guardian that reported that many people had been accessing real library ambiance sounds during the pandemic and during periods of time when libraries were closed. And so I began to wonder about sounds and libraries and why we find comfort in them and why I had gravitated towards real library sounds during the pandemic, compared to the soft and edited sounds that I had originally expected to hear when I clicked on that video.\n\nAs I sifted through videos on YouTube, I found obvious differences in actual recordings of real world libraries compared to edited and created videos of library ambiance, which would typically consist of sounds of pages turning layered with sounds like a crackling fireplace or rain on a tin roof. The sounds in the actual recordings of libraries were full of life, of people talking, people moving, and not really the sounds we might expect when we think of a library.\n\nAnd so this is what we will be discussing today. What do libraries sound like now and how do they differ from our preconceived notions of what they sound like? How have their sounds changed over time? Does this make people feel differently?\n\n[Ambient sound of children and adults talking in a library]\n\nIn order to better understand sounds in a public library, I interviewed three staff members from the Edmonton Public Library, Stanley A. Milner branch, which is the downtown library and the largest branch in the EPL system. I interviewed Dan Hackborn, who works in the Makerspace, Charlie Crittendon, who frequently works in the gamer space, and Anna Wallace who works in the Children’s Library.\n\nMy first question to them was to take me through an average workday for each of them in these unique spaces.\n\n(06:14)\tDan Hackborn\tHi, my name is Dan Hackborn. I’m currently employed by the Edmonton Public Library Makerspace, and I’ve worked there for five years at that specific location or branch.\n(06:27)\tMaia Trotter\tSo maybe first if you could just take us through an average day working in the Makerspace.\n(06:32)\tDan Hackborn\tIt’s in quite a bit of flux right now. There is a real push to open up all the services that were promised with the downtown branch’s retrofit as quickly as possible after a couple of years of more slowly and carefully deploying services. So right now it can be any mixture of learning new services, giving certifications or guidance to members of the public on existing services and planning models for potential future services, and then performing maintenance on existing services as well.\n(07:17)\tMaia Trotter\tCould you give us some examples of what those services are?\n(07:21)\tDan Hackborn\tThe existing services we have right now are free printing which requires regular maintenance of the printers and fixes, the recording studios, which basically just requires minor tuning of guitars- [Sound effect of a guitar string being plucked]\n-and software updates and things like that. Creative computers, which are all managed centrally. So we don’t really have to do much IT on those aside from some minor admin stuff, and the vinyl cutting and key press service, which doesn’t require that much maintenance.\n\nAnd finally, the sewing machine and surging service, which is our newest service. [Sound effect of sewing machine whirring plays] And that mainly requires cleaning of the sewing machines. [Soft string music begins to play in arpeggios] And then all of them require certification and education for members of the public when they’re using them for the first time. So that happens between a mix of short kinds of orientations that last 15 minutes to full three hour courses. [Music swells and fades]\n\n(08:29)\tMaia Trotter\tHi Anna.\n(08:30)\tAnna Wallace\tHello!\n(08:31)\tMaia Trotter\tSo you work at the Children’s Library at EPL, correct?\n  (08:36)\tAnna Wallace\tI do. Technically it’s like a blended position. I work on the literacy vans out in the wilds of Edmonton, [Maia laughs] but I also work, yes, part-time in the Children’s Library downtown.\n(08:49)\tMaia Trotter\tThat’s awesome. Could you tell me a little bit about The Children’s Library and what your day-to-day looks like while you’re working there?\n(08:55)\tAnna Wallace\tThe Children’s Library downtown is huge. So it kind of has its own square footage inside Milner that is about the same as a regular size branch of the Edmonton Public Library. So it kind of turns into its own little world. The way that the shape is spaced, it ends up being kind of a corral in the corner of the first floor of Milner.\nSo we have quite a bit of space for our families to come and hang out in. So your day, just like working a desk can be, honestly day to day, it can look vastly different. It depends on how many people are in the space, how many programs are running that day, whether or not there’s tours in this space or just kind of like what needs your customers are looking for from you as a representative of the Edmonton Public Library.\n\nSo a lot of the time we’re just kind of hanging out, waiting for like, cause the library work is very responsive, right? Like you are, you’re there with library services and you’re waiting for what the customer needs from you or the patron needs from you. So a lot of days can be intensely hectic because our children’s library has turned into an attraction space because it has a lot of interactive elements for the kids to be learning and playing with.\n\nSo there’s a lot of space, for example, we have a little playhouse for three and under to be like climbing on. We have lots of interactive things on the walls to engage their brains obviously, but also just like lots of stuff to play with. So a lot of our families are coming in not only to borrow books and look at our services or our programming but to just be in the space and let their kids kind of interact with the space.\n\nSo sometimes you come in on a Saturday and it sounds like you’re walking into a play gym in a rec center or like Treehouse and you have to question yourself like, didn’t I get into library service?\n\n11:10\tMaia Trotter\t[Maia laughs] Aren’t libraries quiet?\n11:12\tAnna Wallace\tRight? Yeah. Because I mean, it’s a very, like, a very busy space. So within a shift you can be, you can be programming in the program room for a small number of people which is like noise and like, like especially if it’s an early literacy program, you’ve got shakers going. [Sound effect of music with shakers plays]\nYou’ve got music going, you’ve got children interacting with you, and then once that’s done, you could be on the floor helping people with, oh my goodness, like anything on the computer, 3D printing, getting video games set up, letting people into our children’s maker space, explaining things in the children’s maker space. Or you could be running a story stop, which we do every single day.\n\nOr just helping people with the provocations or crafts that we have on the floor. There’s just, it gets really, really intense in there sometimes, a lot of the time, actually, most of the time these days. It’s really, really, really intense. [Shake music ends]\n\n(12:11)\tMaia Trotter\tWe’ve got our next guest here, Charlie, who works in the EPL Gamer Space. Thanks so much for being here.\n(12:18)\tCharlie Crittenden\tYou’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.\n(12:20)\tMaia Trotter\tCharlie, could you tell us a little bit about the Gamer Space and what your day-to-day looks like while you’re working there?\n(12:26)\tCharlie Crittenden\tAbsolutely. Yeah. So the GamerSpace is a room in the Stanley Milner Library, which is dedicated to trying to make gaming more accessible for library customers, sort of creating and giving opportunities to access different kinds of gaming technologies. So we have each of the major consoles there, you know, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, we have a bunch of gaming PCs there as well.\nAnd then we have some sort of retro arcade cabinets there with a bunch of cool games on ’em. So my day-to-day work there is really just, you know, welcoming people into the space, [Electronic music begins to play]\n\nexplaining to them how it all works, helping them get on these various devices, and then sometimes troubleshooting or providing advice, helping out with any issues that might arise. [Music ends]\n\n(13:15)\tMaia Trotter\tYou don’t work exclusively in the Gamer Space though?\n(13:19)\tCharlie Crittenden\tThat’s right. So the Gamer Space is actually staffed by a rotating group of librarian employees drawn from different departments, the Maker Space, the children’s library, and the general library staff as well. People kind of cycle in and out of there throughout the day. [Ambient sounds of people talking plays]\n(13:34)\tMaia Trotter\tNow that I know what an average day looks like for these folks, I wanted to know how these spaces sound in comparison to the rest of the library. I could have chosen to interview staff members about the sounds of the library as a whole, but as we will discuss, libraries are no longer the kinds of institutions they used to be, even if our perceptions are still a little bit behind, and these specific areas we’re talking about are clear indicators of that evolution of space. So I wanted to focus on them and the ambiance they contribute to the library. [Ambient sound ends]\n(14:09)\tAnna Wallace\tIt’s been many a moon since libraries have been quiet spaces, to be completely honest. I mean, I’ve been working for EPL for like a decade now, and it’s never really been like, it’s not like don’t come in and scream your head off, but a certain level of humans being in a space together noise is kind of accepted now. We’ll definitely separate our quiet spaces.\n[Soft light music begins to play]\n\nLike if someone walks into the children’s library and is like, oh my God, we can be like, Hey, there’s quiet spaces on the third floor, or this study room is great, or whatever. But study spaces in the children library aren’t, they’re not copasetic.\n\n(14:53)\tCharlie Crittenden\tSo in terms of library policies, it is interesting to note that we do have a specific policy to not try to, we still don’t allow people to yell too loudly or something like that, you know, or something that’s really disruptive.\nBut like, we do have a higher, like we sort of welcome more noise in that space if people are just having a good time and like the more the level of, you know, cheering or yeah, just kind of calling out or getting excited that’s totally okay and sort of welcomed as part of the gaming experience of, you know having that kind of community of fun around it.\n\nOf course there’s some people who are just kind of quietly playing and doing their own thing, but yeah, that’s definitely something that we welcome in that space. And that’s a bit of a difference to the rest of the library where we would generally ask for people to keep their noise levels more at a conversational level. And yeah, so it’s definitely a special space in that regard for noise.\n\n(15:49)\tAnna Wallace\tYeah, Milner is a very popular branch for our downtown families and public. So it does, like, the Milner itself can get very, very loud and I find that the open space, when you walk into the library, you see the digital wall and you can kind of like see the ramps going up. Like you can hear pretty much everything when you’re in that space. The children’s library itself is a little bit off to the corner, so I feel like they did make a conscious choice to be like, okay, we’re not gonna put the children’s library with a giant open ceiling because then the noise of the children’s library is gonna end up everywhere in Milner.\nI mean, I’ve gotten used to now on my breaks that like, I go find a dark room and like I just, I don’t talk to anybody [Anna laughs] and I just eat my lunch in the dark room because sometimes the space can be so overwhelming that like I myself need a reset button before I can go back on the floor.\n\n(16:49)\tDan Hackborn\tThe design decisions for the Maker Space leaned into more of a bare bones industrial aesthetic. So there are concrete floors in the Maker Space and the ceiling ducting and wiring and stuff is all exposed, which in some ways looks good. I’m a fan of this aesthetic but it has extremely different acoustic properties than the rest of the library.\n[Soft electronic music begins to play]\n\nWhereas the rest of the library things like books actually act as essentially natural sound absorption barriers within the library or within the Maker Space specifically, there’s almost no soft surfaces. Like that we actually had to install some acoustic paneling on the ceiling because at the beginning it was so incredibly loud and impossible to hold a conversation, particularly when we were covering our faces in masks and had the plastic barriers up.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nSo any, basically any conversation anywhere in the space automatically becomes simultaneously magnified and fades into a gray noise where it’s hard to tell what words are actually being said. So that’s the main characteristics of the acoustics in the Maker Space.\n\n(18:16)\tMaia Trotter\tWhen we think of a library, I think we usually refer back to what we have seen in media, which is usually based on libraries of an older generation. I personally think back to that scene in the Music Man when Marian, the librarian, is stamping each book to be checked out, interspersed with s shushes and books being stacked or reshelved in an echoey and quiet environment.\n(18:46)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Hill\t[Arpeggiating brass plays in the background] No, it’s all right. I know everything and it doesn’t make any difference.\n(18:50)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Marian\tI don’t know what you’re talking about. You please make your selection and leave.\n(18:55)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Hill\tI have.\n(18:56)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Marian\tWhat do you wanna take out?\n(18:57)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Hill\tThe librarian.\n(19:00)\t[Scene from The Music Man] Marian\tShhhh. Quiet please.\n(19:03)\tMaia Trotter\t[Ambient sounds from a library begins to play] Throughout history, libraries have typically been indicators of wealth, class, and higher social status, and were thus exclusionary in nature. The materials required to create books were expensive, and the labor to create them was extensive, so they were only available to those with great means.\nThey were typically exclusive spaces reserved for academic spheres in the upper class. Public libraries as we understand them today, didn’t even really start to appear until the mid 1800’s. Silence is a common characteristic of how we generally think of library spaces and has typically been enforced throughout history. But there is an oppressive nature to enforced silence, and as libraries have evolved as public spaces, so too has their acceptance and even encouragement of sounds.\n\nBut this is a more recent approach, and it wasn’t until the 21st century that libraries began to incorporate more spaces like the Maker Space and evolve into spaces that could really be considered community hubs rather than book houses of the past.\n\nAs someone who has studied libraries for the past two years, I will be the first to say that libraries have their problems and they are still not wholly inclusive institutions, despite the vocational awe that permeates most of the general public perception. [Background noise ends]\n\nBut libraries have changed and over time have become increasingly community-led spaces unless their sounds have changed and the sounds themselves represent what a community wants, what it feels, where it struggles, and where it draws comfort. And so with that in mind, I asked my interviewees what were the most frequently heard sounds in each of these spaces.\n\n(20:41)\tCharlie Crittenden\tThe sounds you hear most often emanate from the various consoles. So each of the consoles has its sort of in a the switches up with the front of the room, sort of with the largest TV instead of speakers, which are sort of directionally positioned to try to keep the sound more located like around the couch. That’s couches that are facing it, but you can still hear it throughout the space.\nAnd then the PlayStation on the Xbox are in little sort of areas as well that have speakers sort of near where the people are seated. And so when you’re in the space, you’ll usually hear a variety of sounds from those three different sources. Most often you’ll hear the sounds of Mario kart, like getting started, you know, the engines rubbing and the sort of countdown of the race about to begin. [Sound bite of race starting in Mario Kart]\n\nYou hear Super Smash Bros as a very common one as well. With the sounds of the battle going on or the announcements of the different sessions going on there. You might also hear unexpected noises, like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the game Untitled Goose Game, but it features a goose, which is just basically walking around cracking constantly. [Soundbite of music from the Goose Game plays and ends] So that’s like a fairly common noise you might hear. But like on our other consoles, for example, very popular games are FIFA or NHL. So you’ll hear kind of like, you know, sports stadium noises that sort of thing. [Soundbite of crowd cheering plays and ends]\n\nYou know, like the sort of that side of gaming. In the space there is a restriction of no rated M games allowed sort of rated teen or under, so you don’t actually have as many like, shooting games, although you do have some. So you do hear some of that sort of like gunfire perhaps, but it’s like less often. And it’s more so these sorts of more either like, you know, family friendly Nintendo games like I was describing, or the sports games are the most common.\n\n(22:30)\tDan Hackborn\t[Sounds of people talking ambiently in the background begins to play and then fades]\nBecause there’s reporting studios and stuff like that, music is a lot more probable in the space versus other parts of the library. There is that grand piano down on the main floor which would be the other major space. But in the maker space, you either catch glimpses whenever someone opens a door to the recording studios, it kinda escapes momentarily or if they’re loud enough you can actually hear it, sometimes.\n\nThere’s one guy at the temporary branch before we actually moved into Milner, who was regular, came in every week and played bagpipes. [Soundbite of bagpipes playing begins] And it is my understanding that it’s impossible to play bagpipes quietly. I’m like, you could just hear him over the entire, throughout the entire branch. [Bagpipes fade and end]\n\n(23:25)\tCharlie Crittenden\tAnother notable noise you’ll hear comes from the arcade cabinets. And so on those, it’s like a lot of the kind of retro noises of say like original Mario or very commonly you’ll hear you know, a Pacman or something like that. And then the noises of, or like, you know, Mortal Kombat or something like that, and you’ll hear the noises of the kind of joysticks and buttons getting mashed, that sort of thing.\nSo I’d say those are the most common noises that you might hear in the space. Oh, and sorry, one more point is that you’ll also hear people talking to each other, right? So there’s a lot of times people playing games together. And so especially on the consoles you might hear people, you know, cheering when they score a goal in FIFA or kind of joking around with each other.\n\nMaybe they’re playing Fortnite together on some of the PCs and talking about, you know, what’s going on or something. So you will hear, you know, definitely a fair bit of conversation as well from people cheering or getting excited or talking to each other. [Calm soft electronic music begins to play]\n\n(24:33)\tDan Hackborn\tMachines that make, and equipment that make noises themselves, whether that’s actually the 3D printers which are noisy enough that they actually have what’s called a stealth mode, [Music ends] which makes them move more slowly, turns down the sound, makes the print take longer cause it’s moving more slowly in case you’re in an office that doesn’t want the noise to be that loud.\n(24:58)\tMaia Trotter\tCould you describe any of the sounds that the 3D printer makes?\n(25:04)\tDan Hackborn\tYeah. Like a [Dan imitates a low droning noise]  and like a, [Dan imitates a low churning noise] and those are probably the two main noises.\nThe fan turning on and off, which sounds like a fan. The filament coming off the spool has a very specific noise that’s probably impossible to replicate with the human mouth, like in a large less band being kind of stretched breaking.\n\n(25:31)\tMaia Trotter\tOh, okay. I’ve never used any of the 3D printers in the library or at the university, so I have no idea what they sound like.\n(25:39)\tDan Hackborn\tYeah.\n(25:42)\tAnna Wallace\t[Soft piano music with light percussion begins to play] The sound of children, of course. So either laughing, playing or screaming, crying, which is natural children are gonna communicate the way they’re gonna communicate. [Music ends] You get a lot of once an hour, the cuckoo clock will remind you of its existence, [Soundbite of a cuckoo clock plays] which is right beside the desk.\nYou’ll hear the sound of like sometimes pretty frequently the like floor cleaning machine from custodial will come through, you’ll hear teens or tweens playing Roblox, which you always question like, are they friends if they’re talking to each other like that when they’re playing this game? [Maia laughs] But I assume so cuz they’re back every single day doing the same thing. So it’s a lot of people sounds.\n\n(26:37)\tLibrary audio\tAmbient audio of people chatting in a library. No one person’s voice is audible.\n(26:38)\tMaia Trotter\tNow that we know what we can hear in these unique spaces, even if it may not be what we would’ve expected to hear, I wanted to know more about how sound affects people’s emotions or moods when they visit these spaces. I experience my own set of emotions when I use the downtown library, but I’m usually using the common spaces, the open areas. So I wanted to know what my interviewees thought about the emotions of patrons using the Maker Space, the Gamer Space, and the children’s library.\n(27:08)\tCharlie Crittenden\t[Soft electronic music begins to play] Hopefully I would say that it creates a welcoming sense of fun of it being the sense that it’s a different sort of space than the rest of the library. I think sometimes it can maybe draw in different audiences of people who enjoy games who come there specifically just to play the games and enjoy that environment and being around other people who are playing games, having fun talking to each other about it.\nYou know, I think you might have just maybe a sense of relaxation or of, you know, just having fun, you know, like watching, say like a family play together, you know, on the switch racing on Mario Kart or something and laughing or having fun.\n\nLike it’s, I think the more permissive sense of, you know, just there being volume allowed on these consoles. They’re having speakers where we’re allowing this, this, these sounds to be played. I think it just creates this kind of relaxed environment where I think at least for people who enjoy games, enjoy the noises of games, I think it creates quite a fun sense of play.\n\n(28:21)\tDan Hackborn\tIt’s got complicated equipment in it and it’s a non-traditional part of the library. I think people automatically come into it and don’t know what to do with it. And while the staff tries to be very welcoming and say hi and things like that, like it still, I think, can be an intimidating space, whereas people walk into the rest of the library and like, it looks like what you’d expect a library to be given a common sociocultural understanding.\nWhereas this, I think there needs to be work done on making it approachable. It doesn’t feel like a living space yet. Like it’s a very new built environment. And so I think very smart people are working on changing that. But I do think there’s some work to be done on making it less intimidating cuz there is a definite noticeable sense that when someone walks into it and they don’t know what they’re walking into, they’re not walking into it with a specific purpose.\n\nThey don’t know exactly, like, I’m going to use the 3D printer, I’m going to book a recording studio. They’re kind of like, their eyes go wide. They may just come back out the way they came. They get very quiet, which is ironic given the traditional view of libraries and how that’s changed over time. And then that combined with the acoustic properties of the space, like people tend to whisper a lot more.\n\n(29:50)\tMaia Trotter\tInteresting. That’s not what I would’ve expected with people walking into the maker space, but the way that you’ve described it, that makes sense that they would be more quiet if it doesn’t feel familiar.\n(30:01)\tDan Hackborn\tYeah, totally. I think it’s super fascinating and I look forward to how decision makers in the library work at making it more like a living space rather than kind of like a cold laboratory setting.\n(30:18)\tAnna Wallace\tWe do story stops every day at 2:15 in the children’s library, and convincing kids to go on a little story time adventure with you is so fun. And I love when their parents force them to sit down for a story time. They’re just like, leave me alone. I wanna go back to the train table. [Maia laughs] I’m not interested in this literary nonsense. And then you start reading a story and my favorite is when I get a story that allows me to do a lot of voice changes and then the look in their face when they’re like, that’s not what your voice sounds like. [Maia laughs] Like where is that coming from? Is so fun.\n(31:05)\tCharlie Crittenden\tWhen people kind of walk in sometimes I feel like there’s just a sort of sense of interest or even wonder or excitement. And I think sometimes it’s related to like, for some people maybe with memories they have of going into other environments, like going to the arcades when they were younger. Like if they were from that generation of just like these noises of like, wow, I haven’t seen an arcade cabinet like this in so long. Or, you know, something like that.\nLike it’s, or those noises I think they have quite a nostalgic pull to them when people access games that they played when they were a kid. And so I know for me how I feel in the space, like when I see people playing games that I’m very nostalgic about, like Mario Kart or what have you, definitely has associations for me that really create a sense of, I don’t know, just fun.\n\nYeah. And so I think that can be some of the effect of the space, having these noises be welcomed of these different nostalgic elements of noises that for a lot of people connect elements of their childhood, like whatever, whenever that childhood was, different generations of gaming. I think that can be one of the effects of the noises in the space. [Music ends]\n\n(32:16)\tMaia Trotter\t[Ambient background library audio begins]\nSpecific sounds can evoke varied and powerful emotions in people. Emotions and feelings and thoughts can become attached to specific sounds based on our experiences. Various studies have shown major links between sound and emotion. One study in particular published in 2022 demonstrated that when there is a positive noise in the background and a negative noise occurs in the foreground, like a loud horn honk, for example. The emotional recovery from the negative sounds occurs more quickly because of the positive background sounds, which vary depending on the person.\n\nStudies positive sound examples included mostly nature sounds, but at least in my experience, a positive background sound for me is people laughing, children playing, soft music or nostalgic sounds like video game sound effects, which might partially explain why I felt generally more relaxed and happier when I was listening to library sounds and working from home, even if I heard loud traffic outside or the constant stress-inducing text message ding from my work phone.\n\nThere have also been several studies that have linked ambient sounds and background noises with increased productivity and the masking of everyday stressful or intrusive thoughts, which lead to the feeling of familiarity and relaxation. An article in the Globe and Mail from 2019 looked at a study being done at the University of British Columbia, which made these claims and gave the example of spaces like coffee shops, which would have similar sounds to a library being ideal environments for focusing and thinking creatively based on their average decibel level.\n\nThese studies have their exceptions and obviously not everyone reacts to ambient sounds the same way. But it was fascinating for me to discover this link because I’d experienced it myself. I think it is worth noting that studies have found that the most calming sounds were found to be nature sounds such as wind, the rustling of grass or trees, running rivers and babbling streams.\n\nAnd the most anxiety-inducing sounds for those of outdoor cityscapes like engines revving, horns honking, people yelling and loud music. Dounds in a library seem to sit somewhere in the middle. The sounds of a library are not as harsh and there’s still a general reduced nature of the sound, but you can still hear people talking and walking around and sometimes distant music. And yet I still find these sounds just as comforting as the sounds of nature.\n\nI think when we listen to the sounds of the city, we hear chaos, we hear movement and liveliness, but it is loud and jarring and harsh. That is not to say that loud or unexpected sounds don’t exist in library settings because they absolutely do and they are a part of the library experience. But because it is a public space with a specific and dedicated purpose, there does seem to be a general cohesiveness to the sound that doesn’t translate outside the building.\n\nI think the combination of sounds of other people and the familiar sounds of books, laughter, music, new things to try, and maybe even the distant sound of familiar video games, makes people feel the connection of that public space. A library may not have the calming sounds of nature, but it does have the deeply connecting sounds of community. And even if there are unexpected sounds, I feel as though I recover faster because I can still hear the comforting sounds in the background.\n\n[Background ambient sounds ends]\n\nI think when we think of spaces like libraries, spaces we usually consider to be literary spaces. We have fairly strong preconceived notions about how they sound. We think library, we think books, we think reading, which is usually thought of as a fairly quiet and individualistic activity. But the way libraries are structured now with this emphasis on a community-led approach, we encounter a literary space that is not only increasingly evoking specific emotion through sound, but also one that asks us to engage sonically or verbally in order to learn.\n\nFor anyone who wants to dig deeper into this idea of the sounds of literary spaces, I just wanted to briefly mention that one of our own here at Spoken Web, Dr. Katherine McLeod, [Spoken Web podcast theme music plays very quietly] put together an amazing blog post series while a research fellow at Concordia University in Montreal where Spoken Web is based and the series is sensory based investigation into audiovisual materials housed in library collections. It is a wonderfully insightful examination of not only what we hear in libraries, but how we listen to them. [Spoken Web music swells and fades’\n\nSo getting back to the sounds of learning.\n\n  (36:53)\tAnna Wallace\t[Soft bell tone music begins to play]\nI don’t know if it has particularly changed. Working in children’s, specifically. I mean I feel like I came into library work kind of as libraries were moving into kind of what they’ve called a community led philosophy in that we see that people are buying more books on Amazon or like DVDs are going out of style and all of that stuff. So you have to reevaluate what is the library for the communities that they serve.\n\nAnd it has really moved into being a community space where we’re trying to offer access to information and as best we can. So a lot of these days that’s not just, you know, books and prints, like books aren’t going anywhere. Everybody wants to, like, I get this from a lot of older generations where like, oh, you know, are you worried your job’s going anywhere? I’m like, my friend. My pal.\n\n(37:57)\tMaia Trotter\tI get that a lot too. [Maia laughs]\n(37:59)\tAnna Wallace\tRight? Like, we are the last free public space. If libraries are gone, civilization is just crumbling. Do you know what I mean? Like-\n(38:08)\tMaia Trotter\tThat’s how I answer that question too. [Maia laughs]\n(38:10)\tAnna Wallace\tRight? We’re not, we’re not going anywhere, right? But we do have to be thinking about how we can best serve our communities. So having these spaces where kids can be kids and be learning at the same time, I think is just so important. And it, it, yeah, it’s funny to me because if you’re trying to create that space for children in like a branch where you have to balance, okay, but we have people working on the computers and we have people studying in among the stacks, you need to keep, you know, you have to keep the whole of the branch in mind.\nThe beauty of being in the children’s library is that we can focus that space on, you know, 12 and under or, you know, 17 and under. Cause we do wanna encourage teens to be in our space as well.\n\n(39:02)\tDan Hackborn\t[low droning piano music begins to play] To the vinyl cutters or the sewing machines, which also have their own noises. You can actually look up, I think people have straight up programmed 3D printers to make sound or make songs themselves because they come with such a weird variety of noises. Not only there’s like four different motors on each one and belts and yeah, all just all kind like the extruding 3D printer film, it makes it to a noise. Yeah. It’s all kinds of stuff.\n(39:35)\tCharlie Crittenden\tOn the whole I find it sort of like a pleasant array of noises and sounds generally playing out and overlapping with each other. And I think they’re doing a fairly good job of designing the space with how the speakers are directed and positioned so that it’s not, and we can control the volume as well, so it’s not too overwhelming or too much. We try to keep it more to that sort of pleasant level, I guess, of noise.\n  (39:58)\tAnna Wallace\tLike, you know what I mean? Like the squeals, right? Like we want to hear them. We want them to explore and we want them to play because play is learning and you can’t expect a child to play particularly quietly, like on average.\nLike we all know those one or two kids that can like sit with a book and be quiet and all that stuff and we see it. But if you’re looking at an early literacy space, which half of our library is dedicated to early literacy, you’re looking at five years old and under, and that developmental range is just loud and gets excited and expresses themselves. So we want to make sure that they feel like they can do that in their space. And unless they’re like, hurting themselves or getting dangerous, then we don’t often step in because it does, it just ends up sounding like, oh, they’re just having a good time, or they’re interacting with the things that we’ve put out. [Music ends]\n\n(40:55)\tMaia Trotter\t[Soft piano music begins]\nAs employees, these folks spent a lot of time in the library compared to the average patron. And so my final question for them was to ask what their favorite sounds were in these unique spaces that are huge contributors to the changes in the sonic environments of libraries, most of which produce sounds that are so different from our preconceived notions of what libraries sound like.\n\n(41:18)\tCharlie Crittenden\tWell, I’d say as someone who enjoys gaming and I have lots of positive memories of gaming growing up and that sort of thing, I find it’s sort of a multi-layered experience of almost like different eras of my life of different memories and connections I have with different noises.\nSo, you know, when I was fairly young, going and playing Super Smash Bros on a M64 with some friends or something like that. So when I hear people or I see like let’s say, some friends playing Super Smash Bros and I hear those, you know, like, “SMASH” or whatever you know, “KO” it gets like these kind of very like deeply nostalgic, almost overly memorable noises that you just heard so many times in different parts of your life.\n\n(42:11)\tAnna Wallace\tI mean, I don’t know if it’s cheesy, but I do love a delighted giggle. I love listening to kids discovering something new or the grateful thank you when you like find the book that they were looking for or find something they weren’t looking for, but they get really excited about.\n(42:34)\tDan Hackborn\tMy favorite sound of the space. My favorite sound of the space is like people talking and being excited about projects that they’re interested in or that they’re making, like that feeling when you can tell someone’s just really excited about the thing they’re making or the thing that someone else is making.\nAnd I hope that the space continues to encourage those things. Cuz I think between a number of the characteristics I’ve mentioned, those conversations and those outbursts and exclamations are a lot more rare than I’d like them to be. But when they happen, that’s the best. Like, that’s the whole point of the space really. And so I’d just like to see, yeah, that’s my favorite and I’d like to see more of that.\n\n(43:19)\tMaia Trotter\tThat’s great. Yeah. I remember walking into the Maker Space for the first time and I think it was you and I, we were using the recording studio. I think that was like the first time I explored the MakerSpace and I remember my wow, like look at all the stuff you have in this one room. It’s so cool. [Maia laughs] That’s great.\n(43:39)\tCharlie Crittenden\tThe Gamer Space is really unique in this regard because there’s not many, if any, really, spaces like it in other libraries that are so dedicated in this way to gaming. So I think it’s really quite a unique set of noises that you could stumble across when you’re exploring the library. And I think noise is a big part and sound is a big part of what draws people in and sort of helps them enjoy their time in the space I think is, is these sort of different sets of sounds that they’re experiencing.\n(44:12)\tMaia Trotter\t[Soft arpeggiated piano begins to play] Like I’ve said throughout this episode, how libraries sound is typically not how we expect them to sound. And although that may be jarring for some, the evolution of libraries as public spaces has also caused the evolution of an increasingly sonically rich environment, which might have a more positive effect than we are currently aware of.\nI had no idea that when I clicked on that YouTube link a few years ago, it would open a door to a world of sound that has changed the way I work and the way I listen in public spaces. Although I still find comfort in listening to library ambient sounds like book pages turning and the soft thud of books being shelved, what I really enjoy is listening to sounds of people using the library. It feels so much more real to me. I have been fortunate enough to have positive experiences with libraries, so I typically associate library sounds with positive emotions.\n\nAnd this may not be the case for everyone, but based on what I heard from my interviewees, their favorite sounds all had to do with people enjoying using these unique library spaces, or at least sounds that indicated the spaces were indeed being used, like the gaming sounds. Or like Dan’s wonderful impression of the 3D printer. I find myself feeling relieved that libraries have moved away from enforcing silence and towards a more accepting approach to sound, especially given all the new additions of unique spaces that produce their own unique sounds.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nA library is meant to be explored and used and sound is a wonderful and comforting indicator of the evolution of that usage. Libraries are a way to connect with our communities, which is probably why I found so much comfort in the sounds of people using the library during a time of loneliness and isolation.\n\nHow we think a library sounds probably would not have offered me the same kind of comfort during that time. I wanted to hear life in a way that wasn’t overwhelming and the real sounds of the library gave me just that.\n\nI want to thank Edmonton Public Library for allowing me to record sounds in their spaces, and I especially want to thank Dan Hackborn, Charlie Crittendon and Anna Wallace for taking the time to talk to me about Sounds in Libraries. I’ll leave you with this, A taste of the comfort I experienced the first time I clicked on that YouTube video. Thank you.\n\n[Ambient sound of library: people walking, books being moved, pages flipping, etc]\n\n(47:49)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play] The SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nOur supervising producer is Kate Mofaitt, our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcription is done by Zoe Mix. To find out more about spoken web, visit spokenweb.ca, subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\n\nIf you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb music swells and then ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9600","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4 Bonus, The Serendipitous Headlight 24, 7 August 2023, Pitella, Elbanhawy, Affonso, Ruby, Andrews, and Eastwood"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-serendipitous-headlight-24/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Carlos A. Pittella","Sherine Elbanhawy","Alex Affonso","Ariella Ruby","Olive Andrews","Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Carlos A. Pittella","Sherine Elbanhawy","Alex Affonso","Ariella Ruby","Olive Andrews","Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Carlos A. Pittella\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20169375254524282048\",\"name\":\"Sherine Elbanhawy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Alex Affonso\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariella Ruby\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/59173484194347231513\",\"name\":\"Olive Andrews\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/abc0784b-45ae-4014-8d4e-5fa1ba8e6d7b/audio/5ad0c7d9-d592-4a0c-80f5-8b2091a3b8b8/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"final-mix.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"37,998,385 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"final-mix\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-serendipitous-headlight-24/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-08-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["No transcript."],"contents":["“Though staff turnaround is a challenge for student-run publications, community support remains when people love it. Let’s revive the love for Headlight.”\n\nThis was the sign-off of an application for managing editor for Headlight, Concordia University’s graduate student-run literary journal. Carlos A. Pittella’s application was accepted shortly after—along with Sherine Elbanhawy’s application for co-managing editor—and the 24th edition of Headlight was put into motion.\n\nThis episode is a behind-the-scenes look at Headlight 24, and an exploration of what happens when print publication meets audio production. Diving into a host of recordings made along the way, the episode revisits readings from authors featured in Headlight 24, as well as recordings from the journal’s launch at the De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Also featured is a roundtable conversation with the editorial team—Carlos A. Pittella, Sherine Elbanhawy, Alex Affonso, Ariella Ruby, Olive Andrews, and Miranda Eastwood—as they revisit the challenges faced in reviving the journal following pandemic restrictions, as well as the exciting new directions embraced by this year’s team.\n\nHeadlight 24 will host the second part of their launch at the 4th SPACE at Concordia University, August 31st, at 2pm. We hope to see you there!\n\n"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"No transcript.\",\"type\":\"General\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bandukwala, Manahil. “Turning Twenty-Four on the Rise of the Sturgeon Moon”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nSolomon, Misha. “Tubes”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nMazur, Ari. “A&W”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nO’Farrell, Paz. “I don’t even know what to do about all this”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nPalmer, Jade. “Onyx and Rose Gold”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nTrudel, Nadia. “Goblin”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nCirignano, Sophia. “Giverny”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\nWayland, Tina. “The Tending of Small Gardens”. Headlight 24, 2023.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549666922496,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9601","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E1, Invitation to Sonic Poetry: Demarcations, Repositories, Examples, 7 October 2024, Whiteman"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creator_names_search":["Andrew Whiteman"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/35145971350432331044\",\"name\":\"Andrew Whiteman\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/559b1f32-3d22-44aa-9b3f-3125de148a67/audio/225b5ac2-e7fd-45a6-a035-97f4c89bb277/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,284,009 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invitation-to-sonic-poetry-demarcations-repositories-examples/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-10-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Happy Birthday Ed Sanders Thank You!”, written and performed by Edward Sanders ( from “This is the Age of Investigation Poetry and Every Citizen Must Investigate” part of the “Totally Corrupt Dial-a-Poem Series by John Giorno. Found at https://www.ubu.com/sound/gps.html ) and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track.\\n\\nAudio clips of Amiri Barak, Helen Adam, and the Four Horseman from Ron Mann’s 1980 film Poetry in Motion. found at https://vimeo.com/14191903.\\n\\n“The Great Reigns” written and performed by Erica Hunt ( from Close Listening with Charles Bernstein at WPS1 Clocktower Studio, New York, June 20, 2005, available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hunt.php ), and Andrew Whiteman.\\n\\n“#7” by Alice Notley and AroarA. Unreleased track. Text taken from Notley’s book “In The Pines”, Penguin Books. 2007.\\n\\n“ Pinbot” and “Abu Surveillance” by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track. Text taken from Waldman’s book “Iovis: the Trilogy”, Coffeehouse Press. 2011.\\n\\n“How I wrote Certain of my Books” by David UU and the Avalettes.  from the casette Very Sound (Sound Poems By David UU). Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.18. 1984.\\n\\n“whn i first came to vancouvr” by bill bissett. from the cassette Sonic Horses. Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.19.1984.\\n\\n“From The Life & Work Of Chapter 7 (For Steven Smith)” by Tekst. from the cassette “Unexpected Passage”.\\n\\nUnderwhich Audiographic Series – No. 15. 1982.\\n\\n“ Canto One” by Andrew Whiteman featuring Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Richard Sieberth, Al Filreis. buried somewhere at Penn Sound. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. Unreleased track.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549667971072,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 6, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. We all know it when we hear it, and we have mixed feelings about it. Why does the archaic meeting place of music and poem hit such a nerve? Is this art form literature or is it music? Surely, it’s not song, is it? And if poems already carry their prosodic intentions within themselves – why bother supplementing them with extraneous audio?” These questions are answered by Siren Recordings, a new digital-DIY sonic poetry label run by Kelly Baron and Andrew Whiteman.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:51\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. The episode features the playing of newly created works of “sonic poetry,” along with recordings of sonic poetry that inform and inspire this type of sound work that reactivates audio archives.\nLet the sounds wash over you as you listen, and maybe even start dancing. Plus, along with all of this sound, this episode announces the creation of Siren Recordings, a new multi-platform collaborative venture co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron.\nSiren is a record label, a digital academic hub, and a stable audio-visual archive for a growing database of sonic poetry in many forms. A place for people obsessed and interested in this kind of sonic art making that sounds like us.\nHere is episode one of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Invitation to Sonic Poetry Demarcations, Repositories, Examples.”\n00:02:00\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Sound of voice recorder] At the dawn of 1976, during the New Year’s Day marathon poetry reading given at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, Ed Sanders began his reading with the following lines–\n00:02:18\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders, 1976\tThis is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate.\n00:02:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tForty-seven years later, I raided the UbuWeb Sound archives, listening through all the incredible Giorno poetry systems albums that are digitized and archived there, and I discovered this work.\n00:02:38\tAndrew Whiteman\tI wanted to make a birthday present for Sanders, who turned 83 this past August. I altered his poem, attending to its syntax and cadences and nuances and its energies, supplying whatever skills my training as an indie rock musician affords me.\n00:02:55\tAudio Recording of Ed Sanders’s reading, edited by Andrew Whiteman\t[Piano plays in the background] This is the age of investigation, and every citizen must investigate. For the pallid tracks of guilt and death, slight as they are, suffuse upon the retentive electromagnetic data retrieval systems of our era. And let the investigators not back away one micro unit from their investigations. And this is the age of investigative poetry when verse froth again will assume its prior role as a vehicle for describing history. And this will be a golden era for the public performance of poetry when the Diogenes Liberation Squadron of Strolling Troubadors and Muckrakers will roam through the citadels of America to sing opposition to the military hitmen who think the United States is some sort of corpse firm. And this is the age of left-wing epics with happy endings. [Upbeat music starts playing]\nThis is the poet’s era, and we shall all walk crinkle toes upon the smooth, cold drill of Botticelli’s show.\nHappy New Year.\nAnd this [Distorted voice] Is the age of the triumph of beatnik messages of social Foeman coded in videos the clatter of the mass media over 20 years ago. Oh, how we fall to salute with peels of that the beats created change without a drop of blood.\nIn 1965, it was all it could do to force cajole the writers for Time magazine not to reinforce the spurious and slinger synapse that pot puff leads to the puppy field. But now the states are setting hemp free. Ten years of coding romance yesterday, the freeing of bursts today, pot tomorrow, free food in the supermarket, and finally, [Distorted voice] haha.\nLet us never forget that this is the age of–ha ha ha. He is such a valuable tool, haha. He will set you free from worm farm haunts. Ha ha. He outvotes the warrior cast, haha. He peels out through all the cosmos mandarlid with poet angels, holding Plato’s seven single syllables in a tighter harmony than the early beach boys.\n00:06:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tThat was the track. Happy birthday, Ed Sanders. Thank you. A piece of sonic poetry from last year.\n00:06:32\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is a podcast about sonic poetry and announcing a new project called Siren Recordings, designed to create, distribute, promote, archive, and discuss it in all of its myriad forms.\nIt’s difficult to define. Here is one attempt I made.\n“Sonic poetry” is the collaboration space between contemporary poetry and music. It occupies an aesthetic space of its own making, neither coldly conceptual nor dramatically declamatory. It gathers people who are both passionate and curious about such workings. The poets give their full attention to the soundscape that compasses their words. The musicians arrange their elements in accordance with the materials of the poem.\nIt’s a bit stiff. At least that’s what Anne Waldman told me, and she ought to know, having contributed a vast amount of poetry, sonics, activism, and knowledge to the contemporary poetry scene over the past 50 years.\n00:07:27\tAndrew Whiteman\tMore from Anne later.\nI was trying to delineate aesthetic boundaries for the sonic poetry I wanted to hear and make. I wanted to cut out what I found to be lazy or ill-prepared artistic responses to the call of sonic poetry. The most obvious being either the single-note synthesizer drone, which provides a vague sense of eno-esque atmosphere to a reader. Or the quote: “my friends are great jazz musicians in their killer improvisers approach.”\nYes, I’m sure that’s true, but have your friends read Susan Howe, Percy Shelley, Anne Carson, or Jordan Abel.\n00:08:04\tAndrew Whiteman\tI want sonic poetry where both elements are scrupulously thought out and then allowed their free reign. Jazz and poetry might seem cliched, but listen to Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus or Kenneth Patchen with the Al Neill quartet, and you might have a different opinion.\nI need to remember that Brandon Hokura is the founder and creative director of the record label and publisher Séance Centre. His research intersects with experimental poetics and ethnography, exploring the complex relationships between music, language, technology, geography, and culture. He is also a part of the vulnerable media lab at Queen’s University, where he’s engaged with audio and video preservation.\nHe puts the distinction of sonic poetry in this for me: There are only two categories of sound sonic poetry, really: “acoustic” and “electric.” The “naked voice” and what “sounds the body can produce,” and those transformed by electronics. I suppose you could call the former “sound” and the latter “sonic.”\nStill, I see them as almost historical distinctions since recorded sound is, by necessity, transformed by electrical electronic recording processes.\n00:09:30\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m interested in the liminal space between the human voice and sonic technologies, language and expression, and body and media. This is what makes the work so important to me. These murky, definitional waters, along with my obsession to make such art, led Brandon, myself, and Kelly Barron to decide to build Siren Recordings.\nHere is a blurb we wrote for a recent grant proposal. So yes, this is going to be a little dry as well.\n[From the grant proposal] Siren Recordings is a digital, multimodal platform that operates as a community hub, boutique, studio and archive. We seek to connect scholars, artists, and lovers of sonic poetry in an online community. Following Edward Sanders, we believe that perfection comes in the poetic, the spoken text, the text as beauteously presented on the page, and the text as performed.\nWe incorporate elements of sound and music into recordings of poetry performances to emphasize the effective social experience of poetic work. We value experimentation in form, both contemporary and modern. We renew older poetic works by treating the archive as a participant in our work. Archival play ensures that our releases blend contemporary technology with influential poetry. These values seek to serve one ultimate goal: to contribute to the siren call that warns of the diminishing time we spend in the archaic situation of gathering to hear someone speak. [Prposal ends]\n00:11:01\tAndrew Whiteman\tWhat that doesn’t mention is Kelly’s essential grasp on the importance of building a specific, stable archive. “Sonic poetry” has always suffered from the taxonomic impulse. Where does it belong, literature or music? People often answer this differently; so much of it slips through the cracks and becomes forgotten.\nSiren Recordings has three distinct archiving, creating, and hosting options, and I’ll discuss each of them. But before I do that, I’ll first give a genealogy of how I came to this art form, how it shaped me, and some of the work I’ve done.\n00:11:38\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tHis work is about the universe. [Echo]\n00:11:39\tAndrew Whiteman\tIn the mid-1980s, late-night television provided a welcome respite to the Reagan Mulroney-saturated daytime, fortunate enough to have stumbled multiple times onto Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann’s incredible documentary poetry in motion, which put the oral or the page poetries of that specific moment upfront—witness–\n00:12:00\tAudio Clip, Presenter\tAmiri Baraka. [Cheers]\n00:12:15\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tIt’s a poem for Larry Neal and Bob Marley, two [pause] black cultural workers we lost in 1981. [Beat music starts]\n00:12:37\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tWell, as a week, we know we don’t get scared. Nothing is happening, way out nothing is happening but the positive unless.\n00:12:54\tAudio Clip, Amiri Baraka’s Performance\tYou the negative whalers, we whalers, yeah. Whale, we whalers we whale we whale we could dig Melville on his ship confronting the huge white man beast speeding death cross to see the wheat but we whalers, we can kill whales we can get on top of a whale.\n00:13:17\tAndrew Whiteman\tOr listen to Helen Adam in her apartment, singing an updated ballad of the times.\n00:13:21\tAudio Clip, Helen Adam\tTimes, cheerless junkie’s song, seeking love upon a day, a day of summer’s pride. I left Long Island suburbs for the Lower East Side. The train roared and thundered, and I sang above its scream. There’s a cockroach coming towards me, but it cannot spoil my dream. Love, love and LSD. It shall not spoil my dream. Or the four horsemen cantering toward an unknown destination.\n00:14:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tToronto was having a reggae music boom, and the dub poet Lillian Allen could be heard at the Bamboo Club. Around that time, I fell into a job at the Coach House Press, a place SpokenWeb listeners need no introduction.\nIn addition to making money for rent, I received an informal education in contemporary canlet and some of the people responsible for dragging canlett into what we could loosely call “postmodernism.”\nSome of these writers were experimenting with sonic poetry. As Mann’s film documented, BP Nicoll was one of the four horsemen we just heard, and Coach House co-founder Victor Coleman was making long-playing records. This is from one called “Nothing too fragile or heavy.” [Soft music starts playing]\n00:15:14\tAudio Clip, from BP Nicoll\tI only think of–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because I only Think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing–I only think of breaking down the door–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing here behind it–I only think of breaking down the door because there’s nothing there behind it–nothing good in the distance, three fates wave signals BP–\n00:16:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tNicoll died suddenly in 1988, and Coach House began a short-lived talking book cassette project with the Toronto Music Gallery the next year.\nThat same year, Hal Wilner produced a record by Allen Ginsberg called “The Lion for Real,” which burned into me and has remained an imprint of what sonic poetry might achieve if the elements are precisely attended to. The musicians with Ginsburg were all people from the downtown New York scene, the secret location that had fostered so much critical writing, art, music and activism since the beginning of the 20th century. I wanted to participate in that communal and poetic world.\n00:16:57\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tDeath needs time for what it kills to grow in, for our book, sweet sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, ugly American death site.\n00:17:07\tAndrew Whiteman\tAs I mentioned, I’m a musician, producer and performer by trade. In the early 2000’s, I began touring relentlessly, playing indie rock and spending an inordinate amount of time in vans, buses, and planes.\nI had been very slow to embrace computers, but when the iPhone came out, I took to podcasting instantly, and very quickly, I discovered both UbuWeb and PenSound, and my inner world exploded here.\nI must confess that my obsession with poetry has always held itself separate from my love of music, an aloof, almost higher state, nearly an inverse of Louis Zukovsky’s famous poetic statement, where in my case, music is the lower limit and speech the higher.\nThe discovery of PenSound and Ubu and the tendrils they put out to other locations and activations ignited a second, more profound wave of poetic thrill-seeking from which I have yet to recover. I discovered the incredible storehouse of recorded North American poetry that exploded from the 1950s onward. The archive, I realized, is a hive.\nI began to digitally flip through the lists of poets, listening to their speeches and eventually making sonic poetry. This is Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\n00:18:34\tAudio Clip, Erica Hunt’s poem, The Great Reigns, from her appearance at Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening on June 20, 2005.\t[Eerie music starts playing] A row of xs appeared overnight on windows across the street. We on this side wondered what they knew, what we weren’t being told. The sun shined through the taped windows and made geometric shadows on the floor. On this side, we learned that the sun did not shine that way for us. We did not know what they were doing with their days or nights. And there were photos. The family across the street taped photos onto the windows. After we put up our x’s, which was, after all, only one letter of the Alphabet, their family would never be broken. We on our side wondered what was coming to hurt us. Would our windows break into shards? Would our windows become weapons against us? We wondered who would protect us from the people across the street. Who would protect us from what they knew and that we didn’t know? We wondered what they meant to us. Were the families marked by x related to us? When would they come to occupy our apartments? What were they hiding, hiding behind the x? What did X stand for? Was it really for protection against possible flying glass? Or was it something else? Was the x a sign for the angel of death? Was it a cock? And what was it a code word for? What did the x exempt them from? Into? What did it enlist them? What did we leave out when we didn’t leave our ex? What hadn’t we joined? And what had we said yes to?\n00:20:42\tAndrew Whiteman\tI developed a rough technique for making sonic poetry related to how I used the archive. I would select a poem based on listening. Indeed, many of the works were difficult to access and print, but listening’s advantages were manifest, as Bernstein’s excellent introduction to the volume known as close listening points out that sound enacts meaning as much as designates something meant—end quote.\nWhen backgrounding a poem, I decided firstly to avoid the two situations I mentioned earlier, the default into a textural or drone-like atmosphere created by synthesis, or its opposite, the live musician improvising to poet reading style. My second move was to develop constraints based on the un, as an Alypian might. These constraints might take any form, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or in the choice of instruments used. The formal qualities of the piece might be closer to d,  song, or something else, depending on what I heard in the poet’s voice and understood in the poem’s text.\nI’ll demonstrate how two very different examples. Interestingly, neither of these sonic poems use the archive as the Sanders and the Hunt pieces do, though it remains the greatest resource for creators and scholars. And I plan to make a record based on HD’s reading of “Helen in Egypt.”\nIn 2007, I bought books at Book Soup in Los Angeles. Alice Notley’s “In the Pines” had just come out. While reading it, I noticed her dropping quotes into the poems from a source I knew, the famous Harry Smith folk anthology records, which were legendary, and I knew because they had been re-released on CD.\nI felt instantly that I should take Alice’s numbered poems 1 through 14 and retranslate them back into faux folk songs, taking special care not to attempt any authentic folk or acoustic sound or structure which would have frozen them to death, but rather by using midi and the rough recording situation my partner Arielle and I had set up at home.\nI wanted to create a sepia sound and Dust Bowl sonics. I applied erasure to the poems and shaped them into semi-ballad forms. After securing Alice’s kind permission, we made a record.\nHere is number seven:\n00:23:17\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Alice Notley’s Writing\tEveryone said not to destroy time. We can’t have evolution, we can’t have the mind-body problem, we can’t have compassion, but I am losing mine because in the pines enchants and fortune in love once I had now I don’t in love there is no because your self-identification of the night is hard enough for identification. The night was hard enough, so in order to make the night hard enough, I slept all night. The pines as I offered to, I heard that ooh down moaning, but I’ve never heard that my defect is so beautiful. Now, it’s all that I have. My closet is on fire; turn up the clothes and shoes the closets are on fire to burn up the clothes and shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes and shoot the closets on fire to burn, the closet’s on fire to burn up the clothes that shoes, the closet’s on fire to burn off the clothes.\n00:25:52\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’m happy to say that Siren Records will be re-releasing “In the Pines” in 2025 with extra poems read by Alice.\n00:26:00\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe second example I’ll play is my collaboration with Montreal-based poet and theorist Michael Nardone last year. From Metatron’s digital zine glycophorin, we chose his poem “Tower One, Tower Two” from the book thug titled The Ritualites.\nThe poem centers around an Italian American Sunday family dinner filled with loud, disjunctive conversation, plates being passed crosswise, and background noises of TV and the radio. Here, the constraint provided all the creative impetus needed, given that the song “Hotel California” gets referenced more than once, though interestingly, nobody at the table seems to be able to name it. I decided to scour YouTube for versions of this ubiquitous song, limit my sound choices to what I could find, and then manipulate all sounds other than the poet’s voice coming from other people’s ideas of what “Hotel California” is.\n00:26:57\tAudio Clip, Andrew Whiteman’s Sound Work on Michael Nardone’s Writing\t[Distorted voices with background instrumental] Oh, the pepper. The pasta. Pasta.\nOh, I hope we hear the one about Calvin. Such a lovely song. Such a lovely place. The crushed pepper. At Grossman’s. My dentist. At eight, I caught a commercial on his television for that concert on the national channel.\nWell, we wait until the sauce starts to simmer.\nIt’s nearly time.\nAdd sugar and your tooth, Helen. How to ache.\nBut it doesn’t hurt to eat. It does. But Bob, with all this good food, how could I not help but eat? Sue, this crab dips. My aunt Louise was in California, and she sneaked.\nThe recipe for her favourite.\nHow much sugar should I use, sue?\nTwo tablespoons.\nAdd a pinch of pepper to the pasta.\nOh, Joe. Television. Past the pasta.\nWait, wait, wait, wait. I can’t hear one word of what you’re saying.\nThe pasta, the television.\nTurn it down.\nJoe. Why must he eat adult television? Please pass the. Please, Joe.\nIt’s no use. We’ll have to wait till we have his attention.\n00:28:24\tAndrew Whitman\tWell, I faded that out. As it is a longer piece clocking in at nine minutes, I’d like to move on to Siren Records’s first release, which is slated for the fall of 2024. It’s an album based on a single book, Laois, by Anne Waldman.\nLaois is a thousand page, 30 year meditation on the patriarchy and Anne’s observations of them…uh, us [laughs].\nHal Wilner is responsible for introducing us, and back in 2009, I attempted to get him to produce an album for Anne, who largely relies on her son, Ambrose Bay, to produce her sonic poetry. “After all,” I said, “Hal, you made records for Burroughs and Corso and Ginsburg. Why not for Anne?”\n00:29:08\tAndrew Whiteman\t[Andrew imitating Hal Wilner] “This is in the eighties,” Hal drawled, “I can’t get that money anymore.”\nI thank Hal immensely for slyly shifting this job onto my shoulders.\n“What kind of Anne Waldman record do you want to hear, Andrew?” He dropped into my ear one day. Originally, I had wanted a Plastic Ono-style band featuring Cibo Matto founder Yuka Honda to back Anne up. Stark, minimal three-chord pieces, with Anne’s powerful moan reduced to a whisper. But I couldn’t get the money either. So during COVID I assembled the strongest pieces and began stitching Laois together.\n[Instrumental/techno music starts playing] I’ll play two tracks from the upcoming album.\nHere is “Pinbot.”\n00:30:01\tAudio Clip of “Pinbot”\tHe chokes me. He chose me. He chokes me. He chokes. He chose. He chose me. Pinbot. He shows me comet. He plays me Genesis. He plays TX sector. He shows me punched out Sega Turbo he needs more coins two tigers pole position two Gyrus Metro Cross Double Dribble action Circus Centipede he needs more coins Taito ten yard fight feature Spy Jailbreak super contra he shows me Wonder points Flicky Distron he plays Radical Ninja Galaga give me a break spy Hunter Ring King hat trick he shows me he shows me he shows me twin Cobra ikari warriors after burner danger zone Koban xy bots rampage silkworm Shinobi gorilla or xenophobe as the quest for freedom continues I can’t even carry or travel with this book, let alone read from it. I need a I need a roadie I need a roadie to carry it around and hold it out for me.\n00:32:34\tAndrew Whiteman\t“Abu Sus Valens.”\n00:32:41\tAudio Clip of “Abu Sus Valens”\tTo never have enough Canada never have enough being up Canada never to have enough be enough get enough have enough be enough yet enough never to have enough be enough yet do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish do the election shuffle do it in our Anthropocene death wish unmitigated, concealed our actual colour never be enough get enough never have enough be enough get enough never to have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough over in Iraq, over in Afghanistan, over in Pakistan where next?\nThat’s why we do it at night never have brown paper bags portrait death to never have enough never have enough one out of five to the crippling form of p t s d or suicide Eddie paid certainly slabs never have enough people to never have enough body slumber exultant civvies wild laughter turned on what drug area distorted by the marines where to hide set teeth to knuckles in combat wincey Lindy brutality o ever revert Abu surveillance never have enough be never again never have enough be enough or thumbs up never have a blow to the stomach cold savage beatings more brown bodies atrocity plus silence equals more atrocity Abraham not enough to never have enough link your memory to energy sleeping to never have the hungry ghost ever have enough to never have a hungry ghost more valiant have it all by itself between our realms hungry ghost that dwells in consciousness torments our desire never have a hungry ghost to never have a hungry ghosts never have enough be enough to never have enough be enough get enough never to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough yet to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have enough be enough get enough to never have a get enough be enough get enough get enough.\n00:36:19\tAndrew Whiteman\tI’d like to return to the specifics of Siren Recordings’s three-part project as it is unfolding right now.\n00:36:26\tAndrew Whiteman\tFirst, the archive of Brandon’s work on the Underwhich Editions’s legacy, which informs our first acquisitions, includes most of the sonic poetry made and recorded by the likes of critical members of the Canadian avant-lit scene from 1977 to 1988.\nIn the words of our managing director, Kelly Baron, art needs to be additive, not iterative, for it to advance.\nWe need access to art that comes before us to learn from it and create something new. That access is incredibly limited when it’s originally on vulnerable forms of media, where it was never digitized and where it was originally given limited releases. I want to democratize that access and make it available. Opening up access to the sonic poetry of the past can show new artists how the boundaries between music and literature can be placed, and I hope it will inspire new art.\n00:37:17\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tThere are those who can tell you how to make Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, bombs, or whatever you might be needing. Find them and learn. Define your aim clearly. Choose your ammo with that in mind.\n00:37:29\tAndrew Whitman\tOur first two archival tasks are the Underwich audiographic editions and the Coach House talking books series. Neither have been archived in their totality.\nThe cassettes and reels from the Underwich audio, graphic series and Coach House talking books were given limited releases. There is limited time remaining to digitize them. Digitizing these works will provide widespread access to early, otherwise unseen and unheard works from significant poets in Canadian literary tradition, such as BP Nicoll, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffrey, Penny Kemp, David W., and Bill Bissett.\n00:38:10\tAudio Clip, Unknown\t[Distorted voice] Sewers go into the water instead. Where does it go from the train onto the tracks? Everyone said. My doctor told me cattle ship. That’s what the cows alongside the tracks are waiting for when the trains pass through an English bay in the waters. We could have cows dying. They would be washer cows. People could go into the water again and rob the cows on the dirt, out of the boats, or to the university. I remember a place in Nova Scotia called Cow Bay.\n00:38:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThis is David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books.”\n00:39:05\tAudio Clip from David W’s “How I Wrote Certain of My Books”\tCrowd out, crowd out. Crowd out.\n00:39:18\tAndrew Whiteman\tListening closely, we hear the voice of Gertrude Stein and notice that David W himself is mining the archive to create new forms of sonic poetry. Finally, this is the text from the life and work of chapter seven of Stephen Smith.\n00:39:56\tAudio Clip, from Stephen Smith\tWhen they turned out to be inferior to their reverse heroes, silver’s reign, the poise was the burning beauty being allowed to become holy Balsam. His dignity clouded me possessed by being like an absolute cap sometimes about unloose the full ambition. But there was a person who was certain. Latency in the way of Slosha. With all his regard for the point. Departure stiff places disappeared became gloss fit to a little reveal something a new conscious purpose beyond humanity, having originality and ancient thought while there was still echoing a mighty Asian empathy born incapable of destruction, it became easy to recognize as if sorrow to divide outside. He had known the avoiding drama Asian.\n00:41:25\tAndrew Whiteman\tLanguages would have awakened an age, Kelly continues. Our archival approach is also special. A few Underwich audio graphics series recordings are currently available on Pen Sound.\nStill, the presentation of this archive is such that each piece is just a link, and it becomes a disembodied audio source. The original materiality of that artifact is lost. This materiality is significant, as these works were handmade with unique artwork associated with each release. Our archival process ensures that everything associated with the release is documented and scanned, rather than just the audio itself. We will then describe the images via text, making this work fully accessible for people with visible disabilities.\n00:42:15\tAndrew Whiteman\tDescribing the material ephemera of the tapes will allow the blind community to experience the artwork in its original form more fully. Beyond better serving the blind community, this archival approach also helps to narrativize the work, showing the conditions and artistic context in which it was made. Indeed, Siren seeks to become the standard repository for all forms of sonic poetry, creating a stable archive where the work can be accessed easily and indexed efficiently.\nThe second function of Siren Recordings is the label itself. Depending on the project, we will release three or four full-length albums per year in multiple formats. There are a lot of artists experimenting with sonic poetry at this moment, to name just a few: Kaie Kellough, who has an album coming out on Constellation Records this year, and Fan Wu from the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective is working with Tom Gill on a full-length.\nGary Barwin has been a tireless exponent of sonic poetry since the Toronto small press fair days. Jordan Abel performed at a recent SpokenWeb conference with a crew of two musicians and two readers, and he DJ-ed recording voices during his performance.\nFrom phonograph editions in Portland, Oregon, comes records by Douglas Kearney, featuring the incredible Haitian Vodou electric composer Val Gentil and author Harmony Holliday, under the moniker Bright Moments, creates incredible lo-fi mixes of African American speeches, poetry, interviews, and then mixes everything from Jazzenhe as to Rasta Nyabinghi sounds underneath, something I would love to archive.\n00:43:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tSo here is where I would like to formally call anyone listening. Siren solicits new works, archival manipulations, and interart collaborations involving poetry and sound. We are dedicated to the sonic poets of the present. Our goal is to provide a specific venue for these poets to publish their works.\nRight now, there’s no clear venue for doing this in Canada, but there are venues doing this elsewhere. Examples include recital records from the United States, which started in 2012, and nymphs and thugs and culture recordings. Both British labels begin in the mid two thousand ten s and blank forms from the US. It’s a nonprofit arts organization that began in 2016. Our poets deserve the same opportunities as the American and English poets. We’ll give them that opportunity in science.\n00:44:35\tAudio Clip, Unknown\tI don’t believe in any of your gods or powers. It’s all bullshit. I don’t even believe in my powers or gods.\n00:44:44\tAndrew Whiteman\tThe third effort of the Siren is perhaps the most important and follows directly on the productive actions of establishing the archive and running the label.\nThese two activities will generate the need for responses from our wider community. Essays, interviews, reviews, reports, and other writing will be hosted, shared, and discussed on the Siren Records hub by those obsessed and interested in sonic poetry.\nStrange as it may sound to those of you who have never left the university and might be a bit worn out by the institutional setting, as a latecomer to academia, I have been energized and excited by meeting scholars and students and deepening my study of poetry in an incredibly profound way. Indeed, I found it somewhat of an initiation, something Robert Duncan speaks of in a lecture he gave in 1969, describing when he was a young man, how desperate he was to find his way into Pound’s just released 1st 30 cantos.\n00:45:41\tAudio Clip from Robert Duncan’s Lecture, With Sound Edits\tWhen I went to the library here, I discovered something about this intellectual community: its total interest in Mister Ezra Pound seems to have faded. I want to go back to my initiation in the cabinet. How did I come to hear it?\n[Audio starts getting distorted] Forth, on the godly sea, we set up mast and sail on that swart ship, bore sheep aboard her and our bodies also heavy with weeping August and terrifying presence of a lady bluestocking who knew the entire modern scene, Aphrodite and in my belt on Telegraph Avenue, Elliot and the and pound, the 30 cannons. What was then the avalanche, the whole very confused domain of something one might call voice, which in pound one doesn’t know whether the voice is sort of actual metaphorical and then went down to the ship and I said, I can’t bear it, and then went, one week I went around with that on the godly sea.\nWe set up the mast and sailed on that swart ship. But what do you do when you read a poem? How do you find the rhythm of a poem that is not written? You find it the way they find it in music. Cadaverous dead brides of youths and the old born, many souls stained with the recent tears, girls, tender men, many more found out something we could not know when we were reading the thirties, the forties and so forth.\nAnd that is that pound intoned. And if you hear the record, you will find he has a contour of a singing intoning to the line. And then went down the ship, battle spoil bearing and. And these many crowded with bronze lands, many mauled. I mean, just our American trouble with men, many mauled. The word ” min men ” is already tricky enough when you get that many in there: men mauled with brand land.\nAnd so the Kirkheim. So I don’t always find, you know, Ava Hess’s husband as a Brit says, well, sounds like, you know, you never got out from under the impress of Yates or something like this, you know, and the next day reads in a completely different fashion, much more original. And you have the two readings there took it to heart, making them overlap so that the thing plays a double role.\nNow, I took it to heart. It’s exciting. The first high Yeatsian reading and the following much more casual and intimately superior reading. It’s exciting. Right. And where did you find them? She sent them to me. Oh, fantastic. They have not heard since, you know, they made them back in 59 for a German rating. I wonder if other stuff will start to sound. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution. If you don’t find the music, you have not found the elegant solution.\n00:49:05\tAndrew Whiteman\tThanks for listening.\nI’m Andrew Whiteman, creative director of Siren Recordings; looking forward to hearing from you soon.\n00:49:13\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’ve been listening to the Spokenweb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:49:32\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Andrew Whiteman.\nSiren Recordings is a project co-directed by Andrew Whiteman and Kelly Baron. The SpokenWeb podcast team supervises producer Maia Harris, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. Our sound designer James Healy of season five will be making an exit this season, but we have a new sound designer: TJ MacPherson, who is ready to come aboard.\n00:50:02\tKatherine McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know. Please rate us, comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Also, check social media for our listening parties and more for now.\nThanks for listening."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9603","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E2, Virtual Pilgrimage: Where Medieval Meets Modern, 4 November 2024, Pereira and Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Lindsay Pereira","Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lindsay Pereira\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/2d652a48-92e5-4aab-964f-13c84ab334cc/audio/768dfb20-fca9-4d6c-9e00-295fa04a0338/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e2-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,800,911 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e2-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/virtual-pilgrimage/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Magical Minstrelsy: Where Medieval Meets Modern Through Mimesis, Season 1 Episode 1: Virtual Pilgrimage uses sounds from Freesound. All sound samples that were used in this episode are licensed under CC0 1.0:\\n\\nFootsteps on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/lzmraul/sounds/389454/\\n\\nBirds: https://freesound.org/people/MATRIXXX_/sounds/519110/\\n\\nWater: https://freesound.org/people/BurghRecords/sounds/415151/\\n\\nCows: https://freesound.org/people/Nontu_Lwazi00/sounds/541920/\\n\\nSheep: https://freesound.org/people/rent55/sounds/709921/\\n\\nHorse on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/Ornery/sounds/233345/\\n\\nHorse with cart: https://freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/\\n\\nFootsteps on cobblestone: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/260120/\\n\\nMedieval city: https://freesound.org/people/OGsoundFX/sounds/423119/\\n\\nChurch bells: https://freesound.org/people/Audeption/sounds/425172/\\n\\nCoins: https://freesound.org/people/husky70/sounds/161315/\\n\\nBlacksmith: https://freesound.org/people/Emmaproductions/sounds/254371/\\n\\nMusic: https://ccmixter.org/files/asteria/2615\\n\\nChurch coins: https://freesound.org/people/scripsi/sounds/335191/\\n\\nGregorian chant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ecce.lignum.Crucis.ogg\\n\\nCrowd gasping: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480774/\\n\\nBaby crying: https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/\\n\\nBreath: https://freesound.org/people/launemax/sounds/274769/\\n\\nHeartbeat: https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/612642/\\n\\nWorks Cited and Consulted\\n\\nAhmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2015.\\n\\nArsuaga, Ana Echevarría. “The shrine as mediator: England, castile, and the pilgrimage to Compostela.” England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century, 2007, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603103_4.\\n\\nArvay, Susan M. “Private passions: The contemplation of suffering in medieval affective devotions.” (2008).\\n\\nBailey, Anne E. “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England.” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 203–29. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874.\\n\\nBeckstead, Zachary. “On the way: Pilgrimage and liminal experiences.” Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4_5.\\n\\nBeebe, Kathryne. Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s “Die Sionpilger.” West Virginia University Press, 2009.\\n\\nBenjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 2018, pp. 217–220, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498909-39\\n\\nCassidy-Welch, Megan. “Pilgrimage and embodiment: Captives and the cult of saints in late medieval bavaria.” Parergon, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 47–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2003.0101.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Tradition as play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth.’” History and Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3, 2004, pp. 273–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720042000257430.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, Ellen Badone, and Sharon R. Roseman. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2004, pp. 52–67.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and Marion Bowman. “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 1–23. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515341.\\n\\nColeman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages.” Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. (Jennie) Stopford, York Medieval Press, 1999. WorldCat Discovery Service, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16637.\\n\\nDíaz-Vera, Javier E. “Exploring the relationship between emotions, language and space: Construals of awe in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 2, 2015, pp. 165–189, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2015.1093918.\\n\\nFoster, Elisa A. “As You Came from the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage to Walsingham and Its Crusader Contexts.” Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain, edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 91– 114.\\n\\nGertsman, Elina, and Marian Bleeke. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 23–41.\\n\\nGrazia Di Stefano, Laura. “How to be a time traveller: Exploring Venice with a fifteenth-century pilgrimage guide.” Making the Medieval Relevant, 2019, pp. 171–190, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-008.\\n\\nGregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010.\\n\\nHill, Joyce. “Rome in Ripon: St Wilfrid’s Inspiration and Legacy.” History, vol. 105, no. 367, 2020, pp. 603–25. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13027.\\n\\nHill‐Smith, Connie. “Cyberpilgrimage: The (virtual) reality of online pilgrimage experience.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2011, pp. 236–246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00277.x.\\n\\nHundley, Catherine. “Pilgrims in the Parish: A Method and Two Herefordshire Case Studies.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, Oct. 2022, pp. 40–87.\\n\\nHurlock, Kathryn. “Virtual Pilgrimage.” Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, C1100-1500, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 145–174.\\n\\nJenkins, John. “Replication or Rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 24–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515327.\\n\\nKempe, Margery, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Margery Kempe. Oxford University Press, 2015.\\n\\nKuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald d’Aurillac. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.\\n\\nLangland, William, and Schmidt A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford University Press, 2009.\\n\\nNickell, S. A. The Limits of Embodiment: The Implication of Written and Artistic Portrayals of Mary at the Foot of the Cross for Late Medieval Affective Spirituality, Graduate Theological Union, United States — California, 2011. ProQuest, https://lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Flimits-embodiment-implication-written-artistic%2Fdocview%2F875240824%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D10246.\\n\\nOusterhout, Robert. “‘Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination’: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images.” Gesta, vol. 48, no. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 153–68. www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.2307/29764905.\\n\\nPowell, Hilary. “Saints, Pilgrimage and Landscape in Early Medieval Kent, c. 800-1220.” Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220, Boydell Press, 2016, pp. 133–53.\\n\\nSinnett-Smith, Jane. “Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de Seinte Audree.” Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead et al., Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 285–303.\\n\\nWynn, Mark. “God, pilgrimage, and acknowledgement of Place.” Religious Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–163, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412506008778.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549671116800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["From medieval itineraries to modern livestreams, Christian pilgrimage is often, if not always experienced through an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth. In this episode, hosts Lindsay Pereira and Ella Jando-Saul explore the concept of virtual pilgrimage through conversations with two guests: Michael Van Dussen, a professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, teaches us about the medieval experience of pilgrimage in the British Isles while Simon Coleman, a professor in the\n\nDepartment for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto teaches us about the modern reconstruction of pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, England.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapping with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, producers Ella Jando-Saul and Lindsay Pereira invite us to ask what makes a pilgrimage real.\n00:01:00\tHannah McGregor\tAs digital technologies and global pandemics lead to the rise of virtual pilgrimages, modern spiritual seekers can go on pilgrimage without actually going on pilgrimage.\n00:01:14\tHannah McGregor\tBut is a virtual pilgrimage a mere mediation of the authentic experience? Or are pilgrimages, by nature, an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth?\nDrawing on the expertise of Dr. Michael Van Dussen, professor of English Literature at McGill University, and Dr. Simon Coleman, professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Toronto, Ella and Lindsay explore the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages before inviting us, the listeners, to take part in our own mediated spiritual journey through their sonic reconstruction of a medieval soundscape.\n\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tHere is episode two of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Virtual Pilgrimage, Where Medieval Meets Modern.\n00:02:06\tMusic\t[Soft harmonizing music starts playing]\n00:02:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m Ella Jando-Saul, a Master’s student at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, in English Literature.\n00:02:23\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd I’m Lindsay Pereira, your other equally brilliant, equally razzle-dazzle, though significantly shorter host from Concordia’s MA In Literature.\n00:02:34\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, Ella.\n00:02:36\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes, Lindsay?\n00:02:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI have a completely random and unscripted question for you that will miraculously segue into today’s topic.\n00:02:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, you’ve surely piqued my interest. Lindsay, what’s on your mind?\n00:02:47\tLindsay Pereira\tHave you ever gone on a pilgrimage or maybe wanted to go on one?\n00:02:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tUm, okay, no, I’ve never gone on a pilgrimage or even thought about doing so, to be honest. Have you?\n00:02:59\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, I’m so glad you asked. Yes, I have gone on one.\n00:03:04\tLindsay Pereira\tI’ve completed the Camino de Santiago and even have the virtual badge to prove it.\n00:03:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWait, what? Hold on. When did you go to school? Spain?\n00:03:11\tLindsay Pereira\tNo, no, I didn’t actually travel there. I did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\nI just activated the challenge on the app, and voila.\n\nPilgrimage complete.\n\nLook, it says “Camino de Santiago, start this expedition and hike 784 km by tracking your daily steps.”\n\nCool, right?\n\n00:03:14\tLindsay Pereira\tI did the whole walk virtually through my Garmin Forerunner watch.\n00:03:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tHuh. So, can people go on pilgrimage without going on pilgrimage?\n00:03:37\tLindsay Pereira\tI mean, yeah, it’s a thing.\n00:03:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt’s a thing.\n00:03:40\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah, it’s clearly a thing.\n00:03:41\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut is it a good thing?\n00:03:42\tLindsay Pereira\tHow is it a bad thing?\n00:03:44\tElla Jando-Saul\tI’m not saying it’s a bad thing.\n00:03:45\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, my brain hurts. Speak with words, please.\n00:03:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tLook, I’m just saying with my scholarly hat on.\n00:03:51\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, fine, fine. I’ll Engage Smart Mode 2.\n00:04:02\tElla Jando-Saul\tVirtual Pilgrimage. It’s not a new thing. It’s been around since medieval times, too.\n00:04:06\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, absolutely. Not everyone could afford to travel during that period or was healthy enough even to make such a long, exhausting journey to Jerusalem and back again.\n00:04:16\tElla Jando-Saul\tRight, right, exactly.\n00:04:17\tElla Jando-Saul\tThis is why we have various manuscripts meant as walkthroughs of pilgrimage that were used by nuns who weren’t allowed to physically leave the cloister.\nVirtual pilgrimage was a legitimate workaround for those who couldn’t make the trek.\n\n00:04:30\tLindsay Pereira\tA badge to validate the virtual experience and the indulgences.\n00:04:35\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd, in a way, all pilgrimage is virtual.\n00:04:38\tLindsay Pereira\tWhat’s that supposed to mean?\n00:04:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, ultimately, we are all metaphorically on a pilgrimage toward Judgment Day. And when we travel to Jerusalem, we’re symbolically walking in Christ’s footsteps.\n00:04:48\tElla Jando-Saul\tWhen we travel to Canterbury, Santiago, Walsingham, Hereford, or any number of other pilgrimages, we are metaphorically walking in the footsteps of a saint and, ultimately, of Christ and imaginatively taking ourselves to Jerusalem and Judgment Day.\n00:05:02\tLindsay Pereira\tSo then, why are you poo-pooing my flashy, virtual, totally legit pilgrimage badge?\n00:05:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tElla, I’m not.\nI’m just wondering about things.\n\n00:05:11\tLindsay Pereira\tThings like pilgrimage hierarchy.\nLike is a virtual pilgrimage less valuable or respected than an in-person one?\n\n00:05:20\tElla Jando-Saul\tNo. Well, yeah.\nI mean, it’s an interesting point to consider. Think about Benjamin, right? What’s his first name?\n\nWalter…Walter…\n\n00:05:32\tLindsay Pereira\tWalter.\n00:05:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tWalter Benjamin.\nAnd his concept of the “aura” that an artistic object has.\n\nLike the Mona Lisa, for example. It’s more meaningful to actually have the real Mona Lisa. Even if you had a high-resolution print or a near-indistinguishable replica, it wouldn’t give you the same feature feeling as being in the presence of the painting created by Da Vinci.\n\nAnd in the case of pilgrimage, it’s more concrete. Like, will this experience actually heal me? Will it actually bring me closer to God? And, will this pilgrimage actually have my prayers answered?\n\n00:06:09\tLindsay Pereira\tOkay, okay.\nWell, there’s another reason I’m interested in talking about pilgrimage with you today. The Garmin Watch was merely a brilliant lead-in for my big reveal.\n\n00:06:22\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, what’s going on?\n00:06:23\tLindsay Pereira\tElla, you may previously be aware of my Portuguese background from such things as our years long friendship and the fact that I don’t try to hide it.\nAnd my, you know, clearly, very obviously Portuguese last name.\n\n00:06:39\tElla Jando-Saul\tYes.\n00:06:41\tLindsay Pereira\tYou may also be definitely previously aware from such things as Professor Yeager’s grad class, colourfully entitled “Virgins, Martyrs, Trans Folk, the Early English Saint’s Life,” that my interest in pilgrimage stems from my father’s 50-year plus career as leader of a religious Marian pilgrimage known as the “Romaria,” which is specific to the Azorean island of San Miguel and in existence since 1522.\n00:07:09\tElla Jando-Saul\tWell, this is both absolutely shocking and incredibly exciting.\nTell me more.\n\n00:07:14\tLindsay Pereira\tSo, my father, Eduardo Pereira, was a master who led pilgrims on an eight-day journey during Lent.\n00:07:25\tLindsay Pereira\tThey would all walk from before dawn until dusk, no matter the weather, in a clockwise direction around the island, stopping at churches and chapels, all the while praying the rosary and singing religious songs. At night, benevolent hosts who considered such guests a blessing from the Virgin Mary would feed and shelter them.\nOr if no homes were able to take them in, they’d sleep on the floor of a local church.\n\n00:07:52\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, eight days. That’s a lot of walking.\n00:07:54\tLindsay Pereira\tYeah. And praying. They walk, they pray, they pray, they walk.\n00:08:01\tLindsay Pereira\tI can’t help but think about this sort of invisible yet increasingly potent buildup of what Sarah Ahmed, everyone’s favourite affect theorist, would call affective value. I’m picturing all these pilgrims doing this pilgrimage on a yearly basis, going through the same motions, and every year it becomes more important, more powerful, more valuable.\n00:08:29\tElla Jando-Saul\tIt increases in effective value. And that’s why it feels so intense for pilgrims.\n00:08:32\tLindsay Pereira\tExactly.\n00:08:33\tElla Jando-Saul\tBut at the same time, I feel like there’s this thing where something gets super popular and then suddenly it’s too popular and it’s not cool to like anymore. Or it gets commodified.\nLike everyone is going on pilgrimage these days, or I guess those days in the 14th century, and suddenly you aren’t sure if people are going because they really want to connect with God or just because they want to look good.\n\n00:08:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tAnd someone might, for instance, take issue with feeling accomplished for having completed the Camino de Santiago via their Garmin forerunner.\n00:09:00\tLindsay Pereira\tHey, I thought we were besties.\n00:09:00\tElla Jando-Saul\tOkay, look, now I’m really excited to learn more about pilgrimages—medieval pilgrimages, that is.\n00:09:10\tLindsay Pereira\tYes, me too.\nI have so many questions, but we need more background information, more learned input, and more context.\n\nNow it’s time for “What’s up, Prof?” The part of the podcast where we interview experts in the field to learn about important medieval-ly things so we can become not just smart scholars but also smarmy Scholars.\n\n00:09:40\tElla Jando-Saul\tLindsay, that’s not a good thing.\n00:09:41\tLindsay Pereira\tFor the first episode, we are treating you to two experts.\n00:09:45\tElla Jando-Saul\tWe interview Drs—Michael Van Dussen of McGill University and Simon Coleman of the University of Toronto.\nDr. Van Dussen speaks to us about the material culture of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. He introduces us to objects such as pilgrimage badges and itineraries and discusses the cultural conception of travel.\n\n00:10:03\tLindsay Pereira\tDr. Coleman tells us about the modern revival of an important medieval pilgrimage site in Walsingham, England. Walsingham is a remote village in Norfolk that has become a popular pilgrimage destination over the last century.\nThe site contains a variety of historical and modern shrines to Our Lady of Walsingham, an apparition of Mary in that area. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and non-religious pilgrims gather in the village throughout the spring and summer to venerate the saint and reconnect with England’s medieval past.\n\n00:10:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tWell, hello, I’m Michael Van Dussen. I’m a professor in the English literature department at McGill University in Montreal and I work a lot on medieval manuscripts, medieval travel, and I’m happy to talk with you today.\n00:11:00\tSimon Coleman\tWell, hello, I’m Simon Coleman.\nI’m a professor of the Anthropology of Religion based in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.\n\nAnd my latest book on pilgrimage is called Powers of Pilgrimage Religion in a World of Movement that was published about a year ago. And it really tries to take us through different ways in which anthropologists and others have tried to analyze the significance of pilgrimage in the contemporary world.\n\n00:11:32\tElla Jando-Saul\tFrom your email, I understood that you’ve worked with the material culture of medieval pilgrimage.\n00:11:40\tMichael Van Dussen\tYeah, I am not intentionally going for pilgrimage, though.\nYeah. So I mean, people are traveling for a number of different reasons, but the idea of “curiosity-based” travel, where you’re just going around to see the sights and that’s an end in itself.\n\nThat’s the reason for doing it. That’s not really a culturally held value in the later Middle Ages. I mean it’s coming to be one sort of. But people are apologetic about it or people are maybe doing something out of curiosity, but they are also doing something for a more traditionally legitimate reason as well.\n\nSo that could be a pilgrimage. So, it’s something that’s infused with theological, devotional, and especially significant aspects. Or it could be trade, but trade is always iffy sometimes. But it’s a legitimate reason to travel or diplomacy. So, political travel is traveling for political reasons. But one of the things that are interesting is that what I’m going to call pilgrimage sort of loosely finds its way into all of this kind of travel.\n\n00:12:59\tSimon Coleman\tYou know, some of the best historians of Walsingham and people who’ve written really interesting work on Walsingham are also themselves associated with the church in some way.\nThose are people who are very, very keen on getting the historical facts right. And, you know, Walsingham is more than just a place where there are numerous shrines. Walsingham also has numerous archives. I hope to look at the archives again in a few months.\n\n00:13:34\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so there are all sorts of ways in which people are working to try and make the if you like, the religious or the theological and the historical come together.\n00:13:50\tSimon Coleman\tThere are obviously occasions when people see them as clashing. And I guess I’ll give you one example: If we go back to the Anakin shrine, I think I mentioned to you earlier that, you know, it’s not where the original site was when it was first constructed.\nA well and some artifacts were discovered in the area when the Anglican shrine was constructed. And, you know, Hope Patton at one point was thinking, okay, well, actually, look, God has actually brought us to the original place, you know, by providence, and gradually decided, you know, it’s not clear how long he kept that view.\n\n00:14:48\tSimon Coleman\tGradually, that view tends to fade.\n00:14:50\tSimon Coleman\tIn the 1960s, an archaeological dig is made, it seems, to establish the original site further away. And yet when I first went to Walsingham in the 1990s and I said to people, hi, I’m an anthropologist.\nI’m here to look at the shrines, people said to me, oh, I hope you’re going to actually discover a real place where the original shrine was.\n\nSo even the archaeology of the 1960s had not quite settled this sense of where people felt that the shrine should be for religious and theological reasons. And so there’s always this kind of. There may be slight tension. Not always, but it’s often this slight tension.\n\n00:15:38\tSimon Coleman\tAnd for many people, you know, where history and theology or when history and faith clash, of course, for many people, faith wins. What matters is what Walsingham can do for one’s faith and how it might bring one closer to a church. And I’ve had some clergy and pilgrims say that they don’t want to know the details of the history because that’s precise. That’s not important. And that’s a distraction from Walsingham’s real message.\n00:16:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd in that sense, I find it fascinating and curious that if you go to the original site of the Holy House, for instance, there’s the kind of. That’s now a blank space, and there’s a big kind of arch, which is the original east window of the pirate.\nThat’s there, but there isn’t much else. Of course, that means that people can insert their own imaginations into the site. They can reclose a relatively blank space with their ideas of what the medieval shrine should be for them as pilgrims.\n\n00:17:02\tMichael Van Dussen\tI accidentally found an itinerary in an ugly manuscript in Prague Castle.\n00:17:10\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou know, forgive me, a proud castle for saying the manuscript’s ugly, but it’s got water damage all over it, and it’s grimy. And the last part of this manuscript is soiled. It’s gross and different from the rest of the manuscript it’s bound with. It was clearly carried on its own as a little notebook on the trip that it describes. And there’s this guy; he seems to be a knight. He’s called a Miles, a knight in Latin. But we don’t know anything about it, or what he’s travelling for.\n00:17:43\tMichael Van Dussen\tWhat we do know is that he moves from Prague and makes his way across the continent in the direction of England. He dips down to Paris, goes back up to Calais, and crosses the English Channel.\nAnd then he starts being interested in what he’s describing England. He describes stuff in other places, too, but he’s really kind of. His curiosity, you can just come back to that word, is piqued.\n\n00:18:08\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd he…It’s unclear. Sometimes people are writing their itineraries themselves.\nSometimes, if they’re a little more wealthy, they might have a secretary traveling with them who writes things for them.\n\nWe don’t know who wrote this, but I have found evidence of people going through England and other places with multiple secretaries writing their itineraries.\n\nSo that’s another layer.\n\n00:18:36\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know in this particular case, but he starts to describe the distances between places. You know, this is a very…almost literally grounded itinerary. It’s saying, from Dover or Dover to Rochester or Canterbury to London.\nThis many miles use different units of measurement. And you get a sense that his recording stops along the way, about as far as he could go in a day’s ride on a horse, probably with some other people.\n\n00:19:12\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe goes to Canterbury. He describes the shrine of Thomas Becket as one that no longer survives. One of the tricky things about England is that most of these shrines, these pilgrimage destinations, were destroyed during the Reformation.\nIt’s interesting when we find material evidence of what a shrine looked like because we don’t have that anymore in most cases. So, he describes this shrine of Thomas Becket. It’s golden and beautiful. He doesn’t give a lot of information. He goes to London, to Westminster Abbey, where the queen is crowned and everything.\n\n00:19:55\tMichael Van Dussen\tThen he starts describing all sorts of tombs, which do, for the most part, survive.\nThese still are…You could go to Westminster today and still see what he’s describing. And he describes them. Some of them are saints, some of them are just, you know, kings and queens who died. He’s impressed by these tombs. They’re imposing tombs. And he does the same in St.Paul’s Cathedral. He describes tombs.\n\n00:20:22\tMichael Van Dussen\tHe describes the dimensions of the place in swords, which is weird because he describes the dimensions in swords. It’s this many swords wide, it’s this many swords long, and it’s this many swords high from the ground into the top of the.\nThat’s hilarious—the steep. Like, wait a minute, how’s he doing this? Appropriate. It’s nuts. Is he going around with a sword? But then, how’s he getting up to the very top of this? But then I found. He’s not. He’s not.\n\n00:20:54\tMichael Van Dussen\tI found it by accident. The exact same description, maybe a couple of words different, but the exact same measurements, the exact same everything, is found in another manuscript in the British Library.\nIt tells you where those measurements are written. They’re written down. They’re written on posted texts. Say, this is St.Paul’s Cathedral. This is how big it is, this is how many swords wide it is, or whatever width it is, it’s how tall it is. These are the different tombs. This is who’s buried there.\n\n00:21:26\tMichael Van Dussen\tThis is this cross, this pilgrimage destination at the north door, this CR Cross associated with Joseph of Arimathea and the Christianization of England. There are all these guides in textual form that he’s just transcribing.\nAs I said, I first studied waiting in the 1990s, and sure, we had, you know, we could have email and so on, but it feels like it’s a kind of world apart.\n\n00:21:59\tMichael Van Dussen\tYou Know, going back in the.In the 2000s and twenties. Of course, that has to do with technology, but it also has to do with the post. Post covert experience and the sense I got, you know, having and having done. I’ve been in Walsingham a lot over the last year, especially just posting in the post-COVID period, if you can call it post-COVID. We’re not quite post Covid now, but you know, what I mean was the ways in which actually that sent that.\n00:22:24\tMichael Van Dussen\tDuring that period, people could not come to the shrines, people physically could not come to the shrines, or very few people could.\n00:22:33\tMichael Van Dussen\tAnd you had this kind of. You had to have these groups separate. They were separated from each other.\nSo, you had to separate people physically from each other as they went through. So, how could the shrines respond to that?\n\nWell, as I guess must have been true for many other parts of the Christian and wider religious world, they discovered or were kind of forced into thinking about the role of technology. So rather than simply saying the shrines are closed and nobody can come, they realized that they could actually use cameras in the shrines, Facebook, and other ways of linking with pilgrims.\n\nAnd now, you started to get daily masses broadcast from the shrines—sorry, both shrines. Of course, this linked the shrines with people who would normally have been at Walsingham but couldn’t make it. But it also started to link them with even wider constituencies.\n\n00:23:43\tSimon Coleman\tSo you’ve got a shrine mass, and you suddenly realize that people who are attending that mass virtually, who are looking through the cameras at the priest at the altar, and so on, are people who are spread around the world.\n00:23:58\tSimon Coleman\tAnd so in a curious sense, you’ve, I mean, as one person put it, one, one. One priest put it, he said we broadened our constituency.\nWe actually increased our connections through COVID-19 in a curious way. And there’s one point when there’s a big, you know, celebration that takes place in the Anakin shrine. And it’s one on the national level. It’s one of the national days, and it crashes. I think this.\n\nI forget whether it’s the Anakin or the Roman Catholics, but, you know, the shrine crashes, the link crashes because there are so many people actually trying to get on or that’s certainly one possible explanation. But there’s a wider aesthetic sense here, which is that it’s not just that the linkages are made with a wider constituency.\n\n00:24:46\tSimon Coleman\tAnd okay, at the kind of Fsites, you can see how people attending mass also chat with each other.\n00:24:55\tSimon Coleman\tSo there’s another. There’s communication going on there that wouldn’t have taken place otherwise.\nBut there’s a wider sense in which the use of cameras actually means that images from the shrines are used in such a way that it allows the viewer to get much closer to, say, statues or other parts of the shrine’s material culture.\n\nAnd so effectively you might actually have an image of a statue of, say that of Our lady of Walsingham from the Slipper Chapel. And there’s an image that’ll be on the video, and nothing happens for half an hour.\n\n00:25:36\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, it. You have a cl. Effectively, you can meditate on that statue in a way you wouldn’t have been able to do if you had been there. And so I’m like, there’s a sense in which there’s a kind of diffusion of links, but also a kind of magnification and bringing one closer to these images, even if one can’t physically touch them.\nAnd then, of course, as has happened in other pilgrimage sites, you know, people do them in their local areas so that you recreate the sense of going on pilgrimage. But you can’t do it physically in Norfolk, but you can do it in your local area, possibly with walking with other people, if you’re allowed to.\n\n00:26:28\tSimon Coleman\tAgain, there are all sorts of ways in which people can retain this sense or magnify this sense.\n00:26:34\tElla Jando-Saul\tBeing in touch with Walsingham and that sort of doing a local pilgrimage because you can’t actually do the bigger one, is something that we’ve been researching a lot for this project because that’s a lot of what medieval pilgrimage in England seems to be doing is like, well, if you can’t actually make it to Jerusalem, you can make it to this cathedral in England and that’ll be a stand in for Jerusalem.\n00:27:07\tSimon Coleman\tThis is absolutely true.\n00:27:08\tSimon Coleman\tAnd of course what we need to bear in mind is that Walsingham itself, and when I think about Walsingham, I talk about Walsingham as the place, but I also talk about Walsingham as the experience.\n00:27:21\tSimon Coleman\tBoth Catholic and Anglican shrines are linked up with parishes and dioceses that will have their own local altars where you might Celebrate Our Lady of Walsingham.\n00:27:38\tSimon Coleman\tYou might get together once you know you’re part of a guild or something else orientated towards Our Lady of Walsingham.\nAnd so it’s not. You don’t just think about Walsingham when you’re going on pilgrimage.\n\nYou might actually come together, have a Mass, and celebrate Our Lady. You’ll gather under the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham in your local parish church. And so, the statue itself—the statue of Our Lady might be taken from either shrine and might be taken around the country. And so you might be visited by Our Lady of Walsingham.\n\nShe might come to see you in your local church. Very famously, for instance, the Roman Catholic statue of Our Lady was taken to Wembley Stadium, a big sports stadium in London, in the 1980s, when the Pope, Pope John II, John Paul II, came to England. He celebrated Mass in Wembley Stadium, and on the altar was our statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. So she is mobile.\n\n00:29:01\tSimon Coleman\tAnd, you know, Pope John Paul II effectively contacts her and blesses her, and then she returns to Walsingham. So Walsingham, as a wider experience, is itself mobile.\n00:29:18\tSimon Coleman\tAnd then this gets augmented, as we say, during COVID as people recreate not just to celebrate Mass. You can’t get together to celebrate Mass in your local church, but you can still go on a walk and coordinate with others online.\n00:29:32\tSimon Coleman\tI think this has had some degree of effect after the lockdown experience, where people have realized that you can expand the ways in which you celebrate your connection to Wolsingham.\n00:29:51\tMichael Van Dussen\tI mean, a lot of these are not like the texts, say, the Stations of Jerusalem or Stations of Rome, which are encouraging.\n00:30:20\tMichael Van Dussen\tThey’re not just saying, and it takes one day to get from here to here, or this is how many meters wide this is or something. These kinds of itineraries. Yeah, swords wide, you know, statues or something. This isn’t what they’re recording. They’re. They’re usually much more meditative. Yeah, they are. They have a reference point to specific locations and what’s there, but they might.\n00:31:03\tMichael Van Dussen\tI don’t know if you know about the Stations of the Cross, but you’ll find in every Catholic church today and during Lent, especially leading up to Easter, the Stations of the Will, there will be Stations of the Cross. So you can come.\nIt can be separate from a Mass or part of a Mass, and sometimes physically walk around the church. It’s inside the church but around the walls. And there’ll be 14. You know, all the stations that represent the stages of the Passion of Christ. And they are located in, you know, Jerusalem. But it’s a meditative experience. And sometimes, it’s sort of a pilgrimage within the church.\n\nThis still happens every year today, but I’m mentioning that because these stations of Jerusalem or stations of Rome proceed in similar ways—not identical, but similar. So they’re very meditative and prayerful.\n\n00:31:58\tMichael Van Dussen\tUsually, there are prayers interposed between descriptions of a location so that the emphasis is.\nIt’s hard to lose sight of the idea that the emphasis is spiritual and not just sort of like, “Oh, and then there’s this great place.”\n\nYou’ve got to go to this one bar. It’s not right near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sorry, that sounds blasphemous. One of the things I have heard people talk about is that you know, of course, physically going. Going to the place does more than just put you in. Touch with a place that may differ greatly from your local experience in your everyday experience.\n\n00:33:02\tSimon Coleman\tOf course, you can have your Walsingham, your statue of Our Lady Walsingham, in your local parish, but that’s different than making an effort to travel, let’s say, 200 miles in a coach with other parish members.\n00:33:03\tSimon Coleman\tYou’ve paid. You’ve paid some money, which may be difficult for some people.\nYou are seeing fellow parishioners in a new way. And a lot of people talk about this idea of when you kind of get towards Walsingham, you feel as though there’s this. Suddenly, this bubble appears. It’s a bubble that surrounds the village. And you go through that bubble, and you’re in a Norfolk.\n\nBut you. Maybe you. You may come from industrial Manchester, okay? And that’s where you are most of the year. And maybe you haven’t. You only travel a little. And then suddenly you find yourself, Reg. You know, you. Once a year, you find yourself in this Norfolk rural village. And you’re seeing people who you may know very well. You’re seeing them in a new way. You’re not just that, but you come, and the clergy at the shrine recognize you. And some clergy are brilliant at this. They may see you once a year, but they say, oh, hello, Simon, how lovely to see you again. You know, hello, Lindsay, how. Hello, Ella. It was lovely to see you again. You know, I remember last year. Oh, have you come with your friend?\n\n00:34:21\tSimon Coleman\tSo, all of that, that complex process of hosting is occurring. And then, of course, there’s the fact that you are separating yourself from a lot of the things that you might be having to do at home.\nPeople talk about it, and it allows you to have a particular kind of focus when you actually get there.\n\n00:34:59\tSimon Coleman\tSo it’s a combination of the place itself and the experience of having gotten away and having a time and space in which you can focus in unusual ways on the pilgrimage experience, which I think is very significant.\n00:35:00\tSimon Coleman\tAnd I talked. I have written about this.\nWe need. When we think about that experience, it’s not just a question of looking at what happens actually in shrines or liturgically.\n\nIt’s also looking at what happens on one side of the official worship experiences: that you talk to people and engage in spaces adjacent to shrines but somehow significant.\n\nThey may not be obviously religious, but I call them lateral spaces rather than liminal spaces and times, kind of penumbral spaces, where you’re temporarily and spatially in the environment of a site, but you’re not necessarily celebrating a Mass at any given moment, but you are somehow orientated towards a pilgrimage experience.\n\nIt’s those fuzzier spaces that are also very important. You don’t get them when, effectively, you’ve looked at the shrine through your screen, switched the laptop off, and that’s it. And all of a sudden, you’re back into your everyday.\n\n00:36:23\tSimon Coleman\tAnd those Anglo Catholic sensibilities that we’ve talked about were sometimes derisively talked about as being kind of British Museum religion. And why are you going back to an ossified faith?\n00:36:35\tSimon Coleman\tBut of course, what we’re trying to understand here is how it’s not an ossified faith.\n00:36:49\tSimon Coleman\tIt’s a faith where the past and the present are so closely sandwiched and allied together for theological and other reasons that we’ve got to try and think back into a sensibility where the past becomes living in a new.\nIn a new kind of way.\n\n00:37:07\tElla Jando-Saul\tWow, well said.\n00:37:08\tElla Jando-Saul\tCan we do that? Can we create a sensibility where the past becomes living?\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWe sure can.\n00:37:12\tLindsay Pereira\tWith the magic of our next segment, Medieval mixtape soundscape shapes from centuries past.\n00:37:20\tAudio Clip\t[Background noise of sheep and chatter]\n[Background chatter in Middle English]\n\nIt that will not…\n\nA fool I…\n\nWish is overcome…\n\nBut first in and…\n\nEke to bring and weave as in sweet farm Thou mayest have not of…\n\nAnother thing a brother of who hath no way he eats no kukiwal but e say natural…\n\nThe morning in the morning in the morning, in the morning…\n\n00:49:39\tLindsay Pereira\tThank you, gentle listeners, humble scholars and fellow medieval addicts.\n00:49:53\tElla Jando-Saul\tThanks to James Healy and the rest of Concordia’s SpokenWeb Team for letting us use their facilities and to the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia for lending us fantastic recording equipment.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tAnd thank you, of course, to our lovely experts, Professors Michael Van Dusen and Simon Coleman.\n00:50:02\tLindsay Pereira\tDon’t forget to check out Professor Coleman’s book– Farathya Sunder.\n00:50:08\tMusic\t[Harmonized singing and music starts playing]\n00:50:56\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. The Spoken Web Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web Team to distribute audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n00:51:00\tHannah McGregor\tElla Jando-Saul and Lindsey Pereira produced this month’s episode.\n00:51:01\tHannah McGregor\tSpecial thanks to Dr.Michael Van Dussen and Dr.Simon Coleman for lending their time and expertise.\n00:51:18\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team supervises producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and, me, Hannah McGregor.\n00:51:29\tHannah McGregor\tTo learn more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n00:51:36\tHannah McGregor\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us, leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media. Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tThanks for listening.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9604","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E3, Sound Box Signals Presents – “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings'”, 2 December 2024, Drew, Chircop, and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sofie Drew\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Emily Chircop\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c42f89ac-b9dc-42d9-8fca-240f2598846c/audio/4976f18d-ed74-4fde-91c1-f1ac6d19fad6/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,746,880 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-12-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Side A: Sharon Thesen’s Reading at [George and Angela] Bowerings’” from Sharon Thesen fonds, nd. 2019.002.002, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/sharon-thesens-reading-at-bowerings/\\n\\nSharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: Studio Reading of “The Fire.” Ed. Amy Thiessen. https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/reading\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems. Ed. Erin Moure. Talonbooks, 2023. https://talonbooks.com/books/?refabulations\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 1 “Stories of Spoken Web”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 2 “Sound Recordings Are Weird”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\\n\\nThe Capilano Review, The Sharon Thesen Issue. Spring 2008. https://thecapilanoreview.com/issues/spring-2008-the-sharon-these-issue/\\n\\nSpecifically, Thea Bowering’s article “Sharon Thesen: Poem in Memory, and growing up there”\\n\\nhttps://journals.sfu.ca/capreview/index.php/capreview/article/view/2674/2674\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549676359680,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast is happy to showcase an episode from our sister podcast, the SoundBox Signals Podcast from SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan. SoundBox Signals is hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer.\n\nIn this episode, from Season 2, Episode 1 of the SoundBox Signals Podcast, University of Exeter undergraduates Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop carry out a close listening of a 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen reading from her first book Artemis Hates Romance at George and Angela Bowerings’ house. Drew and Chircop’s conversation focuses on the intimacy, sociality, and ambiguity of the recording, and how this shapes interpretation. The episode features multiple archival clips from the digitized cassette tape, alongside interview audio from Karis Shearer and George Bowering. “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings’” was co-produced by Emily Chircop and Sofie Drew as part of the Press Play project. The SoundBox Collection is part of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:55\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we present an episode from our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals.\nThe episode we selected was produced by Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop.\nThey are students at the University of Exeter, and this episode was produced as a collaboration between their university and the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, home to the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nIt is not the first time that SoundBox Signals has made an appearance on the SpokenWeb podcast feed.\nAnd like in those past episodes, this episode is another close listening and real conversation about archival audio.\nWe’ll let Sophie and Emily introduce you to that audio at the start of the episode.\nHere is episode three of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings.”\n00:01:52\tEmily Chircop\tWelcome to season two, episode one of the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nWe are your guest hosts for the episode.\n00:02:00\tSofie Drew\tHi, I’m Sophie Drew.\n00:02:01\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I’m Emily Chircop.\nWe’re undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, and this is part of the Press Play Project.\nWe are very excited to collaborate with UBCO researchers to explore and share these recordings with a wider audience.\n00:02:15\tSofie Drew\tWe’re here in the Digital Humanities Lab in Exeter to discuss the circa 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen’s reading at the Bowerings of her first published collection of poetry, Artemis Hates Romance.\nWe will be looking at “side A” of this tape in which Sharon Thesen, introduced by fellow poet Robin Blaser, reads the first half of this poetry collection.\n00:02:33\tEmily Chircop\tThis recording is available to listen to in full at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca\n00:02:40\tSofie Drew\tBefore getting into the recording, we’re going to play you a clip from our interview with Karis Shearer about the tape.\n00:02:45\tKaris Shearer\tHi, I’m Karis Shearer. I’m an English professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, and the director of the AMP Lab.\n00:02:55\tSofie Drew\tGreat!\nWe wanted to ask you a little bit about the tape recording and how it got to the AMP Lab.\n00:03:02\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, that’s a great question. I had already been working on a box of tapes that a colleague, Jodey Castricano, had given me, and we were digitizing them.\nWe’d done some presentations about them. So it was known–People knew we had this box of tapes. They knew the lab was busy digitizing, doing scholarship on literary audio recordings. And Sharon Thesen was a colleague of mine in the creative writing department, and she one day gave us two tapes. And her sound is now part of what we call the “SoundBox collection.”\nAnd so it’s two tapes, one of which you’ve worked with.\n00:03:46\tEmily Chircop\tCould you just describe the tape for us, for the listeners? Give an idea of what the event was and what the format was?\n00:03:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. So this is a tape that George Bowering made at his home in Vancouver. And the occasion is he and his wife, Angela Bowering, have invited Sharon Thesen to launch her very first book at their home.\nMy understanding is that that was their reading, and literary events in their home was something that happened quite a lot and they often recorded.\nSharon is introduced by an American poet named Robin Blaser, who was living in Canada. And she reads the entire book, and then she reads a little bit of new work. And so it’s both a kind of presentation of her, a launch of her first book, and then also, you know, what I love about that is a kind of sounding out of new work with a friendly audience.\n00:04:48\tEmily Chircop\tWe also wanted to ask you about the George Bowering oral history that you conducted for us.\n00:04:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, so when you listen to a tape that’s been recorded in an amateur context, people don’t necessarily say their names the way we said our names at the beginning of this recording. So we don’t really know who is speaking on the tapes. And so the tapes are full of mystery.\nOne of the ways that we can do some research and solve some of those mysteries is by inviting people who we know are on the tapes or who gave us the tapes to do some oral histories with us. So we invited them to listen to the tape first.\nHaving, you know, having digitized it, we share it with them, and then we set up an oral history where I get to ask them, or people who work on their research team, get to ask them questions about the context, the history, what they hear on the tapes. And they have all kinds of insights about things that, of course, there’s no way that I could know they can describe the setting as George Bowring does in that particular tape. He says, “Oh, it was a living room.”\n“Do you know how big the living room is?”\n“You know, my living room was?”\nAnd I was like, “I have–I have no idea”.\nSo he is able to sketch out and give me a visual sense of the scope of that room and setting, who was there, and all the. As you hear, what the kind of social context and circumstances of the recording were.\n00:06:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s the kind of context we were looking for when we listened to the recording.\n00:06:27\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. And in some ways, those questions that you have, the tapes themselves, generate all kinds of questions. Right.\nSome of these questions can be answered with research, and some remain mysteries.\nBut I love it–That’s one of my favourite parts of working with archival literary audio. Like, this is the kind of really wonderful questions that they generate and the kind of mysteries that are on them, partly because they’re not often well labelled or they’re, you know, people don’t document in the way that would be useful, but also it’s fun.\n00:07:05\tEmily Chircop\tThank you so much, Karis.\n00:07:06\tKaris Shearer\tThank you.\n00:07:08\tSofie Drew\tIn this episode, we will take you through the recording, delving in and out to explore the sounds of this poetry reading.\n00:07:15\tEmily Chircop\tFirstly, we’re going to play you a clip from the very start of the recording before the poet is even introduced.\n00:07:36\tAudio Recording from the Literary Event at the Bowering\t[Overlapping voices]\nWell, go get one, George.\nGo get one. Go get one.\nGet yourself.\nSomebody might take your seat.\nNo, respect you.\n00:08:06\tSofie Drew\tSo before we hear anyone’s clear voice, there’s a series of sounds that set the scene. There’s whistling, there’s laughing, the sounds of people clearing their throats.\nAnd it really sets the image of a lively, excited group that Thesen is about to be reading to.\n00:08:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it immediately places you in a very intimate household setting. And it really sets the tone for the whole recording by placing you in that atmosphere.\n00:08:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely, and you pointed out that we can even hear a child in the background. It really adds to that household setting.\n00:08:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it does seem like a child’s voice in the background as well.\n00:08:42\tSofie Drew\tIt feels like this little community that’s all gathered.\n00:08:45\tEmily Chircop\tDefinitely, yeah, it is. It’s a community feel. And that’s, I mean, exactly what poetry reading feels like when you’re listening to it. It feels like a very community-based event, a really social event, and a really intimate one. Yeah. And it sets the tone for the whole reading because that’s a thread that’s carried through for the whole performance.\n00:09:06\tSofie Drew\tSo one of the first voices that we hear is, we presume, George Bowering saying that he doesn’t have a beer, which is quite an informal moment, really, that’s captured there. And he gets responses from various people telling him to go and get one or just wait.\nAnd there’s really that sense of familiarity there between the audience members. They’re not afraid to accidentally offend him by telling him to wait. And it’s that really nice view of the intimacy of the setting. And it’s something that’s continued throughout.\n00:09:36\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And it’s a really funny moment as well. It sticks out from what you expect a poetry reading to be like. It’s a very informal moment, and it sets the tone.\n00:09:49\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:09:50\tEmily Chircop\tSo, we hear a man we believe to be Robin Blaser introduce Sharon Thesen on the recording.\n \n\n00:09:55\tAudio Recording, Robin Blaser\tA little respect here.\nI always feel very peculiar introducing somebody that everybody knows. Actually, I kind of like–I very much like introducing Sharon. I’ve been watching her for a long time, and what fascinates me about this book of hers is–she’s going to read to us tonight.\nShe’s going to split it, she tells me, and she’s going to give it the rest in the middle, and she’s going to add to it.\nOne, two, three, newborn something. Anyway, whatever she decides, she wants to do. But Artemis Hates Romance fascinates me. One, Artemis–\n00:10:37\tSofie Drew\tSomething that really stuck out to me about this part about his introduction of Sharon Thesen is probably the pronunciation of the word “romance.” It was quite unfamiliar to me, with this pronunciation putting emphasis on the “ants” at the end of it.\nAnd really, that small change there, for me, conjured up ideas of “courtly romance” of knights in shining armour.\nWhen Sharon Thesen then goes on to talk about her thoughts on the title, she says the word “romance” in a way that is more like how I would. How I’m used to it completely changed the meaning of romance to something a bit more informal, a bit more casual.\nAnd I think it shows us how the recording as a whole does that kind of thing, opens up all these different interpretations that if you were just reading the collection of poems, or perhaps even if you were in the audience, you wouldn’t think too much about.\nAnd I think that really sums up something that the whole reading does: the idea of these different available interpretations. Something Thesen also taps into when she talks about the context around each poem, her insight into them.\n00:11:42\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, the recording and the extra content we get from the introduction and Thesen’s explanations add something to the meaning of the poems.\nWhat I found interesting about the introduction was that this man says that “I always feel very peculiar when introducing someone everyone already knows,” which highlights how social this reading was. And again, the intimacy we mentioned before kind of blurs the boundaries between what should generally be a public event or a book launch with the very private friendship group and household intimacy.\nAnd it’s-it’s very interesting. It really adds something to the meaning of the poems. When you listen to them, you feel–\n00:12:23\tSofie Drew\tThat everyone there is contributing to make this reading work. When people talk about–and they’re discussing whether to have the lights on and, yeah, you really get this feeling that although it is Sharon Thesen doing the reading, she has this supportive audience around her who are all helping to make this happen.\n00:12:41\tEmily Chircop\tSure. It becomes almost a collaborative performance when you hear the whole thing. You can hear the audience as well as Thesen reading. And it adds to the performance. It becomes one whole rather than a reading on its own.\n00:12:54\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:12:57\tEmily Chircop\tWhen we first listened to this recording, I remember we talked about our first impressions. And a lot of the stuff that came up was about these kind of small background noises–\n00:13:11\tSofie Drew\tlike underneath that of the—\n00:13:13\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And interspersed throughout the whole recording. And I mean, there’s a wide range.\nThere’s a moment where a door opens. You can hear someone come into the room. There are cars in the background as well. We can hear cars on the street outside the house, as well as just an ever-present static behind it all. A child laughing in the introduction–\n00:13:39\tSofie Drew\tPeople clearing their throats, that kind of thing.\n00:13:42\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I mean that really made an impression on me when I listened to it. It’s just something I wasn’t expecting at all. I was expecting it to be more of a formal kind of poetry reading.\nAlthough, of course, it, you know, with it, with the setting, that isn’t how it is. But those extra background noises, they take that to a whole different level for me.\n00:14:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I think the sound of the door opening or closing, especially. Especially as we don’t know if it is opening or closing, if someone’s leaving or entering.\n00:14:13\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s this constant reminder of the people in the room that the recording is. And that the performance is more than just the speaker. It’s more than just the reading of the poems. It’s a recording of the whole room. It’s a recording of the audience. It’s a recording of the whole event.\n00:14:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd in turn then you wonder where that line is between the actual reading and the performance as a whole. Including the audience, including the setting.\n00:14:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I think that’s one of the main questions I have about this recording. Where is the line between what is performance and what is just coincidental noise picked up by the tape?\n00:14:51\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely. And I guess having that constant awareness that the audience is there. When you’re listening to Thesen speak, you also know that you’re accompanied by all these other people also listening to her, and you feel as if you are part of that little community there.\n00:15:09\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. You almost get kind of sucked into the recording, sucked into the atmosphere of the tape, because it’s just so. It’s so tangible.\nYou can tell that they’re in a residential area because you can hear the cars on the road. You can know. You can hear the doors; you can hear the people. And it just really places you in the material surroundings of this recording.\nEven though it was recorded 40 years ago, it still feels like it’s happening presently around us when we listen to it.\n00:15:43\tSofie Drew\tYeah, yeah. You experience similar sounds, cars going past all the time. It’s things that we’re familiar with, even though it was that long ago.\n00:15:50\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s definitely–It’s the familiarity. It pulls you into the recording makes you feel part of the audience, which, of course, you are part of the audience listening to the tape.\n00:15:58\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:15:59\tEmily Chircop\tThe original audience adds to the performance, but at the same time, you become part of that audience.\nThe way that it’s been recorded, being able to pick up on all those background noises, it’s not just a poetry reading. It’s a much bigger experience when you listen to it.\n00:16:14\tSofie Drew\tI think it’s a moment in time captured in a way.\n00:16:17\tEmily Chircop\tYes.\n00:16:17\tSofie Drew\tAll these individuals are people you can make out little bits of what they’re saying and doing rather than just the focus being on. Although the focus is on decent speaking, you’re also very aware that there are all these other individuals who have all come together for this one moment.\n00:16:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I like that. A moment in time. That’s a really interesting way of putting it. That’s definitely how it feels to listen to kind of like a poetry time capsule.\n00:16:45\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nYou will now hear the voice of George Bowering, the host of the reading and Thesen’s fellow poet and friend, who was interviewed by Karis Shearer.\nKaris Shearer’s Interview of George Bowering\n00:16:54\tKaris Shearer\tGeorge, one of the things I was thinking about when I was listening to this tape, I realized there is kind of a difference between reading in someone’s house amongst friends and versus, reading at a public library or launching a book at a bookstore.\nOne of the things that’s happening in this tape, especially in the second half, is that people are responding. People are laughing. People are–There’s twice in the reading, someone asks her [Thesen] to read the poem a second time.\n00:17:27\tGeorge Bowering\tYeah.\n00:17:27\tKaris Shearer\tAnd I wonder if you could say something about it.\n00:17:30\tGeorge Bowering\tJust used to do that a lot.\nWell, when you’re at–in somebody’s house like that, especially somebody that you’re close to, right? And that you’re really good friends of, you feel a little bit like that thing that I said about Robin, that you’re not doing a performance, that isn’t that formal thing staying in front of you is rather that they know that you’ve been writing this work for a long time and you finally seem to have got it done.\nAnd it’s almost as if they helped you. Right. It’s like a joint production, and they were there. I really do remember not enjoying it. It might not be the right word, but I felt as if it was important to my soul, you know because it was because of the continuity that I was talking about.\nAnd sometimes, we would do something like work that was not finished and say, here’s where I’ve got so far. And people would read it and get familiar with it. And then later on, you know, when it was 3/4 finished, another one. In a sense, doing something that’s in your house, in somebody’s house. Well, you could have done it in a bookstore, or you could have organized it for, you know, the Western Front or something like that could have happened. But deliberately.\nWould you go to somebody’s house and do it? Because of the sense of community and to use it. We knew this poem was coming, right?? And we knew we. We had read quite a bit of the poem before that. We have it. So it wasn’t as if it was, oh, geez, there’s the poet, et cetera. It was so high.\n00:19:32\tEmily Chircop\tShared.\n00:19:33\tGeorge Bowering\tIt’s shared. Right. Yeah. It was also because. Partly because Sharon, like, she and Angela were best friends at the time, at least, and they were.\nThey spent a lot of time at each other’s place. It was not just an extension of the poetry, but it was an extension of that friendship as well.\n00:19:59\tSofie Drew\tThat was the voice of George Bowring.\n00:20:03\tEmily Chircop\tSo you were talking about the ambiguity and the different interpretations of the poems that are opened up by the recording. Could you tell me a bit more about that?\n00:20:14\tSofie Drew\tSo, yeah, really, some of the most interesting moments of the recording for me were actually the bits where I couldn’t quite hear it.\nI couldn’t quite make out what was being said. And I think it’s due to the sound quality, really, of something recorded. So Long ago. But really, I found that when there were moments where I couldn’t quite make out the words, I was, without really thinking, replacing those ambiguous moments with words that felt more relatable to me and, you know, things that perhaps I would have liked to have written about, that kind of thing.\nSo, one particular moment where I noticed this was something like meeting the sweetest sky at night, meeting the sweetest guy at night, or even sweeping the sky at night. And I thought it was that variety of interpretations that could be taken from the reading that really made it so fascinating.\nThere was another moment where, until we had access to the written versions of the poems, we listened to the recording quite a few times without any knowledge of the actual text.\nJust what we had to hear Thesen speak about it and say because quite a few times, she adds in bits. And you can’t always quite tell where the poem starts and where the explanation ends.\n00:21:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it all blends together.\n00:21:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd so there was one moment where there was a word, we realize now it’s “Creeley”, which is the name of an American poet, but we weren’t sure of that until recently. And so it was this moment where we just really had no clue what these lines were, but it really added to it. It felt like there’s this intimate audience that presumably understands that reference, and we’re almost outsiders to that, in a way, and yet.\nSo that just increases that idea of familiarity among the audience, among Thesen, that we, as listeners, are hoping to catch a glimpse into and join. So, in continuing on from the idea of the listener of this recording being somewhat of an outsider to the community of this reading, is when in one of her poems, she mentions stc, and it’s not explained within the poem, but then afterwards, she explains to the audience that it’s Coleridge.\nAnd the audience reacts to this by laughing. They all burst into laughter, insane laughter. And so it’s like, oh, it must be some kind of inside joke. Must have perhaps expected that kind of thing from her. And yet. So we see that it’s an inside joke. And yet, as the outsider, in a way, we still don’t exactly know what the joke is. We’re not allowed in on it.\n00:23:06\tEmily Chircop\tNo, no. In a sense, yeah, definitely it is.\nThere is that barrier which, to me, amplifies that sense of the sociality and the intimacy of the reading. It really makes you feel the social atmosphere, that they’re all friends, and that they’re all close.\nThey all know each other.\n00:23:28\tSofie Drew\tYou kind of want to get invited in, you know, you want to become one of them.\n00:23:32\tEmily Chircop\tI guess listening to the recording, the fact that it was recorded and has been kindly given to the Amp Lab for us to listen to, is kind of like them inviting us into the moment, which is the only way they can.\n00:23:44\tSofie Drew\tYeah, I like that.\n00:23:46\tEmily Chircop\tIn a way, the kind of ambiguity that you get through the recording, it both alienates us from that original recording context because it also reminds you that it is a recording and that’s why you can’t hear.\nBut then at the same time, it kind of brings you back into that potentially because you are acting more as an audience than ever and trying to understand.\n00:24:10\tSofie Drew\tYes, definitely.\n00:24:13\tEmily Chircop\tI think it does both, which is very interesting as a listener. It’s a very strange experience to be both pulled into the recording and pushed out of it at the same moment.\nBecause I don’t think that’s something you experience when you’re listening to something live.\n00:24:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:24:31\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you miss something, you don’t feel like you’re being pushed out of the experience.\n00:24:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd you could even make a point that today when we’re listening to something, there’s subtitles available or, you know, there’s the whole Internet out there ready to explain it to you, but when you’re looking at something from a while ago, you know, you do lack that.\n00:24:55\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah. The prevalence of captions and transcriptions, I think it definitely changes the way we listen to things. We kind of expect to be able to hear every word and know what the correct word is.\n00:25:08\tSofie Drew\tIn fact, when I went through the written versions, I had a completely different insight really, to some of the poems that I just read. I wouldn’t have gotten just from listening to it.\n00:25:20\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. Listening to poetry being read is a completely different experience. And listening to a recording of a reading, I would say is even a different experience to that. When we’ve been talking about this recording, the way we talk about the recording versus the way we talk about listening to a reading of a poem, it’s completely different. It brings so much more to it.\nI mean, all the things we’ve been talking about today are things we would never really consider in a live reading. We wouldn’t be talking about how the door opens at this point or there’s a car in the background, or we can hear laughter.\nBecause of it being recorded makes all of those things more obvious and noticeable.\n00:26:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nAnd I think, live, your brain probably automatically filters out those background sounds like doors opening and cars driving past.\nBut when you’re listening to a recording, it’s all there at the same level, really, as each other, and you have to work a bit harder to figure out which bits to filter out and which bits to focus on.\n00:26:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And, I mean, personally, I think none of it should be filtered out. While a lot of those noises might not be intentional, they’re still part of the recording. They add to the art and add to the performance. And I think if you cut out all of those background noises, it would be a completely different reading. The impressions we get from it, and the emotions and ideas that are conveyed.\nThe audience has such a huge hand in portraying that to us, and you wouldn’t get it if you cut out all that background noise. It’s interesting. I wonder if they recorded the whole room because that’s the technology they had available or if they recorded the whole room because they wanted to hear their friend’s reactions to their friend reading a poem. In our interview, Karis Shearer had some really insightful comments about this, which we’ll now play for you.\n00:27:11\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, I think that is such a great question. And it’s something that I find I listened to a lot, actually, and I have a research assistant who works on the project, Megan Butchart.\nWe both do a lot of listening for intention. Like, what did people think they were recording? What did they think the occasion was, and what did they think the purpose of the tape was? The recording captures bookends in some ways that exceed the intended purpose of the event.\nSo the sort of sociality, the, you know, George Bowering says, “oh, I gotta have to get another beer from the fridge.”\nProbably not, you know, an intended part of the recording, but nevertheless something that tells us a lot of information about the kind of conviviality of the setting and the way in which people were, you know, food and drink flowing.\n00:28:05\tSofie Drew\tSo another area of the reading that we wanted to focus on was the poem Kirk lonergren’s home movie, taking place just north of Prince George, with sound.\n00:28:14\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you can hear a clip from that play, now.\n00:28:18\tAudio Clip, from N/A\tThis one is a prose piece. It’s a description of a movie that a student of mine brought to class. Instead of an essay, they had that choice.\nIt was one of those kinds of classes. You could do something else. So this kid brought this movie, and he had bright red hair. He was a Sagittarius, and he was into archery completely and thought that archery had a lot more integrity going forward as far as killing things and guns and so on.\nAnd he and all these other archers would go up to a place just outside of Prince George every year and hunt for bears with their bows. And this movie was a–they took up their little movie camera, and they made a movie of one of these little trips, these little hunting trips that they took.\nThis is a description of the movie. And it was very artistic, the movie, the beginning. Some landscapes and words about nature. That particular landscape and what it harbors. Shots of woodpeckers, porcupines, the swamp lilies, bears and moose. And the three archers, one old guy, one medium guy, one young guy, Kirk.\nThis is called “Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.” Taking place just north of Prince George, with sound. That was another thing that was really interesting about it. It was sound. Okay, so.\nAnd one young guy, Kirk, all dressed in camouflage clothing, like those green–\n00:29:53\tSofie Drew\tSo something that really stuck out to us was the introduction to this, in which Sharon Thesen uses quite intimate, small details about this Kirk Lonergan, saying he’s got red hair, that he’s a Sagittarius. Quite unusual details.\nYou can kind of get an insight into her mind that these are the specific details. Not the common details you’d use to describe someone, but those are the ones that stick with her.\n00:30:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:30:19\tSofie Drew\tAnd it’s that kind of thing as well that I think perhaps lots of people can relate to. When something’s quite personal to you, you do remember those small, perhaps unusual details.\nAnd so you get this feeling that what she’s about to read is definitely an insight.\n00:30:36\tEmily Chircop\tAnd it’s humorous, of course, mentioning that he’s a Sagittarius and then describing all of this archery.\nYou can really get that insight into the humour that’s present throughout this whole reading as well.\nThe bit I find most interesting is what she said–She says the film is very artistic, and the room laughs at this. And you just–I just don’t know, does she mean it seriously? Does she mean it’s an artistic movie, or is she saying it’s sarcastic?\n00:31:06\tSofie Drew\tWe have no clue what face she’s making as she says this. Or if people just naturally get from the context that it’s meant in a humorous way.\n00:31:16\tEmily Chircop\tI think either way, whether it’s sarcastic or genuine, it’s a really wonderful moment.\n00:31:21\tSofie Drew\tIt’s great to see the audience engaging with the poem like that.\n00:31:25\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:31:27\tSofie Drew\tAnd she continues to engage with the audience.\nHalfway through reading it, she decides to go back to the title, give a bit more description, context for the poem.\n00:31:37\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. The way she reads this poem is really interesting because in most of the poems, she reads the title, and then she reads the whole poem.\nSome of the poems don’t have titles in this collection. But in this one, she explains what the prose piece is about, and she explains the context behind the movie and the fact that it was a submission to her as a teacher, but she doesn’t give the title.\nShe starts reading the piece and gets to the name “Kirk.” Then, she has to interrupt herself because she realizes, or at least we presume she realizes, that the audience does not know who Kirk is. She interrupts and says, “oh, this is called Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.”\nAnd then she goes back and repeats herself, “Kirk,” and continues with the reading. And it’s really–I find it really fun, a very different way of reading poems, but it brings it back to just the presence of the audience in the intimate setting.\n00:32:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:32:35\tEmily Chircop\tThe fact that that interruption to put the title halfway through the poem is likely a necessity of just the way she was reading it and in the context of the moment rather than a deliberate decision. And yet it’s a really lovely way to read the poem because you don’t need to know the title until you get to that part where you mentioned Kirk. And the way it flows, I think, is actually–It flows really well. I think it’s a really good way of conveying that to the audience.\n00:33:08\tSofie Drew\tAnd in fact, by not introducing it with the title initially, it is almost as if what Thesen is speaking is actually just her thoughts she decided to share with the audience.\nThere’s that sense that she feels comfortable around them. Comfortable enough to interrupt a poem in the middle of it to add on to it more.\n00:33:26\tEmily Chircop\tIt feels very organic, I think, I would say.\n00:33:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd you had some interesting ideas about the form of it.\n00:33:33\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah.\nI think this section really showcases the medium of the recording because you have this prose piece which already stands out in a poetry collection, but that prose piece is a visual, written-down rendition of an audio-visual medium of the home video itself. Then we receive it in an audio format with no visual element. The descriptions are still so immersive and striking, even when you take away the visual aspect that you would expect to be central to a description of a video.\nAnd I think it’s a really. It’s a really interesting experience to be able to convert what was written visually about a visual medium into purely audio. And how that–Then we’re listening to it now, and we can visualize that movie, and I think we get something from it that we wouldn’t get from seeing it written down in the way that she describes it, the way her voice sounds and the way the audience responds.\n00:34:41\tSofie Drew\tAnd I think the fact that in the title, it’s added on at the end “with sound,” I think that really highlights element of the different forms merging together.\n00:34:52\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. So, considering the medium and the fact that it is purely sound-based, how do you think it interacts with the imagery in the poem?\n00:35:02\tSofie Drew\tWell, the images are quite disturbing; some of them, especially in the last few lines, talk about how there’s blood on the hunter’s hands but not on the bear. And I think the fact that these images are so vivid, again, contributes to the idea of the different forms of media kind of coming together there.\n00:35:23\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, there’s convergence of the different elements.\n00:35:26\tSofie Drew\tExactly. The descriptions, the–some of the disturbing simile metaphors that she uses are when she compares things: Cuddling their dead teddy bears.\n00:35:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:35:38\tSofie Drew\tBut I think the fact we get almost, perhaps a better description, a more emotional description of these things in the video than we perhaps would get from actually just watching the video.\nWe do get that sense that there is emotion behind it for either the people in the video or for Thesen watching it.\n00:36:00\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, definitely.\nAnd I think it is because we feel quite pulled into the audience because of the way the recording is formatted, the way that the listening experience–You feel like you’re part of that audience. You feel very kind of taken and potentially like, shaken by what she’s saying. And it’s very–It is quite off putting, but in a very mesmerizing way.\n00:36:28\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely.\nIt’s almost like we’re–You feel that…\nWell, yeah. In the gruesomeness of the imagery, Thesen is being forced to watch the video, in a sense, as–I mean, if these people have submitted it–\n00:36:43\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:36:44\tSofie Drew\tAs work, then she is forced to watch it, in a sense.\nAnd it’s like she’s taking the audience along, us along with her, into being forced to see these gruesome images. It’s almost–\n00:36:56\tEmily Chircop\tSee, I don’t know if this is the right word.\nThe way we’re listening to this is almost voyeuristic, as the content of this video is viewed through the very, like, opinionated lens of Sharon Thesen’s work. And to see someone’s home video through that lens, it’s–I think it definitely changes the meaning. We might feel the same way if we were to see that video or just read a less opinionated description. But the nature of it being prose poetry, really, it just adds that extra level of vividness, that extra level of, like the grotesque metaphors that she uses similes.\n00:37:34\tSofie Drew\tAnd we really get the feeling that it is something personal, even to Kirk Lonergren, because his full name is in the title of this poem.\nI wonder if he knew that he would have a whole poem.\n00:37:46\tEmily Chircop\tI wonder.\n00:37:47\tSofie Drew\tAnd the fact that it’s a home movie.\nYeah. We’re seeing something that’s very personal to this guy, Kirk. What’s, then, very personal to Thesen becomes personal to us.\n00:37:57\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, It’s. It’s just. It’s also intimate, isn’t it?\n00:38:01\tSofie Drew\tAnd yet, while we see the intimacy of this reading as a positive thing, very friendly, comfortable.\nThe intimacy that we see in the. Well, see, in the reading of this poem of the home movie, it’s very disturbing.\nDefinitely not a comfortable. Definitely not comfortable for the reader or the audience.\n00:38:24\tEmily Chircop\tThe next clip we’re going to play for you is from near the end of the recording. And it is the start of the poem, “The Shifting Sands Motel.”\n00:38:35\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tThe Shifting Sands Motel.\nSome transients for you, Robin.\nClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nI get this blue stuff from the Safeway called intensive care.\nBaths and the mineralmakend it makes the water just Mediterranean blue.\nIt’s wonderful.\n00:39:06\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nYou are soon to have lunch with a movie star.\nOpen your eyes and pretend your bath is the Arctic Sea.\nYou are soon to eat your companion in the rowboat.\n00:39:24\tSofie Drew\tSo, from the very start, you seemed quite interested in this poem in her description at the start of it. Why is that?\n00:39:32\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, this part of the recording really was one of my favourite parts. I find the way that she pauses her reading of the poem really intriguing. She says the first two lines, “close your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.”\nShe then explained that the bath beads she got from Safeway make the water really blue.\nAnd then, she goes back and repeats the first two lines. And in doing that, the explanation, that additional context, becomes part of the poem.\nWhen you’re listening to it, it becomes part of the performance. And it brought a lot of extra meaning to the poem for me. And I just. I just think it’s a really interesting concept, especially the explanations throughout this whole recording.\nBut I think this really exemplifies it. Well, the way the explanations are presented and the audience’s reaction. You can hear them laughing when she provides the content, the way that it kind of works its way seamlessly into the performance itself.\n00:40:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I mean, do you feel like it, at least, I think, possible?\nI feel like when she’s describing it, it almost feels like she’s talking to you as a friend, you know, like, “oh, check out these great bath bombs that I get.”\n00:40:44\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s very casual, isn’t it, outside of just the intimacy that’s so prevalent in this recording. And it’s both an interruption to what you would expect to be quite a, like, formal, straight-through-the-poem kind of performance.\nIt’s both an interruption to that aspect, and also it slots right in and makes the poem a lot more, I would say, tangible.\nIt makes it more tangible because you can imagine just how blue that water is.\nAnd by rooting it more in the home, it really picks up on that idea of, like, imagine your bath is the Mediterranean. Not just imagine you’re in the Mediterranean. Imagine your bath in the Mediterranean. And by describing the bath beads that she buys herself, I think it really amplifies that aspect of it, being your bath and the location. Yeah.\n00:41:33\tSofie Drew\tShe’s trying to connect to her audience on that kind of level.\n00:41:36\tEmily Chircop\tThat’s exactly it. It connects to you.\nSo, just to finish off now, I’ve got to ask, what is your favourite part of the recording?\n00:41:45\tSofie Drew\tI think for me, it’s probably within the first poem, “Japanese Movies.”\nI just–I really loved the image created there, especially of death, really. But the main line is where a cold snow lady waits with blackened teeth to cure you of the fear of life. And it’s something that throughout the rest of the recording, that image from the very start really stayed with me.\nI love the representation of death there, really. The idea is that if you trust death long enough, you end up risking more, and death will come down on you twice as hard.\nYou know, the idea that the poem just conveyed, I really loved it, and I think it set a tone for the rest of the poems.\nSo what about you? What was your favourite part of this reading?\n00:42:29\tEmily Chircop\tI think we’ve honestly talked about most of my favourite parts so far. The “hunting piece” and the “Shifting Sands Motel” poem are two of my favourites.\nBut one part we haven’t talked about yet is the poem from which the title of the collection, “Artemis Hates Romance,” comes. And I love this part of the recording.\nBesides, it is just a wonderful poem; you also get this interruption of Thesen talking about the inspiration from COVID-19, which I loved hearing. I loved getting that extra insight into the whole collection, especially with it being a book launch.\nI think getting that kind of extra information about COVID and about the process behind not just writing these poems and reading them but shaping the text into the book form that we end up hearing. Being read from, I think, is something extra special that we get from this recording.\n00:43:24\tSofie Drew\tIt’s something that we probably don’t really think about the majority of the time.\nYou know, you see, like a collection of poems–\n00:43:30\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:43:30\tSofie Drew\tYou take it; those poems are as they are. You don’t think about how they came to be put together, how you choose the title, that kind of thing.\n00:43:38\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:43:38\tSofie Drew\tThis really reminds me of when Thesen reads her poem, “It Being Over, There Being No Other Way,” when at the end she says how she hates it and that she only put it in the collection because Robin Blaser told her to.\nAnd I think that just really highlights that collaborative element of this collection of poems.\nThere’s a personal insight there from Thessa and the people around her. All these individuals have come together to create the collection and create the reading.\n00:44:08\tEmily Chircop\tI think that idea that you touched on about taking the poems as they are is really key in the way we listen to this recording because we’re not taking the poems just as they are.\nWe’re getting so many other layers of meaning and layers of interpretation from the audience, from the recording, from listening to her speak them aloud, and from the fact that it was recorded in the past. That kind of temporal shift. All of it just adds layer upon layer upon layer to the point that you’re not just taking the poem as they are, you’re taking the recording as it is. And that’s, to me, what makes this recording so special.\n00:44:47\tSofie Drew\tYou’ve been listening to the SoundBox Signals podcast with Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop from the University of Exeter.\n00:44:53\tEmily Chircop\tI study English and Communications, and I’m particularly interested in podcasting and how different mediums can influence texts.\n00:45:00\tSofie Drew\tI’m studying Classical Studies in English, I’m pursuing writing poetry, and I’ve written and directed a couple of short audio dramas with the BBC.\n00:45:07\tEmily Chircop\tYou can check out the full recording we discussed today on the SoundBox website.\nThe link can be found in the show notes.\n\n00:45:13\tSofie Drew\tIf you enjoyed this podcast, you can read more of Sharon Thesen’s work in her newest book, Refabulations.\n00:45:20\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music]\n00:45:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was a guest appearance by our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals. It featured producers Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop.\n00:45:54\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n00:46:05\tKatheryn McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\n00:46:14\tKatheryn McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media.\n00:46:21\tKatherine McLeod\tPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\nFor now, thank you for listening."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9605","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E4, From Me to You, A Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception, 3 February 2025, Harris"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/from-me-to-you-a-sonic-glimpse-at-proprioception/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/dcf63247-f0ec-4b4d-a72a-f471c2c46d1a/audio/aef0eda4-6e4f-4343-a8ed-6c4732f445f1/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e4.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:44:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"42,922,421 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/from-me-to-you-a-sonic-glimpse-at-proprioception/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-02-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Han, Jia, et al. “Assessing Proprioception: A Critical Review of Methods.” Journal of Sport and Health Science, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 80–90. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2014.10.004.\\n\\nHickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. W.W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2014.\\n\\nStarr, Gabrielle G. “Multisensory Imagery.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.\\n\\nMechanical Buttons (DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel) by PixelProphecy — https://freesound.org/s/497026/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\nEnd Credits Music by vibritherabjit123 — https://freesound.org/s/738579/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\nWalk – Gravel.wav by 16FPanskaStochl_Frantisek — https://freesound.org/s/499245/ — License: Attribution 3.0\\n\\nsnare 2 SMALLer.wav by Logicogonist — https://freesound.org/s/209884/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nright x small crash.wav by Logicogonist — https://freesound.org/s/209870/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nMagazine Rustle and Book Closing by Zott820 — https://freesound.org/s/209577/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nEnd of 78 Record Gramaphone Running Down .WAV by trpete — https://freesound.org/s/627419/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nRagtime – https://pixabay.com/music/vintage-ragtime-193535/ Liscence: CC0 License\\n\\nrelaxation music.mp3 by ZHRØ — https://freesound.org/s/520673/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\ncelestial arp loop c 01.wav by CarlosCarty — https://freesound.org/s/572560/ — License: Attribution 4.0\\n\\n165 bpm – Broken Beat – Guitar.wav by MuSiCjUnK — https://freesound.org/s/320630/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nSynth Lead by EX-AN — https://freesound.org/s/561505/ — License: Creative Commons 0\\n\\nShopping theme (90bpm).wav by Pax11 — https://freesound.org/s/444880/ — License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0\\n\\nSky Loop by FoolBoyMedia — https://freesound.org/s/264295/ — License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549679505408,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["A proprioception-enthusiast and a thespian walk into a podcast booth.\n\nTogether, they engage with scholars from three different fields outside of those traditionally working with and through the sense of proprioception. From spatial music mixing, to arts education, to English literature, our hosts learn how these scholars understand and apply the sense of proprioception for their work.\n\nThrough the engagement process, the proprioception-enthusiast and the thespian come to understand the affordances of proprioception for framing bodies in space and time and refigure how they understand the space between you and me.\n\n00:00:03\t[SpokenWeb Intro Song]\t[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is a series of stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine MacLeod.\nAnd each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.\n\n00:00:50\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, producer Maia Harris and guest Ryan Litvak offer a sonic glimpse into how scholars from three different fields engage with the sense of proprioception for their work.\n00:01:06\tHannah McGregor\tThrough conversation with special guests, Maia and Ryan learn how this sixth sense, the sense of where your body is in space, might apply to different fields outside of physiology, from spatial music mixing to arts education to English literature.\nAlong the way, they start to rethink the texture of how they move through life.\n\n00:01:30\tHannah McGregor\tAs a note to listeners, this is probably one you want to wear headphones for.\nNow, sit back, get comfortable in your body, and enjoy Season 6, episode 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “From Me to You, a Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception.”\n\n00:01:50\tMusic\t[MUSIC]\n00:01:59\tMaia Harris\tHi, my name is Maia. And two years ago–gosh, coming on three now-I became utterly obsessed with the sense of “proprioception.” [Faint drums play in the background] I see proprioception everywhere.\nWalking down the street [sound of steps], proprioception.\n\nPlaying the drums [sound of drums], proprioception.\n\nReading a book [sound of pages flipping], yeah, funnily enough, proprioception.\n\n00:02:26\tRyan Litvak\tI can attest that Maia will not shut up about proprioception.\n00:02:31\tRyan Litvak\tMy name is Ryan Litvak. I’m a theatre writer, director, and multidisciplinary artist.\nI’ve known Maia for a few years. We work together and do other stuff. [Laughter]\n\n00:02:43\tRyan Litvak\t[Inaudible]\n00:02:46\tRyan Litvak\tI, in fact, am not obsessed with proprioception.\nActually, I don’t really know what it is or why it’s relevant to someone who’s in the humanities, like Maia.\n\n00:02:57\tMaia Harris\tWell, Ryan, I have some great news.\n00:03:00\tRyan Litvak\tYou’re gonna tell me what it is?\n00:03:02\tMaia Harris\tNot only am I going to tell you what it is, but I’m also going to tell you why it’s relevant to you, to me, to the listeners, and, frankly, just everybody. [Faint music starts playing in the background]\n00:03:10\tRyan Litvak\tThat’s huge.\n00:03:11\tMaia Harris\tBut to do this right, to introduce you to proprioception in all of its glory and affordances, I’ve enlisted the help of scholars from three totally different fields who have one thing in common.\n00:03:23\tRyan Litvak\tWhat’s that?\n00:03:24\tMaia Harris\tThey have to grapple with a sense of proprioception for their work. [Music stops abruptly]\nLet’s start with a simple definition. To cite Gary Merrill in his book Our Intelligent Bodies. Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of one’s body in space and time. So a spatiotemporal orientation, which means that–\n\n00:03:48\tRyan Litvak\tWow, pause.\nCan you just back up a little bit there?\n\n00:03:52\tMaia Harris\tOh, I’m sorry. Yes, of course.\nIt all started in 1826 when Charles Bell began to study the anatomy of the brain-to-limb connection–\n\n00:04:00\tRyan Litvak\tStop. That’s not really. I just meant, like, what exactly do you mean by “spatiotemporal orientation”?\n00:04:08\tMaia Harris\tOh, my gosh! Yeah, let’s start there.\nSo, your body is always in space and time, right?\n\n00:04:15\tRyan Litvak\tYeah.\n00:04:16\tMaia Harris\tProprioception is our sense of that.\nIt’s our sense of our own body in space and time.\n\nSo, your sitting body position in this room, for example, or your body position when you walk and navigate the space of, say, like a sidewalk, these are spatial and temporal states.\n\nYour body and your sense of it are relative always to an object in space, to space, or even our own body, just five seconds ago.\n\n00:04:44\tRyan Litvak\tOh, okay. So, proprioception is your sense of your own body.\n00:04:49\tMaia Harris\tExactly.\nThink you’re knowing how, if you close your eyes and you put your hand behind your head, you’re aware that it’s there. That awareness of your own body is your proprioception. And this sense, what you feel with your eyes closed, is what helps to maintain one’s sense of orientation, one’s sense of balance.\n\nIt’s as simple as that.\n\n00:05:16\tRyan Litvak\tOkay, I think I understand what proprioception is, but like, how does it actually work, though?\n00:05:23\tMaia Harris\tWhat’s that now?\n00:05:24\tRyan Litvak\tLike, how do I know my hand’s behind my head? How does that feeling maintain my sense of balance?\nTo see, I have my eyes.\n\nTo hear, I have my ears.\n\nWhat about the proprioception? Is that a verb?\n\n00:05:38\tMaia Harris\tI don’t think so.\nBut to address your question first, we have these things called “proprioceptors,” which are receptors deep in one’s body and tissues. These proprioceptors sense a variety of stimuli having to do primarily with movement, from velocity to vibration to deep pressure. This information is monitored via the central nervous system and is signalled to the brain.\n\nBut I don’t want to oversimplify it because proprioception is actually a “distributed sense.”\n\nIt’s not in or of any single bodily location, nor informed by any single kind of stimuli. Our five major senses also contribute to proprioception.\n\n00:06:24\tRyan Litvak\tSorry, I still don’t understand.\n00:06:27\tMaia Harris\tWould a specific example help?\n00:06:30\tRyan Litvak\tI think it would.\n00:06:33\tMaia Harris\tTake “sound.” We know sound.\nWe do, well, we’re always relative to a source of sound. And that sense of our relative position to that source of sound is an aspect of how we orient ourselves.\n\nJames can explain it better than me, though.\n\nLet me introduce you to James Healy.\n\n00:06:53\tJames Healy\tI’m James. I work with SpokenWeb and Maya. I work in sound, and I’m an artist. I make a lot of music and other stuff.\n00:07:04\tMaia Harris\tSo I asked James about how “proprioceptive orientation” and “sound” might coexist.\n00:07:13\tJames Healy\tOne way we would basically get oriented in a space.\nBasically, the only way that we know where a sound is coming from, if your eyes are closed, is because of your ears.\n\n[You] have your pinna. What that will do is taper down high frequencies coming from behind you. It will absorb some really high frequencies and let the “lows” wrap-around, which means that if you hear that quality, it means that something is behind you.\n\nBecause of the way they’re facing, they’re not absorbing the same high frequencies as if something’s in front of you.\n\nSo, if you were to chop up your ear or something, like pull a little Van Gogh thing or whatever, you actually would have a lot of trouble figuring out where things were.\n\n00:08:05\tRyan Litvak\tOkay, that makes sense. So, our pinna is part of our proprioception.\n00:08:11\tMaia Harris\tIn short, yes. Our pinna and “sound localization” are part of the feedback loop of proprioception.\nBut what if I told you that isn’t the whole story?\n\n00:08:22\tRyan Litvak\tThen I would ask, what is the whole story?\n00:08:26\tMaia Harris\tRyan, come on, it’s not my story to tell.\nAllow me to defer to our next guest, Théo. [A keyboard click, followed by a chime of an incoming video call]\n\n00:08:35\tThéo Bouveyron\t[Soft chime plays in the background] My name’s Théo Bouveyron, and I’m currently enrolled in a Master’s degree and also working at the University of Cologne in Germany. Although, I am currently studying Information Processing.\nAfter finishing my Bachelor’s degree in Media Informatics, I actually started off with a degree in Audio Engineering. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:08:54\tMaia Harris\tThéo has thought a lot about the role of proprioception and spatiality in VR.\nHere, he is describing his project. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:09:02\tThéo Bouveyron\tI recreated a recording studio, or the very least a room resembling it, through which you can move and where you can position instruments.\nThe position of the instruments relative to yourself influences how the music is being processed and ultimately heard.\n\n00:09:17\tThéo Bouveyron\tAdditionally, I provided users with a more traditional way to control the volume of the instruments through a modelled and interactive mixing console.\nMy aim with this project was to build a virtual reality application that reconnects users with the spatial characteristics of sound by allowing them to mix audio in a fully three-dimensional environment. Proprioception is an essential part of my project as it bridges the user’s physical presence with the virtual space in the real world. We naturally use our body’s awareness to orient ourselves, understand distances, and locate sounds.\n\nMy goal is to replicate and enhance this connection in virtual reality, where spatial audio is not just something we hear but something that helps users feel embedded within the environment. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:10:02\tMaia Harris\tThéo’s project exists in a field called “spatial music mixing,” or “spatial audio,” more generally. [Keyboard click]\n00:10:10\tThéo Bouveyron\tIn conventional stereo or surround sound mixing, sounds are represented as fixed points along a two-dimensional plane or confined within specific channels. This approach can never fully capture how we perceive sound in real life, where each sound interacts with the environment and our bodies in complex ways.\n00:10:29\tThéo Bouveyron\tSpatial music mixing, on the other hand, reintroduces the body into the equation, opening the door to making the act of listening a dynamic, participatory experience.\nWith spatial music mixing, the goal shifts to recreating a more authentic auditory experience by treating each sound as a discrete entity existing in a 3D space, free to move and adapt based on the listener’s position. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:10:54\tMaia Harris\tSo, for Théo’s project, listening position – which is part of proprioception, so where you are relative to sound – is a huge deal. [Keyboard click]\n00:11:04\tThéo Bouveyron\tThe concept of “listening position” is pivotal in both “acoustics” and\n“spatial audio.” Typically, our listening position is determined by our head’s orientation and position. Our ears become the reference point for sound perception. As users move through the virtual space, the soundscape shifts in response to their movements, providing constant feedback.\nThis interplay engages proprioception, allowing users to feel their position within space and making the virtual environment feel tangible and responsive. Proprioception, therefore, comes into play not just as a means of feeling present but as an integral part of how users interact with the virtual environment.\n\nAs they move, the spatiality of sound continuously informs their perception of the world around them. This combination of spatial audio and proprioception makes the virtual environment more than just a visual or auditory experience. It becomes an embodied interactive space that adapts to the user’s movement and perspective, creating a more intuitive and immersive sense of presence. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:12:06\tRyan Litvak\tThat’s really interesting.\nI feel like these days, everybody’s plugged into their headphones all the time. And when we listen to music, or we’re watching something with our headphones, all of that sound is just inside our heads, between our ears.\n\nBecause I come from a theatre background, which is very open and communal. But I think that we, as listeners of sound in every context, deserve better than that. Like, we deserve to feel the sound in our body. And to really like “propriocept it.” [Laughter]\n\n00:12:45\tRyan Litvak\tAnd so I think what Théo is doing is really cool.\n00:12:49\tMaia Harris\tYeah, I do, too. Théo doesn’t shy away from the conceptual implications of this project, specifically about what a sense of oneself means in VR either. [Keyboard click]\n00:13:00\tThéo Bouveyron\tIn virtual environments, proprioception becomes a dynamic tool, allowing users to interact with their surroundings in ways that transcend the limitations of the physical world. This freedom introduces an exciting form of self-exploration. As users move or alter their listening perspective, they are not just shifting how they hear sound. They are actively reshaping their sense of presence and identity within the virtual space. That’s what excites me the most: how proprioception in VR enables users to rethink their identity in relation to space, where users can continuously adapt to the virtual environment in ways that redefine their relationship with themselves and vice versa. The virtual environment can also be adapted to your sense of self. [Keyboard click]\n00:13:46\tRyan Litvak\tSo, this proprioception thing is starting to feel like a big deal.\n00:13:50\tMaia Harris\tYeah, it kind of is. So Teo is building the sense of proprioception into his project, but I want to introduce you now to someone whose project was built out of the sense of proprioception itself.\nMeet Eija. [A chime of an incoming video call]\n\n00:14:10\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tMy name is Eija Loponen-Stephenson.\nI just finished my master’s in Art Education at Concordia University. I’m an artist and a scholar. I come from a background in fine arts. I’ve recently been becoming an academic [Laughs], and my work has to do mostly with, I guess, studying, augmenting, and disrupting how bodies move through urban spaces. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:14:39\tMaia Harris\tEija and I talked about her master’s thesis project, which she finished and premiered just last year. [Keyboard click]\n00:14:47\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThe really long academic title is “Urban Choreographics Tracing the Extralinguistic Pedagogies of Montreal’s Underground Metro System.”\nSo my project, in kind of broad strokes, is about how moving through public architectural spaces is really actually an educative experience. So, my thesis project looks specifically at the architecture of Montreal’s underground metro system. It was useful for me to look at a highly programmed structure. Therefore, the metro is a place in the city where bodies have to be highly organized in order to move efficiently through space. And it has to be able to accommodate, like, a lot of flux of movement. And there’s a very kind of obvious rhythm structure of those spaces. Therefore, I investigate the dominant movement patterns of those spaces through experimental long-exposure photography. And also so experimental performative, like sonic investigations, I would say. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:15:59\tMaia Harris\tWe also discussed who and what inspired Eija’s project.\nHere, she discusses Lawrence and Anna Halprin. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:16:09\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, Lawrence Halprin was an architect based out of New York City. Instead of designing structures and then kind of putting bodies in them, he wanted to invert that kind of dynamic. So he invented a kind of choreographic notation. It’s called motivation. And so it was a kind of. It was a way for him to score the ways that a body should move through space before the structure had been conceived of. He would create a score of motions or gestures according to the purpose of the building and then create a structure kind of around that. Those movements. He was a lifetime collaborator with his wife, Anna Halprin, who is kind of lauded as one of the inventors of contemporary dance. And so a lot of his ideas, like his ideas are actually things that they collaborate on together. And so his choreographic notation absolutely comes from the. The kind of history of choreographic notation that was especially big in dance at that time.\n00:17:18\tMaia Harris, recording with Eija Loponen-Stephenson\tCould you talk a little bit more about your own mode? Would you call it a kind of notation recording?\n00:17:24\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah.\n00:17:25\tMaia Harris\tCould you say more about that?\n00:17:26\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah. Thinking about choreographic notation, I think it’s just a good place to start. So it was a way to kind of codify a set of gestures because, like, before videography or photography, how does a dance actually get archived? But what I’m interested in about choreographic notation is actually the absence of exactitude. So, the kind of empty spaces that are left between the notes are not in the precise reenactment of the score. It’s actually in the spaces in between where artistry is.\n00:18:02\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, I became very interested in thinking about architecture as a form of choreographic notation. So, if we think about a building as a bunch of points, bodies have to move between. I’m interested in the similarities and variations in those spaces between the vectors of a building.\nEssentially, my first approach to trying to document these variances or similarities in movements between vectors had like a. Just kind of an inclination. I think it’s probably from my artistic training. I have seen a kind of long exposure to photography. The opening and shutting of the camera lens are very similar. These vectors are in space and like architecture.\n\nSo conceivably, I could if I stayed still. The bodies are moving in space; I could conceivably document that in-between space.\n\n00:19:04\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tIn my preliminary photography, I was getting some interesting results. But it was kind of like I didn’t have a measure. It felt very blurry and just kind of random.\nAnd so I realized that I needed to actually figure out a way to capture time and space in an intentional way where they were kind of connected. So, in my photographs, I started thinking about rhythm analysis, which is the study of the rhythms of everyday life, especially everyday motions. I developed a walking practice where I was walking in time with groups of people during rush hour. So I was using a metronome in my ears, and I was able to, as I was walking, adjust the metronome time so that the beats per minute lined up with my footsteps, like the pace of my footsteps and, therefore, the footsteps of the crowd.\n\n00:20:04\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tSo, I’m able to get a BPM. A bpm reading of that space and time then informs the duration of the exposure. So I have the BPM, and then I determine the length of the gesture that I want to record. So let’s say it’s like a 10-step. So, it’s 10 steps between the two vectors in the architectural space. I also have a formula where I can figure out the exposure time to record a body’s movement across that kind of vector field. When the group of people, like the group of bodies in motion, are walking in synchronization, they become uniformly blurred in relation to proprioception. I think that if we can isolate these gestures and make them strange, then we have an opportunity to at least critically examine them and maybe augment them.\n00:21:06\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThat word vector comes from the text where I first encountered the concept of proprioception, which was Brian Misumi’s Parables of the Virtual.\nBrian Massumi is like a Montrealer and a preeminent scholar in the field of affect theory. He talks about proprioception in a self-referential sense. So, it is something that registers the displacement of the parts of the body relative to each other rather than finding your location in space based on your surroundings.\n\n00:21:47\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tS,o like especially, I mean, this is why it was such like a foundational text for me was that he talks specifically about when he’s on the metro and how if he were to be asked to draw a map of how he gets to the metro, through the metro, where the train goes and then how he gets out of it, he would not be capable of drawing this map. He talks about it in relation to this nautical term, dead reckoning. This form of navigation is based on measuring where you have been. Yeah, it’s a kind of way of navigating through remembrance. Yeah. Anyway, so I read this in this chapter. He’s talking about it, and he’s like, I have no visual sense of this space. Yet I could probably do this with my eyes closed. And so he’s like, this is how he locates. The idea of proprioception is in this kind of bodily memory of, like I said, transporting yourself between vectors.\n00:22:59\tMaia Harris, recording with Eija Loponen-Stephenson\tWhy do you think folks in the arts like yourself are integrating and thinking through this concept of proprioception?\n00:23:09\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tI think, in general, right now, in the art world, there is something happening where the process is kind of becoming more valuable than the product. And I think this is great. When I was just a young art student, I was really, really interested in automatic expressionist painting. It kind of. It took me a long time to articulate this properly. But how a work of automatic expressionism, like Jackson Pollock and many others, is a record of motion. So you can see it like a record of a dance.\nYeah. So I think in terms of my own practice, it’s something that I have been trying to unfold and unpick and start thinking about how. I mean, I’m still in the unpicking phase, but my fantasy is that in my future work, I’ll be able to move towards thinking more clearly and enacting the production of things through gestures first without thinking about the outcome.\n\n00:24:30\tRyan Litvak\tI’m just thinking about my day-to-day life in the context of proprioception and rhythm and, like, awareness of space and architecture and all these ways that Eija just talked about it and yeah, like, I’m never gonna step on the metro and feel how I did step on the metro before listening to those clips. Like, I never really thought about the relationship that the movement that I’m doing has to that space. So, yeah, I’m just really grateful that I got to hear that. But I am still confused. James, Aya, Theo, it’s all made sense. Why do they care about proprioception, but why you? You’re in a literature program. I just feel like I’m missing something, maybe.\n00:25:31\tMaia Harris\tYeah, there’s definitely more to the story. Bear. Literature and proprioception might not seem like an obvious connection, but it’s a really rich intersection of thought. And I’m not the only person who thinks. So. Allow me to introduce you to our next guest, Dr. Andre Furlani. [Keyboard click]\n00:26:00\tAndre Furlani\tYes.\nI’m a professor of English in the Department of English at Concordia University and a fellow of the School of Irish Studies, partly because I teach in that area. I’ve written especially about the expatriate French writer and Irish author Samuel Beckett. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:26:18\tMaia Harris\tDr. Furlani, in part, studies “walking literature,” specifically the composite subgenre of what he’s characterized as the “pedestrian excurses.”\nHere he is walking us, pun intended, through that work. [Keyboad click]\n\n00:26:35\tAndre Furlani\tSome of this work is, you know, really a kind of verbal archeology just reminding us what our language has already prepared us to see and to understand.\nAnd “excursus” is a word that has come to mean a kind of a digression, but which literally means “to rush out.”\n\nI went back to that term, excursus, and attached pedestrian to it to make it clearer.\n\n00:27:02\tAndre Furlani\tOf course, it’s also a term that was really coined by William Wordsworth, one of the arch poetic walkers in the English Romantic tradition.\nBecause there’s such a large body of modern and particularly contemporary texts, what I find in so much “walking literature,” which has famously alluded to generic classification, are traits as old as these terms.\n\nThe excursus presumes that you’re walking out.\n\nBy and large, it’s experienced through the body, it’s experienced through a weather world. It’s congressive in the sense that all kinds of other elements either precede you or accompany you to do so.\n\n00:27:44\tAndre Furlani\tAnd a great many texts have been organized on that very principle. They just go out and see what they can find, or find what they can see by serendipity, find something unanticipated, but very choice, but that which only the particularly the aimlessness of the walk can improve.\nThat is to say, the living, moving, proprioceptive kind of shared cognition that the walk precipitates is characteristic of a wide body of literature. And I thought, well, I’m going to tell you really what these books do have in common.\n\nThese are works that think in terms of the it this way, the tour rather than the map. You know, you don’t see it from above in an abstract, schematic way.\n\nYou are walking it.\n\nYou are faced with it.\n\nSomeone’s saying, “Oh, we’ll go left here,” or “Oh, I made a mistake, but it’s okay, we can turn here, and maybe we’ll find our way back.” And if you’re lucky, you get lost because, as one of these writers, Tiziano Scarpa in Venetian, says, the great thing about Venice is that you get lost in it immediately.\n\nThat’s when you start to really walk because you start having this proprioceptive awareness.\n\nWhere am I?\n\nHow am I moving?\n\nWhat’s next to me?\n\nYou start paying attention to your movements, and you see more through confusion or defamiliarization.\n\n00:29:06\tAndre Furlani\tI guess the first thing about walking is that it is successive, linear, and exposed. Of course, it’s a mode of proprioception and a limited viewpoint. So, all of those are fruitful avenues.\nAnd I think that disposition to experience has a lot to tell us. So, what one perceives in one’s immediate vicinity and through all the senses. There’s been fascinating work on how we think with our, through our skin.\n\nYou know, I always talk about thinking not just on one’s feet but with one’s feet. That sense that if I listen to the body, it actually has something it’s been trying desperately to say. So, it has actually tried to develop my proprioception.\n\n00:29:58\tAndre Furlani\tI have a very narrow, almost tunnel vision mode of attention, but I walk with people who, in fact, have been gifted or have developed a real skill of a larger, more generous proprioception.\nAnd I’ve been learning from them and then from the books which practices remind us how much is happening in the immediate vicinity and how many of our senses are available to absorb it and to interact with it, to recognize one’s, one’s place in it.\n\nThe literature was teaching me something about something you think you know how to do, how to walk around. But I think, in fact, you have to learn how to walk. There’s the first, simply the bipedal gait, and then there’s actually learning how to think with one’s feet. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:30:56\tRyan Litvak\tWait, is that true? Isn’t proprioception just innate? Can people have better proprioception than others? Can you develop it?\n00:31:05\tMaia Harris\tOh, yeah. Although proprioception is precognitive, that is, we don’t actively have to think about it for it to happen. Proprioceptive awareness is not just innate. Like all perception, it’s shaped by memory, learning, habit, or even injury and disease.\nBack to Dr. Furlani. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:31:23\tAndre Furlani\tWalking is a universal yet facultative propensity.\nBears can walk, but it’s a propensity; it’s not a species attribute at all. And you see that, of course, with the very young, how difficult it is. It is striking that walking is actually precarious. And it has been characterized basically as a perpetual successful recovery from a fall.\n\nYou know, we are not brains in a vat. We would not have the same thoughts if we were in a vat. When you walk, you realize how much you’re getting from other sources of being and how your ideas are altered.\n\nAnd the way I would put it, it is not only the body that has a mind of its own, but the body’s mind, you know, minds what it’s doing, minds itself, and mind restriction.\n\nAnd it’s by walking that we’re reminded of it. I’m a white middle-class male, so I’ve had fewer, and I’ve had to be reminded how difficult it is actually to go here or there or at this time at this place.\n\n00:32:40\tMaia Harris\tDr. Furlani also has his own walking practice.\nHere, he is talking about that. [Keyboard click]\n\n00:32:47\tAndre Furlani\tSo, in my walking practice. Well, I mean that gives it to, you know, it’s too August a term.\nBut, one of them is like I’ll fall into a certain kind of rhythm which will remind me of my wife who died of cancer many years, 21 years ago. And she was German. So, there’s a kind of German phrase that just came out of me from walking, remembering, walking with her.\n\nLike it’s, I mean, you know, Emma by Mia Unterwegs Tsuda, you know, always with me and towards you and then, so you know that again, that sense that you’re always walking with someone, whether you remember it or not, is very strong in me. And it’s a way to actually be with that person.\n\nAgain, partly because when you’re walking as well, you’re walking alone, you’re not kind of, you’re not molested – and I really use that word advisedly – molested by the shock element of the city. It is more important than ever, I think, now to be a bit militant about it for us actually to be unmolested.\n\nAnd one of the only times we are is when we’re walking from A to B. And that place between A and B is actually most of our lives.\n\n00:34:00\tAndre Furlani\tAs I said earlier, we’re always going somewhere, but it’s only the going. It’s like Gertrude Stein’s line, right now, you know where I live most of the time, right?\nThe important thing is the walk.\n\nIt is not where you started, where you are, and where you end, but the actual place where you spend most of your time in the middle, and we miss that middle thing.\n\nSo when you walk alone, it’s one of the only times when you can actually be alone, but not solipsistically alone by “you never walk alone,” let’s put it that way. You cannot walk alone.\n\n00:34:44\tMaia Harris\tSo Ryan, what are your takeaways from what you heard today about proprioception?\n00:34:53\tRyan Litvak\tWell, now I’m thinking about proprioception as far as my own practice goes.\nLike in theatre, when you’ve been doing a show, however many times you kind of intrinsically know where in space the path to your light is. And then you get there, and then you feel the warmth of the light all of a sudden.\n\nAnd I feel like that has to do with proprioception. It’s like the path getting there and spending that time in the middle from getting to your spot or even in clown. There’s this idea of the actor’s awareness behind the play within clowning. And I feel like there’s a proprioceptive element to that actor’s awareness as well, where you have that feeling of your body and the feeling of your body in space and the feeling of the movements that you are making outside of the performance in the context of theatre as a performer, but also as an audience member. And maybe wear proprioception as we talk about it as this sort of ultimate form of presence. But what about when proprioceptive awareness can kind of get in the way of being embodied or being present? And this might be a really stupid example, but I’ve been at theatre performances where the person next to me is taking up the entire armrest, so my arm is squished up on my torso, and I’m just hyper-aware of my body’s placement in space that way. And it kind of becomes a barrier to entry for that kind of presence.\n\n00:36:40\tMaia Harris\tAnd it’s so true because, yeah, proprioception is a physiological term. It does not mean embodiment. It can mean a. When it could be a window into these thoughts, you know, about embodiment, about presence. But it’s not those things in and of themselves. Right. It’s still precognitive, but we can become aware of it. We can.\nIt’s like we’re always breathing, but when we become aware of it, maybe that breathing’s a bit interrupted. Maybe it’s not as natural a feeling as blinking. When you start thinking about your blinking, it gets disrupted.\n\n00:37:21\tRyan Litvak\tYeah, absolutely.\nAnd there’s also like this relationship as we’re talking about, or maybe we’re not talking about, but we understand proprioception to be a precognitive thing that our body does. But at some point, those precognitive awarenesses often become cognitive. And how does that change what we are proprioceiving? Also, proprioception is an amazing tool for writers in poetry and prose where, oh, I’m writing a character in a situation, so let me put myself in a similar situation and think about my proprioceptive awareness and how my body feeling and finding the words for those qualities and Placing that into your work. So I’m going to start doing that.\n\n00:38:20\tMaia Harris\tYeah, that’s. It’s so true. I mean, putting your characters in situations that your body takes on. It’s speculative, but there’s something called mirror neurons. And your motor cortex kind of does activate when you read motion, and you read movement, although it is very speculative, but in a more metaphoric and maybe conceptual sense. Feelings of proprioception. Reading proprioception, what that does to the real body is real, even in terms of paying attention to it.\n00:39:01\tRyan Litvak\tYeah.\n00:39:02\tMaia Harris\tAs Dr. Furlani said, as Eija said, Theo kind of applies in his VR situations.\n00:39:09\tRyan Litvak\tYeah. And anecdotally, speculatively, I felt that while reading. It seems like we’re getting to the end of the episode.\nSo what about you? Why do you care about proprioception?\n\n00:39:31\tMaia Harris\tYeah, so I do research proprioception’s affordances for the literary.\nI focus on his name as, Charles Olson. He has 1965; we’ll call it a poem essay, actually called Proprioception.\n\nThough if you know Olson, you’ll understand. I can’t just casually get into it. And I did consider getting into that for the episode, but that wouldn’t actually really explain why I care. Not in any real way, at least.\n\nI care about proprioception because I care about being, like, really being present in my body. And what that means for poetry. Sure, but what does that mean in and of itself? Something came up in almost every interview that I haven’t really talked about yet. It’s the idea of perception, specifically proprioception, as an enactment. This idea comes from the philosopher Alva Noe. And for me, it reframes my relationship and my interest proprioception to my capital S self, and to you too, because, as Dr. Furlani said, we never walk alone in the spirit of enactment.\n\nI want to end with an exercise, if you’ll, what’s the word–\n\n00:40:49\tRyan Litvak\tAgree–\n00:40:50\tMaia Harris\tIf you’ll agree.\nI want to end with an exercise by composer and scholar Pauline Oliveros’s 1996 score Rhythms, which Eija actually cited as inspiring her project.\n\nRyan, listener, wherever you are, I invite you to stand, walk for a moment, and follow along if you’re able. Here’s Eija again.\n\n00:41:19\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThis score is meant to be a walking score, and the score goes.\nWhat is the meter and tempo of your normal walk?\n\nHow often do you blink?\n\nWhat is the current tempo of your breathing?\n\nWhat is the current tempo of your heart rate?\n\nWhat other rhythms do you hear if you listen?\n\nWhat is your relationship to all the rhythms that you can perceive? Of at once.\n\n00:42:14\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tYeah, I think it’s a really beautiful score. And my response to her final question is and always will be my body.\n00:42:28\tMaia Harris\tThank you to the incredible individuals that appeared in this piece. James Healy and I actually spoke for over an hour.\nIn the end, I wasn’t able to include a lot of it, but a huge thank you to James for everything.\n\nThank you to Théo Bouveyron, who was so gracious in participating despite the time difference between us.\n\nThank you to Eija Loponen-Stephenson, whose art and thought are an inspiration to me.\n\nThank you to Dr. Andre Furlani for taking the time and letting me make him so late for his next meeting that day.\n\nAnd thank you to Ryan Litvak, who makes every project more fun. Thank you for listening.\n\n00:43:08\tEija Loponen-Stephenson\tThat’s very sweet.\n00:43:09\tRyan Litvak\tThank you.\n00:43:17\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute the audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n00:43:37\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Maia Harris and featured the voices and insights of Ryan Litvak, James Healy, Théo Bouveyron, Eija Loponen-Stephenson, and Professor Andre Furlani.\nHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ Macpherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod, and, me, Hannah McGregor.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you may listen.\n\nIf you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say “hi” on our social media.\n\nPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n\nFor now, thanks for listening."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9606","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E5, Sounding New Sonic Approaches – A Podcast of A Live Recording Session of A Journal Issue Located in Multiple Spaces and Temporal Dimensions, 10 March 2025, Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/new-sonic-approaches/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4a081369-0b04-4bfa-917f-2a3a734e3020/audio/3c52525a-bd89-41d3-b0ee-cb006a4c8c6c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e5-mixdown-ext-outro-music.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"55,996,320 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e5-mixdown-ext-outro-music\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/new-sonic-approaches/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-03-10\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Amen Drum Break” samples all downloaded from:\\n\\nhttps://pixabay.com/sv/sound-effects/. The file names of “amen drum break” samples used are:\\n\\n140-bpm-amen-break-original-processed-6945\\n20_ca_amens-104513\\namen-sequence-01-dirty-180-bpm-102243\\namen-darkness-74126\\n175bpm-amen-punchy-loop-104487\\ndv-amen-break-133bpm-103971\\namen-break-remixed-loop-01-160-bpm-235384\\namen-break-no-copyright-remake-120bpm-25924\\nBach, Johann Sebastian. “BACH Goldberg_Variations_BWV_988_Variation 25_1955.” Looped excerpt. Performed by Glenn Gould.\\n\\nbissett, bill. “bill bissett at SGWU, 1969. 31 October 1969.” I006-11-083. SpokenWeb\\n\\nMontreal Sir George Williams University Reading Series collection. Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason. All music used to score the episode was produced from\\n“artifact sounds” derived from the source recordings combined with effects and other synthetic digital manipulations.These include:\\n\\nWork 1: “Zoom Music” developed from high-frequency sounds resulting from Zoom connectivity, equalization and reverb effects.\\n\\nWork 2: “Endless Vision” developed from interval noise run through long delay effects.\\n\\nWork 3: “EVOCalities” developed from event participants’ ambient talk and noise recorded after the event had ended, sped up and run through phase effects, delay.\\n\\nWork 4: “Pedalboard Drones and Drips” developed from sounds derived from outdoor microphone run through digital simulations of guitar pedal effects, mainly overdrive, chorus, and delay.\\n\\nWork 5: “Shapeless Fragments with Voices” developed from sounds of participants\\n\\nGinsberg. Allen. “Allen Ginsberg at SGWU, 1969.” I006-11-033.1. SpokenWeb\\n\\nMontreal Sir George Williams University Reading Series collection, Concordia University.\\n\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/allen-ginsberg-at-sgwu-1969/#1\\n\\nMartin, Daniel. “Martin_Mouth by Daniel Martin.”\\n\\nMitchell,Christine.  “Can you hear me?” Sound Collage from audio of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series.  Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), edited by Jason Camlot and Christine Mitchell.\\n\\nhttps://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. Clips downloaded from PennSound,\\n\\nhttps://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Robertson.php. File names are as follows:\\n\\nRobertson-Lisa_Voice-Box-Condensary_8-31-10\\nRobertson-Lisa_02_Introduction-to-The-Weather_PhillyTalks17_UPenn_10-03-00\\n“Vinyl Needle Drop, eclectic kitty, September 28th, 2024. https://freesound.org/people/eclectic-kitty/sounds/757639/\\n\\n“waterfall-in-the-forest_nature-sound-149379” by NickyPe.\\n\\nhttps://pixabay.com/sound-effects/waterfall-in-the-forest-nature-sound-149379/\\n\\nWaterman, Ellen. “Excerpt Dusk at Warbler’s Roost.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549683699712,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This podcast episode performs a sound-media meditation on a live event based on a collection of printed scholarly articles. In May 2023 a triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) was published on the topic of “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies,” edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. The issue, designed to explore how sound, literature, and critical methodologies intersect, included thirteen scholarly articles, and an interdisciplinary forum on the place of listening as a methodology in a wide range of scholarly and artistic fields.\n\nAs the editors considered what kind of “launch” would be best suited to this issue, they felt it should build on the printed scholarship, but also take it further – respond to it,  sound it, and perform it. They asked, “What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices?” They proceeded to organize an event to enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor was invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances unfolded in sequence within the 4th Space research showcase venue at Concordia University, and through the virtual participation of some contributors on Zoom. The performance event was also the object of an experiment in the multi-track recording of a spoken word event, with microphones of different kinds situated throughout 4th Space, and even outside the venue itself.\n\nThe eight tracks of audio resulting from that recording session serve as the raw material, the bed tracks, for a podcast that playfully explores the affordances of sound design for the presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. Some of the simple yet profound possibilities of working in sound to think and argue about sound that are explored here are those of amplitude (playing with the relative loudness of sounds), temporality (the movement and mixing of historically-situated times), speed (the movement of sounds in time), space (the relationship of sounds to the places they happened), noise (the sounds we are supposed not to want to hear), intelligibility (the intention of sounding for meaning), positionality (from where and to whom one is sounding), timbre (the textural quality of sounds and what they do), among many others. The goal of this production has not been to deliver the content of the journal as one might grasp it from the print journal (read the special issue for that!), but to emphasize the possibilities and features of sound, sometimes apposite and sometimes in opposition to the intention and circumstances of the intended message. Archival voices and sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt the planned “Sounding New Sonic Approaches” event. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and mutated by an occasional soundtrack scored for monotonic analogue synths. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new kinds of meaning and feeling-making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Intro\t[Audio recording] Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast stories about how literature sounds.\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor.\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this episode of the SpokenWeb, podcast producer Jason Camlot explores the affordances of sound design for the presence of presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. The raw audio material for this episode was recorded at an event, a sounding of the special issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”\n\nIt was recorded live in the room and online on zoom and with mics placed all around the room and even outside. But what you are about to hear is so much more than that live recording of the event you are about to hear.\n\nA new sound work.\n\nA new sound work that performs an exploration of the possibilities of working in and with sound.\n\nArchival voices and found sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and manipulated. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new meanings and feeling making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.\n\nHere is episode five of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a podcast of a live recording session of a journal issue located in multiple spaces and temporal dimensions.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\n\n00:02:28\tDifferent Recordings Edited Together\t[Chaotic overlapping voices, testing microphones]\nVoice 1: Hello? Can you hear me?\nVoice 2: I hope you can hear me.\nVoice 1: Test, test, test.\nVoice 3: If you can’t hear me, I think there are more seats up here.\nVoice 4: I’ll try to speak a little louder on my own.\nVoice 5: Is it hard to hear back there?\nVoice 6: Even with the microphone?\n\n[Multiple voices testing simultaneously]\n\nVoice 1: Test, test, test.\nVoice 4: There we go.\nVoice 5: If I talk louder into the mic, does that help?\nVoice 6: Can you hear that?\nVoice 3: It’s hard to tell.\nVoice 2: Hello? Can you hear me now?\nVoice 4: Is it still hard to hear back there?\nVoice 1: Hello? Can you hear me with this mic?\nVoice 5: Can you hear me now?\nVoice 6: Y’all hear me?\n\n[Laughter, sound stabilizing]\n\n00:03:13\tDouglas Moffat\t[Regular audio resumes, background instrumental music begins]\nOkay. Hello, everyone. I’m just going to start things up here. Thank you very much.\n\nHello, everyone. Welcome to Concordia University’s Fourth Space. Thank you for joining us for today’s event, Sounding New Sonic Approaches.\n\n[Soft instrumental music continues in the background]\n\nTo help situate you, we are streaming this event live on YouTube from Fourth Space, here on Unceded Indigenous Lands in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.\n\nWe are also running this event as a live-streamed Zoom meeting—though, as you may have already noticed, this is a bit of an unusual setup for us.\n\nWith that, it is my pleasure to hand things over to the editors of New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies, Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod.\n\nWelcome, both of you. Over to you.\n\n00:03:57\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to Sounding New Sonic Approaches, a live recording session.\nWe are recording this event here at Fourth Space at Concordia University and online on Zoom. And we’re live with an audience.\n\nWelcome, everyone! Let’s hear a round of applause.\n\n[Applause]\n\nThe idea behind today’s event is to create a spoken sound work drawn from our collective special issue of English Studies in Canada. Each contributor will sound their article—either by reading an excerpt from their piece in the journal or by selecting surrogate sounds that capture the essence of their discussion.\n\n[Scattered clapping, sound cues shifting in the background]\n\n00:04:50\tJason Camlot\tThe sounds of speech—whether spoken through microphones, over Zoom, or pre-recorded and played back through Zoom—will be layered through multiple outputs.\n[Jason’s voice subtly shifts as different sound devices are introduced]\n\nThese sounds will be played through a variety of speakers, both inside and outside Fourth Space.\n\n[A mechanical whirring sound begins in the background]\n\nThe audio from these various sources will be captured and sent to a mixing desk, where SpokenWeb audio engineer James Healy will be recording everything on multiple tracks using an RME Fireface digital converter.\n\nThis will then be used to create a new sonic approaches sound work, which Katherine and I will be producing as a SpokenWeb podcast episode from today’s performance.\n\n[Persistent clapping continues in the background]\n\nSo, that’s the basic idea. Think of this event as a big poetry reading, or maybe an open mic collaborative performance, or even a kind of literary sonic manifesto—but one that’s being recorded from a variety of sources, in multi-track layers.\n\nSpecial thanks to James Healy, Douglas Moffett, and the Fourth Space team for helping bring this event to life and for creatively reimagining how to record it.\n\n00:05:59\tKatherine McLeod\t[Katherine’s voice echoes, slightly distant]\nWe have a set list for our readers—[Sudden distorted noise cuts in]\n—which also serves as the table of contents for the special issue.\n\n[Echo fades out, sound stabilizes]\n\nWhen it is your turn, please state your name and the title of your article before reading. Keep it brief, and we’ll smoothly move from one reader to the next.\n\n[Brief pause]\n\nWith that—let’s begin.\n\nStart recording.\n\nSounding New Sonic Approaches, take one.\n\n00:06:26\tKatherine and Jason\t[Voices overlapping, slightly out of sync]\nRolling, rolling, rolling.\n00:06:30\tJason Camlot\tMy name is Jason Camlot–\n00:06:32\tKatherine McLeod\tand I’m Katherine McLeod–\n00:06:34\tJason Camlot\tand we will be reading from–\n00:06:37\tKatherine McLeod\tIntroduction New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot\t[Jason’s voice echoes, layered and resonant]\nThe sound of literature is now discernible as never before.[Echo fades, voice stabilizes]\nThis emerging discernibility—inciting new sonic approaches to literature—is due, in the first instance, to digitized audio assets and online environments that have made previously analog collections of literary recordings more accessible and valuable for research and study.\n[A soft whirring sound begins in the background]\n\nBeyond this infrastructural shift, the heightened discernibility of sonic approaches to literary culture has come from a recent interaction and convergence of methods between literary studies and sound studies as a broad interdisciplinary field.\n\n[The whirring sound grows louder, filling the space]\n\n00:07:23\tKatherine McLeod\tOur Call for Papers for this special issue of English Studies in Canada invited submissions that pursue sound-focused studies of literary works, events, and performances—exploring the intersections between literary studies and sound studies.\nFrom the outset, we framed literature as an intentionally expansive concept, one that has shaped the diverse case studies featured in this collection—ranging from archival objects to live performances.\n\n[Katherine’s voice begins to distort, subtly warping]\n\nThe authors whose work we received and selected for this issue embody this diversity in their approaches.\n\n[Distortion fades, voice stabilizes]\n\nIn asking our contributors to—or rather—[laughs]—in asking them to be…\n\n[Soft whirring begins again, subtly shifting in the background]\n\n…thinking sonically, as we put it, we challenged them to write from their perspectives as listeners.\n\nIn other words, we asked them to conflate literary studies and sound studies—to do literary sound studies—while critically reflecting on what it means to listen within the context of their discipline.\n\n[Whirring fades into silence]\n\n00:08:28\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot again, and Annie Murray will be joining me.\nAnnie, do you want to say hi?\n\n00:08:35\tAnnie Murray\tHi.\n00:08:37\tJason Camlot\tDarren Wershler can’t be with us today, but we three are the co-authors of an article called The Afterlife of Performance.\n[Sound of cymbals and drums from a ritual chant]\n\nThe afterlife of performance—\n\n[Cymbal sound repeats, layered with an eerie resonance]\n\n—is riddled with assumptions about life, death, and time.\n\n[Another cymbal strike, now accompanied by a distant, guttural yell]\n\nOne major assumption is the possibility of distinction between the live—\n\n[Cymbal strike reverberates]\n\n—and something else. Not so much death—\n\n[Cymbal clangs again, layered with rising tension]\n\n—but an afterlifeness, shaped by various theorizations of media in what we might call the Age of the Zombie.\n\n[Cymbal clang echoes, now joined by chaotic grunts and shouts of exertion]\n\nBut we’re not so much interested in how particular instantiations of liveness are produced.\n\nRather, we’re examining how the afterlife of performance is produced, managed, and maintained—through the application of various cultural techniques.\n\n[The sound of rhythmic clattering, like a drum being struck]\n\nA network of people, using specific hardware, capturing performance in a particular space, on particular kinds of storage media—\n\n[Drum strike repeats, layered with subtle distortions]\n\n—along with techniques such as mastering—\n\n[Drum beat sharpens]\n\n—editing, filing, labeling—\n\n[The sound repeats, layered with an accelerating intensity]\n\n—holding (that is, long periods of neglecting), digitizing, remastering, and circulating—\n\n[The rhythmic pulse builds, overlapping voices chanting and talking]\n\n—all working together to produce our sense of the relative worth of a recording.\n\nA recording of another group of people—chanting, talking, reading.\n\n[Clattering intensifies, layered with cheers and echoes of past voices]\n\nIf we examine this assemblage closely, we can see its inner workings—the mechanism that produces literary value.\n\n[Final crescendo, then silence]\n\n00:10:13\tAnnie Murray\tI’m Annie Murray, also reading from The Afterlife of Performance.\nOnly some of the materials that document poetic practice in the late 1960s have ever crossed the formal archival threshold.\n\nOthers have been ignored, lost, or destroyed.\n\n[Faint background noise begins, like shifting paper and distant murmurs]\n\nSome, like the Sir George Williams University series, only became formal institutional records after a chance discovery, followed by validation through concerted scholarly and institutional effort.\n\n[The background noise grows slightly, a textured hum of archival handling]\n\nBeing attuned to the concept of the archival multiverse allows us to rationalize the messiness—the expanse, duplication, and incompleteness of literary legacy, especially for event-driven records.\n\nAnd finally, we can see the role of the Web—how it makes archival content both ubiquitous and messy, introducing new complexities in preservation.\n\nThinking in a multiverse way allows us to layer and intersect poetic events, poets, and their literary and geographical movements, as well as the movement and proliferation of evidentiary traces of their work.\n\nIt invites us to gain comfort with a decentralized model of both preservation and dissemination.\n\n[A whispered echo repeats:]\n“…preservation and dissemination.”\n\n00:11:35\tJason Camlot\tNext will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.\n[Distant echo repeats:]\n“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”\n\n00:11:46\tAudio Recording\t[Applause erupts, transitioning into a recorded voice]\n[Recording of a woman:]\n“Thanks a lot, Louis, and thanks, everybody, for coming.”\n\n00:11:50\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tHi there, I’m Julia Polyck-O’Neill.\nI’m reading from my article, Archives, Intimacy: Encountering the Sound Subject in the Literary Archive.\n\n00:11:59\tJason Camlot\t[Faint echo, layered and reverberating]\n“Next will be Julia Polyck-O’Neill.”\n00:12:01\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tWhile researching Robertson—\n[A sharp mechanical hum begins, like an electric current surging]\n\n—meaning Lisa Robertson at SFU, I inquired about the different media available in their collections that might allow me to better access Robertson’s—\n\n[More mechanical noise, layered with a subtle distortion]\n\n—personal feminist networks, a key topic in my work.\n\nI’m particularly interested in materials related to poet, curator, and organizer Nancy Shaw, a scholar responsible for many changes in KSW’s operations, especially in its connections to Artspeak, a Vancouver artist-run center.\n\n[The mechanical noise persists, a rhythmic pulsing of archived media playback]\n\nDuring our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my focus on how KSW intersected with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.\n\n[The machine sound fades, leaving an ambient electronic hum]\n\n00:12:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\t[Julia’s voice echoes]\nDuring our time working together, Robertson repeatedly stressed the importance of looking into Shaw’s work within KSW and Artspeak, and more broadly, given my interest in how KSW intersected— [Voice distortion]—with the Vancouver art world and the group’s feminist activity.\n\n00:12:45\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\tPresented with a box of tapes from the Kootenay School of Writing—[whirring sound]—fonds, also held at SFU, I selected the hand-annotated tapes bearing Robertson’s name, as well as those of Shaw, which only roughly corresponded with the finding aid.\n00:12:58\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill\t[Julia’s voice echoes]\nIt was explained that the tapes had been annotated somewhat ad hoc over the years. [Voice stabilizes] Again, the experience was heightened and singular—[whirring sound]—made even more so by the privacy of the listening space. Putting on a pair of ear-covering headphones, I pressed play on the first tape—only to realize it had to be rewound first.\n\n[Background noise]\n\nAll of these attributes build momentum for the initial moments of listening to—[voice echoes]—the recording. Thank you. [Applause]\n\n00:13:39\tAudio Recording\t[Applause blends into an audio recording]\nThanks, Colter. Thanks, Jacqueline. This is… This is nice to be here in the living room.\n\n00:13:47\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’re going to hear a sound clip of Michael O’Driscoll reading—[sound of truck driving by]\n00:13:54\tMichael O’Driscoll\t[Voice starts in an echo]\nThis essay features a reel-to-reel recording of a 1969 classroom lecture during which Canadian poet and playwright James Rainey demonstrates sound collage in relation to his celebrated 1967 play “Colours in the Dark.”\n\nOn first encountering the recording, the listener will notice—[sound of something large approaching]—the extraordinarily intrusive presence of a jackhammer, located somewhere near the classroom.\n\n00:14:24\tAudio Recording\t[Audio blends into a recording with applause]\nThanks very much. I’ve already given you about a quarter of the reading on tape and gramophone. [Jackhammer begins]\n\nAnd fortunately, before the jackhammer started, the first thing I played was from Karl Orff’s “Music for Children,” which begins with nursery rhymes and lists of names that children recite…\n\n00:16:28\tMichael O’Driscoll\tRainey’s equanimity in this moment is astounding. One could well imagine canceling the lecture—especially one focused on attentive listening. Rainey, however, simply absorbs the intrusive jackhammer into the performance, adopting—or adapting—the sonic dissonance into the logic of a lesson already leaning toward an appreciation of—[voice starts to echo]—the affective tension and political force of jarring oral juxtaposition.\n00:17:03\tKatherine McLeod\tNext up, we have Mathieu Aubin.\nThe paper is entitled “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in the Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966–1971.”\n\n[Distorted] And we’ll be listening to a recording.\n\n00:17:23\tMathieu Aubin\tA short history on queer listening.\n[Faint sound of a man, poet bill bissett, singing in the background]\n\nIn the 1960s and 1970s, listening to and recording queer people from a police perspective was a means of documenting and regulating their behavior.\n\n[Background singing increases] Surveillance efforts targeted queer writers, monitoring their activities through bugged homes, wiretaps, and infiltration of their communities. Police forces compiled this data, circulating it across networks to justify increased surveillance.\n\n00:18:01\tMathieu Aubin\tBut quite the opposite—some queer writers saw listening as a form of homosocial rapprochement. Writers like Allen Ginsberg practiced a tender form of listening, using it to build queer bonds. Rather than being exploitative, tender listening was a way for queer people to connect, orient themselves toward each other, and foster solidarity. [Mathieu’s voice echoes faintly]\nSimilarly, some queer writers performed close listening as a practice of careful consideration—both for meaning and for social potential.\n\n00:19:15\tMathieu Aubin\tAs Jack Halberstam theorizes in Queer Time, queer uses of time and space are developed according to other logics of location, movement, and identification—rather than the heteronormative life model of marriage, family, and reproduction.\n[Singing momentarily increases]\n\n00:20:13\tKatherine McLeod\tJason Wiens: Voicing Appropriations: Sounding Found Poetry in 1960s Canada [Amen drum break sample  plays]\n00:20:20\tJason Wiens\tThe oral performance of found poetry adds a new layer of interpretive complexity to an already complex practice of appropriation and recontextualization.\n[Fast drums continue]\n\nHowever, little consideration has been given to the oral performance or audio recording of found or appropriated poetry—whether from the historical moment I discuss here or in contemporary conceptual poetry.\n\n00:23:25\tKlara du Plessis\t[Voice echoes]\nMy name is Klara du Plessis.\n\n[Whistling sound] I’m reading from “Do You Read Me, Kaie Kellough: The Words of Music”\n\n[Distorted voice and whistling]\n\n00:23:41\tKlara du Plessis\t[Very distorted and echoed voice] In fact, I’m not reading from my essay. In fact, I’m not. Instead, I’m reading from a handwritten scan titled Word Sound System 1: Read Part A, which is included in Kaie Kellough’s 2010 poetry collection.\n[Voice becomes slightly clearer]\n\nThe piece, Maple Leaf Also Reads, instructs that letters indicated by numbers should be stressed to emphasize rhythm. The goal is to repeat until the rhythmic pattern is understood.\n\n[Layered voices overlapping]\n\nD—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—y—o—u.\n\nUnderstood.\n\nE—a—d—m—a—d—d—o—u—d—o—y—d—o—e—y—o—m—a—e—n—d—o—m—y—o—u.\n\nD—r—o—a—d—o—a—o—o—d—u—e—y—o—u—m—r—o—a—u—r—o—y.\n\nD—o—u—r—y—a—r—e—d—r—o—y—o—u—y—o—a—r—I—o—e—r—e—d—o—y—o—u—r—e—a.\n\n[Voice becomes more coherent]\n\nEach component follows a logical continuation.\n\nY—o—o—y—o—a—d—and—e.\n\nSorry, the notes are confusing.\n\nEach component is a continuation of the previous—and once they are strung together, they form a tidy loop that can repeat infinitely.\n\n00:25:48\tJason Camlot\tThanks, Klara. That’s the first cover of a Kaie Kellough sound poem I’ve ever heard. [Jason’s voice blends into a recording]\n00:25:52\tAudio Recording\tYes, [Laughter]\n00:25:53\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’ll hear an audio clip from Kate Moffitt, Kandice Sharren, and Michel Levy, co-authors of Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant’s 1984 Reading of “Grip” and “Posh”.\n00:26:11\tKandice Sharren\tThe rationale behind the copy text aligns with the impulse to prioritize the story itself in our audio edition, rather than the physical artifact or recording event. In some ways, audio offers unique advantages—for instance, when a story is read by its author, it can clarify ambiguities through intonation or even provide the most authoritative version of the text.\n00:26:31\tKandice Sharren\tIn this case, our copy text was the story as Mavis Gallant performed it [eerie sound] on 14 February 1984—a version that clearly had her seal of approval.\nProducing the two podcast episodes required listening to Gallant’s reading dozens of times, and in doing so, Moffitt noticed a significant aside:\n\nNear the end of the recording, Gallant deviates from the story and remarks–\n\n00:26:54\tAudio Recording\t[Cuts to the audio recording of Mavis Gallant] I have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? Yes, these are proofs.\n00:27:00\tKate Moffatt\tDuring a Q&A session celebrating the first episode’s release, we discussed Gallant’s reference to these elusive proofs.\nFollowing that event, SFU Professor Carol Gerson informed us that the proofs for this story, along with a cassette copy of the 1984 reading, were held by the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.\n\nWith help from Roma Kail, a librarian at Victoria University, we were able to access scans and confirm that these were the exact same proofs Gallant had been reading from.\n\nOn page 24, Gallant’s editor had added an interlinear pencil notation between lines 6 and 7, stating:\n\nIs he imagining this?\n\nJust as Gallant had read aloud in 1984.\n\n00:27:38\tKatherine McLeod\t[Echo effect] Next up, Kelly Baron.\n00:27:40\tKelly Baron\t[Bell dings] I’m Kelly Baron, and I’m reading from Oral Memory in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.\nIn the opening pages of Thien’s novel—which explores intergenerational trauma resulting from the Cultural Revolution in Chinese-Canadian communities—[Voice distorts, accompanied by soft piano notes]\n\nLi Ling, the novel’s protagonist, is walking through Vancouver’s Chinatown when she hears Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 4 playing from a store speaker.\n\nShe feels drawn towards it, as keenly as if someone were pulling her by the hand—the counterpoint of the music binding together the composer, the musicians, and even the silence.\n\nThe music, with its spiraling wave of grief and rapture, was everything she remembered.\n\n00:28:26\tKelly Baron\tThat moment sparks a memory of her father.\nIn the act of listening, he becomes so alive, so beloved that the incomprehensibility of his suicide resurfaces, grieving her all over again.\n\nBy her own admission, she had never before experienced such a pure memory of her father, Dong Kai, in the two decades since his death.\n\nLi Ling’s experience in Vancouver’s Chinatown raises important questions about the role of music in literary depictions of intergenerational memory and trauma:\n\n– How does music shape memory recall in novels like this?\n\n– How can listening to the music within literature expand our understanding of trauma and memory transmission?\n\nIn this article, I argue that listening within a literary context provides a methodology for understanding intergenerational trauma—one rooted in the sensory experiences that accompany inherited trauma.\n\nThese experiences are defined by rhythmic repetition, a new setting, and an emotional distinction that alters perception.\n\n00:29:32\tKelly Baron\tI propose that listening to music in literature represents a new method for identifying intergenerational memory.\nThis method focuses not only on the literary depictions of sound but also on how that sound shapes the experiences of future generations.\n\nIf traumatic memories are communicated through silences and gaps in declarative or narrative memory, then sound itself becomes the conduit—a means by which these memories are passed down to future generations.\n\n00:30:04\tDaniel Martin\tMy essay is called— [A recording starts playing]— Girl, the Piercing.\n00:30:09\tSPK_1\t[Recording plays] Yeah, the hell were you doing with her? It’s not what you think.\n00:30:16\tDaniel Martin\t[A low humming sound begins in the background] My essay, The Child’s Stuttering Mouth and the Ruination of Language in Jordan Scott’s Blurt and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance, explores how we read and write about the enigmatic experiences of people who stutter—without succumbing to metaphor, stigma, or the valorization of creative stuttering inherent in all textualities.\n00:30:43\tDaniel Martin\tWe put aside critical methodologies that expose the tensions between voice and text in literary expression and instead imagine the experiences of children who stutter through playful and experimental fantasies of language, devourment, and ruination. [Brief static sound] Despite their differences in genre—one a celebrated Canadian sound poetry work, the other an experimental text by an innovator in hypertext and found-document fiction—\n00:31:11\tDaniel Martin\tBoth Jordan Scott’s Blurt and Shelley Jackson’s Riddance reimagine stuttered speech beyond the prosaic deconstruction of voice and text—presence and absence, fluency and disfluency—that have shaped so much critical study on literary voicings. [Humming sound increases]\n00:31:29\tDaniel Martin\tBoth texts examine what it means to return, in Scott’s words, to the fact of the mouth. These works do not merely romanticize the stutter as inherent to language systems, nor do they simply deconstruct speech versus text, presence versus absence, or phonemic versus phonetic binaries that dominate most literary voice studies.\n00:31:51\tDaniel Martin\tOur critical and theoretical methodologies have grounded literary voice studies in these binaries, but there are other ways to reimagine the romanticization of communicative breakdowns. [A voice in the background hums an extended “mmm” sound]\n00:32:06\tDaniel Martin\tScott and Jackson both reorient the reader’s response away from a logic of extractive meaning toward an invitation to participate in the childlike pleasures of—[stutters]—devouring, ingesting, and ruining language. With this pleasure comes trauma, longing, and loss, inevitable aspects of such a destructive relationship with language. [A distorted voice emerges, layering over Daniel’s words] [Daniel’s voice starts stuttering] Their work experiments with devices, techniques, and tricks introduced under biomedical imperatives for speech cure and management.\n00:32:42\tDaniel Martin\tBoth texts raise profound questions about the history of speech therapy, the cultural history of the stutter, and its status as a haunted and haunting presence—one that is both internal and external to the speaking mouth. [A voice in the background repeats an extended “mmm” sound]\n00:33:03\tDaniel Martin\tFundamentally, these works suggest that reading or speaking fluently is not necessarily a triumph. For people who stutter, reading can feel threatening—it introduces a fragility in the relationship between speaker and language. The stutter itself is a threat of undoing. It creates a hole, swallowing up the very binary distinctions we rely on to make meaning.\nSometimes, that hole becomes a portal—a doorway to other dimensions and voices. Other times, it is simply a giant mouth, consuming language and eroding meaning, a threat as gleeful and destructive as a child’s indulgent play. These texts introduce disfluent joy, embodying the stutterer’s ruinous relationship with words.\n\n00:33:51\tKatherine McLeod\tNext is Kristen Smith.\n00:33:56\tKristen Smith\tHello, I’m Kristen Smith. I’m so grateful to voice an excerpt from Unsounding: A New Method for Processing Non-Linguistic Poetry. [Faint static noise in the background]\n00:34:15\tKristen Smith\tThe comparison of a non-linguistic poem to a graphic score emphasizes the openness of the art form. The poem as score foregrounds the reader’s role as both performer and interpreter, yet it offers no clear guidance in executing either role.\n00:34:35\tKristen Smith\tAt every turn, with each proposed paradigm for assessment, non-linguistic poetry resists. [Faint static continues] Non-linguistic poetry rejects totalizing methods for reading and unsounding. In No Medium, Krecht Dworkin performs close readings of unfilled, erased, or blank pages—seemingly silent texts.\n00:35:03\tKristen Smith\tIn his analysis of Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin asserts: Silence is always ideal and illusory. Silence is a thought experiment—provocative and unverifiable. [Eerie, distant tones rise in the background] Unsounds are filled with interpretative possibilities and semantic meaning.\n00:35:22\tKristen Smith\tThis essay specifically examines works that are not blank but still eliminate linguistic material and prevent sounding. These texts are composed of unsound.\n00:35:35\tKristen Smith\t[Eerie sound increases] Dworkin pushes further, suggesting that in such works, medium itself is as unrealizable as silence. Non-linguistic poems subvert expectations of medium or category. Moreover, these works compel readers to adopt new reading practices.\nWorks like Soult’s Moonshot Sonnet, Bergwoll’s Drift, and Schmaltz’s Surfaces require the reader to meet the poem on the page and actively work through it on its own terms.\n\n00:36:07\tKristen Smith\tWhen encountering a non-linguistic poem, the reader is forced to question their relationship to reading, sound, and communication. [Distorted, eerie sounds grow louder]\nBy resisting any singular method for interpretation, these works show that both sounding and resisting sound can communicate multivalent, albeit elusive, messages.\n\n00:36:36\tKristen Smith\tYet, these communications are incomplete without the reader’s participation—perhaps through unsounding the poetic material. The reader is essential to the visual poem’s communication. The reader is integral to the poem’s becoming. [Eerie sounds linger before fading]\n00:36:57\tJason Camlot\tNow we’re going to hear from the Readers’ Forum on Disciplinary Listening.\n00:37:01\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot.\n00:37:03\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd this is Katherine McLeod.\n00:37:05\tJason Camlot\tAnd we’ll be reading from Forum on Disciplinary Listening: An Introduction.\n00:37:08\tKatherine McLeod\tWe have developed this forum to invite further reflection from experts who have worked with sound across a variety of disciplines. We asked—\n00:37:23\tJason Camlot\t– How has your discipline taught you to listen?\n– What does listening mean within your discipline?\n\n– How do you understand sonic approaches in relation to disciplinarity?\n\n– What aspects of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field do you translate or transpose into your approaches as a researcher and teacher within a specific discipline of knowledge and university department?\n\n00:37:56\tKatherine McLeod\tNow, we invite you to listen to this voice forum as a conversation and to consider what you would write in response to these same questions. Notice the constellations of listeners evoked, the resonances in reflections. Immerse yourself in the listening that each writer educes on the page. [Static noise begins]\n00:38:20\tJason Camlot\tThis is Jason Camlot again, reading from my short article Towards a History of Literary Listening. The story of literary listening may tell of two long-lasting, concurrent desires within literary encounters. One desire embraces literature as something best apprehended through sound and listening. The other seeks to extricate sound and listening—and, perhaps by extension, the intimacy of other kinds of exchange and communication that involve presence—\n00:38:56\tJason Camlot\t[Static noise fades] —from the scenario of literary study. The latter desire—to remove sound and listening from literary study—seems particularly disciplinary in its motivation. [Static starts again] This removal is often justified as a way to protect literary appreciation from the corrupting effects of sound. To the extent that literary criticism seeks to justify its status as a discipline—with established principles of literary judgment—it may be that an interesting technique for contemporary literary listening emerges precisely through acts of listening that ride the contradictions of these competing desires. These contradictory desires reflect larger critical tensions—the desire to hear the past in the present, to feel presence in absence, to know and feel the literary as it exists here and now, as it was, and as it will be.\n00:40:03\tJason Camlot\t[Jason’s voice shifts slightly] Next, we’re going to hear from Tanya E. Clement—reading from Distant Listening and Resonance. [Sound clip begins]\n00:40:14\tTanya E. Clement\tSpeech recordings: sound is text—the words people speak—but also other sounds that indicate a speaking and listening context. Tone, laughter, coughing, crying, birdsong, car engines, horns— [Tanya’s voice begins to echo]—a baby crying, thunder clapping, gunshots, the nano dropping. Using computation to analyze large datasets of sound texts has been called distant listening in digital humanities literature. I describe distant listening to sound texts as a process that uses computing to—[voice distorts slightly]—”distill the multi-layered, four-dimensional space of the text of performance—embodied within the performer’s hour of interpretation in time and space—into a two-dimensional script called code.”\n00:40:59\tTanya E. Clement\tDistant is often understood as implying a lack of presence, an observation removed in both space and emotion—detached from individual, subjective knowledge.\n00:41:12\tTanya E. Clement\t[Tanya’s voice subtly shifts] Yet, sound travels differently—and what is lacking in distance is often made up for in other ways. [Eerie sound rises in the background] What is too close can be deafening. What is far away can be heard loud and clear. As both a physical property and a cultural hermeneutic, resonance serves as a useful theory for articulating how distant listening can create meaning differently. [Sound fades]\n00:41:41\tKatherine McLeod\tNext, we have Kim Fox and Reem Elmaghraby. Kim, would you like to say hello and read your title to start off?\n00:41:51\tKim Fox\tSure, I can do that. Thanks for having me—I’m really excited to join you all. Though it is 11:43 PM in Cairo, Reem and I have an essay titled Reflections on Evaluating Soundscapes and Gathering Sounds in Cairo: The Case of the AUC Diaries Project.\n00:42:12\tReem Elmaghraby\tSo, it is now 10:30 AM, and I should probably open the curtains to see what the weather is like. [Sound of curtains opening]\nWell, it’s raining heavily, and the sky is extremely dull. What a depressing way to start the day. [Sound of liquid pouring] Time to make my everyday morning coffee—an espresso shot with a bit of lactose-free foamed milk, no sugar. [Sound of ceramic clattering] Super basic.\n\n00:42:37\tReem Elmaghraby\tI tend to get really bad headaches when I skip my morning coffee dose. I also get super grumpy, so let’s try and avoid that. [Alarm sound goes off]\n00:42:48\tSPK_1\t[Sound blends into an audio recording] It’s 6:30 AM, and I must get up for my 8:30 class at AUC. The sound of the alarm, which I snooze over and over again, is not enough to get me out of bed. That’s why I always leave the curtains open.\nI don’t like getting up this early. I don’t like it one bit. [Sound of door opening] In fact, I hate it. You know what, maybe I’ll just skip today’s morning class. [Sound of shower running] I’m too tired.\n\nNo, I need the grade. What I do slightly appreciate about this pre-8:30 class ritual is its peacefulness—the silence of everyone still asleep.\n\nAnyways, I grab my things and head out to a busy Thursday. [Sound of keys jingling, bag zipping]\n\n00:43:32\tReem Elmaghraby\t[Back to Reem] I stare at the usual pictures of my classmates—and at the black screens with names in the bottom left corner—as I listen to the lecture. [Sighs]\nThe professor just gave us an assignment, so I write it down in my bullet journal, my calendar, and on a sticky note that I put up on my wall.\n\nOrganization is the only thing keeping me afloat this semester. Otherwise, I’d get nothing done. [Sound of a pencil writing on paper]\n\nMy desk is probably my favourite place to be. The best way I could describe it? If a crazy wizard started hoarding objects from his many journeys.\n\nI have stickers on my wall, art from my favourite artists, tech gadgets, makeup, accessories—honestly, anything of interest to me is somewhere on my desk.\n\n00:44:15\tSPK_1\t[Audio switches to another recording] Minute 63—Egypt scores! [Background chatter and cheering] But then, Congo ties the score in minute 87.\n[More background cheers] We need one goal to qualify. With two minutes left, it felt hopeless. People walked out.\n\nBut then—minute 94—Mohamed Salah scores, in a moment that will go down in Egyptian history. [Loud cheers, static interference]\n\nMy microphone couldn’t handle the reaction. [Cheering and static noise blend together] It wasn’t any tamer on the streets either. [Sound of drums]\n\nIt didn’t look like I could drive home tonight, so I decided to sleep over at Andrew’s.\n\n00:44:56\tKatherine McLeod\tKristin Moriah—That Men Might Listen Earnestly to It: Hearing Blackness.\n00:45:06\tKristin Moriah\t[Audio recording begins—rain-like sound gets louder, then fades]\n00:45:06\tJason Camlot\tNext, we’re going to hear from Nina Sun Eidsheim and Juliette Bellocq.\n00:45:28\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tListening techniques are naturalized within an area of study. [Eerie music starts playing faintly]\nIn the PEER Lab—the Practice-Based Experimental Epistemology Research Lab, which I started a few years ago—we seek to listen to the ways different people and different fields listen.\n\nOur goal is to understand more about how the world appears through specific listening techniques.\n\nOne of my main collaborators is the graphic designer Juliette Bellocq. We took the invitation to contribute to this volume as an opportunity for me to learn more about her listening practices.\n\nThe piece we created together is called What They Say is What They Mean: Listening to Someone’s Story.\n\n00:46:09\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tI started by asking Juliette—what is listening for a graphic designer?\n00:46:16\tJuliette Bellocq\tAs a graphic designer, I agree not to be the sole author of the content in my work. Graphic design, in my practice, means sharing content.\nI place myself in a position to translate something I’ve heard, understood, seen, or reconfigured. That means that I have a voice—I am an author, but there is also a co-author.\n\nThis co-author can be a client or a community, so listening is essential.\n\nBesides working with the PEER Lab, I primarily work with architects in designing spaces. And the key question when we visit a space or meet with people is: What are their stories?\n\nListening is our primary tool and resource. [Faint instrumental music begins playing]\n\n00:47:03\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tDo you listen similarly or differently from architects or even other graphic designers? And if so, how do these different types of listening come together?\n00:47:15\tJuliette Bellocq\tI do think that I listen differently than some other designers because my primary goal is not to solve people’s problems—which is a big part of what graphic design is often about.\nMy job now is to capture something in the air, make it visible for everyone, and see if it can participate in the culture.\n\nI work to transcribe or crystallize ideas that already exist for all of us.\n\nIf I do not listen well, I have nothing to create. Does that make sense?\n\n00:47:45\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tIt does, but I’m wondering—is listening a metaphor for all the ways we absorb things?\n00:47:53\tJuliette Bellocq\tIt’s not a metaphor. It’s note-taking and research to make sure we heard correctly.\nIt’s cross-checking information to ensure that what people meant was actually what we heard.\n\nIt’s about understanding group stories before producing anything visual or graphic.\n\nIt’s a kind of listening that is meant to engage with something alive.\n\n00:48:16\tJuliette Bellocq\tSo, we have to listen in a way that is—hopefully, when done well—non-intrusive.\nIt should not orient the story but let people say what they want authentically.\n\nIt is about understanding their words in the right context before finally proposing something that can participate in the culture it comes from.\n\nSo, listening is a way to circumvent assumed knowledge.\n\n00:48:43\tNina Sun Eidsheim\tThank you.\n00:48:46\tMara Mills\tMara Mills and Andy Slater, Blind Mode: Blind Listening Techniques.\nI’m Mara Mills, a media studies professor and historian of electroacoustics and disability. My co-author, Andy Slater, is a blind sound artist who records, transcribes, and documents blind listening techniques—or what Andy calls Blind Mode.\n\n00:49:11\tMara Mills\tI first learned about Andy’s work when I was researching the history of the C1 cassette player.\nThis machine was released by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled in the United States in 1981.\n\nIt included a time-stretching or pitch-restoration feature so that blind people could speed-read talking books without distorting the narrator’s voice.\n\n00:49:37\tMara Mills\tTo my surprise, this tape player—which is no longer in production—still has a fan base in noise and experimental music scenes.\nAndy uses sounds from the C1, among many other accessibility tools, in his compositions.\n\nAnd now, we’ll hear a recording of that.\n\n00:50:07\tAndy Slater\t[Static sound] [Robotic voice begins] Tape decks and 8-RPM record players were ugly and bulky.\nThey were meant for home use—out of sight, hidden from embarrassment.\n\nMuch like large print books and the white cane itself, some of us knew the glory of the talking book players.\n\nEverything could sound weird if we let it. [Background sound warps slightly]\n\nReading is fundamental, but any Paul Anka song could sound like sword fighting against Yamat the Chromatic Dragon on those players.\n\nJust as many of us discovered that sound itself can be an alternative to photographs and paintings.\n\n00:50:34\tAndy Slater\tThese tools, designed to be unappealing so no one would steal them, were also phenomenal noisemakers—antiquities of blind culture. [Voice gets deeper and more distorted]\nAnd they are not that different from contemporary assistive technology. Both can be used creatively—and both can disrupt and annoy.\n\nPhones talk aloud, lid detectors double as theremins, and object recognition apps are often wrong.\n\nBlind folks process multiple sound sources at once because of our use of this tech.\n\n[Voice gets faster and higher] When you compose and perform using these tools, filling the room with blind people’s sounds, you’re most likely making people uncomfortable—which is often the motive of any noise artist.\n\n00:51:10\tAndy Slater\tBut in my case, it’s about deconstructing my own culture and using tools made specifically for me.\nIt gives more meaning to the art and experience.\n\nIt’s political. It’s entitled. And it’s not just some guy showing off a thrift store find.\n\n00:51:22\tSPK_1\t[Switches to another audio recording] [Overlapping and distorted voices] What does this sound look like?\nHow is my hair? Do any disabled people work here? Am I wearing a red shirt? Can you tell me how to find the bathroom? [Sound of tape rewinding]\n\n00:52:08\tJason Camlot\tThank you, Mara and Andy.\n00:52:09\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd next, here on Zoom—Ellen Waterman.\n00:52:14\tEllen Waterman\tMy piece reflects on a research-creation project with Deaf culture artists, Spill Propagation. It’s called Reorienting Audition through Bodily Listening in Place.\n00:52:35\tEllen Waterman\t[Sound of a page flipping] The practice I’m calling bodily listening in place requires something akin to what Natasha Myers and Joe Dumit have termed improvising in a state of mid-embodiment.\nWriting about the interactive practices and responsive bodies of scientists, Myers and Dumit describe how researchers engage with experimental media, communicate their findings through narrative and embodied gesture, and develop new forms of dexterity in the process.\n\n00:53:22\tEllen Waterman\tTheir concept of the responsive excitability of bodies helps explain how experimentalists acquire new kinesthetic, affective, and conceptual dexterities—as they learn to see, feel, and know.\nTheir description matches my embodied experience. I am learning all over again how to listen. [High-pitched sound begins faintly]\n\n00:53:30\tEllen Waterman\tOf course, Myers and Dumit’s article is implicitly ableist. It assumes a hearing, seeing, mobile subject—and in that respect, it resembles most writing about music, sound, and listening.\nWe need to account for the complexities of working across Deaf and hearing music cultures. And what draws me to this work is precisely what can be learned in this reciprocal, intercultural encounter.\n\n00:53:55\tEllen Waterman\tFor example, my work with Spill Propagation has made me attuned to vibrations—seen and felt—with an intensity I have never experienced in my five decades of making music.\nWhen I listen to music through the vibrotactile vest, I can only discern a generalized buzzing and rhythmic thumping.\n\nMy haptic sense is, it seems, woefully undeveloped.\n\nWhat does it mean to acquire dexterity in a sensory mode?\n\nOr better—what does it mean to adopt an intersensory approach to listening that encompasses multiple sensory modes?\n\nAnd what happens when we foreground interdependence as a valid and precious foundation for musical creativity?\n\nThese questions animate my desire to reorient audition through bodily listening in place. [Sound of book closing]\n\n00:54:51\tJason Camlot\tThank you, Ellen. And we’re going to close this reading from the special issue of English Studies in Canada with Katherine McLeod: Archival Listening.\n00:55:02\tKatherine McLeod\tThis is Katherine McLeod, reading from Archival Listening. [Faint background sound]\nArchival listening is listening to archives while reflecting on how you are listening—and how you intend to share what you have heard.\n\nArchival listening listens with a future listener in mind.\n\nArchival listening is a practice of attending to the archival apparatus—holding the sound.\n\nWhile you were away, I held you like this in my mind.\n\n00:55:34\tKatherine McLeod\tArchival listening is hearing the body in time.\nArchival listening is situating oneself as a listening body in time.\n\nArchival listening understands that there are limits to knowing—and makes room for what cannot be heard. [Static and overlapping voices in the background]\n\nArchival listening takes time.\n\n00:55:54\tKatherine McLeod\tWe want to remember what the archive seems to remember.\nArchival listeners are removed from the time and space of a recorded event—but having heard its sound, a new memory of that event is formed, and the feeling of hearing it remains.\n\n00:56:16\tKatherine McLeod\tThat ends our recording. Thank you all for listening. [Sound fades into a whistle]\n00:56:21\tHannah McGregor\t[Beat music starts playing] You’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast—a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team.\nThis podcast is part of our work distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n00:56:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was produced by Jason Camlot.\nIt features the voices and sounds of Douglas Moffat, Katherine McLeod, Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Michael O’Driscoll, Mathieu Aubin, Jason Wiens, Klara du Plessis, Kandice Sharren, Kelly Baron, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Juliette Bellocq, Kim Fox, Reem Elmaghraby, Kristin Moriah, Daniel Martin, Kristen Smith, Tanya E. Clement, Mara Mills, Andy Slater, and Ellen Waterman.\n\n00:57:20\tKatherine McLeod\tThe New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies event was produced by Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, James Healy, and Douglas Moffat. [SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\nCheck the show notes for all of those names again—and for a link to the journal issue itself that this sound piece performed.\n\n00:57:36\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team includes: – Supervising producer: Maia Harris\n– Sound designer: TJ MacPherson\n\n– Transcriber: Yara Ajib\n\n– Co-hosts: Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod\n\n00:57:48\tKatherine McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.\nIf you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on social media.\n\n00:58:05\tKatherine McLeod\tFor now—thanks for listening.\n00:58:08\tSpokenWeb Outro\t[SpokenWeb theme song plays] [Harmonizing voices singing]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9607","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E6, Sound & Seconds: A Roundtable on Timestamping for Literary Archives, 19 May 2025, D'Amours, MacKenzie, Freeman, and Wu"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-seconds/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Natasha D'Amours","Michael MacKenzie","Sarah Freeman","Xuege Wu"],"creator_names_search":["Natasha D'Amours","Michael MacKenzie","Sarah Freeman","Xuege Wu"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Natasha D'Amours\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael MacKenzie\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sarah Freeman\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Xuege Wu\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/audio/ae6837bb-0fb9-49ac-9461-d3cb833658f7/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e7-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"54,754,506 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e7-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-seconds/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-05-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Abel, Jordan. Nishga. McClelland & Stewart, 2021. pp.243-73\\n\\nBernstein, Charles. “‘1–100’ (1969) .” Jacket2, jacket2.org/commentary/1%E2%80%93100-1969. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Charles Bernstein (Poet).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Feb. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bernstein_(poet).\\n\\nBolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. MIT Press, 2000.\\n\\nOne central point of departure for our research, though we had to cut our remediation questions due to time.\\n\\n“Eadweard Muybridge.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Apr. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge.\\n\\nEliot, T. S. “‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets.” Four Quartets – 1 Burnt Norton, www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Gertrude Stein.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein.\\n\\n“Hayden White.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White.\\n\\n“Jackson Mac Low at SGWU, 1971.” Edited by Jason Camlot and Max Stein, SpokenWeb Montréal, 17 Aug. 2015, montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1.\\n\\nThe full version of the recording shown during the episode can be found here. The portion shown during the episode begins at 1:09:35.\\n\\n“Jackson Mac Low.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Mac_Low.\\n\\n“Susan Stewart (Poet).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Sept. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Stewart_(poet).\\n\\n“Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theorist).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Apr. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Ernst_(media_theorist).\\n\\nMore information about our participants can be found at:\\n\\n“Jason Camlot.” Concordia University, www.concordia.ca/faculty/jason-camlot.html. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Michael O’Driscoll.” English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/mo. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\n“Tanya Clement.” College of Liberal Arts at UTexas, liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/faculty/tc24933. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.\\n\\nMusic Credits\\nThis podcast uses music from www.sessions.blue:\\n\\nFor post-question pauses, we used Jemeneye by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).\\n\\nFor framing the podcast itself, we used the song The Griffiths by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).\\n\\nFor framing the roundtable and preceding questions, we used portions of the song “Town Market” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).\\n\\nThis podcast also uses these sounds from freesound.org:\\n\\n“Mechanical Keyboard Typing (Bass Version)” by stu556 ( https://freesound.org/people/stu556/sounds/450281/? ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Monitor hotler“, by iluminati_2705 ( https://freesound.org/people/iluminati_2705/sounds/536706/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Monitor hotler“, by tobbler ( https://freesound.org/people/tobbler/sounds/795373/ ) licensed under Attribution 4.0\\n\\n“aluminum can foley-020.wav”, by CVLTIV8R ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/800102/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“whoosh_fx”, by ScythicBlade ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/800102/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“ignite_dry_02”, by DaUik ( https://freesound.org/people/DaUik/sounds/798712/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Dewalt 12 inch Chop Saw foley-049.wav”, by CVLTIV8R ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/802856/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\\n\\n“Electronic Soap Dispenser 5”, by Geoff-Bremner-Audio ( https://freesound.org/people/Geoff-Bremner-Audio/sounds/802734/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549686845440,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How does timestamping shape the preservation and curation of literary sound? This roundtable episode brings together four SpokenWeb researchers––Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll in conversation with moderator Michael MacKenzie––to explore this deceptively simple yet profoundly complex question. What emerges is a layered, multidisciplinary view of timestamping, not just as a technical task, but as an archival, aesthetic, and philosophical practice.\n\nIn Part One, the conversation begins by situating timestamping in broader historical and intellectual contexts. Panelists reflect on the epistemology of time, from ancient timekeeping and annalistic history to modern digital temporality. What does it mean to mark time, and how does a timestamp compare to a page number, an index, or a narrative structure?\n\nPart Two asks what it means to think critically about timestamping. Here, the guests draw on their scholarly practices to examine the subjectivity of timestamps, the tension between precision and ambiguity, and the role of annotation. The discussion turns to digital media’s microtemporalities and how timestamps carry expressive, affective weight beyond their data function.\n\nIn Part Three, the panel listens to an experimental performance by Jackson Mac Low and considers the challenge of timestamping layered or deliberately disorienting sound. What responsibilities do timestampers have in maintaining a balance between accessibility and artistic intention? Can timestamping illuminate without flattening?\n\nPart Four focuses on vocabulary. Why does it matter if we tag something as a “reading” versus a “performance”? How do controlled vocabularies shape what we can learn from large-scale literary audio corpora? This final section explores how even the smallest metadata decisions reflect theoretical commitments and institutional values.\n\nUltimately, this episode makes one thing clear: timestamping is never neutral. It is an interpretive act, grounded in choices about meaning, representation, and access. From poetic performance to archival platforms, timestamping remains central to how we listen to—and understand—literary sound.\n\n00:00:05\tSpokenWeb Intro Song\t[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod.\n00:00:39\tHannah McGregor\tOne of my favourite genres of SpokenWeb podcast episodes is the behind-the-scenes look at the material labour involved in creating, preserving, and studying literary sound.\nIn past episodes, we’ve talked about the work of transcription, the affordances of sound design, and the messy business of wading through archival collections.\nIn this new episode, producers Natasha D’Amours, Michael MacKenzie, Sarah Freeman, and Xuege Wu take us inside one of the most common kinds of work that research assistants, working on the SpokenWeb project, participate in: timestamping.\n\n00:01:19\tHannah McGregor\tDrawing on the insights and questions that have emerged from their own engagement with timestamping as a practice, the producers bring together a panel of three SpokenWeb researchers—Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll—for a roundtable discussion. Together, they explore epistemologies of time, the subjectivity of annotation practice, and the role of controlled vocabularies, concluding that timestamping is always an interpretive act grounded in choices about meaning, representation, and access.\n00:01:57\tHannah McGregor\tThis is Season 6, Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb podcast: Sound & Seconds: A Roundtable on Timestamping for Literary Archives. [SpokenWeb theme song plays and fades]\n00:02:17\tSarah Freeman\t[Upbeat instrumental music plays in the background]\nWhat does it mean to listen to literary history? Not just to hear voices from the past, but to make them searchable, structured, and accessible.\nFor SpokenWeb, timestamping goes beyond marking moments in an audio recording—it transforms sound into something legible, curates literary events, and preserves ephemeral voices. Each timestamp isn’t just a data point; it bridges raw audio with structured metadata. By logging sonic events alongside their timecodes, we create a detailed map of each recording. These timestamps are then transferred to a public-facing platform where users can engage with the archive, clicking on a timestamped event to jump directly to that moment.\n\n00:03:10\tSarah Freeman\tI’m Sarah Freeman, a student research assistant with SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta. I joined my fellow research assistants, Natasha D’Amours, Michael MacKenzie, and Xuege Wu, to take a deep dive into timestamping. After all, for most of us, our first task with SpokenWeb was timestamping—carefully listening to archival audio to identify and describe sonic events using a controlled vocabulary.\nThis work sits at the intersection of archival practice and digital humanities. But why does it matter? How does timestamping shape the preservation and curation of literary sound? As Phase One of SpokenWeb nears its conclusion, we turn to three scholars who’ve shaped this discussion: Jason Camlot—\n\n00:04:09\tJason Camlot – Audio Clip\t[Click-whirr] Timestamps have existed since the beginning of time. [Click-whirr]\n00:04:14\tSarah Freeman\tMike O’Driscoll–\n00:04:16\tMike O’Driscoll – Audio Clip\t[Click-whirr] I connect it to a whole series of print-based technologies and responses to an overflow of print information. [Click-whirr]\n00:04:25\tSarah Freeman\tAnd Tanya Clement–\n00:04:27\tTanya Clement – Audio Clip\t[Click-whirr] Time is a perspective, and a timestamp can be off, given a perspective. [Click-whirr]\n00:04:34\tSarah Freeman\tIn this episode, we bring you a roundtable conversation moderated by Michael McKenzie that dives into the intellectual, technical, and archival stakes of timestamping.\nLet’s press play [sound of needle dropping on record] and immerse ourselves in the layered sounds of literary preservation.\n00:04:55\tMichael McKenzie, Audio Clip\t[Soft instrumental music plays]\nOkay, so if everyone could just clap on three. Okay, one, two, three—[one clap]\n[Laughter]\nYeah, that was bad. That’s the worst timestamp ever. [Click-whirr]\n00:05:08\tMichael McKenzie\tMy name is Michael McKenzie. I’m a third-year PhD student at the University of Alberta, in English and Film Studies, and I’ll be moderating today’s roundtable on timestamping. [Soft instrumental music continues to play]\n00:05:26\tMichael McKenzie\t[Click-whirr followed by a beep]\nOkay, so, because we only have an hour, I’ll just introduce the first question. So, timestamping is one of the chief places where many graduate students working with SpokenWeb put in our hours. Our podcast teams experience has brought us to think about timestamping in part like literary indexing practices, something that literature has long been subject to by scholars through, for example, the table of contents.\n00:05:52\tMichael McKenzie\tTimestamping, however, is distinct and that it applies the practice of indexing to durational media such as video and audio by cutting it up into smaller periods of time that can easily be searched and studied. Among our team, we’ve begun to notice the ways timestamping exceeds these definitional boundaries to blur the lines with transcription, annotation, introduction, or summary.\n00:06:18\tMichael McKenzie\tThere seems to be a lot more happening with timestamping than its modest reputation suggests.\nSo given the diversity of institutions and styles across SpokenWeb, we’re so glad to have all of you here and your expertise as leaders in SpokenWeb to help us think through these problems and challenges further.\nSo maybe as a point of departure, you might all attempt a definition for timestamping, and explain what timestamping is or has been for you, and perhaps a defining moment for when you started to think about it seriously. [Upbeat music]\n00:06:55\tJason Camlot\tI wouldn’t mind going first because I I took it very seriously and began to think about what is that question: what is a timestamp?\n00:07:03\tSarah Freeman\t[Click-whirr] Jason Camlot, professor at Concordia University and PI [principal investigator] of SpokenWeb, specializes in literary sound recordings and digital artifacts. As the originator of the SpokenWeb project, he’s been around since the very first recordings were digitized and timestamped. [Click-whirr]\n00:07:23\tJason Camlot\tAnd so, I’d like to share a few theses on timestamps that I’ve just developed, right? The first one I want to mention is that, as I was thinking about this, timestamps have existed since the beginning of time. I think that’s an important place to start.\nTimestamps within digital systems, in that sense, represent one manifestation of a long history of temporal measurement—timekeeping and its mobilization for meaning-making. There’s a lot of scholarship on ancient timekeeping, both in relation to the seasons and in the development of mathematics as a way of producing a calculus of time for various purposes.\n\nSo, the conception of time in terms of measurable units and ideas of temporal precision goes back very far in history. Then I started thinking about Hayden White’s work from the 1980s on history, particularly the distinction between annals and historical narrative. I think that’ll be interesting to think about. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:08:22\tSarah Freeman\tHere, Jason is referring to the American theorist of history, Hayden White.\nWhite introduced medieval annals—lists of notable events organized by year—as alternatives to homogenizing historical narratives. Like timestamps, annals link moments in time to events that occurred within them, albeit on a much larger scale. A set of timestamps may be similar to annals, attributing equal importance to disparate threads of a sonic event.\n\nTimestamps may also emphasize similarities across a sonic event, creating a unified narrative of that event—but more often, timestamps do a little bit of both. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:09:06\tJason Camlot\tBecause, you know, annals, in a way, represent another form of historical timestamping, right? They’re just lists of dates and things that happened. But I think there’s an interesting relationship—perhaps even a tension. I’d probably want to think of it as a dialectical relation between the timestamp as a demarcated moment in time’s unfolding, and the larger narrative account within which that timestamp gains significance.\nSo that’s the first thesis.\n00:09:32\tTanya Clement\tI’m going to play devil’s advocate here. [laughs]\nI’m going to say that a timestamp is more like a page number—a way to reference something else you’re interested in. [Click-whirr]\n00:09:48\tSarah Freeman\tTanya Clement, an associate professor at the University of Texas, brings leading expertise in digital sound technologies, data searching and visualization in relation to literary audio and software development for sound pattern searching. [Click-whirr]\n00:10:06\tTanya Clement\tBecause the timestamp itself is only relevant to the extent that it points you to a concept, an idea, or an event. The way we’re working with timestamps in this project is to indicate or index an annotation. That annotation could be a transcript, a note, or a description. But the timestamp itself is significant only insofar as it points to a place on the material medium. This doesn’t mean it’s insignificant as a material aspect of that medium, but I don’t think it bears significance without an attached annotation—without a reason.\n00:10:58\tMike O’Driscoll\tYeah, I’m going to take a slightly different approach. I think of timestamping as a technology of information management. [Click-whirr]\n00:11:07\tSarah Freeman\tMichael O’Driscoll, professor at the University of Alberta and co-applicant of SpokenWeb, contributes deep knowledge of poetry and poetics, material culture, and archive theory. [Click-whirr]\n00:11:20\tMike O’Driscoll\tAnd I connect it to a whole series of print-based technologies and responses to a deluge of print matter in the mid-19th century—responses that led, for example, to the formation of the Royal Indexing Society in the UK. This included the standardization of cataloguing systems in libraries, a whole suite of archival management techniques, and other methods for handling an overflow of printed information at the time. One of the ways Western society responded to this was by developing a system of codified, standardized, and professionalized information management technologies.\nThese systems evolved over time. And with the emergence of durational media in the late 19th and 20th centuries, we also began to require new ways of counting and organizing time within those media.\n\n00:12:19\tMike O’Driscoll\tAnd so, like Tanya, I would probably connect those to various kinds of print technologies;you mentioned page numbers, but I think of them more predominantly as a form of table of contents—a form of indexation, a way to get inside the black box of analog and digital recordings in order to discern what those contents might be in a practical and manageable way, in advance of actually engaging those as listening events.\n00:12:51\tJason Camlot\tJust to reinforce– [Click-whirr]\n00:12:53\tSarah Freeman\tHere’s Jason Camlot jumping back in. This type of spontaneous exchange is part of the roundtable format, where anyone can speak up at any time. [Click-whirr]\n00:13:05\tJason Camlot\tThe emphasis on print that both Tanya and Mike made—the page, the page number, the index—highlights the mirrored presence of the term “stamp” in relation to temporality, right in the phrase itself. I think it really underscores that way of thinking about the control of time, or the attempt to control something that is, by nature, probably less controllable, you know, by fixing it in some way or another—with a reference or an index—we attempt to make time manageable.\nAnd I would just add to Mike’s point that so much of 19th-century print culture is periodical, right? It essentially divides itself into periods—whether it’s dailies, weeklies, or monthlies—each of which is a different measure of things happening within that span of time. So, the explosion of periodical literature in the 19th century is another strong manifestation of what Mike was talking about.\n\n00:14:11\tMike O’Driscoll\tHaving said that, Jason, I also found that your recourse to early time mechanisms—timekeeping mechanisms—is really fascinating, because it’s true that everything from sundials to Stonehenge, to much else—to the pyramids—are devoted to ways of marking time. And that time is also, you know, connected to astrophysical observations and all kinds of other geological observations. And, you know, it maybe is a false heuristic to divide these things, because they are all technologies of temporal management in one way or another, and time is just one more form of information.\n00:14:52\tJason Camlot\tDespite Tanya’s opening rhetorical gambit, I did not take them to be in opposition to each other whatsoever. Actually, I think what all three of us have said is quite continuous with one another.\n00:15:05\tTanya Clement\tWith one exception, though—I really, honestly, don’t see timestamps as a table of contents. I think it’s page numbers. In my mind, it really has very little information without an annotation attached. So, a table of contents doesn’t make much sense if you just have the page numbers; you have to say, like, what’s on those page numbers that you’re actually indexing. I think the same is true with information architectures—you know, just having numbered cells isn’t necessarily useful unless you know what they’re indicating.\nI still think I’m being a bit of a devil’s advocate here, because I’m not giving that much importance or significance to the timestamp in and of itself without the attached—what I would call—the annotation.\n\n00:15:58\tJason Camlot\tI don’t see that as being different from, say, the annals, right? The annotation there is how the crops were that year, right? You know, whatever—it’s referring to something that happened. So in that case, the annotation and the reference point in time is an event. It might have been an event related to the weather, or crops, or some political event, potentially. You know, when annals mention kings—when they took the throne, etc.—those are all indexing events that happened.\nOne thing I really like about your pushback, though—because when this question about what is a timestamp? was asked to me and I sort of went back in time—is how much I realized that, as we move from ancient history and conceptions of temporality through analog media and its modes of marking time to digital media, a lot of that shift seems to be about the scale at which one is doing annotations, and the increasing degrees of precision—what Wolfgang Ernst calls micro-temporalities—as we move into digital media.\n\nSo, I think a table of contents versus a timestamp, or annals that are annual versus a timestamp of a 3-minute recording with 50 annotations—those are questions of temporal scale that I think are really interesting to think about in relation to timestamps. But personally, I see them as working on a continuum.\n\n00:17:29\tMike O’Driscoll\tOne of the things I really liked that you said, Tanya, is that it actually invites us to make a finer distinction between the timestamp as simply the marking of time, and the annotation as the demarcation of content, or event, or evaluation, or summary judgment—whatever that might be—of that particular moment in time.\nAnd by saying, “Oh, it’s like a table of contents,” I think I’m collapsing those ideas into one concept. And it sounds like you’re working to keep them as distinct—distinct activities or distinct forms of impression. [Soft instrumental music plays]\n00:18:14\tSarah Freeman\tAs student assistants on the SpokenWeb U Alberta team, we see timestamping as a crucial intermediary step between digitizing reel-to-reel tapes and making them publicly accessible.\n00:18:28\tSarah Freeman\tWe use close listening to identify when specific sounds occur in the recordings and sometimes conduct archival research to determine, for example, which poem a speaker is performing. This process results in metadata, such as the following timestamp: “From 0:01 to 1:01, Earle Birney performs his version of Kurt Schwitters’ ‘Ursonate’.”\nIn creating these timestamps, we’re not just listening to and analyzing the recordings—we’re transforming them into written data, effectively turning sound into another form of media. [Instrumental music plays and fades]\n\n00:19:10\tMichael McKenzie\tThe next thing I wanted to ask is: why should we think critically about timestamping? This question comes from a place of thinking about timestamping as something that might fly under people’s critical thinking radar. What kinds of things have you encountered that made you start to think critically about timestamping?\nI have a list of examples here—everything from YouTube’s heat map algorithm, which shows how popular a video is at any given point along its time bar, to EKG (electrocardiogram) monitors that mark the rhythm of a heartbeat and any interruptions in it with beeps and squiggles. There are also the SETI Institute’s protocols for parsing sound from outer space to identify potential alien messages, and seismic monitors or lie detectors that give off sudden bursts of timestamping activity.\n\nThese are all examples with very specific goals and motives. Given the wide variety of things a timestamp can do, what brought you to start thinking critically about it?\n\n00:20:28\tTanya Clement\tSo obviously, especially in the context of the examples you gave, timestamping can be done for a variety of reasons, and different people might choose to index a recording differently for a variety of purposes. What I find interesting, though, is that when you engage with something like timestamping—and you try to translate those timestamps across systems or datasets, or manipulate the data in the process of transposing it from one format to another—what you sometimes find is that the timestamp gets altered. It becomes a little less accurate, a little bit off.\nAnd I think that does matter. I’m not sure if this is an exact response to your question, but it is something that feels closely related.\n\n00:21:24\tTanya Clement\tWhat comes to mind is that the act of timestamping reminds you that time can also be subjective. Especially because timestamping is inherently something that depends on a digital or electronic apparatus in some way, shape, or form. And those devices are calibrated according to different standards—different time zones, and many other variables. There’s also the question of precision: whether the timestamp goes to the thousandths of a second, or just to the milliseconds, or even less precisely.\n00:22:01\tTanya Clement\tSo I think there is some space to consider whether we are actually thinking about timestamps—and if, as I’m proposing, we disambiguate timestamps from the act of annotation itself. If we want to think about timestamps in a more theoretical or conceptual way, I do think there’s a provocation or an invitation to consider the extent to which time is a perspective—and how a timestamp can be off, depending on that perspective. Whether it’s a human perspective, a particular system, or a specific data format, time shifts. It’s not fixed.\n00:22:43\tMike O’Driscoll\tSo I was teaching T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets yesterday, which is, of course, a poem about time—a really deep philosophical meditation on time—that I would argue can only be understood through listening to the poem. And I think that, in some ways, is Eliot’s argument: you cannot comprehend the poem’s bid for revelation or incarnation through critical description or classroom discussion. You can only get where he wants to take you by listening to the poem.\nAnd that’s predicated on those great lines toward the beginning of Burnt Norton:\n“If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.\nWhat might have been is an abstraction,\nRemaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.”\n\n00:23:44\tMike O’Driscoll\tAnd Tanya, as you were talking about the transmediation of timestamps—the ways in which they go awry, and the ways in which they are unredeemable, in Eliot’s words—that’s what I was thinking about: that it’s actually an incredibly complex process to mark time. And we delude ourselves into thinking it’s a matter of simplicity. There’s so much going on in the presumptions we make about redeeming time in the space of durational media, and how we might mark and manage something that, as Eliot says, remains a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.\nThis is not only a deep philosophical problem—it’s also a very complex practical one.\n\n00:24:40\tJason Camlot\tGoing back to the distinction between analog and digital media, I think the idea of having greater control over something unfolding as it’s represented in a medium is key. And I would add photography to this. We could think of chronophotography, for example—Muybridge being one notable case. [Click-whirr]\n00:25:00\tSarah Freeman\tEadweard Muybridge was a 19th-century photographer known for using sequential images to capture motion, pioneering early studies of time and movement. [Click-whirr]\n00:25:12\tJason Camlot\tAnd then we can think of early cylinder recordings—and especially flat disc recordings—as having timestamps on them, or at least as representing or manifesting a certain kind of timestamping of time. In Muybridge’s case, each image is, in a way, a timestamp in a series of movements. But on a flat disc record, the spaces between tracks could be seen as timestamps, as the album side unfolds. They help you locate something that could also be matched up with time indicators next to a track—though that happens a bit later.\nThen, analog tape recorders began to include time counters. Not right away—in the 1930s, they didn’t have them—but eventually, they did, as it became more important to navigate and manipulate the recordings. So, there’s a strong sense of timestamping as a form of power over time, embedded in whatever media format one is engaging with.\n\nAnd I guess the point I was going to make about digital technologies, as opposed to analog ones, is that digitized and digital media represent a fuller realization of the timestamp concept in media form.\n\n00:26:35\tJason Camlot\tSo that is—time in digital media becomes sampled into these micro-temporalities. It’s not fluid in the way we understand analog media to be, because analog is made up of transduced patterns that don’t necessarily have natural breaks within them. But digital media is literally sampled—it’s slices of time. That’s how it’s represented. And so we could say that, as a media form, it lends itself even more to the idea of controlling time in the most infinitesimal ways.\nBut where I want to go is actually to my last thesis, in relation to what Tanya was saying, which is that timestamps also have the potential to express. That’s the thesis—it’s an ambiguous or cryptic one, and I’m going to unpack it. I think it has something to do with what Tanya was pointing out about the subjectivity of timestamps. What I mean by that is the possibility of an aesthetic or a poetics of the timestamp in itself. And I love the idea that timestamps, when disconnected from their annotations or from their historical or temporal events, can go awry in a variety of ways.\n\nThey are primarily mechanisms of precise control over time—for a variety of purposes, to make arguments, to serve different ends. But the example I have in mind is actually a chapter in Jordan Abel’s book Injun. There are a couple of sections where he offers a timestamped transcript from a lecture he gave at the TransCanada conference. And if you read that text as a poem, I think what he’s performing there is exactly what Tanya was talking about—he’s really attempting, in this piece of writing (which consists of a lot of timestamps), to explore that poetics.\n\nI’ve actually read it out loud, and when I quote from it, a long section might be something like: 15:38:53–15:38:54, right? That’s just the passage of a second. But it carries so much weight in how it’s presented.\n\n00:28:56\tJason Camlot\tAnd it just goes on and on—you can literally read that for half a page. But he’s using timestamps in relation to the text, which is also timestamped, but without the same precision. He’s using them to communicate either what’s not being said, or what’s being felt in the interim as he’s reading. He gives a sense of using the timestamp to capture the affect in the room and in the speaker, as that speech unfolds in time.\nAnd the timestamps, as they appear on that page, I would argue, represent a kind of poetics of the timestamp—one that aims to show how time is always subjectively relative. It depends a great deal on how one is experiencing a moment, a second, or whatever unit of time it may be.\n\n00:29:48\tJason Camlot\tI think it’s very important, as a sort of initial ethos or way of thinking going into timestamping, to remember that these are determinations. It’s a kind of determinate technique that we’re attempting to use to control time in certain ways. But the poetics—or aesthetic—of the timestamp, as I’m finding it in Jordan Abel’s work, reminds us of something very important. And that’s what Tanya opened with in this segment: the idea that timestamps can be off, and they can be off even when they’re on, in some ways. I guess that’s my point—yeah.\n00:30:30\tMike O’Driscoll\tMichael, you started this part of our conversation by asking what it was that got us to think a little more critically and carefully about the act of timestamping. And for me, that was very much part of it—the recognition that this was a constructed way of framing, accessing, and receiving durational media and its contents. That in the act of timestamping, as well as in the act of annotation, there is a whole series of historically, ideologically, and culturally bound presuppositions that we bring to that activity.\nAnd that is where the expressivity of the timestamp might lie: in the fact that we carry certain values and meanings into the production of timestamps and annotations. Those values and meanings shape the circulation and reception of the objects we subject to those practices.\n\n00:31:31\tJason Camlot\tI have a question for Tanya, actually—and it comes out of the project we’re working on right now, which involves attempting to crowdsource timestamps from people watching a video. It’s a great example of the unhinged timestamp, because we’re trying to bring in timestamps from Zoom and then figure out how to upload them and match them to the AV content.\nWhat I’ve realized as we go through this project is that so much of our work focuses on making sure that the comments—the annotations—are timestamped, that they’re actually linked up to the AV, right?\n\nI’d love to hear, or for all of us maybe to reflect on: what’s the difference in value between a timestamped annotation (which we almost use as one word sometimes) and just an annotation? Like, what if we didn’t timestamp any of our annotations for that event, and we just had this running text? The reader—or the listener—would then have to figure out what’s referring to what. You know?\n\n00:32:34\tTanya Clement\tYeah, no, I think—I mean, if you’re going to do that, then why even do them sequentially? Because I think even the act of having those annotations, the way you described it, gave me a visual of positioning them next to each other—almost like people are listening and looking at them side by side. But that’s also a form of timestamping, right? It’s not as precise, per se, but I think it’s a kind of conceptual timestamping that operates with broader parameters around time.\nFor example, I was timestamping an interview the other day—mostly just doing transcripts—but I had a range for a particular moment.\n\n00:33:25\tTanya Clement\tAnd it was interesting to me because I kept having to correct myself. I would say, Oh, this is wrong because the timestamp isn’t exactly right. But then I had to remember, as I was listening and then looking over at the timestamp, that I had used a range. So in fact, what the person was saying wasn’t outside the range—it wasn’t at the start time or the end time—it was somewhere in the middle.\nBut I kept having to remind myself: Oh, it’s not that exact number. The number kept making me think it had to be very precise, when in fact, it could be anywhere within that space. I’m always reminded of Gertrude Stein, right? As human beings, when we’re reading things or trying to understand them, we tend to put them into structures—and we rely on those structures to make sense of what’s happening. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:34:20\tSarah Freeman\tHere, Tanya introduces Gertrude Stein, a modernist writer who challenged linear narratives through her use of repetition. Tanya’s evocation of Stein invites us to consider how we impose order on information. Perhaps our uncritical encounters with timestamping reflect a broader tendency: our uncritical reliance on the formal structures of language itself.\n00:34:46\tTanya Clement\tSo I do think that just the simple act of placing notes—again, in my mind, it’s spatial—next to the screen where you see the video means that people are going to tend to read them sequentially, unless you intentionally mix it up. And if you tell them it’s mixed up, then that becomes a whole different experience. But if you don’t tell them it’s mixed up, they might feel confused—and I don’t know if that’s the intention.\nSo I think one’s intention, if you’re being inexact with timestamping, can be generative, but it can also be confusing. Because when people see timestamps, they tend to assume: this is what’s happening at that exact moment. Or if they see something in sequential order, they assume: this is what’s being talked about first, then this, then the next thing. So you’re still imposing a time-based order, I think.\n\n00:35:57\tMichael McKenzie\tYeah, that’s actually so great—it leads me right into the next question, which has to do with the idea of the audio object as a black box. Someone approaching it without something like timestamps won’t necessarily know what’s inside.\nMy question is about what timestamping does in this context: on one hand, it provides accessibility—it allows you to directly find what you need. But at the same time, some artists or performers might want to preserve a certain sense of enigma or opacity in their work. So timestamping can also risk disrupting that intentional ambiguity.\n\nWhat I’d like to do now is briefly check out a clip from Jackson Mac Low. I’ll share my screen so we can listen to it together—it’s one of the pieces we’ve timestamped. I’ll share my question with you right after we take a look. [Click-whirr]\n\nWarning: you might want to turn your volume down a little bit. [Click-whirr]\n\n00:37:04\tJackson Mac Low – Audio Clip\t[Overlapping, distorted voices]\n“…About—honestly, that… Alison Knowles, Carol… Dickens’ farm… Rose Jackson, Scott… take… Gotti? Haha… there’s something… dark—God? Song? Sing? Maybe that. Slide… please… I—I gotta eat… thank God now… guaranteed… body spa? Please…”\n\nNote: This segment contains heavily distorted and overlapping voices. The transcript reflects best approximations.\n\n00:38:30\tMichael McKenzie\tOK, so that was a clip from Jackson Mac Low’s Fifth Gatha, and I’ve got a few questions. What do timestamps do on a practical level for people using the audio in your practice? And what do you want to avoid with your timestamps in a recording like Mac Low’s, or something else you’ve encountered?\nWhat matters from a practical and theoretical perspective when you encounter a difficult piece like this? And specifically, what I mean by that is: when a piece appears to want to remain enigmatic or appear opaque—not necessarily easy to interpret—what happens when we include, inside our timestamps, descriptive words like inaudible or unintelligible? What does that do? How might that affect a reader or listener when the thing they’re listening to might have the express purpose of being noise, or of being inaudible on purpose?\n\nAnd so, have you thought about the intersection of those things? And also, more generally, have you run into difficult pieces like this that have really made you think about your practice?\n\n00:39:49\tJason Camlot\tSince this came from the Sir George Williams series, and I was there when this first transcription happened—this timestamp mentioned—I could give a little bit of background. And I think it’s a fascinating example for thinking about timestamping in the way we’ve been discussing it.\nFirst of all, how is this timestamped and annotated on the site where it appears? Essentially, there’s a timestamp before the performance of the Fifth Gatha, where Mac Low explains what they’re about to do. The transcript for that explanation is actually connected to a timestamp—so that’s at 01:06:11, where he says something like, I’ll do a piece called Fifth Gatha, and then he goes on to explain what’s about to happen.\n\nThen you have an annotation at 01:09:35, and it just says performs Fifth Gatha, right? And there’s nothing else there. But I’m looking at this, and I’m actually quite grateful that there are no annotations for the piece itself.\n\n00:40:54\tJason Camlot\tThe reason we didn’t include annotations to describe what was happening in the piece is that we had an approach for all the annotations: not to transcribe any of the poems themselves, so to speak—because we didn’t have the rights to them. Although that probably wouldn’t have applied in quite the same way to this particular work.\nSo, following that logic: at 01:09:35 it says performs Fifth Gatha, and then at 01:26:20 he starts talking again. So all we have is the time span during which that piece unfolded, and that’s the only annotation that exists in relation to that timestamp.\n\n00:41:34\tJason Camlot\tSo there’s not much there, other than the fact that a certain amount of time took place—or unfolded—when this particular piece was performed. The other thing I’d mention is that we approached it with the sense that transcribing it wouldn’t necessarily have been advisable anyway. Instead, we did a lot of contextual research around the event to try to understand what it was we were hearing.\nAnd that, probably, would be more interesting to actually include—because we learned quite a bit from conducting an oral history with two of the technicians who were there assisting Mac Low. They told us about the setup in the room: there were five reel-to-reel tape recorders that had been pieced together. I even saw the tech list that Mac Low had submitted, and that made all the technicians laugh when they were together in the room.\n\n00:42:21\tJason Camlot\tIt was like, there’s no way we’re getting him this stuff, you know? But they cobbled together a bunch of machines. This piece was performed in other places at other times, and he would play those performances while the one happening in the room was also being performed—and recorded by another machine, right?\nSo, essentially, to timestamp this would be extremely complex, because it’s an event unfolding in multiple places at the same time—in New York, and wherever else he was—as well as in the present moment. And then that tape would be brought to a future performance, and so on.\n\nSo, in this case, I think some explanation of the context of what we’re listening to would probably be even more useful than attempting a transcriptive annotation.\n\n00:43:15\tMike O’Driscoll\tThe gaffes are really important for Jackson, as I understand it, in part because they’re one of his many challenges to the centered, stable, egoic presence of the author in the production of the work. In particular, with these polyphonic pieces, he’s challenging notions of a monologic, expressive lyric subject and disrupting our presumptions about the authority that rests with that voice. And the gaffes do really interesting work in that regard.\nBut the other thing they do—and you could say this about a lot of Jackson’s work—is tied to its recursive nature. He’s working with computer technologies and other algorithmic systems to produce his work in the first place, and he’s drawing from discursive corpora of other authors. Gertrude Stein came up earlier in our conversation, and the Stein poems would be a really good example of that—but there are many others as well.\n\nOne of the things he’s doing is also challenging our notions of time. The linearity of the performance piece, its monologic subjectivity, and its stability—these are all things that he’s disrupting in a piece like The Gathas. And these, in turn, are the very presuppositions we often bring to the practice of timestamping.\n\nIn other words, in a very fundamental way, Jackson’s art forms challenge the basic suppositions we hold when we think about duration, performance, event, and subject. All of those things come under scrutiny—and all of them are disrupted in one way or another by his work. That’s why the limit case you shared with us is such a wonderful way to get us to rethink the fundamental ideas we bring to the activity of marking durational media.\n\n00:45:35\tMichael McKenzie\tYeah, that’s so great. OK, the next question has to do—and this might be interesting to you—with constrained vocabularies or standardized vocabularies that are used in style guides. What happens when the only option, for example, when someone is reading or performing something, is to choose the word perform—which is the case here at UVA?\nWhat goes into deciding on a standardized vocabulary or a reduced set of words that we’ll use when annotating or timestamping? What’s the thought process behind determining that perform is going to be the word we use, and not read?\n\n00:46:28\tTanya Clement\tYeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that, because I mean—it’s really the most difficult part. So for our project, we allow people to index the annotations, and that includes a tag. That tag allows you to group your annotations in particular ways, which then lets you access them according to those groupings later.\nSo, let’s say your annotations are transcripts, and you want to add speaker names as tags so you can see everywhere that a particular person has spoken across a project—because all of their annotations have been tagged with their name. The same could be true if, say, you were working within a particular theoretical perspective, and you had terms that might be adopted in the context of that theoretical positioning—you might want to tag a transcript based on those.\n\nI guess the short answer is: it depends on your theoretical perspective. It depends on what it is you’re trying to pull out or identify as significant in a particular recording. You don’t have to do transcripts at all, really. A lot of people tend to do them because they create better access for listeners or users. But I think the larger point is: it depends. It depends on what you’re trying to mark as significant.\n\n00:48:08\tJason Camlot\tTo build on what Tanya said—why reads versus performs—that’s an interesting question, right? The short answer is: it allows you to do things with larger amounts of data that you couldn’t do otherwise.\nSo, the very first thing we did with SpokenWeb in the first year—the first task force we struck—was our Metadata Task Force. That was in anticipation of having hundreds of hours of audio that we were planning to describe. We were imagining doing things with that material which, without some kind of controlled vocabulary and grammar for our schema, would have been much more difficult—especially if we wanted the recordings to teach us things about each other when placed in relation to one another.\n\nWhen I say it allows us to do things we couldn’t do otherwise, I mean we were looking at other existing schemas—their vocabularies and grammars—to ensure that, if we came across other collections that already had some metadata, we’d be able to bring it in, or ingest their metadata, more easily than if we didn’t have a shared structure.\n\nSo we wanted to make sure our terms were interoperable with other standardized languages or grammars. But we also wanted, as much as possible, to ensure that we were tagging, annotating, and describing individual recordings in a way that categorized them meaningfully.\n\n00:49:40\tJason Camlot\tSo that if we then faceted our larger dataset by a search term—like, say, poetry reading or radio broadcast—it would bring up all of the recordings, or as many as are appropriate to bring up under that category. It allows us to actually search a larger corpus of audio more effectively, and also to make connections across recordings in ways we might not have even thought of yet.\nFor example, if we’re interested in the distinction between performing versus reading, perhaps that becomes a useful search term for locating more experimental kinds of performance within the contents fields themselves—which one could do, if one wanted to, because that vocabulary was adhered to.\n\nSo the vocabularies can be useful, but they are all forms of abstraction—necessary forms of abstraction if you want to do this kind of more distant searching or reading of the contents. They’re useful in their own ways, but abstractions also do violence to the particulars of the events themselves. They’re not always accurate, or fully capable of capturing what’s actually unfolding—but they’re useful up to a point, depending on the goals one might have when working with these materials as data.\n\nAnd that’s the other thing that’s really happening in a lot of this work: we’re converting qualitative humanities content—speech, performance, sound of various kinds—into different forms of data, by using these controlled vocabularies.\n\n00:51:21\tMike O’Driscoll\tOne of the things I really love about these kinds of questions—and this is something that has become more and more apparent over time in working with archives of audio media in the context of SpokenWeb—is that every one of these practical questions actually has an incredibly rich intellectual, theoretical, and scholarly background. And that’s quite an amazing thing.\nSo I would say, for example, that the difference between performance and reading—if we designate the activity of a particular author on stage who’s been recorded as reading a work—for me, it connotes the idea that the literary audio performance is secondary to a print version of the text. That you are reading—that it’s derivative, right? That it follows from something else.\n\nWhereas the notion of performance, for me, carries the weight of the performative. In other words, it’s a constitutive medium of its own. A performance produces a text that is not secondary or derivative to the print version—it’s its own beast.\n\nAnd so, the language that we use to describe the work we’re doing in this regard can carry some pretty heavy connotations. But that only comes under scrutiny—only becomes a matter of discussion—when we sit down and deliberate: how do we describe these things? And what values does it carry to do it one way or another?\n\nThat’s the part that’s most exciting for me. Getting to the practicality of it—being able to produce constrained vocabularies to increase searchability, interoperability between different systems, and all of the things that go along with that—is really crucial.\n[Upbeat instrumental music starts playing] But the fun part is the conversation that gets you there.\n\n00:53:41\tSarah Freeman\tTimestamping doesn’t happen in a bubble. During our roundtable, timestamping took us through history—as we discussed, for instance, Gertrude Stein, medieval annals, Hayden White, Victorian periodicals, and Stonehenge. We reflected on the intricacies of the controlled vocabulary used in timestamping and its broader applications, from EKG machines to SETI protocols that extend far beyond literature.\nWe also explored what it means to timestamp a recording that resists singular meaning—such as Jackson Mac Low’s Fifth Gatha. Most of all, we learned that timestamping is far from a settled field. There is no objective or universal timestamp. Each one results from a series of subjective, contingent, and political decisions made by the time stamper.\n\nTimestamping is an invitation to intervene, to interpret, and—most of all—to create.\n\n00:54:49\tSarah Freeman\tThank you to our roundtable participants—Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Michael O’Driscoll—for their insightful contributions to our discussion.\nFurther thanks to Michael O’Driscoll, Sean Lowe, and the SpokenWeb Podcast production team for their support in creating this episode.\n\nTechnical support was provided by the Digital Scholarship Centre at the University of Alberta.\n\nThis podcast was produced by Natasha D’Amours, Michael MacKenzie, Xuege Wu, and me, Sarah Freeman.\n\n00:55:41\tHannah McGregor\tYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from — and created using — Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThis month’s episode was produced by Natasha D’Amours, Michael McKenzie, Sarah Freeman, and Xuege Wu, and features the voices and smart ideas of Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll.\n\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast Team includes supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. If you love us, let us know — rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media.\n\nPlus, check out our socials for info on upcoming listening parties and more. For now, thanks for listening."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9609","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E10, SoundBox Signals presents “Is Robin Here?\", 6 July 2020, Shearer and Sallam  "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-robin-here/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3c9851a8-a26b-4ce2-a34d-55fd66f7201c/sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:40:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"39,404,818 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"http://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-robin-here/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-07-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94219\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39907\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The SoundBox Collection: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\\n\\nAmy Thiessen’s Honours Project / Digitial Exhibition on Sharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net\\n\\nThe Real Vancouver Writers’ Series: https://realvancouver.org/\\n\\nEpisode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast featuring Hannah McGregor: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/\\n\\nSecret Feminist Agenda podcast: https://secretfeministagenda.com/category/podcast/   \\n\\nChristine Mitchell’s “Can You Hear Me?”:  https://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/ \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549691039744,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor and Emily Murphy to question what we can uncover about the dynamics of a space through listening. Together they invite us into a ‘close listening’ of Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church (Vancouver) March 14, 1970. Recorded on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Listen to find out if “Robin” is here.\n\nProduced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what *listening* allows us to know about cultural history. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\n\n00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:26\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast SoundBox Signals. We’ll hear some new voices to the podcast, as well as some that might sound a little bit more familiar, like mine. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close-listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together, they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor—that’s me—and Emily Murphy. Together, we discuss Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “‘Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church in Vancouver on March 14th, 1970 on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Here is Karis Shearer and SoundBox Signals asking: “Is Robin Here?” [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Begin Music: Gentle Ambient Instrumentals] [Various Recorded Voices] I see you face to face. What is the voice? Certainty of others for life, love, sight, hearing of others. Where is this voice…coming from? I see you also face to face.\n \n\n02:45\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today in the studio at UBC Okanagan by guest curator Amy Thiessen, who is the SpokenWeb RA and our very own project manager and she’s also completing a honour’s thesis on the work of Sharon Thesen. I’m also joined by Emily Murphy, who is a professor of digital humanities and assistant director of the AMP Lab. And today we have from Vancouver Hannah McGregor, who’s assistant professor in publishing at Simon Fraser University and host of the Secret Feminist Agenda. Welcome everybody, thanks for joining us.\n \n\n03:22\tHannah McGregor:\tThank you, I’m delighted to be here.\n \n\n03:23\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, I too am delighted.\n \n\n03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tAmy, are you also delighted?\n \n\n03:28\tAmy Thiessen:\tSuper.\n \n\n03:31\tKaris Shearer:\tFantastic. We’re here to talk about a really special recording, a weird recording. So we’re gonna rewind to March 14th, 1970 and have a listen to Warren Tallman introducing an event that is called the Charles Olson Memorial. So here we go.\n \n\n03:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Audio, Warren Tallman] Some people who were planning this, that we would have all the poets lined up in front on a sheet of paper so that it could be read off one, two, three, four, five. It didn’t work out. So all you poets are in the audience. And so it’s going to have to be when it gets around to that point at which you would like to read for this reading, it is, it’s going to have to be kind of Quaker, you know, or what I assume is Quaker that you stand up on your feet and walk forward in some calm or pause that has taken place. And…yes? [Someone Asks A Question] Yeah. You can’t hear? [Person Speaks More, Inaudible] Oh, I– yeah. I’m supposed to make an announcement about how long to read. It’s always impressed me as rather ridiculous to tell a poet how long to read, but I will tell all of you poets this, that if there’s a rhythm that’s going, which makes for three or four or five minutes, if you break it by reading for 40 minutes, everybody in the audience will hate you. [Laughs] So I would say three or four or five minutes, although you understand that’s not an instruction to impede on the freedom of any poet to read. [Crashing Sound] [Laughter] I– I am, I am, I’m being deliberately rather facetious and frivolous, so that we can have that to work on, to move into an actually more serious occasion. And since we do not have any listing of the poets, you must choose your own occasion as it occurs to you. But first, I would like to have Robin. Is Robin here? Okay. Well, Robin Blaser is going to start this with a reading. It is going to be interrupted with a tape and there’ll be an interruption after the tape of about three or two minutes or so. And then the poets will read whatever has occurred to them to read on the occasion of this memorial for Charles Olson. [Click]\n \n\n06:43\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy, you chose this recording. Can you tell us a little bit about what we know about it?\n \n\n06:48\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. So this recording, as Karis said earlier, was recorded on March 14th, 1970. We know that they are gathered at St. Anslem’s church on the UBC Vancouver campus and that it was recorded on reel-to-reel.\n \n\n07:04\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And it’s about, it’s an excerpt, it’s the very beginning of a whole recording. It’s about an hour long. It also features a number of different poets. Robin Blaser, obviously, is mentioned. Judith Copithorne, Peter Quartermain, Lionel Kearns, Richard Sommer from Montreal, Maxine Gadd, and quite a few other poets. It’s a weird introduction to a poetry reading. Hannah, I’m going to turn that over to you. You’ve been to a lot of record–, poetry readings. What, what’s weird about this?\n \n\n07:38\tHannah McGregor:\tI mean, so one of the, one of the major jobs when I think about what hosts at poetry readings are trying to do, one of the major things that they are doing, is sort of set tone and norms for what’s about to proceed. And a lot of that, a lot of the work at literary readings has to do with establishing how long people are allowed to read for. Because in my experience, without that, people will read for a wild amount of time. And even with the norms, people will read for a wild amount of time. And so what really… The first listen through to this, what really struck me was that invitation to a Quaker-like sort of self-electing process in which poets will get up, “you poets” will just get up, and read when they feel moved to do so and are sort of given this like, you know, read for four to five minutes or whatever feels right. Probably not 40. Which is… There’s a lot of lateral movement in that four to 40 minutes.\n \n\n08:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you bet. It’s, I mean, there’s a sort of sense of spontaneity, but Emily, it’s kind of, it’s, it is controlled, right? I mean, he is setting up some boundaries. What are the boundaries that you’re hearing in this?\n08:48\tEmily Murphy:\tSuper controlled. I mean, I think that one of the major boundaries is this idea that social pressure will help keep boundaries around the poets, which many of us know probably wouldn’t work. But one of the things that I did find really interesting about this is that buried in this desire for spontaneity is kind of like a series of conventions about what’s going to count as it. Like, even down to instructions for movement, right? Like some kind of Quaker ceremony where you, like you stand up in a moment of silence and walk towards the front of the room. There’s already like a really embodied physical dimension being made explicit in his instructions, which indicates to me then that there are actually like quite clear boundaries for what counts as spontaneity and probably what counts as improvisation of a sort in this room that, I mean, we often think of improvisation as a thing that just kind of springs from you internally. But there are, there’s plenty of research that is calling for a kind of richer understanding of what the conventions of improvisation are or kind of conventions that signal this sort of authentic, spontaneous contribution.\n \n\n09:59\tHannah McGregor:\tI was just thinking even in that “be totally spontaneous, but four to five minutes” suggests that this really interesting tension between the desire to establish an environment of spontaneity and sort of free responsiveness to what’s happening alongside the need to state and establish norms. And that tension is really interesting and also leads me to wonder, you know, historically, at what point do we start establishing norms of five-minute readings of 10-minute readings? Like, when you hear about readings that last 45 minutes, how and when and why are we starting to arrive at a sense of what is supposed to be, apparently, kind of innate or kind of intuitive or kind of felt the sense of how long is an appropriate length to read?\n \n\n10:53\tEmily Murphy:\tMy– I mean, my hunch is that that history is probably a religious one, right? That we probably start seeing shorter readings while, when more people are literate, essentially. I mean, my own, any of my knowledge, which is limited, about how people would read in public is about kind of belletristic traditions, right? Where you would read letters because you weren’t reading to a literate population and you would read verses and sermons that were timed to like the bells that would go off in a public square. And so that’s like, that’s a really religious background to public readings. And here we have an extensively secular event that’s held in a church and that—can I give a spoiler about the first reading?\n \n\n11:42\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you sure can.\n \n\n11:42\tEmily Murphy:\tThe first reading is from Revelations. So it’s like shot through with these religious contexts.\n \n\n11:50\tKaris Shearer:\tIn addition to the invocation of the Quaker-ness, right? There’s actually—\n \n\n11:53\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n11:53\tKaris Shearer:\t–quite a lot of religiosity evoked in this. One of the questions we ask on the podcast is like, what does listening allow us to know about cultural history? And I’m going to turn this over to Amy to ask you what kind of information do we hear in this podcast, do we gather through listening in terms of like space or numbers of people? I mean, we have a list of poets, but what kind of sense do we get of the setting here?\n \n\n12:21\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. Quite a few times, and even just this short bit of the recording, we can hear the audience like laughing or talking, or there’s that point at the beginning when Warren’s not sure what the, I think woman at the back is saying, and there’s a moment that doesn’t turn out to be the technical difficulty that “Oh, you can’t hear?” But that’s something that… You can tell that technology is present in that room and it’s, we can hear it through the tape and we can tell that Warren is miked and that there’s sort of that… He’s in front of people and there’s a crowd there. And yeah.\n \n\n12:57\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I mean, there’s also one more point, at least one more point, in the tape too where we get a sense of like how many people are… Like Warren’s perception of how many people are in the audience. What is, it’s actually one of your favourite parts if I remember. What is that moment?\n \n\n13:14\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, we get the moment when Warren, isn’t sure if Robin is there. You can sort of sense that he’s looking around and maybe doesn’t see him right away. Yeah, is unsure. It’s not like there’s a crowd of 15 people and you can see him, right?\n \n\n13:28\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah, “Is Robin here?” And he’s looking in the crowd. Somebody has also suggested that this recording that it’s possible that the lights are turned down and he’s not able to actually see into the audience. And I’m not sure. You know, obviously there’s limits to what we can know through listening.\n \n\n13:47\tHannah McGregor:\tThere is that feeling though, right? Like, including the way that he addresses the audience as “you poets.” And sort of doesn’t like, “Oh, sorry, you can’t–” Like he, you know, he doesn’t call people by name. And if you’re sort of thinking, like you’re familiar with the people who are here, then you would say somebody’s name when they are talking to you. So there’s certainly the sense that he can’t necessarily see them. And that question of is it because there’s a huge crowd or is it because it’s dark or is it because I’ve never been in this space? Like, what is this venue like? Is it full of weird pillars that hide people? I don’t know.\n \n\n14:21\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And I guess one, I mean, certainly one of the research questions are the things that we’ll do when we’re pursuing research on this type is actually go to St. Anselm’s Church and have a sense, have a look at its architecture. I want to pick up on something that you’ve kind of moved us towards, which is that relationship between Warren Tallman and the audience. He’s an English professor. He’s not himself a poet. But he certainly had a good relationship with poets and was, through the facilitation of events like this, through his teaching of poetry. What do we hear in terms of his relationship with the audience? And I’m gonna go to you Hannah first and then I’m gonna go over to Emily.\n \n\n15:00\tHannah McGregor:\tWell, like, I keep mentioning it, Karis, because you pointed it out to me and now I really hear it whenever I listen, is his addressing the audience as “you poets.”\n \n\n15:09\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I can’t get over that.\n \n\n15:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is very funny. It has this kind of… This familiarity and also this sort of joking disdain. Like, “You know what you poets are like, just gives a vibe of the sort of… When you are familiar enough with a group to make fun of them. Which suggests a sort of an intimacy of environment, right? That you don’t make fun of an audience unless they are your friends. Which sets up this sort of warmth. Like you don’t get the feeling that this is a random public reading. The audience are the speakers, it’s a community gathering, and you can feel that in the way that he is addressing an audience that is at once the sort of participants and the listeners for the event.\n \n\n15:53\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Emily, what about you? What do you hear in terms of that relationship between Tallman and the audience and maybe that kind of question of authority?\n \n\n16:02\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, question of authority. I mean, I don’t want to be the person who keeps bringing it back to religion, but I guess—\n \n\n16:10\tKaris Shearer:\tGo for it.\n \n\n16:10\tEmily Murphy:\t–that’s my role. I just, like, I always hear this tape in terms of like the situation of mourning. And it always sounds to me like a wake. And as a bit of background to that, I’m born in Ireland and my entire family is Irish. We are not the kind of Irish people who have wakes. That’s actually like quite specific. But it’s still this sort of community gathering among friends where you’ll tell jokes and sing songs and maybe read from Revelations. But there is a sort of bondedness and a kind of joy in the mourning. And so I think like, I mean, what’s an authority figure in Irish culture if not a priest, right? And he is sort of like in a way, like literally speaking to a flock, right?\n \n\n17:01\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:01\tEmily Murphy:\tAnd that’s also interesting in terms of the relationship of the professor to students, professor to poets who he is actively engaged in making the, like the canonical poetic community of his age. Yeah.\n \n\n17:23\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. We were talking a little bit about that professorial feel, right? Like, it does not surprise me to hear that this person is a professor because I hear in the way that he is addressing the audience, the gathering, something that sounds a lot to me like how I talk to my students, that sort of facetious and sort of like self-undermining, like making fun of yourself a little bit, which sets a very particular tone of like, “Okay, I’m in charge here, but like, not that in charge. So, you know, here’s some structure, but also I really want you to feel free to take over and for this to be your space to do with as you want. But you also…” Like Emily was saying, you know, total freedom, total improvisation is sort of impossible without structure. So you need somebody taking that role and saying like, “I am going to be the guiding hand here,” but how do I guide people into a feeling of openness and spontaneity and participation and sort of some level of safety, ’cause what you’re asking people to do, step forward and just begin to read, does require some level of comfort. So, you know, how you establish that tone. I hear in that humour some of that work happening.\n \n\n18:35\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, definitely. Amy, what, like, what are you hear in terms of like picking up on what Hannah was saying about shared authority and sort of self-deprecating humour? He’s getting prompts from the audience and I guess maybe that’s what I’m asking about. Like those moments where the audience is prompting him around certain things that he’s meant to say up at the front.\n \n\n18:56\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, there’s the moment in the tape when you can’t hear the person speaking, but he’s like, “Oh, I’ve been, I’m supposed to tell you that you can only read for this amount of time.” And there’s other points of interaction, I guess. And one thing that I sort of notice is that it seems to me that he’s not necessarily taking cues from the audience as to like his tone or like his approach to what he’s saying. Like he’s being sort of like goofy and funny in the first bit, but in a way that I would imagine someone else, they say something funny, the audience laughs, “Oh, I’m going to say something else funny now.” But I think he’s just genuinely being… It sounds like he’s just genuinely being himself and speaking sorta without that intent to get a laugh.\n \n\n19:45\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I mean, and you’ve listened to a lot of recordings with Warren, you know, where Warren Tallman is, he’s giving a lecture to a class or I think you’ve got a really good feel for him as a person and this is very much very Warren Tallman-esque, if you will. I think a little bit more about mourning, right? He changes register partway through this tape from being what he calls deliberately facetious and he’s being a little self-reflexive about that. And the register changes from being funny to serious. Emily, I wanna come over to you and ask you about a little bit more about mourning. What kind of space is being created for mourning here and what is the role of humour, seriousness, the kind of gravity?\n \n\n20:32\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great question. One of the things that I love about this tape is I feel like there’s this kind of subvocal like landscape of the emotion in the room in a way. Like probably the most explicit way that you can hear it is something that Hannah has pointed out to me, which is the sort of the murmur that goes through the crowd when Warren Tallman says, “We’re not going to have five people! Instead, you’ll just do whatever!”\n \n\n21:03\tHannah McGregor:\tHe counts them, like, “Oh, he’s going to have you numbered up at the front, like one, two, three, four, five.” It’s like, thanks, Warren, I forgot how numbers work.\n \n\n21:15\tKaris Shearer:\tWell, and then as you pointed out, like everyone starts going like, excuse me, what?\n \n\n21:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. You hear it. Like, it kind of sounds like this is the first they’re hearing of it. Right?\n \n\n21:23\tKaris Shearer:\tOh, for sure.\n \n\n21:23\tHannah McGregor:\tThat they also were led to believe that they would have an order and that they are now finding out that no, in fact, Quaker-style, you will be self-electing.\n \n\n21:34\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd it’s kind of like this weird, this rejection of like the pedagogical, right? Like that one, two, three, four, five, right? Like he’s counting, he’s physically counting them, but that’s, that’s not what’s gonna happen, right? So he performs the thing that’s not going to happen in this really kind of, you know, it becomes almost, it is almost humourous, right? It’s like very… There’s a kind of physicality to it, of an establishing of space on the stage. And it is like making the, you know, creating for us the thing that will not happen, which is like overly pedagogical, overly constructed. And it is the thing to be rejected in favour of this more spontaneous… Yeah, spontaneous form that is more appropriate for mourning? To when we make a connection, Emily, between–?\n \n\n22:20\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. I mean, he makes this rhetorical move, right, where he says, like, “I’m being deliberately facetious and frivolous” on what is actually like quite a, that you say, solemn occasion, maybe? And so there’s sort of like, there’s more than one switch, right? Like there’s the like… Or maybe not more than one switch, but the switch does, has two roles, right? That we have the like humour as the lead-in, as a setup for a solemn occasion that will entail reading verses from the Bible. But humour as also a kind of, a kind of marking of occasion, right.? And a kind of framing of the mourning and of the solemnness. And I still, like, I feel like so much of the, like the evidence that I gather from this tape is just like a feeling in the room, like a kind of warmth that’s, it’s difficult to point to like any one thing that you might be able to hear from the audience, but it feels like maybe the, like maybe the echoes in the room are like are letting you know that people might be like kind of chatting to their neighbour while he’s making jokes at the front of the room or that they’re like laughing and chuckling to themselves, right? So there is a kind of like a… It’s not like, it’s not quite joy, but it is sort of fellow feeling and warmth. Which indicates to me that like there is a really nice acknowledgement of the social role of mourning, right. And the social embeddedness of that kind of loss.\n \n\n23:57\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. ‘Cause I mean, they’ve gathered on the occasion of the death of a major American poet.\n \n\n24:02\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n24:02\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd the way that they’re gonna celebrate that or mark that occasion is through the act of reading. And I think, you know, again, like make–, you know, making space for different types of… Like, that mourning is individual and therefore the space needed to read or mark that occasion is also individual, whether it’s short, three to four minutes or, well, not, not 40 minutes.\n \n\n24:30\tEmily Murphy:\tWell, like it’s so individual, but it’s so communal as well, right? Because I mean, if mourning is so individual, stay in your own house and read for 40 minutes to yourself. Right? But instead there’s this nice tension between not infringing on the freedom of any poet to read. Um, and don’t read for 40 minutes, everyone will think you’re a jerk.\n \n\n24:51\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd the expectation, right? So feeling the pause in which—\n \n\n24:55\tEmily Murphy:\tYep.\n \n\n24:55\tHannah McGregor:\t–you stand up and read means attentive listening, right? That you’re not just sitting there like checked out, waiting for your turn. You have to be listening and engaging. So it is this sort of interesting tension between the individual and the communal, which we can think of as being a characteristic of religious experience and a characteristics—\n \n\n25:16\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, absolutely.\n \n\n25:16\tHannah McGregor:\t–of collective mourning.\n \n\n25:18\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah. I mean, the guiding principle of this whole event seems to be attentiveness to the audience, right? And attentiveness to each other. You know, you know when you’re going to, when it’s your turn to read, when there’s a kind of a space and you arise and it’s very… He describes it in a very physical way, right? You arise, you get up on your own on your feet. Right? As though there would be any other, I mean, I suppose there would be maybe other ways of getting up, but in this case, it is you get up on your feet and you walk toward… There’s a real physicality of the description. I’m gonna bring it over to Amy again and I want to ask you about technology and how technology features in this tape. What moments do you hear technology making itself present? Yeah.\n \n\n26:06\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, so there’s this moment when Warren’s saying that there’s gonna be a tape and then there’s gonna be a reading and then there’s gonna be another interruption. And it’s very like sort of vague what that’s going to be. And by saying that it’s going to be an interruption it’s not really interrupting. And what we know also is that from our perspective there, the tape doesn’t actually surface at all on our version on the reel, which is interesting.\n \n\n26:41\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, absolutely. I mean, this is in some ways very characteristic of Tallman in general. He, you know, we have the tape, the event that’s being recorded, but then there’s also the indication that there’s going to be a recording within the recording or they, the playback of a recording within the recording. And then we also hear, we also hear the mic, right? Where someone isn’t able to hear from the audience. Technology makes itself present, yeah, I think throughout the tape.\n \n\n27:11\tEmily Murphy:\tWell, I wonder… So you’re right that we can, like, we sort of, we get an indication of the presence of the mic, but I feel like that is Tallman interpreting the reaction of the audience that way, not necessarily the audience actually experiencing those aspects of the technology or like he… Instead of “I’ve just thrown you a curve ball” it’s “Oh, you must not be able to hear what I’m saying.”\n \n\n27:35\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, yeah.\n \n\n27:37\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n27:37\tKaris Shearer:\tAbsolutely.\n \n\n27:38\tEmily Murphy:\tBut I think, I mean, this is something that happens with newer technologies all the time, is that once the newer technology is present, it gets to have the role of being technological. And then all of the other technologies that people are engaging with all the time are perceived as naturalized and non-technological. So even though he’s… Like, they’re reading from books in a room that has like probably quite specific acoustics in a language that is already an extension of human capacity, but it’s the tape that dominates the sort of technological landscape, whether or not it is in fact present. It’s the idea of taping us, in a way.\n \n\n28:18\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, taping us.\n \n\n28:19\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, taping usTM.\n \n\n28:22\tHannah McGregor:\tGood thing you TM’ed that—\n \n\n28:23\tEmily Murphy:\tI’m writing that down.\n \n\n28:23\tHannah McGregor:\t–’cause that was gonna be the title of my new book.\n \n\n28:24\tEmily Murphy:\tTaping us… I mean, I’ll take royalties.\n \n\n28:29\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd in fact that distrust of the microphone, that distrust of technology is actually something so common across recordings that Christine Mitchell, I think when she was a postdoc at Concordia, created a whole compilation—I think it’s about two minutes long—and it’s all the excerpts of that exact moment of distrust of the microphone. Can you, and it’s called “Can You Hear Me? And it’s a compilation of all, you know, readers across the Sir George Williams Reading Series saying things like, “Is this thing on? Can you hear me at the back? Can you hear me?” And so Warren, again, that particular distrust of the technology in the room, it’s both, you know, the microphone is both facilitating his connection with the audience, but it’s also the thing to be distrusted.\n \n\n29:17\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, you’re so right about that distrust, but I wonder then if we can put that in conversation with how we’ve been talking about authority. Because at the same time that it is expected to fail, right, expected to be the reason that people can’t hear him, it’s also like being… It’s a recording for posterity and I think you and I have talked in other ways about how Tallman is doing all of this recording at the same time as like law enforcement is using tapes—\n \n\n29:44\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n29:44\tEmily Murphy:\t–as like the new technology of catching criminals, right? They’re becoming this sort of incontrovertible version of evidence quite quickly.\n \n\n29:57\tKaris Shearer:\tSurveillance.\n \n\n29:57\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. And so, yeah, I don’t think that I have a “so what” about that relationship, then, between mistrust and authority. And I don’t think it’s as radical as I’m making it sound. Like it’s…\n \n\n30:08\tHannah McGregor:\tI mean, I think that there is something there about the way that technology’s become, are turned into via social processes are turned into forms of witness, forms of evidence, forms of authority that you get a really clear sense of the work that is being done around generating understandings of new technologies when you get these archival moments in which people, events for example, distrust. So like, it is helpful in terms of thinking about the very deliberate work that’s being done around transforming audio recording into evidence when you hear the context in which it is not.\n \n\n30:52\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, that’s nice. I’m going to go around with the group and just ask you, finally, what is your favourite part of this recording? And maybe it’s something we’ve already talked about, but favourite moment or favourite aspect of this? Emily, I’m going to start with you.\n \n\n31:10\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, it’s the murmurs in the room that you can kind of like, you can hear the walls almost, like the echoes off the walls. I love that.\n \n\n31:17\tKaris Shearer:\tHannah?\n \n\n31:18\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s gotta be like, it’s probably a tie for me between when he counts out loud and when he tells people to get up on their feet. Like it is these moments in which there is… I like the way you refer to it as being like overtly almost over-the-top pedagogical, like, “Get up, on your feet, and step forward.” Like, yeah, okay, I get it. Warren, we know how to get up.\n \n\n31:41\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy, what about you?\n \n\n31:43\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah and I have said this already, but my favourite part is when Warren says, “Is Robin here?” And it’s just, just unsure.\n \n\n31:50\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s also, you know, kind of quite a moment of anxiety, if that’s like… You’re, you know, you’re counting on Robin to open the more serious part of the occasion, like, it’d be really great if he were there. And you can hear this, you know, you can almost hear him scanning, right? Like where he’s, he’s looking around.\n \n\n32:10\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. At least if Robin didn’t show up, you’d still have the text of his reading.\n \n\n32:16\tKaris Shearer:\tBut that is true. That is… He reads from Revelations. John… I forget which is it.\n \n\n32:23\tAmy Thiessen:\tAnd I also like wonder if Robin knows he’s about to be called on first and like importantly out by name first and then nobody else is called by their name to come up and read.\n \n\n32:34\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n32:35\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah.\n \n\n32:36\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n32:36\tHannah McGregor:\tKaris, what’s your favourite part?\n \n\n32:39\tKaris Shearer:\tOh. [Exasperated Sigh] I love it when they turn it back on me. It’s the “you poets.” It just really… I was like, I realized at that moment, like I could imagine doing all the things, you know, that he does in terms of facilitation, but the moment where he says “you poets,” I was like trying to imagine myself doing that in a room of like my poet colleagues who I totally enjoy. I can’t imagine just being like, “All you poets!” and like what their reaction would be to that. It’s so, it’s so weird, but also I think really speaks to that relationship, like a very particular relationship that he has with them and probably nobody else does. And he’s emphatically not a poet, right? In that, in hailing them as “you poets” it’s also marking him as “not poet,” but he gets to do that because he has this special relationship and I think because of the work he’s done, because of the work he’s done over the past decade and more in really cultivating a literary community. Yeah.\n \n\n33:47\tEmily Murphy:\tI mean, we talked briefly about the sort of modernist landscape in this recording, especially because we have sort of like super traditional, like, readings from the Bible and then immediately the thing that follows that on the tape, which is not in the explicit recording, is like experimental sound poetry and how for a lot of the 20th century, like that mix of like deep investment in western canon and formal experimentation is actually a hallmark of poetic communities. And I think the other hallmark of the poetic, of poetic communities is the increasing role of the critic.\n \n\n34:24\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n34:24\tEmily Murphy:\tRight? And then that’s bringing us back to authority in a way as well. Like it is not being the producer or the artist that is the most authoritative position, but in being like a kind of critic or curator or even in other, like other artistic fields, like, people like Diaghilev who was like a ballet producer of a kind, but was not himself a dancer and not even a choreographer. Well, sometimes he was. Yeah. Anyway. That’s just, that’s up for debate. But.\n \n\n34:54\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I think, I mean, this recording in a lot of ways and Tallman’s presence across the recordings, invites us to look back at literary communities and think about the roles of folks who weren’t themselves writers, but the role that they played in establishing those communities and the labour that they performed to facilitate events, et cetera. Often gendered, often gendered.\n \n\n35:19\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, very gendered.\n \n\n35:22\tKaris Shearer:\tYep. Yep. This is around the time that we normally do a shout-out to an event, a book, a reading, something that you’d like to recognize. And so I’m going to start with Amy and ask you what would you like to shout-out?\n \n\n35:38\tAmy Thiessen:\tAm I allowed to shout-out myself?\n \n\n35:38\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you can! Go for it.\n \n\n35:38\tAmy Thiessen:\tBy the time this podcast comes out, you listeners could go view my honour’s project online if you’re interested in Canadian poetry or environmental writing or forest fires. We’ll put a link in the show notes to my digital exhibition.\n \n\n35:59\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd as your supervisor, I’m going to say it’s a very excellent project. Super cool. Hannah, what about you? Shout-out.\n \n\n36:08\tHannah McGregor:\tI’m gonna shout-out my favourite reading series in Vancouver, which is called the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, which was started during the Vancouver Olympics in response to the sort of Olympic-committee-sanctioned cultural programming. It was a series of readings that were meant to sort of… It was the literary community in Vancouver saying like, “No, actually, here’s what Vancouver literary community looks like.” It’s now been running for a decade, I believe, and it’s remarkable. I think it happens quarterly. And it’s a really remarkable reading series, both for the level of thoughtful curation that goes into the kinds of stuff that you get to see there, but also for the hosts Sean Cranberry and Dina Del Bucchia just do this amazing job of creating this environment where, like, there is more catcalling at this reading series than I have ever experienced at another literary event. And it has so much to do with the tone they create through hosting. And I was really thinking about the sort of work they do around the series when I was listening. So shout-out to the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series.\n \n\n37:13\tKaris Shearer:\tAwesome. Thank you. Emily, what about you? Shout-out?\n \n\n37:17\tEmily Murphy:\tMy shout-out is a bit of a cheat as well because I want a shout-out for Amy.\n \n\n37:23\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy is well-deserving of many shout-outs.\n \n\n37:26\tEmily Murphy:\tDefinitely, definitely. Amy is presenting on her honour’s thesis in the Tech Talk series at the AMP Lab here at UBCO campus on the 26th of March at 12:30 PM.\n \n\n37:38\tKaris Shearer:\tI don’t usually do a shout-out, but I’ll, I will do one. And actually I’m going to do one that we had from last time, but it’s coming up really soon. It’s the Sharon Thesen, Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent and it’s coming up on Thursday, March 19th, which is also gonna be passed by the time this comes out! I’m like just dropping it left and right here.\n \n\n38:03\tHannah McGregor:\tLove these weird audio archives.\n \n\n38:03\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. It’s like, “Wait a minute, time…passing…okay.” Well, I’m gonna wrap this up. Thank you so much, Hannah McGregor here from Vancouver. Hannah, do you want to say what you’re here for giving a workshop?\n \n\n38:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Well, I mean, that’s definitely gonna be in the past by the time people listen to this.\n \n\n38:21\tKaris Shearer:\tIt is definitely gonna be in the past. But—\n \n\n38:24\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n38:24\tKaris Shearer:\t–I feel like it deserves a…\n \n\n38:26\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Yeah, shout-out to podcasting, that’s what I’m giving a workshop about. You know what, in general, shout-out to maybe the other podcast that I host, which is the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n \n\n38:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah!\n \n\n38:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich this has been an episode of, SoundBox Signals has been an episode of, but more other things. I am actually the April episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is me. [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] Is me? So listen to that.\n \n\n38:50\tKaris Shearer:\tSee, ’cause we haven’t had one from you yet.\n \n\n38:51\tHannah McGregor:\tNo, you haven’t, so you’re gonna—\n \n\n38:53\tKaris Shearer:\tOh.\n \n\n38:53\tHannah McGregor:\t–get to hear what I do, which is…just complain about male poets.\n \n\n39:04\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer and I was joined in the studio [End Music: Ambient Instrumental] by Hannah McGregor, Amy Thiessen, and Emily Murphy. We recorded the episode back in early March when we were still able to get together in person. And I’m recording the outro right now in my new studio at home, which is a blanket fort. I can assure you that we will continue to bring you new episodes of SoundBox Signals over the summer. I want to thank the estate of Warren Tallman [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] for allowing us to use the recording, which you can find online on our website soundboxsignals.ok.ubc.ca. Please stay safe. [End Music: Ambient Instrumental].\n \n\n39:36\tMusic:\t[Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals]\n \n\n39:52\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab. [End Music: Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Emily Murphy for her contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9610","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E11, Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in podcasting, 3 August 2020, Barker, Telaro, Barillaro and Camlot"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Sadie Barker","Emma Telaro","Ali Barillaro","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sadie Barker\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/418173666199007392824\",\"name\":\"Emma Telaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/255946fd-ceff-4b6b-a91c-4df32581bc15/sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-episode-11_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:08:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"66,125,366 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-episode-11_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ideas-have-feelings-too-voice-feeling-and-rhetoric-in-podcasting/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-08-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Bender, John and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey.  “A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  209-225.\\n\\nLlinares, Dario. “Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity.” Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media.  Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry.  Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.  123-145.\\n\\nRapp, Christof, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .\\n\\nSterne, Jonathan.  “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality,” CanadianJournal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 207-225.\\n\\nOng, Walter J.: Orality and Literacy–The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, New York, 1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549693136896,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do concepts make us feel? What is the function of affect in the communication of ideas?\n\nIn this episode, three SpokenWeb graduate students – Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker and Emma Telaro – revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise that was assigned to them by SpokenWeb researcher Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, namely the functions of voice, ambience and the overarching media rhetoric of the podcast as a form. Comprised of recorded zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini-podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from Year 1 of the SpokenWeb podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself.\n\n00:00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with high pitched voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do, eh?\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Relaxing ideas, anxious ideas, loving ideas, and even heated ideas. Feelings aren’t just for people; ideas have feelings, too. Or, at least, that’s what our episode contributors this month aim to explore. If ideas do have feelings, how are they communicated? And in turn, how do different ideas, concepts, make us feel? In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, graduate students Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, and Emma Telaro revisit their experience of making a short-form podcast as an exercise assigned to them by Jason Camlot in his Literature and Sound Studies seminar at Concordia University. The episode explains some of the guiding themes that emerged through discussions that Ali, Sadie, Emma, and Jason had about podcasting as a mode of critical practice, exploring the connections between voice, feeling, and rhetoric. Comprised of recorded Zoom conversations, short audio essays, and featuring three distinct mini podcasts within a podcast, this episode, the last from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, closes the season with a meta-podcast about the practice of podcasting itself. Without further ado, here’s the SpokenWeb Podcast season finale: “Ideas have feelings, too. Voice, Feeling, and Rhetoric in podcasting.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:23\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping multiple voices] We made a podcast!\n00:02:24\tEmma Telaro:\tUsing our podcast voices and other sounds.\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] And other sounds!\n00:02:28\tAll Speakers:\t[Overlapping] Who are we?\n00:02:29\tJason Camlot:\tBegin Music: Light Guitar] Who are we? I’m Jason Camlot, Professor in the department of English and Concordia University research chair in Literature and Sound Studies at, well, Concordia University.\n00:02:41\tEmma Telaro:\tI’m Emma Telaro, a Master’s student in the department of English at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb.\n00:02:48\tSadie Barker:\tI’m Sadie Barker, a PhD student.\n00:02:50\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd I’m Ali Barillaro, an almost graduated grad student.\n00:02:54\tJason Camlot:\tMaking a collaborative podcast is fun–\n00:02:57\tEmma Telaro:\t–but also challenging.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe logistics of who does what and how to bring everything together is one challenge.\n00:03:03\tAli Barillaro:\tBut perhaps the greatest challenge has to do with–\n00:03:05\tAll Speakers:\t–defining the voice that shapes the podcast. [Music Changes: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass]\n00:03:09\tEmma Telaro:\tIn an audio essay, there is usually a clear narrational perspective.\n00:03:13\tJason Camlot:\tAll the sounds presented are filtered and organized through a single voice, which represents a sonically particular perspective on all that is discussed and heard.\n00:03:23\tAli Barillaro:\tIn our case, we have aimed as much as possible to allow multiple narrational perspectives to be heard and to shape this podcast episode.\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot:\tSo this podcast, the final episode from year one of the SpokenWeb Podcast series, is kind of a meta-podcast about making podcasts. [End Music: Instrumental Guitar and Stand-Up Bass] In the winter semester of 2020, I taught a graduate seminar on the topic of Literature and Sound Studies. I’d taught courses on sound and poetry before, but this seminar, more than the ones I taught in the past, was committed to bringing interdisciplinary concepts and approaches from sound studies together with literary texts and sound recordings.\n00:04:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] We are [ ]. [Begin Music: Ambient Hum]\n00:04:04\tJason Camlot:\tAs my department’s annual required theory seminar for PhDs—although it consisted of both PhD students and MA students—it was heavy with critical theories and cultural studies about sound and listening. So we read and discussed together selections from R. Murray Schafer, Friedrich Kittler, and Lisa Gitelman. Jonathan Sterne and Mara Mills.   Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith. John Durham Peters and Brandon LaBelle. Douglas Kahn and Dylan Robinson, among many others.\n00:04:38\tJason Camlot:\t[End Music: Ambient Hum] We read a few literary works that framed sound, listening, and voice in interesting ways, like Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. And we considered poets whose work moved between print and sound productions, including the talk poems of David Antin, the erasure poems and time-stretching sound collages of Jordan Abel, and the poetry scripts and [Audio, Overlapping, Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] audio-visual live performances of Oana Avasilichioaei.\n00:05:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Oana Avasilichioaei performing “Operator”] The subject is occurence. The subject is the eye that brutesSim      the sky…\n00:05:15\tJason Camlot:\tIn the context of a literature course that aims to think about sound, it’s difficult to do so without having one eye on the print world. It’s difficult to think about sound outside of the generic categories we use to think about printed texts. Podcasting about literary sound is kind of an interestingly messy place to be. Already, asking literature students to engage with sound rather than print works to trouble their relationship to their primary source text. Asking them to think through and present their ideas in a sound-based medium was a further exercise in estrangement. They would be required to learn a whole new media rhetoric, one that involved sound editing, speaking, and recording their ideas in a voice that seemed right to the purpose, possibly the use of music or ambient sounds to reinforce or frame the ideas and arguments they were making, not to mention arranging, balancing, EQing, mixing, and exporting the final product. The results were awesome in so many ways, students made podcasts about [Sound Effect: Siren] noise.\n00:06:18\tSima Meghadadi :\tAh, the hustle and bustle of the city.\n00:06:21\tJason Camlot:\tAnd silence.\n00:06:22\tMarlene Oefinger :\tSilence, then, is not really absent of sound, but the beginning of listening. And when there is nothing to hear, you start to hear things.\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why most audio books aren’t satisfying.\n00:06:37\tBrian Vass :\tI generally dislike audiobooks. I wouldn’t listen to a recorded book if I could just read the book instead.\n00:06:43\tJason Camlot:\tAnd why Samuel Beckett’s radio plays are awesome.\n00:06:47\tRyan Tellier :\tNow to be somewhat self-reflexive, Beckett’s story is partially about the very need to find a voice.\n00:06:53\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how Sylvia Plath’s confessional poetry is as extra as a Lana Del Rey\n00:06:59\tPriscilla Jolly :\tIn this podcast, I’ll speak about the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration in relation to the confessional mode using the work of Sylvia Plath and Lana Del Rey.\n00:07:09\tJason Camlot:\tAnd how the running voice in your head talking to itself is kind of like a never-ending hip hop track.\n00:07:14\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani :\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Hip Hop] Some words just make me feel uncomfortable, like soot. Ugh. That fire debris thing or whatever? You can’t see, but I just shivered saying that. They should really make some kind of visual podcast, like a vodcast, you know? [End Music: Instrumental Hip Hop]\n00:07:31\tJason Camlot:\t[Overlapping, the voices and sounds from the beginning of SpokenWeb Episode 8] At the same time that everyone was working on their own podcasts, I was also at work on one with my colleague Katherine McLeod that eventually got released as episode eight of this podcast series, the episode entitled “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” And I’d already worked on my very first podcast in the fall, episode two called “Sound Recordings Are Weird.” It hadn’t occurred to me how difficult choosing and performing a voice in a podcast would be until I tried making [Audio, Throat Clearing] a podcast myself.\n00:08:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lord Alfred Tennyson.\n00:08:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe complexity of voice as a performative and expressive factor in the context of a podcast is about authority, expertise, positionality… All of which Ali, Sadie, Emma, and I discuss later in this podcast. But it’s also about something else, something that for me at least is coming to define what a podcast does to ideas, concepts, and arguments. It has to do with affect and feeling, the proximity of the speaker to her ideas. The proximity of the listener to the speaker sharing an idea. The affective exchange that is inseparable from the conceptual exchange when a podcaster talks about something. Stacey Copeland explains this idea powerfully in a recent article when she observes that–\n00:08:52\tStacey Copeland:\tThere is an inherent intimacy in voice-driven sound work. That seems to be [Begin Distortion] soaking in affect. [End Distortion] The listener puts on her headphones, presses play, and becomes immersed in an affective discourse of human experience through listening and connecting.\n00:09:13\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] So one way in which ideas have feelings is through their expression and effective communication in voice. Another way that we came to realize how ideas have feelings, during the process of making our podcasts, is through the broader sonic affordances of the medium, [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] especially the way we come to obsess with the use of music and ambient sounds in presenting stories and ideas. Podcasting uses sound to help us experience how a concept feels. So that covers voice and feeling as we’ll be discussing those topics in this podcast. When we say the rhetoric of podcasting, we’re thinking of everything that Aristotle included in his definition of the concept of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, which encompassed a) the character of the speaker, [Begin Music: Distorted Instrumentals] b) the emotional state of the listener, and c) the argument, logos, itself.\n00:10:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe first two elements of rhetoric as a method are pretty well covered by our categories of voice and feeling. I would define the last element—that of argument, or logos—as including the first two, plus the overarching structure, genre, that we choose to use in arranging and shaping our podcast. And also the degree to which this form of communication engages in explicit kinds of reflection upon its own rhetorical affordances and strategies. We may come to feel ideas as tenets of authentic truth, but this is so because the modes of rhetorical persuasion we use have become normalized to a point that we just don’t notice them or think about them anymore. An ideology of rhetoric sets in and a sense of the “end of rhetoric,” as John Bender and David Wellbery had dubbed it, is felt. Sometimes rhetorical protocols can come to seem so useful, normal, so right to community that uses it, that the rhetoric of it seems to disappear altogether.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s through the migration of rhetorical protocols across communities that we can find rhetoric work, interestingly, at cross purposes with its original community. Like when biblical discourse or legal discourse is repurposed by communities of poets, novelists, cartoonists, comedians, it is due to this perpetual migration of rhetorical forms, media, and effects across communities that I think podcasting represents such a powerful tool for scholarly communication and humanities pedagogy at the present time. Podcasting, in practice, is a great way to make us see and feel the rhetorical and media assumptions we use to produce and share knowledge in our scholarly disciplines. A new kind of awareness of the rhetoric of thought has been another outcome of the experience of engaging in podcasting as a form of critical expression. [End Music: Distorted Instrumentals] And this is an experience that we all seem to share. So, with these keywords—voice, feeling, rhetoric—briefly explained, and with the basic plan mapped out, first here is Ali Barillaro presenting her podcast on the meaning of applause in poetry readings.\n00:12:29\tAli Barillaro:\t[Theme Music] When I started working with SpokenWeb, I didn’t really know what I wanted to research. So Jason told me to start by listening through the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and to take notes on anything that caught my attention. That ended up being the sounds of applause and the frequently conflicted comments different poets made about the presence of applause in poetry readings. So I spent my first year as an RA trying to come up with better ways of talking about applause because just measuring duration and amplitude didn’t seem good enough to me. If I wanted to find the “why,” if that’s really possible, I needed to look at the wider context. I had already produced a five-minute talk, a one-hour workshop, and a 12-page paper on this topic. On the page, I had to describe the sounds of applause and use screenshots of waveforms and spectrograms. And none of that really does the sound justice. With the podcast, it was a lot easier to weave narration or argument and the source material in and out of one another, which I think makes for a more immersive listening experience.\n00:13:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] [Muriel Rukeyser] Thank you. It sounds peculiar when it’s said that way.\n00:13:53\tAli Barillaro:\tApplause, a sign of approval, an act of support, a cultural indicator worth listening to. In John Bulwer’s manual of rhetorical gestures Chirologia, he explains that “to clap the raised hands one against another is an expression proper to them who applaud, congratulate, rejoice, assent, approve, and are well-pleased used by all nations. This public token has been of old and is so usual in the assembly of a multitude when they cannot contain their joy in silence.” Bulwer’s contemplation of applause, however, quickly takes on a judging tone with concerns about decorum and the appropriateness of the gesture in particular artistic contexts. Addressing the inherent duality of applause, Steven Connor posits that “Clapping one hand on another dramatizes the fact that you are subject and an object simultaneously, a doer and a done to.” Applause, it seems, belongs to both the individual and the crowd. It can be deliberate or uncontained, disregarded or powerful.\n00:14:59\tAli Barillaro:\tIn the context of the archival sounds of reported poetry readings collected by SpokenWeb, we can hear not only poetic voice or textual content. We hear the sounds of interactivity and deception. We hear traces of the relationships between speaker and audience that ground the poetry reading as public, as event. Despite their potential significance, sonic manifestations of audience response, including laughter and verbal address, are not consistently present or consistently treated by poets, series organizers, recordists, and archivists. In 1966, acclaimed Montreal poet Louis Dudek was invited to introduce Henry Beissel and Mike Gnarowski’s reading as part of the poetry series at Sir George Williams University. Dudek attempts to set the tone and establish the appropriate reading series etiquette, as he reflects on his effective response to Beissel’s performance, stating,\n00:15:53\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Strongly, I was impressed and moved by that reading of Henry Beissel.\n00:15:57\tAli Barillaro:\tFrom a position as both audience member and poet, he explains:\n00:16:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Louis Dudek] Really several times after the poems, I wanted to applaud, only we don’t do that.\n00:16:06\tAli Barillaro:\tHmm. If applause isn’t universally accepted as a fundamental part of the poetry reading, why are there so many instances of applause heard throughout the Sir George Williams collection? Despite concerns of impropriety, applause can function as a demonstration of etiquette or a measurement and influencer of public feeling, as Sarah Balkin claims. Tanya Clement and Stephen McLaughlin frame applause is both enabling an audience’s ability to engage in dialogue with a poem itself and effect its mode of meaning-making, or as a signifier of structures marking the transitions between different elements of a reading. Most examples of applause can be labeled either procedural, referring to moments thought to be appropriate or expected in a reading series, or as purely spontaneous phenomenon. Those spontaneous applause appears to be more appreciative in nature; procedural applause is not exclusively formal or inherently removed from appreciation for the poet, the work, or the performance. Another key feature of applause is the concept of consensus, which implies a communal response from the majority or all of the audience to a given performance.\n00:17:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause]\n00:17:16\tAli Barillaro:\tA noticeable lack of consensus is often perceived as…uncomfortable. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:17:24\tAudio Recording:\t[One person claps] [Unknown Person says, uncomfortably,] Oh! Thank you…\n00:17:25\tAli Barillaro:\t[Begin Music: Electronic Instrumental] Caused by what Tia DeNora describes as individuals or small groups of people lacking the skill and practical knowledge necessary for appropriate emotional responses in a given performative context. Moments in the Sir George Williams recordings can be used as case studies to examine consensus, procedural, and spontaneous applause and to begin to unpack what specific sounds of audience response might signify when listened to within the greater context of an entire reading and the series as a whole. Let’s listen to the response to Irving Layton’s “Confederation Ode” read at Sir George Williams University in 1967 as an example.\n00:18:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:09\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton was certainly no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night, “Family Portrait,” receives the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the poetry series collection, a 40-second auditory event so intense we could call it a wall of noise.\n00:18:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Very Thunderous Applause]\n00:18:28\tAli Barillaro:\tLayton’s opening remarks draw attention to the makeup of the sizable crowd gathered to hear him.\n00:18:33\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my friends and former students in the audience.\n00:18:40\tAli Barillaro:\tA statement elaborated upon in a post-grad article that details the overcrowding of the venue that hosted the university’s then-poet-in-residence. Consensus, then, is not an issue for Layton. What is worth questioning is the spontaneity of the reaction to a poem like “Confederation Ode” that was new at the time of the reading, especially considering Layton classics, like “Misunderstanding” and “The Birth of Tragedy,” are met with no audible response. Beyond finding out who is in the audience, the location and timing of the reading is also crucial to the discussion. With Expo 67 scheduled to begin just over a month after this Montreal performance and with the poem’s bold sexual imagery and overt political satire, Layton correctly assumes he need not explain his intent further than a simple preface–\n00:19:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] My contribution to the centennial year, “Confederation Ode.”\n00:19:31\tAli Barillaro:\t–for the audience to receive his message and respond accordingly. The question still remains open, though. Why did this audience react so strongly to this Layton poem in that moment. The ephemerality of the event and lack of corresponding oral history work makes it hard to firmly pin down an answer, but further inroads can be made with the use of growing audio archives that could potentially allow scholars to trace a poet’s reading history, cross-referencing multiple performances of a given piece and documenting the range of responses from audiences over time and across space. For the “Confederation Ode” applause, further research into Layton’s biography and public sentiment about Expo 67 and the Canadian government more broadly may also elucidate some of the meaningful resonances the performance affected in Layton’s listeners. Thank you.\n00:20:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Applause] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n00:20:34\tAli Barillaro:\tWhen Jason, Emma, Sadie, and I got together for a series of Zoom meetings to replay and talk about our podcasts a few months after making them, hearing the episodes quickly conjured up…a few feelings.\n00:20:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I said something to Emma and Sadie about how I realized I kind of sound like some weird robot presenter lady in my podcast. And I… It’s so cringy to listen to ’cause that’s not how I talk normally at all.\n00:21:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] It’s always embarrassing to hear your own voice back, right? You know, to some extent, especially when you’re like, “I’m trying to do my podcast voice.” Right? You know.\n00:21:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I think it’s… I’m trying to sound like a…informational guide. I think there was only one like one or two very brief, brief moments in my mini-podcast that I was trying to break away from that. I remember in one of your comments that one of the parts that you were like, “Yes! That! That’s what you should be going for more” was just me going, “Hmm” at something. You were like, “Yeah! Like that’s, that’s something we would want to hear.”\n00:21:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Yeah, it’s ’cause that “Hmm” was so Ali. Right? [inaudible]\n00:21:40\tAli Barillaro:\tOverall, I think the end result was relatively well-produced and that I managed to convey a general sense of the work I’ve done on applause within such a limited timeframe. But the thing that we all kept coming back to was my voice. What exactly was going on there?\n00:21:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] What does that mean, first of all, to be doing a podcast voice? What is it?\n00:22:03\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] It’s funny ’cause I remember when I was in CEGEP, I had an assignment where my friends and I made a video about composting and I decided to narrate it and it sounded exactly like that. So it’s been like a thing for like a long time. And I don’t know why, like why that’s my go to voice. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s very weird.\n00:22:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] Could you do that voice right now? Like on command?\n00:22:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Let me pull up something that I could like read. ‘Cause I can’t do it just like speaking spontaneously. Because that’s not how I talk! Okay. Let’s see. “The contents field serves to describe the audible content, speech, and other sounds of the audio asset.”\n00:22:44\tSadie Barker:\tIt seems so kind of genre-dependent, like your podcast, content-wise was quite academic and it was funny ’cause like listening to it, I actually didn’t notice a difference in voice at all, but then just now when you performed your voice, I really noticed it. So there’s something about like the setting of… The content setting that… Where you kind of assume a certain voice and… Yeah, ’cause it really, it really stood out in this very more casual settings.\n00:23:12\tEmma Telaro:\tI think it’s hard not to do it.\n00:23:13\tAli Barillaro:\tMhm.\n00:23:13\tEmma Telaro:\tI mean, as soon as you have a device in front of you, like tense up and that’s, I think, more often than not what happens.\n00:23:23\tAli Barillaro:\tI guess it’s like, it also feels like a safer way of doing it. Like it feels less vulnerable to have that kind of voice and not just have people listening to what you actually sound like.\n00:23:35\tJason Camlot:\tSo you’re, you’re performing the voice of sort of pure information, would you say?\n00:23:41\tAli Barillaro:\tI want it to be straightforward. I want it to be clear. Yeah, I want people to understand what I’m trying to say to them and I, for some reason, in my head, that’s what that sounds like.\n00:23:52\tJason Camlot:\tWould you say that you’re trying to make your voice almost disappear in the communication of the information so that it’s like, it’s there, but hopefully won’t be noticed?\n00:24:01\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do ’cause for some reason, I guess like my own natural voice doesn’t seem like the best, the best possible option for doing that. And I… It’s, it’s often when it’s something that’s scripted and it’s not like, it’s not theater or something like that. It’s something that is like argumentative or analytical or theoretical. That’s what that voice sounds like in my head. So I’m trying to perform that rather than something that’s more conversational or more natural or more performative in a different way.\n00:24:38\tAli Barillaro:\tEveryone had a lot to say about their own decisions regarding the performance of the role of podcast host or narrator. And I’ll be back later in the episode to lead you through some of our major realizations about voice.\n00:25:04\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Emma Telaro.\n00:25:04\tEmma Telaro:\tThe podcast I created for Jason’s class I named “Conditionally Audible Heat,” though future iterations should have a punchier name. Broadly speaking, my podcast examines the sonification of heat in the archival recording of the 1974 Margaret Atwood reading from the Sir George Williams University’s reading series. The curiosity I felt for this particular tape begins in listening. On the occasion of this performance, the reading is upstaged by an unbearable and unlikely October heat. The introducers, Atwood, stumble over the heat, the crowd shuffles restlessly, and this frenzy infectious makes its way through the audio recording. I found this occurrence mesmerizing and in a fit of note-taking attempted to mark all the moments when heat, though constant, materialized and usurped the reading. And yet there wasn’t a specific quality or sound associated with this heat, but a convergence, rather. So I wondered what in the first place was I listening to? [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling] What does heat sound like? How does it manifest in audio recording and what sensations does it provoke? I listened and listened again. So, I inched towards my driving question: how do we hear heat? I felt that to answer this question, what does heat sound like, to attempt a podcast on the sonification of heat, I had to begin with the event itself. Heat announces itself from the very beginning of the reading.\n00:26:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Henry Beissel] Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system. The hall is going to be too hot.\n00:26:34\tEmma Telaro:\tAnd I wanted to give a sense of the temporality of the event, the time elapsed and distorted by heat as it presses languorously and anxiously onto the reading. I had to find a way to do this, to describe, engage with, and represent 35 minutes of audio in a six-minute podcast. The podcast really took off with the introductory audio collage. Once I decided that my primary task was to sound heat, I clipped elements from the beginning of the recording to create the collage and timed it to fit a sultry musical track I found online. It felt very much like I was assembling quotations. I treated the clips, whether of speech or exterior sound, as fragments and pieced them together. To get the sounds to hit at the right time was a minute task and the more I edged towards the effects I wanted, the more finicky I got. That first sound, the one moment you’ll hear, took ages to place on the right beat and significantly, I selected it because it’s the first voice you hear in the archival recording. I felt strongly about keeping it, that short phrase captures the mood of the reading, the disorder, the tension, and the sound and feel of the room. You’ll notice how the speaker, Henry Beissel, signals the overflow, the body’s mass in the room. And you’ll hear the humour, too, which recurs in the event as necessary relief.\n00:27:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Sultry Instrumental] [Henry Beissel] One moment. [Music Changes: Bass Joins Sultry Instrumentals] [Henry Beissel] We did try to get a larger hall, but it was impossible to accommodate the overflow we have set up loudspeakers in the little gallery here, how it [inaudible] in the other one, too? [Unknown Person] Outside. [Henry Beissel] Outside there’s loud speakers. So please don’t all crowd into the room. Can you ask the security people to turn on the cooling system, turn on the cooling system? The hall is going to be too hot. [Music Changes: Xylophone Joins] [Margaret Atwood] I don’t see any reason why this thing should resemble a steam bath. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] If everybody on the chairs would, would shift over this way, and sit on sort of as if it were a bench, then some more people could sit on the edges there. [People Chattering] [Margaret Atwood] It’s fucking hot.\n00:29:06\tEmma Telaro:\tMontreal, October 18, 1974. [End Music: Sultry Instrumental] It’s hot, really hot, an unlikely hot autumn evening. Margaret Atwood is set to perform at the Poetry Series, a reading series organized by the Sir George Williams University’s English department, now Concordia University. The room is jammed. She begins to read.\n00:29:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] Is not one– Oh boy, is it ever hot in here, I can’t stand it, yeah, hmm?\n00:29:35\tEmma Telaro:\tAtwood’s performance is of peculiar interest for two reasons. First, she’s one of the few women invited to read at the series. Second, the reading is overwhelmed by this autumn heat wave. In the recording of this performance, we hear Atwood repeatedly referenced this oppressive heat, and we hear the audience members, too, shuffling and speaking excitedly as they crowd into the room. We hear this especially in the first few minutes of the recording and in the Q and A that follows her performance. The reading itself is cut short to accommodate the unusual weather, which is ironic, perhaps, given our first point.\n00:30:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] I think I better read just three more poems…before we all die.\n00:30:19\tEmma Telaro:\t[Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] In an article written for The Guardian called “Boiling point: why literature loves a long hot summer.” Aida Edemariam writes, “Novelists have used heat waves to create tension, erotic charge, and moments of possibility. It is a time when all the rules change.” Of course, we’re not speaking of a fictional heatwave, but of a real, historical and material manifestation of heat. And yet we might pursue literary analysis and say that the sweaty, hot room acts as a framing device for the poetry reading, or if we want to borrow a term from sound studies, we might include heat in a study of the reading soundscape. But how in the first place does heat sound forth? How do we hear heat? What is the significance of an audible heat? For the most part, we’re listening to the effects of heat. Heat acts on bodies, bodies contribute to heat, voice and movement manifest discomfort or pleasure, or…pleasure in discomfort.\n00:31:16\tEmma Telaro:\tThe audible manifestations of heat, Atwood’s humorous quips, her nervous laugh, the frenzied audience response highlight the sociality of performance. Heat dramatizes the encounter between audience and performer and despite the very real constraint material circumstances of the reading, heat provides a release from constraints. We sense the overflow in the room, which contributes to the sense of possibility that emerges out of close contact with Atwood and her poems. Later, she jokes about being called a “witch” by some critics, which adds fuel to her feminism and speaks to the disarming power of her poetics. In this heat, with Atwood, we anticipate something. Boundaries might be crossed.\n00:32:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy? Has anybody died yet?\n00:32:08\tEmma Telaro:\tHeat helps us imagine what it might’ve felt like to be there. And it is remarkable that we can retrieve the sensation, if only   through recording. Heat is a conjuring trick; it signals presence even in absence. We hear the spatial, temporal, and material circumstances of Atwood’s reading, we hear the body, and of course, we hear the poems. And it all feels quite sweaty.\n00:32:35\tEmma Telaro:\tWe’ve talked about the sociality of performance sounded through heat, but there’s also the various meanings that shift in reading. Heat alters the poems themselves. Where and how you listen matters to how you receive meaning in the poem. Imagine a late summer evening, or if you prefer, a blazing mid-August sun entering deep, deep into the pore of your skin. Can you taste the sweat, smell the humidity? Or is it a dry heat, red and sandy? Are you close to, far from other bodies? How does the clothes feel on your skin? What sounds are there around you?\n00:33:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Margaret Atwood] “Late August.” This is the plum season, the nights / blue and distended, the moon / hazed, this is the season of peaches / with their lush lobed bulbs / that glow in the dusk, apples / that drop and rot / sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands / No more the shrill voices / that cried Need Need / from the cold pond, bladed and urgent as new grass / Now it is the crickets / that say Ripe Ripe / slurred in the darkness, while the plums / dripping on the lawn outside / our window, burst / with a sound like thick syrup / muffled and slow / The air is still / warm, flesh moves over / flesh, there is no / hurry. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:34:13\tEmma Telaro:\t“Late August” felt like the most fitting and only close, a return to the poem that felt nostalgic and dreamlike. Throughout the podcast, I focused mostly on extra-poetic speech, but the quality of her voice and reading shifts tellingly to [Changes voice to mimic the cadence of Atwood’s voice in the reading] the anxious phonetic pace indicating unbearable heat, slows, when she reads. “Late August” is this langour, this culmination, this release. The beautiful yet dark aura of the plums, ripe. The seductive quality of late August heat that focuses heat as an affective and aesthetic experience. It’s a heat which makes its way through autumn cracks, [Sound Effect: Autumn Bugs] the kind of heat that sometimes surprises us here in Montreal. It’s the heat of the poetry reading, from the bodies in the room, giving grain to the voice, to the poem. I wanted to end here, in “Late August,” to return to the poem, to listening, to feeling. If I speak “Late August,” I think of the swarming of bees by the Lachine Canal, but also the humidity that hangs on, that persists despite the signs of fall. There are sounds to these feelings, to describing these images. It’s perhaps a matter of listening more closely, of finding the right vocabulary for them.\n00:35:36\tJason Camlot:\t[Theme Music] Sadie Barker.\n00:35:36\tSadie Barker:\tFor the last four years, I’ve tree planted in northern BC. I would do this between my schooling, where especially more recently, I’ve been thinking and learning about sound studies. And these interests came together last summer when I brought a recorder with me to camp with the intention of recording the day-to-day world of tree planting. So when I wasn’t planting trees, I was walking around camp, interviewing people,–\n00:36:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] Okay, Michelle, we’re recording.\n00:36:05\tSadie Barker:\t–collecting the sounds of camp life, [People Chatting] and just amassing various audio. So I was pretty excited when, in Jason’s class, I had the opportunity to assemble it. Because I already had several hours of tape, I was in many ways advantaged going into this assignment, but I was still apprehensive. I never made a podcast before. While I’d written lots of essays and could appreciate music and sound, I’d never attempted to tell any kind of audio story. As someone that studies multimedia and aesthetics, podcasting made me realize that while I research and write on these topics, I hadn’t really ever diversified or experimented with my own modes of expression. I hadn’t ever really tried to facilitate an aesthetic experience itself beyond formal academic writing. So this assignment made me reflect on [Beeping Alarm] the tendencies, comforts, and familiarities of my own academic modes.\n00:37:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Beeping Ends] [Crackly Static]\n00:37:17\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s 5:45 AM, cold, and the clothes you pull onto your shivering body in the pitch black of your tent are damp, coated in dew and sweat from the day before. Outside, the sun has not yet risen, but the gravel pit bears its first signs of life nonetheless. The hum of the generator [Mechanical Clacking] and the few early risers sitting on the breakfast trailer steps, brushing their teeth, smoking cigarettes, chewin’ the fat.\n00:37:49\tAudio Recording:\t[Truck Backing Up] [Unknown Person Sings] Tree planters are giving the trees a newly [inaudible] life. [Laughter]\n00:37:55\tSadie Barker:\tThis is the stretch of calm before the day. In 15 minutes, the breakfast trailer doors will open and people will shuffle through, heaping scrambled eggs and oatmeal onto silver trays to eat in the tent, both anticipating the day to come and cherishing these moments of idleness. At 7:00 AM, everyone will board their trucks and leave for the cutblock  to spend the next 10 hours planting trees. [Wheels On Gravel I could try and describe these 10 hours and the world of possibility they hold, but Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt does it much better.\n00:38:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Begin Music: Country Guitar] [Charlotte Gill] Planting trees isn’t hard. As any veteran will tell you, it isn’t the act of sowing itself, but the ambient complications. It comes with snow pellets or clouds of biting insects so thick and furious it’s possible to end a day with your eyelids swollen shut and blood trickling from your ears. They’re swaying fields of venomous plants like devil’s club and stinging nettle. The work has the bodily effect of a car crash in extreme slow motion. Besides that, the task itself is thankless and boring, which is to say, it’s plain and silent. What could compel a person to make a career of such a thing? I’ve always wanted to find out. [End Music: Country Guitar]\n00:39:16\tAudio Recording:\t[ ] I’m Behnke, I’m from Terrace, British Columbia, and I– My name is Belle –am a second year tree planter– and I’m from Vancouver– My name is Liam Hannah– and I’m a first-year planter– Oh, my name is Alanna– I’m from Toronto– I’ve been planting for seven years– And I’ve been planting for four years– Hey, I’m from Thailand– –for two years– My name is Clara. I am from Thornbury, Ontario– Hi, my name is Sebastian– –planting for a couple of weeks now –I’m from Northern BC– –so this’ll be my first, first year– –and I’ve been planting for, this is my second full season planting.\n00:39:52\tSadie Barker:\tThere are many different kinds of planters. People come from all sorts of places and plant for all kinds of reasons. But most planters will tell you that the happiest part of any season is May, before any of the real work has started.\n00:40:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] So they say there’s three parts to the planting season–\n00:40:10\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Liam.\n00:40:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –and they map onto each month. There’s May, the honeymoon month where everybody’s having a good time and they’re enjoying themselves. They just got here. [People Chatting] They’re partying a lot every night… [People Chatting] [Begin Music: Ukelele].\n00:40:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] You spend so much time with these people, so–\n00:40:30\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Kim.\n00:40:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] –yeah, It feels… Leaving and coming back, it feels like camp as a little kid, like seeing all these people that you’ve connected with.\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] I think there’s like a creative energy.\n00:40:44\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Belle.\n00:40:45\tAudio Recording:\t[Belle] Music and art, I feel like that is sort of always happening in the background of camp.\n00:40:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] People are just pretty cheerful. [Music And People Chatting] ‘Cause everybody’s quite happy, ready to get to know each other and [Michelle says “Wonderwall”] joke around and…\n00:41:04\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] When you’re around the fire and everyone’s laughing and someone’s playing guitar… And then, again, you just sit back and you just go, “Wow, this…. This is good.” [Michelle] Katie, It’s not, Katie’s all request hour. [People Laughing And Chatting].\n00:41:27\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:41:28\tSadie Barker:\tAnd then–\n00:41:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –June hits.\n00:41:30\tSadie Barker:\t–it’s the June blues.\n00:41:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And people are getting exhausted and they go downhill.\n00:41:36\tSadie Barker:\tThis is when reality starts to set in, but when the bodily effect of a car crash in slow motion that Charlotte Gill was referencing, starts to occur.\n00:41:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] It’s, it’s really hard to justify like the toll it’s taken on my body because I felt so–\n00:41:50\tSadie Barker:\tThis is Michelle.\n00:41:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] –physically able before coming.\n00:41:54\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] I have a huge gash in like the webbing between my thumb and my index finger.\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording:\t[Overlapping Unknown Voices] My feet are regularly cramping– The [inaudible] hurts– Common tendonitis– And it’s like a charley horse in my foot– Drought– I don’t know what I’ve done to my back– Foot pain– Some ribs popped out– So two days ago I woke up and I barely could see out of– Basically my knee started swelling up– –my right eye– –and I took my first day off ever. –it was bitten from a black fly– And so I hobble around and struggle to get in and out of the truck and struggle to get in and out of bed…\n00:42:21\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think? Is it worth it?\n00:42:28\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle Laughs] I don’t know. [Laughs] I don’t know.\n00:42:33\tSadie Barker:\tThis also when the days start to feel long– [Sound Effect: Rain Falling]\n00:42:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] The time doesn’t fly enough.\n00:42:40\tSadie Barker:\t–really long.\n00:42:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Markus] Well, the worst thing that I find tree planting is…definitely the loneliness\n00:42:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] There doesn’t seem like… No birds are singing or nothing. Everything is just grey and…\n00:42:56\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] If you have one bad thought on the block, then it can just stick with you all day long.\n00:43:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And it’s always been the hardest job I’ve ever done and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.\n00:43:07\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] But like today–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] And then–\n00:43:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –at some point I sat on the log–\n00:43:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] –July hits–\n00:43:14\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I just started laughing–\n00:43:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam]–and it’s the home-coming stretch.\n00:43:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Zoe] –and I was laughing by myself for like a big two minutes and then I just stood up again and…planted!\n00:43:27\tMusic:\t[Begin Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso]\n00:43:27\tSadie Barker:\tAnd what do you think, will you be coming back again?\n00:43:32\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Yeah, see, that’s a hilarious question.\n00:43:35\tAudio Recording:\t[Kim] People always say it’s the last season, then they come back.\n00:43:37\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] Obviously I’m saying never again after this season.\n00:43:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Michelle] That’s the struggle now where it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll come back. No I won’t. Yeah, I will. No, I won’t.” Back and forth, back and forth. I think–\n00:43:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Liam] I think this is my last year. I think this is my last year, but I said that last year. So. Who know? Everybody always says that.\n00:44:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Alanna] I said that—I think it was my third year—that I would never come back and now I’m at four years later so…I guess it does something right. [End Music: “Coffee” by Sylvan Esso. Rain Sound Effect Fades Out]\n00:44:19\tSadie Barker:\tIt’s funny hearing your own voice and podcast, maybe, especially, when it’s your first. I remember at the time of making this not really having a plan, maybe because this combination of sound and text was a new medium for me, not having a deliberate sense of process. But maybe because of that, having a sense of freedom. I knew I wanted to capture the everyday-ness of planting and I was excited by the possibility that I didn’t need to directly argue for the everyday or pose it as a structured thesis necessarily, but that I could present it experientially to the listener. I remember gravitating to certain sounds almost impulsively and assembling them in ways that just felt intuitive. It’s interesting now to hear the sounds that came through and the ways in which they did the sound [Mechanical Clanking] of the generator for me is interchangeable with the sound [Beeping Alarm] of the alarm clock. Both mean early morning.\n00:45:17\tSadie Barker:\tThey mean that the cook is likely starting to make breakfast and you should probably be mobilizing out of your tent. These parallels, I think, was the underlying rationale for putting those sounds in almost overlapped proximity. The sounds of the beer can and the fire and the instruments and banter. Those sounds for me capture the social world [People Chatting] of planting and the sound of the rain [Water Splashing] on the tent in the morning, which is always the first thing you hear and notice because it cues exactly the kind of planting day it will be seem to perfectly sound the ways in which planting is almost always at the mercy of the environment. So, I wanted to forefront those visceral relations between planters and their everyday surroundings and I think podcasting allowed me to do that in ways that were more in accord and representative of planting as itself: an immersive and sensory and experiential medium. [Theme Music]\n00:46:31\tAli Barillaro:\tAs Sadie, Emma, and I talked about our podcasts together with Jason, we found ourselves coming back to three key themes, including what we’re calling feeling or ambiance and rhetoric. But we probably had the most to say about voice, about vocal performance, intent, effects and affect.\n00:46:52\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio Recording] Listening to your, to your natural voice recorded is also kind of scary.\n00:46:57\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:46:57\tAli Barillaro:\tHaving that option to sound like somebody else, I guess in a way, is, is like a safety blanket, sort of.\n00:47:06\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s a really interesting point. I think it’s a great point. And it’s… I find it really… I mean, I’m not surprised, but I find it interesting that clarity and authority means voice evacuated of emotional characteristics or traits, right? You know. Which is also protective ’cause it shows that you’re not vulnerable to emotion, right? So in this version of podcast voice we’re to evacuate our voices of emotion, to communicate authority, clarity, and to somehow twist our personalities into some kind of robotic version of ourselves, you know, maybe avatars against, you know, that more authoritative robotic version of self-performance, but actually is about putting yourself out there and being casual and being yourself.\n00:47:54\tAli Barillaro:\tA lot of that comes from also feeling like sort of inadequately prepared to be that authoritative speaker as a student and for an assignment for a class. The audience was all of us, technically, like the other students, but it’s also Jason. So it’s a little hard to step back from that, even though you’re aware that you can and we were encouraged to do so in the podcast form, it’s very hard to stop doing that.\n00:48:23\tJason Camlot:\tEmma, did you feel you were also engaging in a kind of a different version of yourself, a more transparent or, or somehow, you know, objective version of yourself in your vocal performance in your podcast? Or were you doing a different kind of voice?\n00:48:40\tEmma Telaro:\tI think on some level I was–\n00:48:42\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro.\n00:48:43\tEmma Telaro:\t–just because this was a podcast that was assigned to us within an academic setting. So, and I was talking about heat in my podcast and I, I realized how that can become quickly humourous. I think like you, Ali, I kind of feel like, “Oh, that was a little bit of a missed opportunity. I could’ve made a bunch of like really silly jokes about heat.” But also I was sometimes actively trying to avoid that because I was afraid that that wouldn’t make it not serious. I often do think about that idea of the authoritative voice and how, as a student, it’s difficult to ever feel like you have one. And also like as a woman, having like a high-pitched voice is not necessarily normally seen as authoritative. So it’s something I often think about on the daily, especially at school, because I also find that my voice at the university is not the voice I have when I’m at home with my parents or when I’m at a bar with my friends, it fluctuates so much. And it’s something I pay a lot of attention to. And I think for this podcast, I wanted to find like a medium, like how can I be myself, but also sound like better than I am? Which is maybe like a silly, insecure thought, but it’s a thought that I’m sure everyone has, as soon as they’re being recorded.\n00:49:56\tAli Barillaro:\tI think a lot of us are kind of self-conscious about sounding, not, not too shrill, not too loud, and like not too high-pitched. I think my voice is actually quite deep. Like even now, I’m realizing listening to myself that when I’m talking and I know I’m being recorded, I do often try to, to keep it to the lower registers with my voice.\n00:50:20\tEmma Telaro:\tI used to sing. So it brought me back to being like in a recording studio and it brought me back to that moment, like right before record like that, that sort of… The acknowledgement you have in your head of like, “Okay, well now I’m putting on this performative voice.” And that voice felt a little bit similar to my singing voice because I was trying to like, I think extend the words and circle around the letters in a way that I don’t when I’m speaking casually. So it’s also a fake casual voice, I think.\n00:50:51\tJason Camlot:\tYeah. A performed casual voice, which is a big part of the podcasting voice that we often hear. When’s it acceptable to have emotion like in… For a narrator to have emotion or host to have emotion in a podcast? Because I definitely don’t either in my narrations, at least the ones I’ve done so far, it’s been pretty, it’s been pretty much based on like my grade eight radio assignment, you know? I don’t think I’ve progressed very much in thinking about how I’m supposed to sort of project or what a narrator’s really supposed to be. I think I’m trying to be clear. So I totally get what Ali was saying earlier about wanting to enunciate well at the same time to sound casual or conversational so, so that the text I’m reading doesn’t sound like it’s being read. There’s this kind of attempt to, to strike a really impossible or unnatural thing, balance, between reading texts, so sounding like an actual text that’s being read, but being a voice that’s doing that text in a manner that sounds conversational. I think it’s, there’s a lot of that kind of communicating a sense of reception through how one speaks back to what someone said without always saying, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I like what you’re saying.” It’s coming across through these vocal modes of expression instead, in timbre and in, in register in the voice itself. Earlier in this conversation like Ali, when you’re laughing, you know, about yourself and everything like that, that’s all there. And it’s like, “Oh, that sounds like a podcast voice to me, like much more than the formal narrator’s voice that we all seem to sort of slot ourselves into.” Sadie Barker.\n00:52:34\tSadie Barker:\tThat’s true. The podcasters, like I’m thinking of even someone like Ira Glass, kind of walks this line between being kind of well-spoken, but also can kind of respond naturally and with emotion on the spot and how it’s a really fine balance.\n00:52:52\tJason Camlot:\tIf you were to perform a different podcasting voice to sort of give us an example of what your voice might sound like if you were to redo your podcast, having reflected a little bit on the voice that you did use, what would that sound like?\n00:53:06\tSadie Barker:\t“Wake up everyone, it’s 5:45–” no. I think maybe I would just try to adopt the shifts in energy more… Like I think the, the podcast starts with kind of a lower energy, but it does kind of rise. I would reflect maybe more on my own experiences, my own personal reflections, take less of a back position and come to the fore more.\n00:53:32\tJason Camlot:\tWhat about you, Emma? Would your, your voice change, do you think?\n00:53:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThinking about it now, it was a very literary voice I think I was trying to mimic and I think I was also trying to match it with Atwood’s knowing that I would be putting the clips together. Whereas like, if I were talking about pizza, which I’m also super passionate about, it would be a very different voice. And I’m also thinking like Sadie, I wouldn’t want you to lose that like rising, quiet quality, because it’s as much part of the story as is the other speakers or the content. It is like a question of matching tone or timbre to, to content in the same way that we do when we’re writing. It shifts. But there is always something there that, that speaks of the author, right? Whatever that is. I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers the question. I guess it wouldn’t change, it would, it would maybe change. I don’t know, depends what I’d be focusing on this time.\n00:54:24\tAli Barillaro:\tIf I had to respond to this question, I’d say it might sound something like this:\n00:54:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Audio, Begin Music: Relaxed Instrumental] Sir George’s then-poet-in-residence Irving Layton was no stranger to praise. His final poem of the night received the longest and loudest unedited record of applause found in the entire poetry series collection, [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental] a 40-second auditory event so intense I call it a wall of noise. [Thunderous Applause, Previous Music Returns] In his opening remarks, Layton proudly draws attention to the sizable crowd in front of him. [End Music: Relaxed Instrumental]\n00:54:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Irving Layton] I’m really glad to see so many of my…\n00:55:03\tJason Camlot:\tEmma Telaro\n00:55:03\tEmma Telaro:\tIt seemed that the medium, we were dabbling in, podcasting ,demanded that we concentrate feeling, that it was part of the argument, content, and narrative voice of our podcasting selves. The relational, immersive, and affective experience of sound and of podcasting guided or thematic discussion on feeling. Jason asked us to recall moments from our podcasts that were soaking in affect and to reflect on the achievements and challenges of these. We all thought of Sadie’s very successful rendering of the ambiance of camp and in particular of her campfire clip.\n00:55:36\tSadie Barker:\t[Audio, Overlapping With People Chatting] I sampled the sounds of people jamming and then I sampled sounds of people conversing. I think it was really an attempt to describe the sort of social atmosphere of planting that really… It seemed much more informative to use these small sounds, as opposed to saying, “You know, usually there’s 12 people standing around a fire and there’ll be some people playing instruments.” And I don’t know, it just made me kind of reflect on how the smallest sound can be so telling and so much more telling than kind of a lengthy description. I chose this scene because I thought it really captured the ambiance of camp.\n00:56:16\tEmma Telaro:\tSadie aptly negotiates images through sounds so that we feel like we’re there sitting around the campfire. If Sadie sought to sample atmosphere of camp, I focused on the ambiance of a room. My podcast, in a sense, was about feeling the feeling of heat at the poetry reading event.\n00:56:31\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Margaret Atwood] How are you doing? Is it hot and steamy?\n00:56:35\tEmma Telaro:\tThe goal was to transmit a listening experience that centred heat, in listening closely to the room, and from there eased into a discussion of the reading event that preserved its heated texture. The heat felt all-consuming, shares much with Sadie’s rain, calling forth sensations, [Sound Effect: Stormy Rain] images, and memories that are otherwise inaccessible. I’ve never been planting in Northern BC, but I can hear the rain on my tent regardless, just like I had not been present nor alive during the Atwood reading and yet I feel I know that heat from that October night. While Sadie and I focused on the field of our particular subject matter, the sound of camp and of heat, of tree planting and of the poetry reading, Ali asks, what does podcasting itself sound like? Ali, quite brilliantly questions the mood evoked by the genre and sets the tone for the experience of listening to an informational form of communication. What remains consistent across our podcasts and in our discussion of feeling is this focus on our affective relationship to sound. The affordances of the medium seem vast in this regard, how to translate, feeling, affect, how to tell. What rhetorical methods might be used.\n00:57:40\tJason Camlot:\tSadie Barker.\n00:57:41\tSadie Barker:\tOur approach with this podcast was to structure it around thematic discussions, voice, and ambience, too. But now we land at structure itself. How do we bring all of these components together to make one coherent, but also hopefully compelling narrative? Just like the structuring of this very podcast determined through brainstorming, zooming, and certainly some trial and error, our approaches to structure were varied.\n00:58:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] It was the same feeling of having to fill up a blank page and like, where do you start? Where do you end?\n00:58:15\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I wanted to start with a statement.\n00:58:16\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs be the primary structure.\n00:58:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n00:58:23\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I found it very difficult, found it very hard. I just had a lot to say.\n00:58:27\tSadie Barker:\tBut before we get into any of that, Jason usefully summarizes what exactly we’re talking about when we say “structure” and “rhetoric.”\n00:58:36\tJason Camlot:\tSo when I’m, when I talk about rhetoric, I’m thinking of the handling of different registers so that you create a kind of persistently interesting series of sounds that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish combined with the kind of understanding of a beginning, middle, and end.\n00:58:54\tSadie Barker:\tAnd, as leader of the discussions, he offers some useful soundbites towards structuring this very segment.\n00:59:02\tJason Camlot:\tBut maybe we can each reflect a little bit on the challenges of the overall structure and arrangement of our podcasts.\n00:59:11\tSadie Barker:\tIn doing this reflecting, I started to realize that these categories [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] of voice, ambiance, and now rhetoric and structure, ones that we’d been discussing somewhat separately, were connected, entirely connected. Feeling and ambiance suddenly seemed integral to how my podcast was constructed. [End Music: Intense Instrumental]\n00:59:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] In my case, I knew I wanted to have the emotional arcs of the season be the primary structure, but that that was structurally quite ambiguous. And so I had Liam, who is my partner and a planter, describe those emotional arcs in the language that everyone recognizes as the honeymoon and the burnout and the homestretch, just to provide a bit of structure [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] to the listener that keys the transition, right?\n00:59:56\tSadie Barker:\tBut I also realized that voice and its spectrum of intonation and register was key to the structural shifts themselves.\n01:00:05\tAudio Recording:\t[Sadie Barker] I did really rely on the voices of planters to capture the different emotional registers of those moments. There was an interview with this girl, Zoe, and she was describing a really miserable day on the block. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] And then she kind of goes, “But then I just pick myself up and I start planting” and being really drawn to that “but” because it just captured both in what she was saying, but the intonation, like the shift in register, that really mobilized the next chapter. So it was interesting to think about the content of what people were saying, but then also just how the sound and the way she said that one word cued that we were in a different emotional space.\n01:00:43\tJason Camlot:\tCool. That’s amazing how just a single intonational shift can actually signal, “Okay, new part.” And it shows how much feeling is a determining factor in the segmentation or shaping of argument in podcasting.\n01:00:56\tSadie Barker:\t[Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] And just like with structuring an essay where everyone seems to take a different approach to argument, some brainstorm, others start with the thesis, and others just begin with no particular sense of how, my approach in many ways seem to differ from Ali’s, which was to–\n01:01:13\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro]–to start with a statement rather than “applause and the sounds of the audience are important and here’s why.”\n01:01:19\tSadie Barker:\tWhich would then orient listeners to her particular stance on the topic at hand.\n01:01:24\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] Because most research with recordings of poetry readings are focused on the poets for obvious reasons. So I wanted to start out sort of stating that.\n01:01:32\tSadie Barker:\tAnd while Ali didn’t particularly focus on vocal inflections or registers–\n01:01:39\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] I don’t think I was successful in thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking like, “Okay, well, my voice should signal these shifts in the narrative arc.”\n01:01:48\tSadie Barker:\t–she had a strong sense of how the structure of her podcast was mobilized by the complexities of an idea.\n01:01:55\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] The middle section is more about the work that I’ve been doing to figure out how to talk about applause in a way that isn’t just, “Oh, it lasts this many seconds and it’s loud or it’s quiet,” but to come up with terms that are more specific to the qualitative essence of different moments of applause.\n01:02:13\tSadie Barker:\tBut Ali also reflected on how her structure was mobilized through the possibilities of an idea.\n01:02:20\tAudio Recording:\t[Ali Barillaro] And then the ending is sort of where I still am in a way, which is that there’s a lot more [Begin Music: Intense Instrumental] that can be done to develop that further. And there’s a lot of exciting possibilities for tracing performances across even just different days or different years or decades and different locations and, and charting sort of the responses from different audiences in different contexts to the same poet and the same work.\n01:02:46\tSadie Barker:\tSo if my approach was to structure emotively and Ali’s was to structure more theoretically, Emma’s further diversified our set of approaches. Emma ended up taking—at least initially—a structured approach to structure.\n01:03:02\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] I resorted to what I know how to do, which is how to write a paper. So I thought about it. I thought to myself, “Okay, what’s going to be my introduction, what’s the body, and then what’s the conclusion?”\n01:03:11\tSadie Barker:\tBut also found in the process that essay and podcast structure have some fundamental differences.\n01:03:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] Except that it was almost more scary ’cause it was just like, how do I, first of all, put sounds onto this platform and then also make them make sense?\n01:03:25\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these differences call for different approaches.\n01:03:29\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] So I had various clips that I liked. I wrote a script. Then in the end I had all these sound bites or clips that I just needed to assemble into a collage. Like the whole thing to me felt like a collage.\n01:03:38\tSadie Barker:\tAnd that these approaches rely on feeling in different ways.\n01:03:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Emma Telaro] But when you do that there’s not necessarily like a linear structure that you have right away. So it’s also just trusting that the process will reveal itself. I didn’t know how to conclude this in a way that would be engaging and not too formal and not too academics. And that’s when I decided to include the poem “Late August,” which just felt like it needed to be there somewhere. And to end it with that, I think was to go back to like, just to come back to the reading.\n01:04:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Jason Camlot] I love that move at the end of your podcast. And it relates to what we’ve been talking about this whole time because it’s a return to a verbal rendering of a mood. So it’s a way, it’s a return to the poem on the page or language, the actual words themselves, communicating what you’ve been communicating through, through the rhetoric of podcasting with using, you know, sound and mixing and all those other things up to that point. So it’s sort of like a return to text, to print, you know, to the power of poetry and words themselves to do what you’ve been doing up to that point with sound.\n01:04:53\tJason Camlot:\tSo that about sums up the conversations we had based on the amazing podcasts that Ali, Emma, and Sadie made. As you heard, our focus was on the mood that’s created through ambient sounds, the overall rhetoric of the podcast, and how voice carries affective expression of concepts. [End Music: Intense Instrumental] By way of closing, we tried a little experiment. Basically the idea was to choose some classic critical terms like things from M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms, and to read them with feeling, with the feeling that we associate with a critical term in question. So here it goes, our kind of beat poetry performance of the glossary of critical and literary terms where ideas have feelings. [Begin Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumental]\n01:05:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature. Literature.\n01:05:59\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Focalization. Focalization. Focalization! Focalization. Focalization? Foooocalization. Focalization. Focalization. Focalization.\n01:06:09\tAudio Recording:\t[Multiple Voices] Interpolation! You know, like, “Hey, hey interpolation!” Interpolation! [Laughs] There has to be a finger in there, you know, like, interpolation! Yoo-hoo, interpolation. Interpolation!! Oh, that’s terrifying! [Laughs] Hey! How do you..? Interpolation! Interpolation!\n01:06:45\tAudio Recording:\tHi, my name is Id. Iddddddd!! Id. [Exaggerated Inaudible Words] [End Music: Fast Beat And Jazzy Instrumentals] [Begin Music: Distorted Electronic Beat]\n01:07:30\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Emma Telaro, and Jason Camelot. A special thanks to everyone who contributed to the SpokenWeb Podcast over the last season. You know who you are. And hey, if you are part of the SpokenWeb network and want to get involved, let us know. Season two is just around the corner, so stay tuned this fall for brand new episodes from all your favourite scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. We’ll also be back with brand new Audio of the Month minisodes with Katherine McLeod from deep in the archives. To find out more about SpokenWeb, [Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here in the fall for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9614","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E1, Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’, 4 October 2021, Bloom"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/podcasting-literary-sound-revisiting-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Myra Bloom"],"creator_names_search":["Myra Bloom"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/79174225341311352865\",\"name\":\"Myra Bloom\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/373cabca-0ad8-4c98-a73d-97905d0a3b23/audio/4f64fdd9-c42b-40c8-ac20-6eff2555de43/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e1-revisitingelizabethsmart.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:09\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,340,674 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e1-revisitingelizabethsmart\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/podcasting-literary-sound-revisiting-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-10-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23334883\",\"venue\":\"York University Glendon Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON, M4N 3M6\",\"latitude\":\"43.72824305\",\"longitude\":\"-79.37750288670469\"}]"],"Address":["2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON, M4N 3M6"],"Venue":["York University Glendon Campus"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.\\n\\nMUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549699428352,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Today, we are welcoming you to Season 3 by reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you. \n\nOver the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.\n\nFeatured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer. This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.]\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n \n\n00:50\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to Season Three of the SpokenWeb Podcast. We are so excited to bring you another season of the podcast, featuring the research and ideas of the SpokenWeb community and a few special guests. We hope this podcast is a source of joy, inspiration, and learning for you. It certainly is for us.\n \n\n01:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWe want to open Season Three with an invitation to collectively reflect on the sounds we’ve been listening to. And the questions we’ve been exploring – beginning with a conversation about sonic literary research with episode producer Myra Bloom, followed by a replaying of Myra’s Season One episode: “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart”. Myra and I go back to her episode to ask: how does listening to archival audio shift our relationship to the authors we’re studying or reading?\n \n\n01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThis question is at the heart of the SpokenWeb project, which is dedicated to the discovery and preservation of recordings that have captured the literary events of the past. Writers and artists have been avidly documenting their performances of literary works, events, and conversations since portable tape recording technologies became available in the 1960s. Yet, most of these audio archives remain inaccessible or in danger of imminent decay. Even those that are digitized are often hard to discover, siloed on different institutional websites. Our goal is to help researchers and the public engage with these sonic literary artifacts today. [Start Music: Instrumental Jazz] Now you might be asking, why should we care about decaying old recordings? In the very first episode of our podcast, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod interviewed SpokenWeb researchers about how they got interested in literary sound and the SpokenWeb project. [Sound Effect: Tape Being Put in a Recorder. Beep of Recording Starting]\n \n\n02:41\tAudio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Michael O’Driscoll:\tArchives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. They –we only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them.\n \n\n02:51\tAudio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Annie Murray:\tWhat we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets were going on reading tours [Audio Recording: Overlapping Voices Performing Poetry]. We were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings. Where [Audio Recording: Audience Applause] did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read?\n \n\n03:11\tAudio Recording,  S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Jason Camlot:\tI was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach. And the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class, played to me by my professor, John Miller. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson receiting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” [Audio Clip: Muffled Recording of Tennyson receiting “The Charge of the Light Brigade]\n \n\n03:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ve discovered that once we make old tapes listenable again, the results are powerful –\n \n\n03:43\tAudio Recording, S2E6 “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”,  Mavis Gallant:\tThis is a story called Grippes and Poche.\n \n\n03:45\tHannah McGregor:\t[Audio Recording of Mavis Gallant continues] –like the voice of Mavis Gallant, inspiring producers, Kate, Kandice, and Michelle, to ask new research questions about her life and literary work.\n \n\n03:55\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:\t[Sound Effect: Beep of Recording Starting] Why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984?\n04:00\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kate Moffat:\tWe wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed, or not, from that of the individuals attending the event.\n \n\n04:05\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kandice Sharren:\tIt was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n04:11\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:\tIt’s like, where is this voice coming from? It did seem really unusual.\n \n\n04:17\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] Actually hearing an author reminds us that literary works can have a presence beyond the page. Like this moment that Katherine McLeod documents in a series of ShortCuts minisodes about Muriel Rukeyser – [Audio Recording of Muriel Rukeyser Begins] a moment of author and audience sharing a literary experience.\n \n\n04:36\tAudio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Muriel Rukeyser:\tYou know, this part of the story.\n \n\n04:38\tAudio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Katherine McLeod:\tI can see by your nods. You know this part of the story. By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are.\n \n\n04:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] The sounds of literature are embodied and emotional – they resonate within us. As the SpokenWeb Podcast begins its third season, we’re continuing to reflect on our mission asking ourselves questions like: how do we ethically manage and share old recordings with care? What can literary scholars learn from studies? What is present and absent from the sonic archive? And how does gathering sounds of the past change the way literary research happens in the present?\n \n\n05:27\tHannah McGregor:\tNow that I’ve set the scene, I’m delighted to bring Myra Bloom into the conversation. Myra is an assistant professor of English at York University, and was the producer of our Season One episode, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart”. In this episode, Myra used archival audio, her own narrative reflections, and interviews to examine the great passion behind Smart’s famous work By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – and the obstacles that impacted Smart’s literary career.\n \n\n05:56\tHannah McGregor:\tCould you start off by telling us a little bit about what the process was like for you of making this episode originally?\n \n\n06:03\tMyra Bloom:\tSo I –as anyone who knows me knows, I love Elizabeth Smart and I love By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and I had been thinking for a while about doing some kind of project about it. I’ve written about it before, I wanted to do a critical edition of that book, but for issues of obtaining the rights, I was a bit thwarted from that project. But I still had it in my mind that I wanted to do a lot of kind of archival research and primary research. I had done a lot actually. And I talked to some of the people already who were important players in Smarts, kind of afterlife, her biographers. I’d talked to Kim Echlin, I talked to Rosemary Sullivan, and I wanted –I loved the way that they spoke about her. And so I knew in my mind as I was conceiving of the piece that I wanted to bring in other voices, other women in particular, who had been inspired by Elizabeth Smart. And then it suddenly occurred to me that even though I’d spent some time in the archives looking at various documents, I’d actually never heard her voice. And so I decided – I looked around and tried to find if there were any archives of her actually reading. And I found two pieces that I ended up including in the episode, one of which was a video that I harvested the audio from, the other of which was an audio recording of a reading. And that’s kind of where the piece began to take shape for me.\n \n\n07:32\tHannah McGregor:\tSo what was it like for you hearing her voice for the first time? How did that shift your relationship to the work?\n \n\n07:37\tMyra Bloom:\tIt was very jarring, to be honest with you. Many of us have this image in our minds of Elizabeth Smart as this passionate young, beautiful, intense, almost tragic heroine figure. At least that was sort of the image that I always carried with me. I think that book is so powerful and transcendent and youthful and it’s spirit and language. It’s very accomplished, but it’s the passionate intensity of a young person. And as I say in the piece, those are feelings I really had related to as a 19- 20 year old encountering it for the first time, full of that kind of passionate intensity. But the thing about Smart that’s kind of interesting for Canadians is that we only really encountered her later in life. She came to Canada as a writer in residence in 1982 and she died in 1986.\n \n\n08:29\tHannah McGregor:\tWow.\n \n\n08:30\tMyra Bloom:\tSo, yeah. And so that’s really kind of the Elizabeth Smart that Canadians knew. And it was this feeling of belatedness – a lot of people spoke about this at the time that we kind of discovered her too late. And that was really the feeling that I had almost listening to the audio, not just that it was too late, but sort of the poignancy of the fact that Smart as an older woman was sort of reanimating this work from her earlier life. But the texture of her voice – this is a woman who drank a lot and smoked a lot and led a pretty Bohemian life. And you can hear that in the grain of her voice. So hearing her read that audio, I was really connecting with the older Smart, as opposed to the younger Smart I thought I had set out to encounter.\n \n\n09:20\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Which really sort of contextualizes the whole sense of what that book means differently.\n \n\n09:26\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. And you know, she’s a fascinating figure as well because that book is such a magnum opus and it presages such amazing things. And then she sort of had lifelong writer’s block, a lot of the works that came after The Assumption of the Roads and the Rascals –her other novella – is good, but it’s not the same level of good. And her poetry in my mind is not quite as accomplished as the novellas. And so, there’s a way in which she sort of lived on the laurels of that work and was kind of forced to re-encounter it again and again.\n \n\n10:04\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd there’s always this sort of element of, I don’t know, maybe regret or a feeling of not having achieved what she could have achieved potentially. So the disappointment –there’s a sense of disappointment I always hear in the reading. In fact, in some of those archives, she reads a poem twice because she starts out reading it at the beginning of the reading and then it gets a good reception. And then she says, I think I’m just going to read that one again. And you can really feel her kind of like soaking up the attention, which was, which was really denied to her for so much of her life when she was raising her children and kind of wallowing and obscurity [Laughs] – not obscurity that’s the wrong way to put it because she was a very successful copywriter. She just was never heralded as the great modernist that she really was.\n \n\n10:48\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s remarkable to be able to hear that in the recording too, the sense that your encounter with this voice in the archive is also a sort of re-encounter that what you are hearing is a sort of much later articulation of a relationship to this work. And it is this reminder of the way that author’s own relationships to their work transforms over time. And often you can only hear that in the audio record.\n \n\n11:15\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. And I think, if she had gone on to write consistently throughout her career, maybe she would offer something in her late style and then throw in a hit or two from her juvenilia, which By Grand Central Station would have been at that point. But because she never – she was kind of a one hit wonder – not exactly, and again, as I say, I don’t mean to diminish the rest of her output, which was considerable. I read somewhere that she was the first person to use sexy in an ad, the word sexy, although I have to independently verify that fact, because if that’s true, it’s amazing.\n \n\n11:47\tHannah McGregor:\tAmazing.\n \n\n11:47\tMyra Bloom:\tYeah, it’s amazing. But yeah, but she kind of had to figure out what work was going to mean to her for the entire rest of her life over and over after the George Barker of that work.\n \n\n11:59\tMyra Bloom:\tI mean, not again – my interests are very much in severing biographical readings of texts from the text itself. I think that’s too facile a conflation, but certainly George Barker, her lover, was a kind of animating inspiration for the love affair we see depicted in that book. And by the time she’s reading in Canada – their relationship, they had produced four children, it had completely fallen apart. They were friends and then they were frenemies and then they weren’t speaking. And this is like having to summon the passion of a relationship that has – is decades exhausted. So it’s interesting in that sense too.\n \n\n12:37\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, that is really interesting. So to follow up on that, your interest in severing the biographical tie in particularly women’s writing. We know this is something that haunts women writers in particular that while male writers are generally allowed to be making art, women are always read as operating in the autobiographical mode. This is like the great Sylvia Plath conundrum. How is that relationship complicated by encountering this work read, but in the authors’ voices?\n \n\n13:12\tMyra Bloom:\tElizabeth Smart was really canny about how she herself framed this work. So when it originally came out, sometimes she and George Barker would appear at readings together and sort of play up the biographical elements of the work. Sometimes she would say, “Oh, this is, this is about a great love affair.” She would really emphasize that aspect. Other times she would lie about its composition. She would say, “Oh, I sat down for two hours crying and writing this book”, which is not true. It evolved over a number of years. So she would make it sound like it was an outpouring, but the moment that kind of biographical reading would get applied to her, like when they tried to do an adaptation for, I think for film ,where the characters were named George and Elizabeth, she totally freaked out and completely recanted that biographical conflation.\n \n\n14:03\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd so I think that– I was aware going into it that she herself had played in that gray zone between the biography and the art. I think for me hearing it read in the voice of an older woman, it was no longer about George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. It was much more about an older woman’s relationship to her younger self. And to me that’s so fascinating because what draws many of us to this book is the sort of cult of youth and beauty and passion and all these transcendent emotions. But, anyone who’s heard this piece or will hear this piece that I ended up producing knows that it’s really much more about a kind of – it’s a more reflective piece. It has a more – I tried to take a more reflective tone and just to kind of open it up to a broader rumination on art making and the things that impede women from art making. I opted for a more sober, reflective tone to the piece, ultimately.\n \n\n15:02\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd so, I know that you have recently gotten funding to do a whole podcast series. Can you talk to us a little bit about sort of what inspired you to propose that in the first place and what that series is going to take up?\n \n\n15:17\tMyra Bloom:\tYeah. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. I am currently writing a book whose provisional title is Evasive Maneuvers. And the book is all about the ways that certain contemporary Canadian writers subversively inhabit the confessional mode, which historically has always been a powerful mode for women. It’s – we wrote in letters and diaries and journals before we could access the publishing sphere and certainly confessional poetry and the United States and the 60s was a very powerful mode. And I should say that obviously persists to this day where confession is a very popular internet, social media, these kinds of first person narrative mode for women. But historically at every moment, the confession has also held out a kind of trap or a snare for women in that the moment you use it, you get accused of being overly effusive, of being not a serious writer, of being kind of compelled by your hysterical passions, right?\n \n\n16:16\tMyra Bloom:\tFeeding into these stereotypes of who women are and what forces they’re animated by. And in the internet, a lot of women try to use first person writing as a way to become published and then kind of immediately had those doors slammed on them when they were subsequently perceived as non-serious writers, precisely because they were writing about “I found a hair ball in my vagina” or something like that. Anyways. So keeping in mind all of this, this backdrop, I was interested in how women find ways to negotiate these confessional aporias or confessional problems in their work. And I’m really interested in kind of auto fiction or hybrid genre works, or the insertion of autobiographical content into poetry, or all these unexpected venues where the confessional kind of wells up in this ambiguous subversive way. So I’m working on the book, but I also realized it would be so powerful and interesting to hear women talking about these things in their own voice and to have the chance to actually do some interviews.\n \n\n17:16\tMyra Bloom:\tI was thinking today about how within the discourse of CanLit, social media and the internet has come to play such an important role and identity politics are really triangulating a number of these issues in a very, very personal way. So I thought, oh, well, maybe I could talk to some of the people who have tweeted very personal things about their experience that have gone on to factor prominently in the so-called CanLit dumpster fire. So I just realized there’s a lot of possibilities for talking to people that open up when you do something in a forum, like a podcast, rather than a book and different modes of scholarship, modes of engagement, modes of approaching an issue. And I am a huge, huge podcast listener. I have a very active podcast listening practice, and this was my first experience producing a podcast myself, for SpokenWeb. And I enjoyed the experience so much, I thought, okay, now I’m ready to really take on something at a larger scale. So yeah, so ultimately the SSHRC insight development project that I’m doing is going to be this multi episode engagement with this question of how contemporary Canadian writers and maybe even scholars are using confessional modes.\n \n\n18:21\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s very exciting. Okay. One last question. And that is, if anybody who is listening right now is an academic who wants to dip their toe into the world of podcasting, but is hesitant to do so, do you have any advice as somebody who went from a first time podcaster to now a passionate podcaster?\n \n\n18:42\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. Yeah. So my advice is the same advice that I would give to anyone who wants to be a writer or wants to practice any skill. The first thing you have to do, if you want to be a writer, is be a reader. And the first thing you have to do, if you want to be a broadcaster, is listen to podcasts. Just start listening to the medium and get a sense of what you want to do and what you like, and then just try it. It’s great. It’s very rewarding.\n \n\n19:03\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks again for joining us. Myra. Now here is Myra Bloom in our January, 2020 episode [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] “The Agony and Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n19:19\tMusic:\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n19:31\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tI thought, if it’s agreeable with you, that I’d read a chapter book I wrote called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. And this is about a couple of people, in case you haven’t read it. Well, I fall in love and they’re dashing away across America, madly in love.\n \n\n19:55\tMyra Bloom:\tI first encountered the writer Elizabeth Smart in a time of great passion. I was 19 and reading her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for an undergraduate class. Her description of a transcendent, debilitating obsession captured what I was going through at the time: the beautiful harrowing torment of first love. By Grand Central Station details a love affair that comes to an end as hyperbolically as it began. As the title implies, it ends with the narrator pregnant, bereft, and crying out to her lover who by this point has returned to his wife. I would soon come to relate to these darker feelings too, as my own relationship combusted, albeit under less salacious circumstances. I’m pretty sure there’s a direct line between my feelings about this novel and my decision to teach literature for a living. I wanted to talk to other women who had been similarly affected by the novel. I sought out writers and filmmakers who had written or made films about Elizabeth, or were planning to do so to ask them what drew them to her. I expected that their stories would sound similar to mine, that they would tell me tales of great loves, loved and lost. I was planning an anthropological study of female passion, but those weren’t the stories they told me.\n \n\n21:28\tSina Queyras:\tIt was on Vancouver Island and I was living in the rainforest and they had a cabin and I could see through the walls and it would just rain and rain and rain and rain. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n21:36\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is poet and professor Sina Queyras.\n \n\n21:40\tSina Queyras:\tAnd I was sitting there reading this – somebody sent it to me, my friend Rita whos a fellow from creative writing, sent me this book and that had been, I mean the reason she sent it to me was I loved Marguerite Duras’ A Lover and they’re sister books, right? They’re totally sister books. But the surprising thing about the Smart was that there’s just no Canadian voice that’s anywhere near the depth of feeling and just the intellectual precariousness, like she’s so present but also vulnerable and self propelled. There’s just nothing –I mean, I guess Margaret Lawrence, but that’s not ecstatic like By Grand Central Station is just so ecstatic. So I know that going forward it was like, it’s like Sappho, it’s like Sappho wrote a novel.\n \n\n22:57\tMusic\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n22:58\tKim Echlin:\tMy name is Kim Echlin. I’m the author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fuge Essay on Women and Creativity, and I was drawn to Elizabeth Smart first because of her great passionate love affair with George Barker. But then that quickly led me down to a much more complex story and it is the story of her as exile in England, as writer, as mother, and as a single woman earning a living. Romantic love is by definition irrational. It means sexual passion, the love of beauty, the potential for destruction, the taste of immortality. It is obsessive. Sometimes it flickers briefly, deliciously. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental] Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Its destructiveness evident even to the lovers themselves. Yet, lovers are loath to give up romantic love. Lovers believe they are most alive and it’s embrace. With strange pleasure we watch ill-matched lovers devour each other. They believe that their love is their very life force.\n \n\n24:01\tKim Echlin:\tI think about passionate, romantic love when I consider Bluebird’s Castle or some of John Donne’s poetry or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or such novels as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. I think of a different kind of love, one that still has no name, when I think of some of Samuel Beckett’s characters and of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Rosalind ironically and wittily says to the object of her desire, “love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as mad man do, and the reason why there are not so punished and cured is the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” Elizabeth wrote this ordinary lunacy in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but her telling is extraordinary. Just as Rosalind tells love in a fresh way from a woman’s point of view disguised as a boy, the narrator of By Grand Central Station tells love in a fresh way from the point of view of an unmarried pregnant woman. But before Elizabeth wrote it, she had to live it. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n25:17\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tBy Grand Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow, but I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone, It leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces, everyone compromises. They say, as we grow older, we embrace resignation, but oh, they totter into it blind and unprotesting and from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there’s no redemption. It’s the sin of damnation. What except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tiger shark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every impossible side. The senses deliver the unbearable into sleep. And it ceases, except that it appears gruesomely at the edges of my dreams making ghastly signs, which wear away peace, but which I cannot understand. The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end, it had operatic grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station, like a Judgment Day. It was more iron muscle than Samson in his moment of revelation. It might’ve shown me all Dante’s dream, but there was no way to endure.\n \n\n26:53\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd what did it mean for you for Elizabeth Smart to be the subject of your first film? Is that important to you?\n \n\n27:00\tMaya Gallus:\tIt was important to me. My mother was an artist and I saw her struggle as an artist and a mother, also a single parent. [End Music: Instrumental Jazz]\n \n\n27:10\tMyra Bloom:\tDocumentary filmmaker, Maya Gallus.\n \n\n27:13\tMaya Gallus:\tSo I think that Elizabeth represented some of those elements for me as well, because I was trying to figure out how to be a woman and an artist in the world. And it seemed to me that women of my mother’s generation and previously of Elizabeth’s generation really had this conflict and dilemma about being able to stake their claim in what is largely a male dominated world. And also then the additional challenges of being a mother. So I was kind of figuring all of that out and Elizabeth’s writings really spoke to me because she really went into the nub of that in a lot of her work and her poems. A poem like “The Muse: His and Hers”, I still find is a very relevant, in many ways. I mean, we still are living in a male dominated world and people are speaking about it a little more openly now than before. And perhaps people are more willing to listen to what women have to say and recognize that actually women have something important to say about life and art and love. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n28:33\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tNow, I would like to read you a little poem that most amazingly I wrote last week. It just sort of popped out and lo and behold, it’s a feminist poem. I hope this won’t give any offense. [Audience Member: Why worry?] I’m not worried. Anyhow, it’s called “The Muse: His and Hers”. His pampered Muse / Knew no veto. / Hers lived / In a female ghetto. / When his Muse cried / He replied / Loud and clear / Yes! Yes! I’m waiting here. / Her Muse screamed / But children louder. / Then which strength / Made her prouder? / Neither. Either / Pushed and shoved / With the strength of the loved / and the, unloved, / Clashed rebuked. / All was wrong. / (Can you put opposites / into the song?) / Kettles boiling! /Cobwebs coiling! / Doorbells ringing! / Needs haranguing! / Her Muse called / In her crowded ear / She heard but had / Her dirty house to clear. / Guilt drove him on. / Guilt held her down. / (She hadn’t a wife / to lean upon.) The dichotomy was killing me.\n \n\n29:58\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tShe said till old age came to assuage. /Now Muse, now you can have your way. Now, what was it I want him to say? /And used, abused and not amused. The mind’s gone blank./ Is it life you have to thank?/ Stevie, the Emily’s, Mrs. Woolf bypass the womb and kept the self/ But she said, try and see if it’s true and without cheating. My muse can do./ Can women do? Can women make? /When the womb rests animus awake./ Pale at my space starved and thin, /like hibernating bear too weak to begin./ To roar with authority, poems in the spring./ So late in the autumn of their suffering./ Those gaps. It’s decades of lying low./ Earthquakes, deep frozen mind askew./ Is it too late at 68?/ Oh fragile, fresh reanimate./ Oh flabby, teetering, body concentrate./ Astute, true woman, any late profligacy squandered on the loving of people and other irrelevancy/ useful in the dark in articulacy./ But drop it like poison now if you want poetry./ Let the doorbell ring, let the fireman put out the fire or light it up again./ Sheepish and shamefaced at 9:00 AM/ till the Muse commands her ritual hymn./ See lucky man, get off his knee./ And here now his roar of authority./ This test case woman could also be,/ just in time for a small cacophony/ A meaningful scream between folded womb and grave./ A brief, respite from the enclave.\n \n\n32:09\tRosemary Sullivan:\tI remember one wonderful moment when Elizabeth and I went to this reading.\n \n\n32:15\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth Smart’s biographer.\n \n\n32:21\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd it was by Mavis Gallant, who of course one admires deeply. And it was amusing to see how jealous Elizabeth was [Laughs] because, she’d written a great book when she was in her late twenties, and then she didn’t write again for 30 years. She used to say, when asked her who she was, she’d say, I’m my son Sebastian, the poet’s mother. And when we talked about this in detail, she did say, and this is quote that she felt that the maestro of the masculine was sitting on her shoulder telling her she could never be good enough. So she had sought out George Barker because he wrote the kind of poetry she wanted to write. And then George, being a poet of his era in the tradition of not T.S Elliot, but Dylan Thomas, kind of knocked her down.\n \n\n33:17\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd she said that she needed to be knocked down because she came from this wonderfully arrogant position of a debutante in Ottawa, put forward by her mother hobnobbing with the prime minister’s set, and so on. She said, “I needed to be knocked down a little bit, but not nearly as much as George knocked me down.” Then of course you asked her, well, why did you keep – what was it about George that was so seductive? And she said, “oh God, he had such a sense of humor.” [Laughs] So.. I did meet George.\n \n\n33:55\tMyra Bloom:\tWhat was he like?\n \n\n33:57\tRosemary Sullivan:\tExactly what she said. He was with his last wife, Elsbeth, you know that he had – this could not happen now. He had five wives, two of them legal, 15 children. And then they all adored him, because the creative male was given a kind of permission that he can’t be given today. But here I was at Elsbeth’s and she was lovely. There was a point at which she had tried to get Elizabeth to take George back, she was so fed up with him, but it didn’t work. And she was teaching, she was a Latin teacher, even though she had at one point aspired to be a poet. But again, that was part of the time you –if you wanted to be creative, you were creative vicariously through a man, right?\n \n\n34:44\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\t[Start Music: Jazz Instrumental] Yes. You – in another of your poems you talk about – this is the trying to write one, that you read last night. You talk about it being unfeminine to write.\n \n\n35:00\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes, yes. And somebody asked me last night too, about why I said that love was parallel. You see, I do feel that I’ve always been thinking about that you really have to be ruthless to write. And it isn’t– so it isn’t a loving thing. And of course we all want to be good, perhaps, but they do conflict. If you’re good, you’re not ruthless. You always think somebody else, they want to come in and tell you about their troubles. You’re writing. You don’t say “No, off. I’m busy.” You say, “come in.” And I listen to them.\n \n\n35:31\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tThis is called “Trying To Write”. Why am I so frightened to say I’m me / And publicly acknowledge my small mastery? / Waited for sixty years till the people take out the horses / And draw me to the theatre with triumphant voices? / I know this won’t happen until it’s too late / And the deed done (or not done) so I prevaricate, / Egging them on, and keeping Roads open (just in case) / Go on! Go on and do it in my place! / Giving love to get it (The only way to behave). / But hated and naked could I stand up and say / Fuck off! or, be my slave? / To be in a very unfeminine very unloving state / Is the desperate need / Of anyone trying to write.\n \n\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tAnd so in fact, goodness and art are parallel and can never meet. That was my theory.\n \n\n36:39\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tThat it’s egocentric to write.\n \n\n36:42\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tYeah you really have to have a large ego. I felt the mind been rather squashed so that I feel I have to get it back a bit.\n \n\n36:50\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tAnd do you think this is a particularly female problem? That it’s a problem of the woman writer?\n \n\n36:53\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tWell I do because whatever people say, I do think that women are – perhaps it’s a training, I don’t know, but they do want to be more loving and kind and helpful, don’t they? Maybe that’s because they’re in that position.\n \n\n37:10\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tWhen you speak about – it is necessary for a writer to be ruthless. I mean, it does remind me of Virginia Woolf and her, her essay on the angel of the house.\n \n\n37:18\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tThe angel of the house.\n \n\n37:21\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes, that a woman to write successfully had to kill the angel of the house.\n \n\n37:25\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\n \n\nWell that’s it, that’s the same thing.\n \n\n37:26\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tShe could not, no longer be if she was going to write, she couldn’t be responsible in this way or recognize or wait for family in her house or else she would never find time to write.\n \n\n37:35\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tAnd then most with children and the house, I mean, you’re always, you’re fragmented your mind. You think, “Oh dear, we’re out of Vim”. Or “the soap flakes are down” you can’t, you know, these sort of things that are in your mind.\n \n\n37:47\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes.\n \n\n37:47\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tAnd you’ve got to remember to go and get this. Well the men, well they are doing it more now, but there was never any question: they wouldn’t notice if you’d run out of lavatory paper or something.\n \n\n37:57\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes. Yeah.\n \n\n37:59\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tIn fact, George would just tear out a sheet of a book. [Laughs]\n \n\n38:04\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tReally?\n \n\n38:04\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYeah. No respect for literature.\n \n\n38:11\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tNot his own books?\n \n\n38:11\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes! Yes, his own ones. He wouldn’t care.\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tAnd yet, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, I know you’ve written so much more recently and that is all sort of new developments and further thoughts and you may be tired at times of hearing people hark back to the book you wrote many years ago –\n \n\n38:29\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tOh no, I’m delighted to have a little attention so late in the evening.\n \n\n38:31\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes. Well, so many people, particularly I think women, do identify with it. It is a love story, which must’ve been very unique, still is unique. But when it was published in 1945, a very moving, very explicit, very passionate description of a love affair. And I think at that time, it must’ve been thought, well this is a bizarre thing. I mean, I think it would be men that had been writing about this sort of thing. I mean, did you get that sort of reaction?\n \n\n39:07\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes. I think I mentioned last night that they said “a trivial subject”. Women’s feelings are trivial subjects. And nobody said how shocking to say it’s a trivial subject, they just took that.\n \n\n39:20\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tWell, does it make you angry when they said that?\n \n\n39:24\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tI didn’t know. One just thinks, that’s the way things are. I don’t really make any judgment. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n39:34\tMyra Bloom:\tDo you really feel that Elizabeth writer’s block was attributable to the fact that she felt overshadowed by George? You don’t necessarily attribute it to the material circumstances of having to raise four children? [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n39:47\tRosemary Sullivan:\tYou know, I know people who’ve raised four children and continued to write, Judith Thompson is one. So in fact, what’s so interesting is when you look at Elizabeth’s work, she was writing Grand Central before she met George. So he was simply the embodiment of it. After that, I do think that she lost her ego as a writer and it’s easy to – writing is such a fragile activity. I mean, I haven’t written poems for quite a while because I think I need that vertical sledgehammer into time before I can write. Everything’s going horizontally. There’s every reason not to write. And so, it became a habit, not writing. But also Elizabeth would – she had her youngest daughter Rose in a private school, so those children were off during the week and sometimes on the weekend they’d have these crazy so-called uncles taking care of them. So in fact it was – she had a professional life. But some people had managed a professional life with writing at night. But I think Elizabeth lost her nerve. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n41:12\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tA warning. This old woman waddles toward love, becomes human, but the Muse does not approve. This going flesh is loved and is forgiven by the generous. But houses the demon. Hello my dear, sit down. I’ll soothe your pain. I’ve known what you’ve known, but won’t again. Though passion is not gone. Merely contracted into a last ditch weapon. A deed, not dead. A mine unexploded and not safe to have near the playground of innocent life. Keep clear of this frail old, harmless person. 50 years fuel of aimed frustration could shatter the calm and scald the soul. And love falls like napalm, over the school.\n \n\n42:13\tMusic:\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n42:15\tMaya Gallus:\tOh, I think Elizabeth Smart should always be read. I think she brings an enormous amount of wisdom and life experience to the later work and an enormous amount of passion and literary innovation to the early work. And also some of her poems are really powerful as well. Her poem, “A Bonus” is one that I always think of whenever I finish writing something because she captures so beautifully that feeling of being in a bubble. And as she says, “feeling dirty and roughly dressed” and getting through this difficult thing of finishing something, and then that beautiful feeling of completion.\n \n\n43:06\tMyra Bloom:\t[Reciting Poem] “A Bonus”. That day I finished/ A small piece/ For an obscure magazine/ I popped it in the box // And such a starry elation/ Came over me/ That I got whistled at in the street/ For the first time in a long time// I was dirty and roughly dressed/ And had circles under my eyes/ And far, far from flirtation/ But so full of completion/ Of a deed duly done/ An act of consummation// That the freedom and force it engendered/ Shone and spun/ Out of my old raincoat.// It must’ve looked like love/ Or a fabulous free holiday/ To the young men sauntering/ Down Berwick Street./ I still think this is most mysterious/ For while I was writing it/ It was gritty it felt like self-abuse/ Constipation, desperately unsocial/ But done, done, done/ Everything in the world /Flowed back/ Like a huge bonus.\n \n\n44:20\tMaya Gallus:\tI can’t think of another poem that captures that moment and that feeling as beautifully as that does. So I think Elizabeth is relevant now and we’ll continue to be relevant for continuing generations.\n \n\n44:35\tMyra Bloom:\tI hope so. Okay. Thank you.\n \n\n44:39\tMaya Gallus:\tYou’re welcome.\n \n\n44:46\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tGood morning boss. A cup of coffee and two fried eggs. Look at the idiot boy begot with that knife. He’s all the world that is left. He is American better than love. He is civilization’s heir oh you mob whose actions brought him into bed. He is happier than you, sweetheart. But will he do to fill in these coming thousand years? Well, it’s too late now to complain, my honeydove. Yes. It’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are. That’s all. You have to learn to be adaptable. I myself prefer Boulder Dam to Chartres Cathedral. I prefer dogs to children. I before in corn cobs to the genitals of the male, everything’s hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything’s OK. It’s in the bag. It can’t miss. My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep? [Audience Applause]\n \n\n45:56\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. The episode we replayed for you today. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” was originally released on January 6th, 2020 and was produced by Myra Bloom. The new introduction to this episode was produced by Judith Burr and me ,Hannah McGregor, with special thanks to Myra Bloom for coming back to discuss her episode again with us. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our transcriptions are created by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9615","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E2, Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive, 1 November 2021, Polyck-O’Neill"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creator_names_search":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Julia Polyck-O’Neill\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3d1f947d-a26e-415a-9002-caeecdb1698e/audio/9aee09d9-16e3-4499-b25f-e666c04ae3a4/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,801,683 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/15396822\",\"venue\":\"York University Keele Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 \",\"latitude\":\"43.77417545\",\"longitude\":\"-79.50474900961275\"}]"],"Address":["4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 "],"Venue":["York University Keele Campus"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Duke University Press, 2003.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” No More Potlucks, 2018, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2019. \\n\\nMorra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2014.\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. “At the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, 1994: Launch of XEclogue on January 8, 1994.” PennSound, n.d., https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Robertson/Robertson-Lisa_Reading_Kootenay-School_Vancouver_01-%2008-1994.mp3. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum, 2018.\\n\\nTaylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549701525504,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, SpokenWeb contributor Julia Polyck-O’Neill shares an archived recording of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson with us and talks us through two interviews she recorded with Robertson. Polyck-O’Neill invites us to consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections in light of the relationships between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. In examining these conceptual, material and immaterial dimensions of the archive within Robertson’s personal narrative history of the Kootenay School of Writing, Polyck-O’Neill points to how creative and feminist approaches to the archive and to archival practice are exist within Robertson’s practice. Polyck-O’Neill shares with us how Robertson’s archives are influencing her research and the ways she approaches the topic of archives and intimacy in her work and her life more broadly.\n\nAddendum: Listening Notes\n\nNancy Shaw (1962-2007), a celebrated curator, poet, writer, and organizer, at times collaborated with Lisa Robertson and also wrote work in dialogue with Robertson’s poetry. Robertson wishes to mention how greatly the absence of her good friends Shaw, Stacy Doris (d. 2012), and Peter Culley (d. 2015) has affected her. Additionally,  XEclogue was, in fact, Robertson’s first book, although she published chapbooks prior; additionally, she does not think of her books as collections, as they are written as single, cohesive works. The new edition of R’s Boat is titled Boat and is being published by Coach House in Spring 2022.\n\n00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Creating an archive of literary lives and events can be a daunting task. Think about an author you admire – if you want to preserve their legacy in a box of materials, how would you do it? What would you save? How would these materials communicate the realities of the present to those living decades in the future? And how do sound recordings fit into – or even enhance -an archive? Archival collections or fragments of memory – a curated set of materials that has been gathered and preserved to encapsulate a moment, community, or person. Archives preserved at universities, museums, and other places contain all kinds of materials from mundane lists and notes to photographs, to sound recordings – our speciality here at Spoken Web.\n01:33\tHannah McGregor:\tIt might feel counterintuitive to think about the need for archiving today when so much of our lives are ceaselessly recorded. There are many digital outlets that people can use to collect and share moments from our lives and our literary present. But this abundance of material is also a call for curation and intentionality around what to protect and pass on. We can’t save everything and we probably don’t want to. So what should we choose to save? Today, our episode producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill leads us into one archival project: the archive of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Julia is caring for and studying part of Robertson’s archive as part of her postdoctoral work on the complexity of archiving the lives and works of interdisciplinary artists. In this episode, Julia shares a recording of Robertson from the archive and plays clips of Robertson discussing the challenges of forming her own archive. Julia uses these clips to reflect on creative and feminist approaches to archiving and on her personal connection to Robertson’s life and work. This episode is a fascinating and moving glimpse into the power of sonic archival material and the weight of memory, mortality, and trust in the archival process. Here is Julia Polyck-O’Neil with season three, episode two of the SpokenWeb Podcast, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:18\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Hello, thanks for listening. My name is Julia Polyck-O’Neill and I’m a post-doctoral researcher, theorizing interdisciplinary artists archives, according to feminist and digital epistemologies. This podcast episode, on which I’ve been working for quite some time has recently been re-imagined according to my private emotional responses to two long and surprisingly intimate conversations I recorded with Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, a feminist writer who was a member of the Kootney School of Writing in Vancouver in the 1990s and early 2000s.\n03:55\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI’m considering Robertson’s archive as part of my post-doctoral project. [End Music: Strings Instrumental] My conversations with Robertson and meditations on the connections between her body of work, biography, and her archive form the bridge between my recently completed dissertation work on Vancouver’s critical conceptualism in art and writing and my work re-examining and analyzing the complexity of the archival collections of interdisciplinary artists. Robertson’s work has figured into both projects in a formal way, but now, I wish to consider how her archives, and our collective thinking about her archives, is influencing my research and the ways I approach the topic of archives and intimacy in my work and my life more broadly. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Listening to our conversation months later invokes all kinds of feelings related to the relationship between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. Archives have an emotional weight – a kind of affective tenor that is challenging to describe accurately with language; objects begin to stand in for complex lives and relationships.\n05:05\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn this episode, I’m going to introduce you to Robertson’s poetry and my research. First, I will share a recording of Robertson reading in 1994. Then, I’ll share clips from an interview I conducted with Robertson earlier this year on Friday, April 16th, 2021, over Zoom with Robertson at home in France and me at my desk in downtown Toronto, months before Robertson’s 60th birthday (in July) and just before the announcement of the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award in fiction (for which her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal would be nominated on 4 May). Throughout this episode, I will be putting these recordings into the context of my thinking and research on her work.\n05:49\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections and the reflections she shared with me in light of a creative, conceptualist interest in the archive. I also propose these as aesthetic strategies related to histories of feminist material analysis that reconsider archival practices according to feminist ethical and effective methods, including feminist and affective approaches to audio recordings and the material (and immaterial) histories, they impart as Deanna Fong and Karen Scherer argue in their 2018 essay, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental]\n06:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI want to start this episode by listening together to this 20 minute recording of “Eclogue Eight ” at the January 8th, 1994 launch of Robertson’s book, XEclogue, which exemplifies important characteristics of her writing and her work with the Kootenay School of Writing. In this recording from the PennSound archive, you can hear the sounds of community participation. So central to the ethos of the Kootenay School. Of course, we might primarily focus on the poet’s own powerful voice, but I’m also drawn to the other voices we hear: the voices of other members acting as the “Roaring Boys,” an amateurish chorus, and the contributions of poet, artist, and organizer Nancy Shaw. But in this recording, in light of my interviews with Robertson, I’m most drawn to what we overhear in the background, the voices of audience members laughing and reacting in a way that suggests a deep, warm familiarity with the readers. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] The sounds of community. Part of an archive of community sounds. After we listen, I’ll talk about how this connects with my research, and I’ll share excerpts from my interviews with Robertson. [End Music: Strings Instrumental].\n \n\n07:46\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Eight: Romance. The Roaring Boys fan back.[Footsteps] [Audience Laughter] [Audience Chatter]\n08:01\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe March trees torch the prophetligate sky because I say so. [Audience Member Laughs] A tiny flopping boy with sullen fits drifts like a sheet of golden lust. In this empire of no-tense he bullies the dust. He lends the block street, a gleaming arch. He flaunts his hidden rope burn like defeat. So what about his consummate latinady? He has been moving in the pale night with the urgent authority of a meaning. The flicked fringe of his anger flatters mangled angels. And he weeps like a twin in the heat. The Greenwood never wanted him nor the puckered gully he calls thought. A seabird rises like an angel in the night and shrieks it’s brackish laughter at his dream. The Swains of justice pinch out the lights. A pronoun’s snout is gentle torture dressed in the dust of the jejune Northern sky. He scissored to that pilgrim’s grief. His marble whippets snap at piety; they’re pearly lust encrypted as confession. Under the empires, arches swooning flower chasers confuse scripted infamy with paradise.\n09:25\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey blindly submit to the loutish bonus of roaring boys’ dreams. As if the Greenwood were the room of philosophs. As if their yearning arms were half tree. They had been moving all this time towards a rose of dust in the street, calling it golden, calling it the sodden issue of their belief. They clasp their girlish secrets like tiny, glowing wreaths. In the tender platinum sky, a pronoun gallops, a pronoun shifts, a pronoun shifts. Hey, Venus kick in paradise, revolve outside March trees of piety. Gently the golden whippet snouts of gorgeousness lust in the tragic streets, touch supine forms of girlish hooligans. A bud will clasp its profligate secret rather than submit to gold stiff piety. And the pale jejune week unfolds through the lattice of confusion. Who is not a Pilgrim carrying grief like an image through the Northern sky? Already dressed as a boy, his dream of justice fucked.\n10:41\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tHe had been moving through this adult and gentle world of gentle laughter. Softly he flicks out his wings on the marble steps, the quiet of philosophs peaks in their rooms. Hey Nancy, what’s that colour falling in the heat, like a twin? Like a tiny flapping soft scissor and mistake. The fringe of his wings licks the dust like pearly fingers. Hey, Venus, get dressed in a better latinaty. Wear that salted harness beyond the need for abnegation. He quotes a crumbling dream and dares not say so. These boys are vicious as a burnt lip tongued [Audience Laughter]. The sleek swing of a silk fringe rewrites their project as a failure. One begins to sing. It is an anthem sprung with a quality of flung bits, withdrawn or chastened as rustling tongues and fluent scandal. Reigned with the amusing cruelty of Cupid birched. Caressed by an accent has rubbed for murmurs to the sneaking night sulking as a flipped skirt, cradled in the precise euphoria of a method held in reserve. Dirty per se.\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] [Intermittent Audience Laughter] Rear all you face and wave to the enormous night. Since love’s pure need lures [inaudible] credit through hungers creamy trap well suss a petty sight. Pass floral delight and sip at feeble kisses. Permit us a sip from that gaze quiet tremor. [inaudible] or crop that tricky verb. We’ll either sap or wet Nancy’s sultry transit. Sufficient ardor to us. [inaudible] This time of filming will quote Cupid’s vulgar luck to taste her silly statement. [Laughter and Applause]\n \n\n13:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tBut pathetic lays all that’s left of freedom in the cloistered night. Like a lock of Helen and the dangerous summer having bloomed from the silvered style of an anxious wrist who’s blunt syntax lackers opacity with greed. Yet crushing nothing more than the dampness that moves across the nyloned air with rancid gusts in an age of tawdry indolence that breeds such smear doubles for a calling, for a bruised structure, for a dupe sincerity that flaunts escape. The next pretty boy emerges like a rape from his crisis to find the concept does not need him. A slick whisper weaves across the commodities. Are you looking for fragrance? There is no sea and no forest and no boats passing. It’s eight o’clock. The glass world curves into history, leaving a bear pronoun to bask on the roof of a promise. Read them, audacity’s slim wrists cuffed in elegance, wandering fingers clipped to the pulsing sky by those bannal enchantments of antiquity and authority and consent.\n14:24\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tRead them as mere exitation, pooling products of neglect. Nancy straps the audible sulk of a method to her hips and presses bitter lips against an image. Let’s go down to the water’s edge. Who fished the ineffable from this slick tissue of an absence dripping it’s regret. She spends the loose coins from a lisped purse on important grammar that opens that goes on sheer, a girl-boy’d mirror, a compact Nancy pins them to the glass. Roaring Boy Number One is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of his mind as a great dusty silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he would exude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. He could be said to profoundly resent his inability to control his desire for an impenitent extrovert.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWhen he closes his eyes, he asks, “shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight?” He is skinny and pure as a calling. Roaring Boy Number Two ,boy with the volute heart of a girl names, the faithless toss of an abandoned guest’s exactitude. He gives his thought with the sinews rigor of a cut silk garment. Lives looking at the sky, waiting for the specificity of a pleasure whose deferral is underwritten by a constriction of memory. The violent stammering of a repressed structure. The plains of his face point to the exquisitely even surface of a late antique life. He has begun by setting aside holy dread. Deferral is his darling. Roaring Boy Number Three, rather than submitting to the trial of action, wants deeply to possess an opinion [Audience Laughter] than having to possess, to distribute it with maximum efficiency. Since the spectacle of luxury pleases him and others, he embarks on a gradual, to the point of imperceptibility, inflation of his own verbal style and a concurrent almost compensatory deflation of his person. He is both febrile and duckerish – decorish [Laughs]. [Audience Laughter] A foolish hooligan of sardonic emphasis.\n17:29\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Nine: History: Knowing memory only bruises the past, Lady M scans the face of a faint document whose ardent stammer she has already echoed than languidly rejected.\n \n\n17:47\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe cannot think tranquility a throne, yet time exceeds is barely tolerable pleasure.\n \n\n17:53\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIt is a crumb in our syntax.\n \n\n17:55\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe need not innure ourself to peace and luxury, but our privilege lies in understanding how the senses detect what is not servitude.\n \n\n18:03\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWho then would write the biography of their desires?\n \n\n18:07\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWe ourselves will claim the requisite authority.\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey wished for lips of red thread, like so many spies. They received through the veil of expression, a heart moved only by etiquette. They wished to experience thought as we would be compelled to remember it. It became a language impossibility. Their heart was lodged in an audible sentence. They wore nervousness on their spine and wrists. Their small soft edgy world was an intoxicant. The superb crumbling of the afternoon, so secret and so intense identified itself as history. The ground shelved gently to the water side, flowing from the flushed pulse of vulnerability under full, soft, hot light. It was a challenged mesh from which our presence had been washed.\n \n\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIf we were to imagine that contradiction as a landscape overwritten with vast exhausted melancholy quenched in mauvis tasseled wind, we would only perpetrate the vain in position of a hoax.\n \n\n19:17\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tYet the sea’s novice rhythm seems to reek of freeze. The Roaring Boys drift aimlessly, believing their thoughts imperius. A background ground of shimmering woods fetters our weary gaze. The black brow of a rock parches the trees. Sister of a lynx gert with quiver steps, cunningly and cheats the light. Recall the echoing crags a shore’s lip keeps happiness for itself. The woods breast is pierced with sight. Why may we not clasp the revolving night? The dusky grove bleeds virtue. For we saw two maids clashing with men whom the black storm had scattered. We saw one bear knee break the ghastly dark. We saw a strong hand raise the bow to slash the weird decrepitude time had wrought. Undone by our vision we began to move tirelessly among the wending dwindling paths. Though they appeared with grace, then faded into cruelity without apparent motivation. Slowly, we came to understand how the forest was fraught or thatched with use. Capital had tagged or lurid route. We asked ourselves, will this delicate world of deliquescent charms compel a future? Then answered ,the ground breeds sentiment, but what else is there to walk on? Sullenly we raised our glance, the coy foliage swung open to reveal this Moston scription.\n \n\n20:56\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] Shirk off the moderate little grace of vain Cupid and grease the silver and lascivious age as livid qualms dope our cool arrival. Rich poems sag like great nuns, arch cheeks, tongues, martyrs.\n \n\n21:14\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tFrom the lip of slavish shade, the guilty land reclines swollen in a thousand livid tents. All around us everything’s humming. In the low valley our futures writ on winking leaves. Texture Brit brushes, drenched texture in a glamorous frizane of wit. The cushioning ground urges us to remeasure our impatience. May we muster sufficient elegance to court this pangs mobility? Sunken moss we dream of the lustrous pitch of a truculent tissue. It means we are traders for we do not accept the idea of the present. We dream we are treading the sloping orthodox street etched with a scammed pride of hunger. It means memory has been defaced, implicated by the effects of poverty. We dream that their desires have become transparent to us so that we may suavely recite. What does Lady M want? To bask in unfathomably strange beauties. Political beauty, liberties, beauty, undeniably gorgeous beauty of a girl’s mind. A wrist’s quivering beauty. Beauty of the skin of boys’ backs. Beauty of burnished hoaxes deepen a clamoring taxi cabs. Appalled beauty of a scholar’s nervous heart. Cleft beauty invaded by splendid lucidity. We dreamed the night as far spent. Inexorable, thick lacquered, private. It means we have mistaken an invitation for permission. Yet still we feign this new erudition. Inappropriate and demeaning. With a movement of tearing we wake and cry out, we are not our own! Then find this freight’s scrap pinned to our sleeve.\n \n\n23:06\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tLopsided interpolations following a wrinkled blind eye. Oops.\n \n\n23:13\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe crooning leaves shut around a mercurial ankle. The stir and toss of the stroking breeze begs belief. Through the screen of grief, we glimpse an ear’s profane frill, luminous and insulting. These two have transformed us into what we are: green laurels that lose no leaf. What we call thought is cleft and afternoons olden freeze is cracked and lacking only verisimilitude. We wish to seize the real as a tissue. Leave the milieu of the curious and enter that radiantly tortured grove. Yet we are history’s minions. so again, we draw on the opulent glove of sleep. We dream. We have the will to think with the points of tiny scissors. It means luxury teaches us to dream of luxury. We dream of a barren, unbroken hunger blazing up in wild proportions that we taxi through a wet night on thrumming streets. That a city’s sumptuous edifice wanes like so many abandoned ghosts. That the shock of recognition twists like a blurred salvage, like a roped horizon, like a girl waiting in a car. We see the cradling flowers as taunting apostrophes. Through thick glass, the granular light slats among fronts, the shining mud sucks at thought, the leaves reek of rust. Girls whose memories caused the clamoring see in all names of ease. Quit tossing us such shoddy dreams. We dream we are dilations of banality. It means we are the willing captives of their metaphor. [Pause]\n24:58\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Aside to Audience] And I’ll just finish by reading the epilogue. [Returns to reading] I’m afraid I’ll be misunderstood. Asleep and sleeping in the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning like a dahlia or some other flower with the strong odor of clothing. I am reminded of my conceit by a row of pale scars on the ceiling whose shy origin I shouldn’t identify. Speech bites into my walls. Maybe for that I will never forget the bus. In my dream of an intersection we eat and hear as we relax. We felt this as the cabinet swung open, we felt a strong burst of vitality. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n25:59\tMusic Interlude:\t[String Instrumental]\n \n\n26:08\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Music Continues: String Instrumental] XEclogue was not Robertson’s first collection, but it is among her earliest published books and signals a formative moment, both for her and for the Kootenay School of Writing. The recording we just listened to captures aspects of her writing practice [End Music: String Instrumental] as it developed as a member of the Kooteny School of Writing in Vancouver: the sense of the formation of a feminist subject, and the development of a feminist ethics of care and leadership within the membership and community, which seems to come out in the ways Robertson includes community participation in her reading.\n26:43\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tWhen approaching the corpus of Robertson’s writing in relation to her archive, including these sound recordings, it might be useful to observe that although her writing career began in and was situated in Vancouver when she was in her early thirties, the writing she completed during her moves around North America and relocation to France still bear a solid connection to the physical and emotional site of these beginnings. Importantly, while Robertson’s environment and community in Vancouver influenced her engagement with and conception of the archive, her practice also demonstrates and maintains a personal engagement with feminist, conceptualist thought. Her poetic and artistic networks in the city framed archival practice as a form of creative and political institutional intervention, as well as a method for feminist self-realization and reflection. More pragmatically, the connections between cities and selves are maintained by her generative engagement with her own archive, both as an idea, premised in affective self-reflection, and as a studious method for a form of intuitive, meditative writing.\n27:51\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn many ways, Robertson takes an ongoing reflexive, relational approach to the institutional concept of the archive in her own fonds. She does so by means of the maintenance of different archives for different purposes: and official archive in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University; and two personal, unofficial, or what literary scholar Linda Morra has named “unarrested” archives. Robertson’s divided fonds demonstrate how her poetics actively engage with the theoretical-ideological, feminist legacies of the KSW and its institutional contexts, while also maintaining a certain emotional engagement not immediately present in the content of her formal writings as they’re published.\n28:38\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRobertson’s methods enact another manifestation of her relational approach to the archive, in the ways she implicates her archive in her work itself. She does so by incorporating regular readings of her personal archival collection, kept with her in her home in France. Doubles of some of these materials are held in her official fonds at SFU, while other more recent items she actively retains, mostly journals, as future contributions that aren’t currently too important to her ongoing work to send away. Yet another small collection is currently under my care – that which I have named her “maternal archive” –which she shared with me after our first interview in 2017 to help me with my early dissertation work. With her consent, I published an article in 2018 titled “Lisa Robertson’s Archive: The Feminist Archive, Singular and Collective,” in the academic journal, English Studies in Canada.\n29:37\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThese archives – that which is housed at SFU, her own, and that which was accumulated by her mother Lynette Mullen, and then passed along temporarily to me – demonstrate how archives, particularly when imagined holistically and beyond the conventional structures of the institution, are anything but static and are inherently distributed and dynamic, expanding and contracting across space and time.\n30:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t“It is a slightly weird thing when one thread of your life becomes an institutional topic,” Robertson said during our conversation in April, reflecting on how her lived and embodied experience differs from published narratives. The recent interview was noticeably more intimate than the first, probably because so much has happened since 2017, and possibly because we communicate from twin spaces of isolation during a global pandemic that unites everyone in indescribable melancholy. It has also possibly because I unwittingly have pulled Robertson into an exercise of thinking through her life by means of archival materials in different ways. When she read my article before submission, she commented on how important her mother’s collection of objects now seemed –admitting that she had felt uncomfortable passing along such an unwieldy unremarkable accumulation, which she may have referred to lightheartedly as “junk”.\n31:09\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIt is a global pandemic. For the first time, I realize, in a material way, that archives, “the archive,” is a concept entangled with notions of death and dying, and, intrinsic to these extremes survival and trauma. This is an essential, material component of the archive: birth, marriage, and death records, or vital statistics form the basis of national public archival collections. The immaterial memorial aspects of archives have been theorized in several different ways. Feminist theorist Ann Cvetkovich writes about the idea of an archive of feelings as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are included not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception”.\n32:06\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe archive, imagined broadly, brings to the fore not only recorded events, but also the lived experience, the rolling background of the lives that contain them. Critical of conventional archives, scholar Diana Taylor, in her book, The Archive and the Repertoire from 2003, explains that in arguing for the repertoire as an expansion beyond the archive, she “tried to put limit events into conversation with the daily noneventful enactments of embodied practice” in her study, foregrounding the importance of context within memory structures.\n32:46\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe feelings and emotions invoked by an archive, by one’s own archive, can be hard to isolate and express, much like an event might be challenging to extract from its lived contexts. In scholar, Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, her 2018 book of creative nonfiction, the narrator’s desire to archive what she describes as sensing “what [movement philosopher] Erin Manning calls the “anarchive,” that strange and stunning “something that catches us in our own becoming”. The narrator goes on to explain the ineffable quality of this realization: “This is the future archive. The archive of alterity. And like yours and mine, this is a body that has gone up in flame. A body that is an excess, that is another world and also this one.” For Taylor, the body is incompatible with the archive, and for Singh, it is inseparable from it.\n33:48\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tFor Robertson, the tensions between texts and embodied experience are embedded in her archive. In our conversation, we meander between themes in a way that draws out these relations Robertson. And I talk about the late Nancy Shaw, one of the original members of the collective in Vancouver who we heard in the previous recording, and Robertson begins to reflect on how so many of her formative relationships are contained in her archival collections, although they likely remain inaccessible, relegated to footnotes or snapshots. In so doing she meditates on the limits of narrative to capture lived reality and how key figures in her memory are omitted from many representations of her life. She observes how this is a fact of habit, of “how we receive and reiterate narratives.” Histories that are intertwined are separated, and textures are smoothed over, she explains, noting how patriarchal structures are internalized. “Feminist, queer, and Marxist working class circulations through KSW were extremely complex from the get go,” she says, and encourages me (again) to look more closely at Shaw in my research. “She was fucking brilliant…and she stood her own at the bar,” she emphasizes.\n35:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: String Instrumental] We talk about an envelope of photos from parties she recently sent to SFU, and how objects get imbued with new relational significance over time. Listen to Robertson describe her changing relationship to ephemera and her archive in our conversation last April.\n \n\n35:35\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Robertson, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n \n\n39:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRevisiting the archive can be integral to Robertson’s writing practice. She is currently revisiting and writing a companion piece for her 2010 book, R’s Boat, a book that evolved from her 2004 chapbook Rousseau’s Boat, and which will eventually be republished as a new edition by Coach House Press in Toronto. We discuss how she has been using her archives as a starting point for writing or rewriting this work, as what she calls “a programmatic method,” and she remarks that she finds it useful to track how the psychological experience and the emotional experience of gathering material is “putting pressure in a certain way on what is a very avant-garde, constraint driven composing technique without actually entering the poems as content.” For Robertson, this process shapes the poem. Now I’ll play a clip of my interview with Robertson where you’ll hear her describe her process in her own words.\n \n\n40:15\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Roberston, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n44:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tNoting her upcoming birthday Robertson observes how the process of reworking the material from her archives [End Music: String Instrumental] has a distinct relationship to reaching a certain point in her life. She explains, ” Language is emotional […] Subjectivity is linguistic. For me, you don’t need to directly refer to emotional content in order for it to be present.”\n44:36\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tAt first, I interpret these words at face value, thinking about the corpus of Robertson’s writing, but then I step back and apply it to the broader context of her archive. I think about the interconnections between her archival collections and her shifting relationship with these objects and records, and how these – the relationships, the objects, the records – are imbued with emotions: hers, and those of many others. I reflect on how these emotional resonances, whether foregrounded in conversation or completely silent in the background, are what have always drawn me to want to spend time wading into the archives as a site of lived history. [Start Music: String Instrumental]\n45:22\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tTo close this episode, I would like to consider how Julietta Singh opens No Archive Will Restore You with a passage that captures the tenor of my last conversation with Robertson and my ongoing relationship to her archives (especially now during the distressing and ongoing quietude of the pandemic). Singh describes the beginning of her graduate studies and her entry into the ambiguous, precarious, but intimidating environment of archival studies. She writes, “We were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect that few of us know what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.” But in contrast with the picture of the grasping desperate graduate students Singh presents in this chapter to give context to her eventual revelations, that archives are much more than the cold, institutional entities whe first encounters, I see the instability of this kind of mystery or unknowing as an invitation for engagement that tests the boundaries between academic and emotional selves. In the context of my conversations with Lisa Robertson, I can now better understand how relationships to the archive, and the collections that constitute archives themselves, can shift and evolve over time and across space. An archive that is in a constant state of transformation is a proposition for new kinds of thinking about relations between methods and modes of representation and lived, embodied experience. [End Music: String Instrumental]\n \n\n47:15\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb contributor, Julia Polyck-O’Neill. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And don’t forget to rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod:mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9616","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E3, Forced Migration, 6 December 2021, Wilson"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Wilson"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Wilson"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michelle Wilson\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/90aa09d2-eddd-4ff8-8ef9-b401cde0a6c6/audio/0eab67ed-3d02-4825-a7f7-3c1d6483e027/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"final-swp-s3e3-forced-migration.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:48:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"46,487,554 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"final-swp-s3e3-forced-migration\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-12-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/161607238\",\"venue\":\"Western University Ontario\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7\",\"latitude\":\"43.00937\",\"longitude\":\"-81.2618335\"}]"],"Address":["1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7"],"Venue":["Western University Ontario"],"City":["London, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In the Spirit of Atatice:\\nhttps://csktribes.org/more/videos/in-the-spirit-of-atatice/in-the-spirit-of-atatice\\n\\nTo Wood Buffalo, With Love, by Chloe Dragon-Smith and Robert Grandjambe:\\nhttps://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/to-wood-buffalo-national-park-with-love\\n\\nForced Migration:\\nhttps://scalar.usc.edu/works/remnants-wallows-and-outlaws-a-multidisciplinary-exploration-of-bison/forced-migration\\n\\nGardenShip and State at Museum London:\\nhttps://www.gardenship.ca/exhibition\\n\\nBuffalo Treaty:\\nhttps://www.buffalotreaty.com/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549706768384,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Forced Migration: Bison stories and what they can tell settlers about a past, present, and future on stolen land\n\nAs uninvited guests on Indigenous land, we are continually told that national parks, and our conservation system in general, are a benevolent inheritance from our settler ancestors. The creators of parks and conservation societies crafted archives in the form of magazines and biographies to document the salvation of charismatic species like the bison. In this episode, artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines these archives to create alternative stories of the bison’s path to conservation. These audio essays reveal how ideologies around capitalism, human exceptionalism, and white supremacy have influenced settler relations to the more-than-human world.\n\nIn this episode, we will hear from poet Síle Englert who helped distill Michelle’s more extended essays into these shorter, affective pieces of prose, and musician and composer Angus Cruikshank whose score enriches Michelle’s audio storytelling.\n\nMichelle’s project seeks to extract narratives from a white supremacist, patriarchal written tradition and play with the immediate and affective possibilities of audio performance and sound design.\n\nThe audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map “Forced Migration”. It is on view at Museum London as part of the GardenShip and State exhibition until January 23rd, 2022.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n \n\n00:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThere are sounds in the archive, and there are also silences. Here on the podcast, our producers engage closely with what we can hear in archived recordings, but also ask hard questions about the stories behind and around the sounds. When and why was the recording made? Who created this old record, and what story were they trying to tell? How does power function in the archive to uplift some beings and stories, erase others? For everything that we can hear or read in an archive, there are just as many questions about what has not been included, and who has been left out.\n \n\n01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tThe episode we bring you today takes a creative and critical approach to archival records to present a collection of stories about bison, violence, and the history of Canadian conservation. Artist and researcher Michelle Wilson uses archival records to trace what happened to the bison whose descendants ended up on the land now designated as Wood Buffalo National Park in Northern Alberta and in most other conservation herds across Turtle Island. Almost all the plains bison in the North American conservation system are descendants from the herds Michelle investigates in her research. With the help of sound designer, Angus Cruickshank and poet Síle Englert, Wilson brings us a collage of critically interpreted and creatively imagined stories. These stories strive to grapple with the impacts of colonialism and to give voice to the more-than-human characters at the heart of the research. Michelle and her collaborators on this episode are special guests from beyond the SpokenWeb network. Their work builds on conversations we have had on this podcast about critically engaging with archival artifacts, the practice of research creation and audio work as a form of scholarship. In addition to appearing here on the podcast, the sound works in this episode are also part of an exhibition called “GardenShip and State” on display at Museum London until late January, 2022. We are delighted to bring you producer Michelle Wilson with Season 3 Episode 3 [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Forced Migration. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:06\tMichelle Wilson:\tHi, my name is Michelle Wilson. I’m an artist, mother and researcher.\n \n\n03:12\tMichelle Wilson:\tBack in 2016, I was lucky enough to be invited to do an artist residency at Riding Mountain National Park. I intended to listen to, record, and learn from bison communication and speak to the people who work with them. It was a thrill to find the bison each day and to sit and watch and listen. I learned so much from those who shared their knowledge about these bison, but just as instructive was what was left unsaid about how they came to be corralled for display at a national park. I have been tracing the story of these bison’s ancestors ever since.\n \n\n03:50\tMichelle Wilson:\tThe audio artworks I’d like to share with you today come together to tell this story; the forced migration of a lineage of bison. I will take you from so-called Saskatchewan to Manitoba, Kansas and Texas, Montana, then Alberta, and finally to Wood Buffalo National Park, which straddles Alberta and the Northwest Territories. This story spans centuries and zooms in and out from microbes on a blade of grass tickling a bisons nose to national policies.\n \n\n04:24\tMichelle Wilson:\tThese short vignettes emerged from a collaboration with poet Síle Englert, who took my 8 to 10-page essays, found their essence, and remixed them into short affective pieces of prose, and Angus Cruickshank, who created layered soundscapes that in a way, bring their own parallel narratives to the pieces. We will hear more from them later.\n \n\n04:47\tMichelle Wilson:\tA note before we listen to these works; I identify as a woman of settler descent, so it was vital for me to tell the story of what settlers did to the bison and their kin. It seemed fitting for me to draw my research from the colonial archive, infuriating as it often was. What I have created here, however, is not a recitation of facts. It is an alternative archive that centers specific and bodied perspectives.\n \n\n05:16\tMichelle Wilson:\tI have found in my research that citing practices did not prevent the transmission of false information and faulty worldviews, so I am taking these stories out of a written tradition. I’m not using the trappings of the academy to give myself authority. My voice as the narrator is never softened by the need to appear objective. On the contrary, it is impassioned and personal. Sometimes I even take on the perspective of a bison. This recentering of the inherited “facts” changes stories of salvation and domination into stories of connection, empathy, and survival.\n \n\n05:56\tMichelle Wilson:\tOur first story takes us to the banks of the north Saskatchewan river in 1873, where the circuitous route to colonial conservation starts.\n \n\n06:08\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] Charles Alloway tried to hold onto a bison bull, to place to anchor them post. But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.\n \n\n06:21\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental] Until his dying day, Alloway controlled the myth of how he “saved the buffalo.” His story: the white hero, the repentant slaughterer. His words are the ones that survive in the colonial record.\n \n\n06:33\tMichelle Wilson:\tOne word – half-breed –tried to obscure the body of the Honourable James McKay, Scottish and Cree, trader and guide with the piercing grey eyes.\n \n\n06:45\tMichelle Wilson:\tTogether, McKay and Alloway drove their oxcart down the rutted mud streets and out of Winnipeg to meet a convoy of Métis hunters. Searching for bison to slaughter for hides and pemmican.\n \n\n06:56\tMichelle Wilson:\tA matriarchal band of cows and calves moved through meadows, just emerging from winter’s grip. Grandmothers, aunties, mothers. The bison and must’ve stampeded as the first round of bodies fell. Brown-headed cowbirds took to the sky, their liquid chirps and trills drowned out by hooves and bellows as they abandoned their posts on the bison’s backs.\n \n\n07:22\tMichelle Wilson:\tEncamped at a distance, the women and children heard what they couldn’t see: “a sound deep and moving like a train moving over a bridge… acontinuous deep, steady roar that seems to reach the clouds.”\n \n\n07:36\tMichelle Wilson:\tClose to the carnage, McKay and Alloway felt the guttural calls of anguished mothers resonating in the cavities of their chests. The hunter’s sought cows, their flesh more palatable than the bulls’. Which meant the next generation were in their bellies when they fell.\n \n\n07:54\tMichelle Wilson:\tWomen were brought in to butcher and process the bodies. Calves lingered near their fallen mothers, watching.\n \n\n08:05\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] These “pitiful creatures” were run down or lassoed at McKay’s and Alloway’s command. The partners recognized that the current rate of slaughter could not be maintained.\n \n\n08:16\tMichelle Wilson:\tFive freeborn bison calves were captured, survived, and reproduced, forcibly adopted by domestic cows. But their relationship to the land died.\n \n\n08:28\tMichelle Wilson:\tOn the establishment of Buffalo National Park, Alloway said:\n \n\n08:33\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] “The animals will increased under natural conditions of peace contentment. Everyone of them came from my original group three heifers and two bulls.”\n \n\n08:43\tMichelle Wilson:\tWhen the last Canadian bison were being slaughtered in 1878, Alloway sent out a hunter who brought him back 30 bison hides –\n \n\n08:52\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] “We cannot see distant things from the all absorbing present sometimes,”\n \n\n08:56\tMichelle Wilson:\t–he lamented. In trying to anchor the bison bull, Charles Alloway was left with scars on his hands that he carried –\n \n\n09:04\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] –to his grave. [End Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental]\n \n\n \n\n09:08\tAngus Cruikshank:\tHi, my name is Angus Cruikshank. I’m a musician and composer. I’m Michelle’s partner as well. I did the score for “Bedson” and all the other tracks to this project and I also did a bit of editing and some of the mixing.\n \n\n09:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tHey Angus, thanks so much for talking to us about your process. Can you speak to the track we’re about to hear, “Bedson” and tell us a bit about what the story means to you and how you approached composing a score for it?\n \n\n09:38\tAngus Cruikshank:\tI think “Bedson” is my favourite track because it’s a very –I don’t know – moving story that has so many different parts to it, and it just comes together so well. And so, I think when I approach the track and listen back to Michelle’s performance of the reading, it’s like this very bittersweet tale of the bison and obviously their relationship to Bedson Stoney Mountain, and the plains in general. And so, I didn’t want to necessarily create like a doom and gloom type sound to it or composition to it, I wanted there to be almost like a pensive reflective type sound where you’re – it is kind of in a minor chord but there are like major chords in it that maybe convey some sort of, not hope but empathy to the story?\n \n\n10:39\tMichelle Wilson:\tI do like how you haven’t made it just a simple minor score because there are moments of lightheartedness in this piece and so I was wondering if you could talk to us about what you were doing with those upper register notes.\n \n\n10:54\tAngus Cruikshank:\tUpper register notes that are just really kind of holding down a beat and so it kind of gives this it – it kind of gives the piece sort of like a galloping feel to it, which I guess you know you could link back to maybe the bison, but also just sort of this running feel. Its like a [Sings] “duhn duhn dat dat dat dat dat”. So I don’t know I just it felt really right and it felt like it really worked for the mood and the theme of the piece.\n \n\n11:25\tMichelle Wilson:\tWhat do you see as the themes in “Bedson” and how did that influence the kind of sonic imagery you came up with?\n \n\n11:32\tAngus Cruikshank:\tI think the theme of the song “Bedson” is one of incarceration and the penitentiary, the structure that still exists today and is still a penitentiary and one of the oldest in Canada if not the oldest. I think a lot of people aren’t aware of that and how it played a role in essentially isolating, confining people who resisted colonization. And kind of the isolation of the penitentiary itself within this vastness. And having lived out there, and sort of seen vastness, that isolation of winter in the prairies, it’s sort of a very beautiful yet morose vibe, because nothing can really survive out there, yet the sun is shining and its 40 below. Yeah, nothing except bison can survive out there and it’s beautiful. And I think it worked really well with, when I picture Stoney Mountain Penitentiary just sort of sitting there alone, or when you listen to it you sort of maybe hear that maybe hopelessness, but maybe frustration, but also like an empathy towards those who are incarcerated there, both human and nonhuman such as the bison. I think musically it works so well, and I think why it is my favourite is because it really captures that vastness I was talking about, the use of delay it’s really just like kind of two chords, and then yeah then a slight variation as the song progresses.\n \n\n13:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tOkay Angus, one last question. We’ve collaborated together for a very long time. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about what it’s like to collaborate by layering on someone else’s words?\n \n\n13:38\tAngus Cruikshank:\tYou’re really interpreting and trying to compliment what is being said, and that can be kind of hard sometimes because the music is there to support the story. You have a lot of leeway, but at the same time it’s really hard to capture the essence of what is being said and it does take time to kind of get that right feeling. Because if you don’t have it then it could distract from the actual story itself, and that is really the most important part.\n \n\n14:13\tMichelle Wilson:\tWell thanks so much Angus, I really do think that you bring life and texture to these pieces and a lot of the empathy that people perceive in them comes from your compositions so thank you, and here is “Bedson”. [Start Music: “Bedson” by Angus Cruikshank] It is a testament to how remarkable the sight of bison were, that in 1880, 800 people attended the auction that determined the fate of just 13. Because the bison were once so plentiful here that at a distance, they could have been mistaken for a churning, brownish-black river surging across the plain. The winner of the auction was Samuel L. Bedson, the warden of Stony Mountain Penitentiary. In the early hours of a frigid morning, a tawny bison calf was born onto trembling legs. Still wet with afterbirth, he had barely taken his first tentative steps when his herd, now 14 in number, was roused from slumber by men sent to drive them to their new home.\n \n\n15:22\tMichelle Wilson:\tImagine the wind whipping across a sea of flat, uniform ground on a painfully bright February day. On top of a sudden swell in the land sits a three-story sandy brick building. Dozens of elegant arched windows peer down upon you, the bars not discernable from a distance—that’s what those 14 bison saw. The bison were often corralled in a stone pen near the farm on the prison grounds. This complex was nicknamed “the castle,” and Bedson was its king. He was no great hunter; he was a collector, always trying to domesticate wild animals for the amusement of his family and neighbours. The farm at Stony Mountain housed a collection of wolves, deer, bears, and badgers, but Bedson’s moose were local favourites; a pair had even been trained to pull a handsome sled in the winter.\n \n\n16:17\tMichelle Wilson:\tOn a Christmas afternoon, Bedson tried a similar trick with a two-year-old bison bull. His shaggy brown body was hitched to a toboggan. Eight merry makers loaded on the sled while five or six of the incarcerated men held onto a rope tied around the bison’s neck. Imagine this ludicrous game of inter-species tug-of-war, the free laughing and playing while the prisoners, human and bison, were scared for their lives. A tense calm lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes until suddenly the bull leapt into the air, scattering prisoners and guests into the snow. There was no catching the bull once he had gained his freedom. Months later, Bedson received a letter from North Dakota that a lone young bull had been found grazing with an old rope tied around his neck. Bedson sent a hired man across the border to bring his property back. [End Music: “Bedson” by Angus Cruikshank]\n \n\n17:32\tSíle Englert:\tMy name is Síle Englert. I am a writer, editor, and visual artist, and I feel very grateful to be a small part of this project, in that it was my work to edit in a sort of cut and paste way, like a collage, to take these longer pieces describing the history of the bison and rework them into shorter narratives to be recorded, like storytelling.\n \n\n17:55\tMichelle Wilson:\tSíle, could you tell us a bit about the story you most enjoyed working on?\n \n\n18:00\tSíle Englert:\t“Fight or Flight”, I think is the piece that probably affected me and stayed with me the most. Maybe, because you’ve written it in a first-person perspective from the mind of one of the bison and that means you brought an immediacy to the history. It changed the language you were able to use to describe the experience, allowing human emotions and familial relationships so that the listener completely empathizes with the bison’s and experience. I think the shift to a first-person perspective makes the process of creating this piece, step-by-step even more interesting too. You’ve done an incredible amount of research, collecting historical accounts, stories, and statistics. And collected, the picture that all of this information paints is sad and disturbing, evocative of the horrors and the pointless suffering that humans put these animals through. But in “Fight or Flight” in particular, we hear the story from one of the bison herself. And it’s a sort of magic, I think, to take this pile of numbers and information and create a first person account of some of these moments where you can feel the pain of it right in your chest.\n \n\n19:30\tSíle Englert:\tAnd then you sent the longer story to me and my part I think was another kind of archaeological process: digging through this wealth of matter to find pieces that felt like the essence of the story. And then figuring out how those pieces fit together as a narrative. And there’s there’s an emotional element to the process too. When so much damage was done to both these bison and to the environment that we share, when so much pain was caused, how do you decide what’s most important? What people should hear? I had to make sure I kept enough of the spirit and the experience of the bison as you wrote it, and enough of the horror so that those listening could understand what these creatures went through – and to maintain that organic flow that’s kind of difficult to describe in words that movement you can hear in the story. All of that comes through in the final step, in the recording you’ve done, the sound and the music, these bison, this particular bison comes to life –her wants and needs and experience and pain. I think several steps of distilling this down to its essence from history, to story, from information, to emotion allows those listening to connect with something real, something far beyond numbers and statistics.\n \n\n21:12\tMichelle Wilson:\tThank you so much Síle for that generous and thoughtful reflection. And now here is “Fight or Flight”.\n \n\n \n\n21:22\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental] [Michelle performing ‘Flight or Flight”] We are grazing, hidden in the breaks between sand hills. Always alert, our ears panning for the sounds of men. My body orients toward the wind, waiting for the odour that twangs my fraught nerves and triggers our flight. I don’t want to leave this place. The snow has just melted from the slopes, moistening the thirsty earth below, reviving the scrubby grass after a long winter. There are so few of us, now. So few babies. We cannot let down our guard to breed as we used to. Two lame bulls follow us but they barely have the energy to register when we are in estrus. When we do conceive, our bodies can no longer nourish the unborn. We are haunted by those stolen from us. Mothers who aren’t killed fighting off the snatchers return again and again to the site of their loss. As the night lifts, my body is alive with sensation— rain drizzles, a sweet, pungent balm rises from the earth. I don’t detect them until they are among us. We bolt toward the wind. We cannot stop moving. We might still outrun them. The bulls cannot keep up and drift away, but these predators are not enticed by weakness. Night settles again and they keep pressing us. The sun rises and they are still there. Three nights and days they keep at our heels. Urine, sweat, and dead skin wafts toward me on a breeze exhaled from a canyon mouth. I turn, lead my sisters and their young onto an open prairie. My instincts have betrayed me, betrayed us. I hear the oscillating whistle of a lasso and the desperate, grunting cry of a calf. I hear him fall. A thud, thud, thud, dragging and scraping. The man’s rope finds another of our young and pulls him down. But now we know what he is here for. My sister is a blur of bristled hair as she charges him. There is a crack of thunder, and mushrooming from the deafening sound is the acrid, smoky, rotting smell of water that cannot breathe. My sister staggers a few strides from the source of her pain and sinks to the earth. Disoriented by the sound and smell of death, I barely register the hum of the rope when it strikes out and brings down our last baby. [End Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental]\n \n\n24:14\tMichelle Wilson:\tThis next story runs parallel to the one you just heard. “Fight or Flight” and this story “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name” were created from autobiographies of a man named Buffalo Jones. “Fight or Flight” uses his observations to understand the beings he prayed on, while “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name” confronts the attitudes used to justify the hunt.\n \n\n24:41\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Piano and String Instrumental] [Michelle performing “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name”] Some people would have you believe that Charles Jesse ‘Buffalo’ Jones got his nickname for his conservation efforts. Please don’t believe them. Jones heard God’s call in Genesis 1:26 –.\n \n\n24:54\tVoice Actor:\t[Church Choir Singers Underlaid] “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over all the earth and over everything that creepeth upon the earth.”\n \n\n25:17\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Michelle performing “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name”] – He set out to capture the last remaining remnants of the great southern bison herd, not as some noble conservation effort, but as breeding stock for his own grand experiment. On the first three expeditions, he took only calves. He learned as he went, and the bison he encountered suffered for his mistakes. The calves refused buckets of water and called relentlessly for their mothers. Jones and his men rode out, looking for range cows to forcibly milk, but instead found two of the bison mothers wandering the site of their loss. Jones shot one of them for her meat and milked her dead body. When calves became rare, he resolved not to leave any bison on the plain. Capture myopathy was not identified until 1964, diagnosed in another endangered species. The stress of being captured triggers the creature’s biological defense mechanisms, and the prolonged or intense engagement of these mechanisms causes massive, often fatal system failure. The animal suffers lethargy, muscle weakness, incoordination, rapid breathing, shivering, dark red urine, and hypothermia. Their blood turns to acid. Their muscles suffer necrosis and die as the animal is still struggling for life. This is how the last of the Southern bison died. Jones believed that there was no place for wild bison on their former ranges. Man’s mastery transformed these arid tracts into productive farms “made exceptionally fertile by the manure, bones, and flesh of the millions which lived and died there during centuries past.” With a name like Buffalo Jones, it would be easy to believe that he saved the bison. [End Music: Piano and Strings Instrumental]\n \n\n27:35\tMichelle Wilson:\tAfter Buffalo Jones’ bison schemes went bust, he sold his herd, a mix of bison from the Southern Plains and decedents of the Saskatchewan calves, to two ranchers at the Flathead Reservation in Montana. These two ranchers, Michael Pablo and Charles Allard were adding to their captive herd. But how had these bison come to be protected within the Flathead Valley? Tracking down this history was, for me, a journey through a twisted game of racist telephone. It was really fascinating, in the way that a disaster is fascinating, to see how white authors used quotes and citations in articles and dissertations to give legitimacy to each garbled version of the past. I followed this path until at last, I arrived at a telling shared by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. In the show notes, we’ve linked to a video produced by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes about the return of the bison and their fight to continue their stewardship and sovereignty over their lands. You will hear the following two stories back-to-back, they share how the bison came to be on the land, and how they were forced from it.\n \n\n28:53\tMichelle Wilson:\tThe search for facts goes in circles. I find a fact and follow it back to its source, only to find every new telling contaminated. [Start Music: Intermittent Percussion, Tonal Sounds] Who first brought the bison back to the Flathead Reservation? A white trader named Charles Aubrey inserted himself into history by recording his story.\n \n\n \n\n29:12\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Reading Charles Aubrey’s words] In the year 1877, I was located at the Marias River and engaged in the Indian trade…Among the Pend d’Oreille Indians… from across the mountains, was (a)… man… whose Christian name was Sam. He was known to the Blackfeet as Short Coyote… A rather comely girl had attracted the attention of Sam… (and) she became his wife. I told him very frankly that he had made a mistake…I said to him; “You are a strong Catholic and your Church does not permit polygamous marriages” He feared he would be punished by the fathers of St. Ignatius Mission…I thought there was still a chance to make peace with the soldier band of his tribe by getting a pardon from the fathers… I then suggested…he rope some buffalo calves…and then give them as a peace offering to the fathers at the mission. Sam herded his buffalo with the milk stock for five days, resting and making arrangements for his trip across the mountains… seven head in all is my recollection of the bunch… I afterward learned… that immediately upon his arrival upon the reservation he was arrested and severely flogged… In the course of time I heard of Sam’s death…passing away peacefully in his lodge…\n \n\n30:24\tMichelle Wilson:\tOther tellings of Sam’s story seep into my consciousness as I wade deeper into newspapers and websites. Racism oozing between every word. They describe Walking Coyote’s meeting with Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, who bought the bison calves. They speak of him “brooding… over gleaming piles of wealth.” They record his death as “a less-than-heroic exit” under a Missoula bridge, resulting from “a drinking spree,” and “one that matched the spirit in which he had lived and captured the calves that were now prospering on the rich grasslands of the Flathead.” The words sit like bile in my mouth. Walking Coyote’s legacy as a drunk, greedy Indian became entrenched in the dominant archive. I wonder if the tendrils of Aubrey’s story have made their way into others. Did interviewers seek out those that would corroborate their stories? Or did the keepers of more profound knowledge withhold it, for fear of contamination? In 1978, when he was 87 years old, Pend d’Oreille Elder and historian Mose Chouteh recorded the story of how bison returned to the Flathead reservation. I will let Mose Chouteh’s words speak for themselves:\n \n\n31:40\tMichelle Wilson, reciting Mose Chouteh:\t[Reading Mose Chouteh’s words] While I was growing up I heard this told by many elders…It is about a man called Ataticeʔ. (While on a hunt several buffalo followed their camp) And so in the evening, (the men) went into the tipi. The chiefs were smoking… Ataticeʔ said, “Hello. I have come to ask you, my chiefs. I think that it would be good if we took these buffalo back to our land to live there.” Some of the chiefs said, “that’s exactly right.” And some chiefs said… if we take them back to our land, we will be tied down… We will not be able to go anywhere. We will just be in one place as we gather our food.” The chiefs disagreed with each other. Half of them said yes and the other half said no. (After three days the council remained at an impasse and out of respect for the tribal need for consensus on major decisions Ataticeʔ withdrew his proposal). As he mounted his horse… He waved at these buffalo, like sending them to different parts of the prairies. Ataticeʔ said to the buffalo… “it will be up to each of us whatever happens to you and whatever happens to me. That is all.” And all these buffalo turned towards the east, the rising sun… They were going away. And Ataticeʔ cried. Ataticeʔ’s son Ɫatatí having the same deep connection to the buffalo as his father, renewed his father’s request to capture calves in the 1870s. The council, seeing the effects of the unchecked settler slaughter of the buffalo, approved Ɫatatí’s plan. Six calves were brought over the mountain range, they soon flourished and became twelve. Ɫatatí’s mother, meanwhile, remarried Samwel Walking Coyote. While Ɫatatí was away, two people went to see Samwel. One was called Charles Allard, and the other man was called Michel Pablo. These two men met with him and told Samwel, “we’ve come to buy your buffalo.” Samwel said, “ok, it will be so…” Ɫatatí returned to his house… all the buffalo were gone… he asked his mother, “where are my buffalo?” And his mother told him, “your stepfather sold them.” And Ɫatatí cried. [End Music: Intermittent Percussion, Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n34:07\tMichelle Wilson:\tMichel Pablo’s bison were sold to the Canadian government in 1907. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental] Extraction from the land was violent and rail travel for bison was perilous. I wonder if the removal triggered memories of their previous transfer from Kansas to Montana. The only recorded death during that transfer of bison was a calf who was trampled to death in the stifling, shifting, rattling cars. In my imagination, the calf is still a reddish caramel colour. She is not yet weaned. Was she with her mother? Had her mother been born into captivity or was she dragged by lasso from her own mother’s side? I know that somewhere in her matrilineal line, a cow fought a man to keep her calf and probably died in the process. Did this trampled calf carry that memory in her bones? Did her mother listen to the imperatives of her instincts and keep her calf close? Did her own feet bring her calf’s death? The egg that became my daughter existed in my genetic code when I was an egg inside my mother. What of my mother’s trauma is playing out in my daughter’s body? How does this kind of trauma make its way into genetic material? They say a butterfly has sense memories carried over from its caterpillar self, even though it basically becomes a gooey soup of cells in the chrysalis. I imagine the phantom call of a calf falling under shifting panicked feet, echoing in the body of another cow who died shortly after being loaded onto a wagon train on the Flathead Reservation. Cowboys loaded her into a reinforced wagon without her calf. The calf grunted and called to his mother. The call of her offspring drove her into a frenzy. In desperation she rammed her horns through the two inches of wood that imprisoned her. Her horns became lodged in the wood and in thrashing against it she broke her own neck. She was butchered, and her hide sold. I don’t know what happened to her calf. I know that 19 other bison died in the round up. 708 were shipped off the Flathead Reservation.653 made it to the ill-fated Buffalo National Park. 55 stayed at Elk Island National Park and founded a herd there. The colonial story of bison conservation is one of rescue. The Confederated Salish And Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty, are writing a new and yet ancient story. It is theirs to tell. It is incumbent on us to find it. [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n37:11\tMichelle Wilson:\tWe now arrive at Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta. The archival information around this now-defunct park demonstrates an absolute indifference to the agency of other beings and to the specificity of this place. The result was an ecological and economic disaster. In this piece, I tried to speak with two voices, one that personifies the Parks service’s approach to resource management and another that takes the lives of bison and their kin seriously.\n \n\n37:47\tMichelle Wilson:\tNumbers. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] They transmogrified breathing, eating, shitting, connected bison into numbers. That’s what happens when a being becomes a commodity –\n \n\n37:57\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] 20 to 60 million bison ranged North America before colonial contact.\n \n\n38:03\tMichelle Wilson:\t–Surveyors and homestead inspectors came looking for a home for the government’s newly acquired bison. What they saw was land that had no value because it could not be settled or farmed. It was worthless, but maybe it could be made useful. This place, southwest of Wainwright, Alberta, became Buffalo National Park in 1908. Reducing the bison’s lives to numbers –\n \n\n38:29\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] In 1888 there were 103 wild plains bison in North America.\n \n\n40:13\tMichelle Wilson:\t–The land and the bison had sustained one another. The bison compacted the arid ground, helping it hold on to precious moisture. Cows and bulls felt their way across the grassland, stems and blades tickling their nostrils as soil stirred up by a roving muzzle and probing tongue was inhaled –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] By 1912, 748 bison had arrived at Buffalo National Park from Michel Pablo’s herd.\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t–There was an intimate interconnection between bison and the thousands of “microbes; fungi, bacteria, and protozoa” populating each square centimetre of forage. These microscopic beings had the enzymes to break down cellulose in the grasses the bison eats. Neither being could live without this symbiotic relationship –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] The government wanted quick and exponential growth. By 1922, 6,780 bison were sharing the park’s limited resources with large deer, moose, and elk populations. The land strained under the pressure of all these mouths and bodies.\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t–Reciprocity and movement had co-evolved over centuries, enabling the dunes and desert-like conditions of the Hills to sustain vast herds over the winter months –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] Over 19,141 bison were slaughtered over the park’s thirty-year existence.With Canada’s involvement in World War II looming, the park was declared a failure. On December 30, 1939, the last bison were shot; untold numbers of deer, moose, and elk followed them to the abattoir. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental]\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t– Just numbers.\n \n\n40:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tWe have been on a journey through space and time. In this final piece, we arrive at Wood Buffalo National Park in the year 2021. I wrote this closing section in response to an article by Chloe Dragon Smith and Robert Grandjambe in Briarpatch magazine. We’ve linked it in the show notes as well. Chloe and Robert live off the land within their ancestral territory, which falls within the bounds of Wood Buffalo. Their article is a missive from the future to their future children. It references an imagined fulsome and personal apology delivered by Parks Canada to the 11 Indigenous nations and councils whose traditional territories the sprawling Wood Buffalo occupies. In this section, I used the archival information around Wood Buffalo to imagine what that apology would need to atone for. This apology felt like the only way to address the ongoing violations at Wood Buffalo, but also not nearly enough. So, for me, it is simply a place to start.\n \n\n41:38\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Reverberating Tonal Sound ] I want to speak to you today about what we did— our predecessors— the many branches of the Dominion government and the people who ran them; the treaty negotiators, the Department of the Interior, and Parks Canada. The creation of Wood Buffalo National Park was an act of “ecological imperialism.” From its first inception, the Park was designed to be a place that excluded Indigenous peoples, a place where Canada could extinguish treaty rights. We created a swath of Land where vital relationships between human and non-human have been severed. We saw the bison as an exploitable resource and used their bodies to make money. Our park wardens slaughtered bison one day and persecuted your hunters the next. We turned exercising your rights and sovereignty into a privilege. We used racial dogmas to determine who had hereditary rights within the Park, and we used a politics of purity to drive communities apart. We separated families. We ignored letters pleading to be reunited. We contributed to the residential school system and intentionally engendered dependency instead of acknowledging your right to hunt and practice lifeways on your own lands. We chose to believe that pulling the strand of bison from this web wouldn’t cause it to unravel. We armed police and then wardens to arrest and harass your guardians. We created a policy of surveillance and intimidation. Even when we built abattoirs and killed hundreds a year, still we kept you from the bison. Our attachment to conceptual borders extends to policing the boundaries between Wood Bison and Plains Bison, between pure and hybrid, between contaminated and uncontaminated. Steeped in white supremacy, we did not see how these logics of purity were weaponized against both bison and your people. These imagined borders place bison and Indigenous peoples outside the protective bounds of white and human. This pattern has continued. Our pools of knowledge are shallow, and our spatial and temporal scales are different than yours. Your pools of knowledge are deep and dependent on a connection to place and language. We have come to embrace the term “two-eyed seeing,” as envisaged by Mi’kmaw Elder Dr. Albert Marshall. It is a concept of “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together for the benefit of all.” But first, we acknowledge that for nearly a century our laws stripped Indigenous peoples of their treaty rights if they pursued a university education. We tried to outlaw “two-eyed seeing”. We are ashamed that we fought for nearly a century to avoid fulfilling our Treaty commitments to your Nations. We apologize to you. We apologize for making your communities fight for what was theirs. We would like to work with you, the descendants of the dispossessed, to make restitution for these wrongs. To move beyond access and towards true sovereignty on the Land. We recognize that decolonization is not a metaphor. [End Music: Reverberating Tonal Sound]\n \n\n45:37\tMichelle Wilson:\tThank you so much for coming with me on this journey. The audio pieces I have shared with you today have many lives. They can also be experienced as part of an interactive textile map. It will be on view as part of the “GardenShip and State” exhibition at Museum London, in London, Ontario. We will link to the exhibition and documentation of the piece in the show notes as well. I hope that this collection of stories has illuminated how bison conservation has been a tool of colonization. The sources I have drawn from want us to believe conservation stories are ones of rescue, but as Indigenous literature scholar Pauline Wakeham puts it, conservation narratives attempt “to overwrite colonial violence” and locate it in a distant past. If you are interested in a future where a decolonized relationship with bison exists, please check out the work being done by Dr. Leroy Little Bear, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty. We’ve linked to an excellent site that documents the work of the Buffalo Treaty to get you started on this journey\n \n\n46:57\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Michelle Wilson. The audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map, “Forced Migration”. It’s on view at Museum London as part of the “GardenShip and State” exhibition until January 23rd, 2020. See the links in the show notes and the image gallery on our episode webpage to engage more deeply with the research and stories behind this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us, and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9617","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E4, SoundBox Signals Presents “Performing the Archive”, 3 January 2022, Shearer, Butchart and Sallam"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Megan Butchart","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Megan Butchart","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Megan Butchart\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/470425b9-3ec2-4306-83fc-49f6bc3a2b7d/audio/1c30fb73-bdd4-42e2-8a5b-6d70ff8f0b07/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e4-soundboxsignals-performingthearchive.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:59:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"57,301,830 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e4-soundboxsignals-performingthearchive\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-01-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"John Lent’s “A Matins Flywheel”: https://thistledownpress.com/product/a-matins-flywheel/\\n\\nDavid R. Loy’s “Nonduality in Buddhism and Beyond”: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Nonduality/David-R-Loy/9781614295242\\n\\nDaphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic: https://houseofanansi.com/products/ana-historic\\n\\nInspired Word Cafe: http://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/\\n\\nRead more about the AMP Lab’s events with Daphne Marlatt:\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab Blog. 17 November 2019. http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/\\n\\nBuchart, Megan. “Poetry, Campus, Community: Tuum Est.” The AMP Lab Blog. 18 November 2019. http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/18/poetry-campus-community-tuum-est/ \\n\\nOddleifson, Shauna. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt.” In Featured Stories and Our Students, UBCO Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies. 11 September 2019. https://fccs.ok.ubc.ca/2019/09/11/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt/ \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549710962688,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Host Karis Shearer, guest curator Megan Butchart, and poet Daphne Marlatt have a conversation about Daphne Marlatt’s 1969 archival recording of leaf leaf/s and her experience of performing poetry with the archive in 2019. This episode was co-produced by Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam.\n\nProduced by the SpokenWeb team at AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what *listening* allows us to know about cultural history. Find out more at https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n\n00:05\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tDoes literature sound like? What stories, what we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. It can be both wonderful and surprising to notice the work of your favourite writer change over their years of inspiration and creation. The recorded literary events that we hold in collections across the SpokenWeb network give us a particular opportunity to reflect on the multiplicity of an artist: an opportunity to talk to living artists and writers about the recorded works and performances by their younger selves. Sound recordings can reveal layers of memory beyond a text. They can evoke embodied memories: What emotion can we hear in an author’s voice and tone? What can we hear of literary community in the sounds of the room, the staccato of laughter, and the bursts of cheers and applause? How do artists reflect on their own performances as they are carried across time in these recordings? Today we bring you an episode from our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals, that considers the poetry and practice of Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt across decades of writing and performance. In this episode, producers Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart record a thoughtful conversation with Marlatt. They use a 1969 archival recording of Marlatt reading from her book leaf leaf/s to reflect together on her readings from the collection 50 years apart. The SpokenWeb project uplifts the power of such work with living authors. This episode exists in conversation with others we’ve shared with you in our monthly episodes and ShortCuts minisodes. If you enjoy this episode, check out “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”, “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word”, “Talking about Talking”, “the Sounds of Trance Formation”, and “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return” for more conversations with artists about their recorded works. SoundBox Signals is produced by the AMP Lab at UBC-Okanagan, which holds recordings of Daphne Marlatt’s work in the SoundBox Collection. This episode was originally aired in February 2020, and we are delighted to bring it to you today on the SpokenWeb Podcast. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Here is Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart with “Performing the Archive.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n03:07\tSoundBox Signals Intro Music:\t[Start Music: SoundBox Signals Theme Music] I see you face to face. What is the voice? The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\n \n\n03:19\tSoundBox Signals Intro Music:\tWhere is this voice coming from?\n \n\n03:23\tSoundBox Signals Intro Music:\tI see you also face to face.\n \n\n03:27\tKaris Shearer:\tThis is SoundBox Signals, a podcast that brings archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close listening and conversation. Together we’ll consider how these literary recordings signify in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. Full-length versions of these recordings are available online in our SpokenWeb archive at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n \n\n03:52\tAudio recording, Clip of Warren Tallman reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:\tHow curious you are to me. [Tape Click]\n \n\n03:55\tKaris Shearer:\tHave you ever listened to a recording of yourself when you were younger and noticed how your voice has changed? On September 20th, 2019, Megan Butchart and I got together with Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt and talked with her about the experience of doing just that. In our SoundBox collection, we have a recording of Daphne from 1969 when she was just 26 years old talking with Warren Tallman about her second book leaf leaf/s. Yes, she had published two books by the time she was 26. Our conversation took place the day after contemporary Daphne had given a reading here in Kelowna with her younger self, or her archival recorded voice, as part of our “Performing the Archive” series. The event was co-hosted by Megan Butchart, Erin Scott, and Cole Mash, and took place at Milk Crate Records. It was sponsored by Tuum Est, SpokenWeb, City of Kelowna, and the Inspired Word Cafe. In this podcast episode, you’ll hear our conversation with Daphne Marlatt. But first, let’s rewind to July 1969 and hear Daphne read from leaf leaf/s  [Tape Click]\n \n\n05:01\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1969:\t“4pParts of morning for 714” i: that petals’ veins / rift blue  / pared with razor / edge / tired eyes against the / gold dust, daisies / in a jug dyes / slowly into water / seeping pink. ii: moon drops / early / roused rocks / dry already a / firefly / threats rain it / flickers / green light over / night / sink’s / rust.  iii: white hood of a white / pickup parked on / green / trucks can be / steam risers, lettered / white / hollyhocks / of sun a whirl, / Cézanne, in a / tall tree. / iv: like it / flowers hail / outside our / back door stars / saw as worm / clots trod / morning / glories in deeper / small shells. [Tape Click]\n \n\n06:13\tKaris Shearer:\tYou just heard “4 parts of morning for 714.” Now we’ll fast forward to our contemporary conversation. In the first half of it, you’ll hear us ask Daphne about her experience listening to and voicing poems at public readings. In the second half of our conversation, we will talk about the archival recording itself and the experience of performing poetry with it. [Music Interlude]\n \n\n06:37\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer.\n \n\n06:37\tDaphne Marlatt:\tMy name is Daphne Marlatt.\n \n\n06:41\tMegan Butchart:\tMy name is Megan Butchart.\n \n\n06:42\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd we are here podcasting, or preparing material for a podcast. So, we have nine questions in kind of three different areas. But we also have a lot of flexibility around adding more or, I encourage Daphne to also flip the questions back on us as well. So, it becomes kind of more of a conversation, if we would like to do that. So, there really is no firm structure, that’s for sure. The first questions though, have to do with poetry readings because you know, we are very interested in the poetry reading. And Megan, you have the first question. So, do you want to?\n \n\n07:19\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah. All right. So, Daphne –.\n \n\n07:21\tDaphne Marlatt:\tMm-hmm.\n \n\n07:21\tMegan Butchart:\tCan you recall the first time that you ever heard a poem read out loud?\n \n\n07:27\tDaphne Marlatt:\t I’m trying to remember, whether – well, the first poem that I ever saw that would have been a wonderful one to read out loud was on the wall of my grade 12 classroom at Delbrook High School in North Van and my English teacher had put up one of Allen Ginsberg’s poems, which was the first time I ever heard about Allen Ginsberg. I mean, we’d been reading much much further back. I don’t think we’d even got, we must have got to Dylan Thomas, but nothing like Ginsburg, and I can’t remember if Mr. Patterson, that was his name, actually read it aloud to us or not. It’s the kind of thing he could have done.\n \n\n08:20\tKaris Shearer:\tSo, building on that, can you, can you tell us about the first poetry reading you ever attended, and what kind of impact it had on you?\n \n\n08:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThe first poetry reading was probably at UBC. And Prism held poetry readings, it seems to me, and there was another student magazine that did too, Raven. The first one that I actually remember, because I was very nervous about it, was one that I had been asked to read in. And I suspect it was a Raven poetry reading. It wasn’t raven as in “R-A-V-I-N’,” it was raven as in the blackbird, the trickster. And I said I’m too nervous to read. I don’t think I can read my poem. And I can’t remember whether it was Frank or someone else who said, you know from the TISH group, who said “I’ll read it for you.” I have a feeling it might have been Frank. Anyway, he read it and I squirmed in my seat because he didn’t read it the way I thought it should be read and from then on, I vowed I would always read my own poems out loud to an audience. [Laughter]\n \n\n09:51\tMegan Butchart:\tAnd so, how do you prepare to deliver for a poetry reading then?\n \n\n09:56\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, that’s a very good question. [Laughs] Hmm, it’s really interesting because it has become more flexible as I age. I still start the same way, I look at the book and I look at what I feel like reading that day, and I look at maybe different kinds of line that I might do from poem to poem. Sometimes it turns out there is a kind of image motif that’s running through several poems. I think, well, maybe I’ll do that. Sometimes I look at a poem and I think, I don’t want to read this poem aloud. When I was younger, I would take the book and I would look at the book and I would say, “I don’t feel like reading any of these.” [Laughs]. And that was pure nervousness before a reading, but now I will sometimes get up and I think, no I want to read this other poem instead. I mean I prepare, I have a list of what I’m going to read. I even time it because everybody is so concerned about timing and if there are other readers, I don’t want to go over my allotted time. But sometimes, like last night, last night’s reading, I wasn’t going to read the “Beo” poem at all and I just thought, no, I really I think after hearing Kurt read his Caetani poem, which used a lot of the language origins of the Caetani family, I thought, yeah, I want to read “Beo,” because that brings up a little of it, and it certainly talks about the relationship that Sveva had with her mother. So, that felt more appropriate, I guess.\n \n\n12:09\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I was struck by that too, last night, how responsive you were to the audience and to the kind of moment and things that were going on. How you were kind of re-crafting the reading in the moment.\n \n\n12:19\tDaphne Marlatt:\tRight, Right. Yeah, now that I’m the ripe old age that I am [Laughs] I feel more comfortable in front of an audience, so it gives me more freedom to do that.\n \n\n12:34\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Can I connect that back to what you said about hearing Frank read your work and then deciding – that as an impulse to want to read your own work. Can you kind of draw us a line from that to kind of feeling much more comfortable and responsive and being flexible in that moment? Were there kind of key pieces along the way in readings?\n \n\n12:57\tDaphne Marlatt:\tNo. No, I can’t. I don’t think I can know how to respond to that. It’s more a sense of having grown into your own voice and you have a sense of what your own voice is. and it’s interesting to me that even then I was beginning to have a sense of my own voice and it was not the voice that was reading the poem.\n \n\n13:17\tKaris Shearer:\tNice. Yeah. Thank you.\n \n\n13:18\tMegan Butchart:\tDaphne, can you share some of your thoughts on the significance of the live poetry reading during the period of the 1960s?\n \n\n13:25\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, the live poetry reading was very important. It was a social glue, in a sense, that held all of us writers together. It was an occasion for being serious and being hilarious at the same time. No doubt there was room for a lot of grandstanding. But because, the group of writers that I knew met regularly, once a month, anyway, and sometimes more if we met at Warren’s house, to read to each other or to discuss. For instance, we had one evening where we had a long discussion of Olson’s essay on projective verse trying to figure out what he was saying and how that applied to any of us. So, there was a lot of push and pull, give-and-take, and I think the importance of those live readings was that it brought the language back into the body. The body was very present in the voicing, each person’s characteristic voicing of line, voicing of sound patterns, and so on. And I think that it clued us into that very quickly.\n \n\n15:03\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd you were doing that as students, right? I mean I’m talking about a time when you were undergrads at UBC.\n \n\n15:06\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yeah. Well, some of them were, I mean, several of them were older than me and they left in ’63 right after the ’63 conference and went on to graduate school. Whereas, I still had another year anyway as an undergraduate. Yeah, and I can’t figure out, I mean, some of them were doing student teaching too, I think so, I don’t know if they stayed an extra year or the Honours program required an extra year. I have no idea. I just don’t remember all of that.\n \n\n15:43\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd were you also that student group that’s kind of like the Writers Workshop group?\n \n\n15:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd the TISH group. Yeah.\n \n\n15:50\tKaris Shearer:\tWere you also going to see other visiting writers give –\n \n\n15:54\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, I remember Leonard Cohen coming to give a reading. Yes, a poetry reading from what was it, Spice Box of the Earth, his first book, and that was remarkable because, he started out, it was in a classroom in the Buchanan Building and he started out to read and he suddenly stopped in the middle of a line! And we all thought, what? what’s going on? And he said something like “no, that’s not right” and he started again. And I was very impressed by that, like he was being so true to his sense of the line and he wanted it to come across the way he wanted it to come across, and that was a moment of freedom. Freeing for me because I realized the importance of that. And then I heard Irving Layton read. I can’t remember maybe that was in the old Auditorium. Was odd. There was kind of a stage set up but it was lower than a proper theater stage. So, I don’t know where it was, which room, but there he was. He had two young women posed on this little stage on each side of him. [Laughs] Layton. And okay. Well, that’s okay. That’s Layton, that’s Irving Layton. It was a very different reading from Leonard Cohen’s. And then, of course, we had these arts festivals that began and they were starting to do that and they brought in incredible people like – all these names are going to escape me. At 77, memory begins to go. There’s a New York poet, I cannot remember his name, and he did these very, to us, astonishing readings, which were not readings, they were performances. And he assigned lines to a number of us to say as we walked around the auditorium. But that really stuck in my mind because it was the beginning of the language approach that the Language School of Writers in the U.S. and was a beginning of that, I think. Very different from the aesthetic that we had developed and grown up with through the San Francisco Poets coming up, especially Robert Duncan, but Jack Spicer too, and of course Robin Blaser. So, it was a bit of an eye-opener to me that you could do that kind of thing with language. And it was like doing in language what John Cage was doing in music.\n18:57\tKaris Shearer:\tCool.\n \n\n18:57\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah.\n \n\n18:57\tKaris Shearer:\tWho is organizing that festival? Is that Warren?\n \n\n18:59\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThere wasn’t. No, there was a group. There was a group of faculty people from, I think, theater people as well as music people and people from English. Literary people. It was great. It was wonderful. It brought the outside world to us in performance and it was very exciting.\n \n\n19:25\tKaris Shearer:\tSounds amazing.\n \n\n19:26\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah.\n \n\n19:27\tKaris Shearer:\tWere you there for the Jack Spicer reading in ’65? Was it ’65?\n \n\n19:31\tDaphne Marlatt:\tUh, no, I was not there. I was in Bloomington, Indiana.\n \n\n19:35\tKaris Shearer:\tRight. Okay.\n \n\n19:36\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah.\n \n\n19:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. That sounds like an incredible, I mean, just I always kind of think about myself, being back at, wanting to be back and that kind of moment of just kind of heady readings.\n19:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh yeah, well Robert Duncan, of course, was the big one for me and for a number of us. Because he himself was so dramatic. I can see him walking between the catalpa trees, striding between them in his black cape on the way to giving a reading in the Buchanan building. [Laughs]. I learned a lot from Robert Duncan, a lot about language and the music of language and how language carries breath and spirit.\n \n\n20:21\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Can I ask you, following on that – you would’ve read the Black Mountain Poets before they arrived in ’63, I mean, I guess they read at different times, some of them, at UBC.\n \n\n20:32\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, yeah.\n \n\n20:33\tKaris Shearer:\tBut prior to meeting them in person, had you formed ideas about them that maybe were changed by meeting them in person?\n \n\n20:44\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, I had no idea that Denise Levertov for instance was such a dynamic reader. That was a wonderful event. And she was so open to young women poets. I mean I had a coffee with her and chat about my imminent marriage and whether I could continue writing, and she was great. She was very supportive. Robert Duncan, we knew because he’d come up several times before ’63. Olson was a revelation, because he was such a large man and his work was so large in its scope and yet he was very open to talking to us. You know, one of the things he said to me in Warren and Ellen’s kitchen, was when I told him – he asked me where I’d grown up. And so I told him I spent my childhood in Penang and grew up North Van. And he said, you should write about Penang. And I’m only just doing this now in my late 70s. [Laughs]. But some things kind of stay with you, you know. You get gifts like that. And Creeley. We knew Creeley, and he had taught a wonderful Creative Writing course. I think it was the first Creative Writing course that the English Department had given and it was – I mean Edward Bernie was busy trying to get a Creative Writing Department going, but I took that one from Robert and Bob Creeley. Yeah, Bob didn’t teach it like a workshop, like we know Creative Writing workshops these days. What he did was he brought in a lot of ideas in the form of reading assignments and discussions of what we had read and how does that relate to what you’re writing? It was very opening for me. It was about at the level of the older TISH poets. So, I was floundering around a bit, but it set the tone for me. Set the bar high, intellectually. Yeah.\n \n\n23:22\tKaris Shearer:\tNice. Nice. Can I pick up on that and ask, I mean, some of the things that strike me about like your descriptions of the Creative Writing course or your experiences in English courses are so different from how courses are run these days, typically –.\n \n\n23:37\tDaphne Marlatt:\tI know. [Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n23:37\tKaris Shearer:\t– so that description and then what you said the other night about Warren teaching an English course, but having students do a lot of reading aloud.\n \n\n23:53\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, right.\n \n\n23:54\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you take us back to that for a second, just the role of reading aloud?\n \n\n23:54\tDaphne Marlatt:\tRight. Right. That was that course, we did a lot of Whitman in and it was a poetry reading. It was a course on poetry and it’s funny, I can’t remember who else we studied. But Whitman was an eye-opener because in a way it was a bit excruciating for the class. He didn’t want to talk about the content of the poem, several poems, he just had different students read aloud. He would point to someone say, “okay, you read this one.” Person would read and he’d say, “you read that! and you read that!”. And of course, we would hear all these different versions of the same poem and we would all be thinking, “okay, what is the version he’s looking for?” But what it did was, it opened us up to hearing the poetry, hearing how the words were moving together, musically, rhythmically, semantically\n \n\n25:03\tKaris Shearer:\tNice. So, we have another set of questions that have to do with this recording of leaf leaf/s in an interview that you did with Warren Tallman in July 21st, 22nd, 25th, 1969. [Marlatt Laughs] Warren is not really sure what day it was recorded. But I wanted to ask you about that recording in the next couple of questions, and whether you can recall how you came to do that recording, that interview?\n \n\n25:32\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWhich one month was it?\n \n\n25:34\tKaris Shearer:\tJuly 1969. Some recording of an interview with Warren’s Tallman about leaf leaf/s and you’ve heard a copy of this where you read the full book in two parts, and he asks you a series of questions about it.\n \n\n25:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tInteresting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I had had when I wrote those poems, so what was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading. There was so much, my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being, and I think it’s because of the giving birth experience. You know, I mean we sat in the living room where he usually recorded and I was very happy that he wanted to record the whole book and then talk about it, but I think we had some slight – we had different approaches to my writing at that point because I had gone somewhere else. I had been in Bloomington and then I had been in the Napa Valley in California and in Bloomington. I belonged to – I joined a small writing group that Clayton Eshleman organized and D. Alexander was part of the deal. D. was a linguist. And we had a very significant conversation, significant for me, in one of the local student pubs. They don’t call them “pubs” down there, “bars,” in Bloomington, about language. And he pointed out to me that there was, there’s an elasticity, and a semantic associativeness and flexibility that I was not paying attention to because I wasn’t thinking of language just as a medium, as language. I was thinking of language referring to objects and actions in the world. And he said, I mean, this is Saussure, right? It’s basic Saussure. “No, you should read Saussure, for one thing, but language is a medium unto itself and it has all these currents in it that you could be hearing.” And that was a big eye-opener for me. So, leaf leaf/s was very much written out of learning that and trying to put that into practice. I find it a rather abstract book now, but it taught me a lot about writing because it taught me a lot about language.\n \n\n28:40\tMegan Butchart:\tAnd so, what does this recording mean to you now to listen back to it?\n \n\n28:44\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, as I said, I was surprised that my voice was so present in it, in the language. I was happy to hear that. I was still, I mean reading it in Warren’s living room was very familiar territory for me. So, it wasn’t like reading it aloud to an audience, which I still then found very nerve-wracking. But reading it to Warren –I can’t remember if other people were present or not. I know when he had me read frames of a brain, frames of a book, of a story…. Yeah, see, I can’t even remember the title of my first book! [Laughs]. Frames of a Story. He had me read that in his living room to a group of people when it first came out. I think it was – it might have been a fireplace. There might have been a fire burning in the fireplace. I felt very much at home there, and a lot of my friends were there in the living room and it was a big experience for me to read the whole, the whole of that book! “Warren, are you sure? really all of it?” “Yes. Yes. Yes.” [Laughs] So leaf leaf/s was after that. And it seems to me it was more, I don’t think there were many other people there, if any other people were there.\n \n\n30:13\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I didn’t get the sense listening to it that there were others.\n \n\n30:15\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, yeah. Yeah. I think Warren was trying to figure out what had happened to my language while I was away. I suspect that occasioned that.\n \n\n30:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, that transition from that kind of Black Mountain Poetics. It’s Duncan, Creeley, especially. He really wants to emphasize [inaudible], right?\n \n\n30:37\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right. Well he is very close to Creeley’s work. Yeah, yeah.\n \n\n30:41\tKaris Shearer:\tCan I take a little detour and ask about this concept of reading the entire book? Because that comes up in the Sir George Williams University recording as well where George Bowering says, back in Vancouver we would just – a reading, you would just read the whole book to your friends. Was that a common thing?\n \n\n31:00\tDaphne Marlatt:\tNot that I remember, no. I think Warren probably, I think, George was probably thinking about Warren, because I don’t remember that happening elsewhere, the whole book.\n \n\n31:13\tKaris Shearer:\tOkay. Yeah. I was just curious.\n \n\n31:16\tMegan Butchart:\tHow do you think that changes the reading experience though? To read just single poems versus reading something consecutive?\n \n\n31:24\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Well, for me, there’s always what you might call a kind of, it’s not a narrative in a book of poetry, necessarily, but narrative has always been of interest to me and that’s what Frames was. It told the narrative, but there’s a sense in a collection of poems some sort of line of a development through the book, and so you would only get that if you read the whole book.\n \n\n32:00\tKaris Shearer:\tAs a listener, I really love these moments where we get to attend a reading where someone reads the entire book because it feels like you’ve in advance made a commitment to staying for that kind of duration, it’s a significant duration –\n \n\n32:15\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right. That’s right. It is.\n \n\n32:16\tKaris Shearer:\t– and a kind of dedication to that person who’s going to read. They’re always –they’re very – and they also feel like a kind of communal dedication everybody in the room is there for the whole for the whole thing.\n \n\n32:25\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right. Yeah, yeah.\n \n\n32:28\tKaris Shearer:\tI long for those occasions, although one cannot have them all the time. [Laughs]\n \n\n32:32\tDaphne Marlatt:\tNo, but it was particularly nice to have an occasion like that in Warren’s living room. I should always say Warren and Ellen – because it was both of them – they were both such wonderful supporters of young writers. Really, I mean that whole phenomenon that’s become known as the TISH group wouldn’t have happened without them.\n \n\n32:59\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you talk a little bit about Ellen’s role in that? I know it was significant.\n \n\n33:02\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Ellen was very significant because not only did she help organize that 1963 conference, but she had the contacts because of growing up in Berkley and going to –I mean growing up in San Francisco and going to Berkeley. She had the contacts with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and Robin Blazer, and she brought those with her when they moved to Vancouver. So, there was a clear line, a clear artery, if you like, for infusion. I knew Ellen not as a teacher. She became a teacher. She taught at UBC later. But when I knew her she was more, the one that everyone could talk to about their personal lives, their problems. She was remarkable. I’ve never known anyone who could cook a whole meal in the kitchen while talking to somebody about their deep emotional angst. [Laughs] She was a phenomenon in herself and I was really glad when she started writing in her later life about her experiences meeting all those people. And I wished, I mean, she had a very busy career as a therapist, and she was very, very supportive to a number of people in the AIDS community who it would have been very different for them without Ellen. And she didn’t have much room left in her life for writing. But the pieces that she did write were so good, and I kept encouraging her to try and find more time to write, but it was difficult. And she had her health problems as she aged to deal with. So, yeah.\n \n\n34:59\tKaris Shearer:\tI think of her very much, as you say, that social, as someone who had the kind of social connections to invite those writers up, but also who received them when they did come. And he talks on one of the recordings about choosing Robert Duncan’s poems and choosing the entire lineup for him and kind of orchestrating behind the scenes.\n \n\n35:24\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yep, yep. Yeah, she was –she was intelligent and I think a lot of people might not have known that in the early days. She was very intelligent. Yeah. And also, intuitive about people. Yeah.\n \n\n35:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. We need to talk more about that kind of work behind the writing. Because it’s so important.\n \n\n35:44\tDaphne Marlatt:\tIt is, and Gladys fulfilled that role too.\n \n\n35:48\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n35:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah Gladys Hindmarch, Maria.\n \n\n35:53\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, very much. So, I want to turn to, if you don’t mind, talking about last night’s reading, because it was a pretty marvelous, marvelous event in so many ways and I can’t stop thinking about it. Last night, you read with your former self [Marlatt Laughs], as we and sort of billed it –\n \n\n36:14\tDaphne Marlatt:\t[Laughs] That’s right.\n \n\n36:15\tKaris Shearer:\t–with your 26-year-old voice, from the archive as part of our “Performing the Archive” series. I know you’ve only had a short time to maybe think and reflect on that, but what was it like to collaborate with yourself?\n \n\n36:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, first of all, I was very very glad that Craig would key me in, because I didn’t want to read the poems as I heard them. I didn’t want to read them on the page. I wanted to hear them. And so, I couldn’t always remember when a poem would end. And so, I was always looking at him to clue me in to when to start reading in my current voice from that book. And we did this sandwiching thing, past and present, past and present, past and –so, it was interesting because it felt, well, it felt peculiar, in one sense, to hear my voice played back to me. And it wasn’t my voice as it is now. Bridget commented afterward that she noticed that there was still more English pronunciations, English-English pronunciations in it, which – and probably in the tone more than anything, I would think. And that voice was very clear about what it wanted, how it wanted the line to sound and exactly where the brakes went. It was a musical score, basically. The poems were kind of a musical score, and that voice was very keen on paying attention to that. And then when I read in my present voice, there was more focus on maybe image, and on the movement of a poem as a whole. Yeah, I don’t know what other people heard.\n \n\n38:20\tKaris Shearer:\tWell, actually, I’m going to turn to Megan and ask her. What did you hear in that kind of movement from the archival voice to the contemporary voice?\n \n\n38:31\tMegan Butchart:\tWell, it was interesting to me because you have two different contexts in which you’re reading. So, the 1969 voice is just you and Warren in the living room, which you would think would be the more intimate setting, whereas last night’s reading was in front of a crowd of I don’t even know how many –\n \n\n38:46\tKaris Shearer:\t70 people.\n \n\n38:46\tMegan Butchart:\t70 people.\n \n\n38:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\t70, huh?\n \n\n38:48\tMegan Butchart:\tAnd in that case, it seems like you would naturally want to perform more. And I actually found that the 1969 voice was more performative, in a sort of deliberate sense. Whereas, your reading last night was, like, I got musicality of the words together more –\n \n\n39:06\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, wonderful.\n \n\n39:08\tMegan Butchart:\t– I felt it was a softer reading, and I feel like everyone was so intent and so attentive, to your reading that there was sort of this silence around your speaking almost, it was incredible.\n \n\n39:21\tDaphne Marlatt:\tIt was a wonderful – well, it was a wonderful audience. And you know, we’d heard such diverse voices before I got up to read and that audience was open to every one of us. That was the astonishing thing.\n \n\n39:36\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah.\n \n\n39:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Erin Scott and Cole Mash have really crafted – I mean, that’s been a reading series over the past more than two years and every time I’ve been to it the audience is so generous and so warm.\n \n\n39:51\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell Cole really sets that up. He’s so spontaneous and himself. And no posing at all on stage.\n \n\n40:00\tKaris Shearer:\tListening to him afterwards, one of the things I love about the way he hosts is he manages to kind of move between the sort of different registers, like that comic register, this sort of open, outrageous comedy, but then very respectful, thoughtful attentiveness and seriousness as well. And he’s able to move through those registers back and forth in a way that is very energizing. But also, yeah, just really attentive to the audience.\n \n\n40:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd the space was really good for a reading because even though I’m surprised to hear there were 70 people there because it didn’t feel like that, I mean, there’s all the records at the back and the shirts, t-shirts hanging up in the back and so on, but on the in the front this peculiar platform of a stage with an Asian carpet spread out on it [Laughs] and…\n \n\n40:57\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd a Mickey Mouse table. [Laughs]\n \n\n40:59\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd a Mickey Mouse table, that’s right. It’s very – well, it reminded me of the 70s actually. So, I felt really at home there. And also, the way, it was announced that this was probably the last event there, because people were being evicted, had to move, and Richard, I mean the flowers for Richard, the owner, not owner, but manager of Milk Crate Records, I guess he’s the owner of Milk Crate Records, not the owner of the building, and how he got up and spoke so, with such determination about the future of the place and then the diversity of the poets, the three poets before, and then Sari reading. It did feel almost like being in somebody’s living room. Yeah.\n \n\n41:58\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah. I mean, even there’s a couch in the front row –\n \n\n42:01\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n42:02\tMegan Butchart:\t– and everyone’s just hanging around.\n \n\n42:05\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWith footstools – with hassocks with footstools or, yeah.\n \n\n42:08\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things I’ve been reminded over the last couple of days from the events that we’ve been doing. Just the kind of diversity of audience for poetry that really, I find very invigorating. You know, we’ve had at the “curated close listening” event, first-year students and students who are coming with sometimes very little background in poetry itself or knowledge of a particular poet, and they’re coming for a variety of reasons and contributing amazing things to the conversation. Yeah, and that struck me too with Milk Crate, with the reading last night, we saw a variety of different performers, different styles.\n \n\n42:50\tDaphne Marlatt:\tRight. Very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a variety in the audience too.\n \n\n42:56\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, definitely.\n \n\n42:59\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, I hope they find a good place.\n \n\n43:01\tKaris Shearer:\tMe too.\n \n\n43:02\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd keep it going. Because it is, it does remind me of what the Vancouver poetry scene was like, and there were readings in folk music coffee shops [Laughs] and readings in bookshops. It wasn’t always this staged thing where you sold tickets or whatever.\n \n\n43:32\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, it reminds me too, I mean Milk Crate Records is a venue for music and has been so welcoming to poetry. And so, Sari’s response last night, to your question Megan, about what undergrad course had most influenced her. I mean our connection sometimes are very much outside of the literary classroom, if you will, or the poetry community proper, and I think that those other connections are often where it finds growth.\n \n\n44:00\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, poetry should never be just an academic subject. It was never meant to be that in the beginning. And in one of the things that, I feel, the commercialization of the literary industry in Canada’s done is make it much more ambitious, the whole award business for one thing, I mean I’ve been on one of those juries and it’s impossible to choose the best book for the year. It’s a matter of people’s tastes finally vying and you get some kind of compromise. But poetry comes out of life, it comes out of lived experience and it also reaches for something that I was thinking of this morning, as philosophy in the original sense ‘philos’’sofia’, the love of wisdom. It’s about how to live, how to be alive in this time with all that we’re facing, as a culture as a society, and going through one’s individual life journey as well, at the same time.\n \n\n45:31\tKaris Shearer:\tDefinitely. I mean in that sense it has to reach out beyond the poetry community, proper. Draw from and be responsive to.\n \n\n45:43\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yeah.\n \n\n45:46\tMegan Butchart:\tDo you think it could describe a little bit more, sort of, how you’re reading style has changed? I mean your voice has changed some, it has become less English, perhaps, but, like, your reading style.\n \n\n45:58\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, how did you hear it? How did you hear the difference?\n \n\n46:02\tMegan Butchart:\tI mean I heard the difference is being less deliberately performative, which is interesting. And maybe it was sort of the intimacy of having the mic right there instead of perhaps just, you know, a reel-to-reel machine in the room, right? So, there might have been a little bit.\n \n\n46:16\tDaphne Marlatt:\tSo, I didn’t have to project as much.\n \n\n46:18\tMegan Butchart:\tPerhaps not. Yeah. But I’m not sure. Karis, do you have any thoughts about that?\n \n\n46:22\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I mean, I think what I heard in the recording was a voice that was clipped and deliberate and for a long time, when I think about leaf leaf/s I think about that recording and that’s kind of in my head, the reference point for the sound of it. What struck me when you were reading last night was the way that you kind of opened up some of the vowels and it kind of lengthened and some of the vowels and it felt much more kind of flowy, and the turns more gentle. Then yeah, that particular – but I still hear echoes of the style, of course, across both.\n \n\n47:03\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, that’s good feedback for me. Yeah. Thank you.\n \n\n47:06\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n47:07\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, well, I’ve always had these two diverging interests in writing and one is narrative and one is the lyric. And the narrative also fights against the sense of sequence, that sequence doesn’t have to be narrative. And yet I’ve written narratives, I’ve written two novels, if not three, and I fought against, in each case, I fought against writing a traditional narrative [Laughs]. So, there’s an interesting conflict that feeds into the writing. And the lyric side of it has to do with my feeling that poetry is not about being declamatory. It’s about music. It’s what the music in the language, how it informs one, even sometimes unconsciously. Writing feels to me much more like improvisation than trying to get from A to B. So, there’s a funny kind of uneasy balance in my work between getting from A to B, as in a narrative, and the improvisatory.\n \n\n48:42\tSpeaker 5:\tWhen you were finishing with leaf leaf/s last night and transitioning to some of the other work, you mark that transition with a reference to the longer line, right? The very short lines of leaf leaf/s and the move into this like long the longer line of Steveson, for example. Can you talk a little bit about that?\n \n\n49:02\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Well it was wonderful for me to be able to stretch out into a longer line. And of course, I started trying to do that with the Vancouver poems. But even there they would come back to a short line here a short line there and so on, whereas with Steveston the writing was really informed by the flow of the Fraser River that ran underneath everything I wrote about Steveston. I wanted the flow of the river there, and the flow of history, which has a kind of, what’s the word I want? It has a kind of fatality to it, that is like the flow of the river out to sea, you can’t reverse it. You can’t reverse the tide. Not the tide, but the current in the river. It keeps on going out, and it keeps going out into this disappearance, into the oceanic. And I wanted to talk about the fatality of that awful moment in Canadian history when people who are born here as citizens, Japanese-Canadian citizens, were suddenly stripped of their citizenship and sent off, basically imprisoned and in camps in the Interior. And how fear it has a kind of fatality in it that grabs people so that they cannot see outside it. I wanted some of that to come through, and so there was this, you could call it a driving force, that was driving the line. But at the same time, it was aware of the music of the line because when a river flows it eddies around the banks and at eddies around whatever it encounters in the current and so there was this waylaying, musically, of that current driving forward. And I was really intrigued with a balance of that or trying to balance that in some way.\n \n\n51:31\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s also picked up on the, I mean, the spaciousness of the page as well, I think. Right?\n \n\n51:35\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yeah, which is why I thought the books have those white pages. Yes. I ran into such trouble trying to submit poems from Steveston to anthologies or magazines. I mean sometimes anthologies would ask me for poems, and “please, don’t cut the line!”\n \n\n51:58\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd so, to pick up on that is the page a unit for you in that sense?\n \n\n52:04\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, the page is a kind of unit. And of course, then, poems will go over the page. And so that’s interesting. Where did they go? Over the page. How do they get over the page?\n \n\n52:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, and especially when you’re in when the work is anthologized, I mean if you’ve had control or input in the page as a compositional unit in the original publication that gets –.\n \n\n52:38\tDaphne Marlatt:\tCompletely undone, yeah.\n \n\n52:38\tKaris Shearer:\t–compromised unintentionally.\n \n\n52:38\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, that has been a cause of great aggravation.\n \n\n52:39\tKaris Shearer:\tI want to ask, Daphne, you, and Megan. We’ll start with Daphne. Is there anything you’re reading right now that you would recommend to the audience, the listeners?\n \n\n52:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, there’s a book. I picked up at Mosaic Books here in Kelowna. That I was delighted to see — it’s John Lent’s new book. It’s called Matten Flywheel and they are remarkable poems because they’re written in the aftermath of a near-fatal heart attack and he, I would say those poems, they radiate that kind of ‘philosophia’ that I was talking about as what poetry reaches for. There’s a lot of it in there as well as the daily. But it always has to be. The daily always has to be there too. And the other book I’m reading that I’m very interested in is David R. Loy’s Nondual Thought.It’s a very exciting investigation of how the Buddhist notion of emptiness, which is very present in Chan and Zen Buddhism, and in Mahayana Buddhism. It has been presaged – there are connections with earlier Western philosophers, including Heidegger and Kant and he’s talking about the non-binary. And I think that is such an important concept. It’s one that I was first came in contact with through Rachel Blau Duplessis’s work and the work of feminist theorists generally and of course, Loy doesn’t talk about that, which he should do, but he doesn’t. He’s philosophical. And it’s a really interesting investigation of that, of those kinds of connections, and he’s now applying that to ecology and the environment. So, I’m going to be curious to hear what he has to say about that.\n \n\n55:04\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s great, Thank you very much. Megan, over to you, for final thoughts. What would you recommend?\n \n\n55:10\tMegan Butchart:\tI’m in class right now. So, I’m reading a lot of books for class. But I’ve also been re-reading Ana Historic. Kind of in anticipation of this visit. That’s a book that’s meant a lot to me, because of its topics with archival work and archival studies and trying to retrieve voices, often marginalized voices from the periphery that have been silenced. So yeah, just re-reading that and also thinking about the SpokenWeb project more broadly and the sort of work that it’s it’s hopefully doing, yeah.\n \n\n55:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\tGreat.\n \n\n55:48\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah.\n \n\n55:48\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWonderful.\n \n\n55:49\tKaris Shearer:\tThank you so much.\n \n\n55:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, the archival is very interesting. Of course, I’ve used archives a lot in my work. What was it Olive Senior said in her recent talk? At the Writers Union, their little magazine writing has a kind of synopsis of it, but she said something like “place is never fixed.” It’s not fixed in time. We affect place, place affects us too. And the archival is interesting because it gives us a sense of what was there before we encounter it. We tend to think what we encounter is all there is, it isn’t. And we need to have not only a sense of what was there before we encountered it, but where it’s all moving to now, especially with climate change. So, there’s, I don’t know what you’d call the opposite of the archival, but it has to leap forward from the archival, just as Indigenous knowledge, and what the elders teach moves from very very far back in what preceded us, now, here, and forward to seven generations, they affect seven generations down the line. That’s the kind of view we need in our culture.\n \n\n57:19\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n57:19\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah.\n \n\n57:20\tDaphne Marlatt:\tSorry to get a little [inaudible] –.\n \n\n57:21\tKaris Shearer:\tBut, a kind of a living archive that is not just passed on, but also co-created maybe?\n \n\n57:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Well the understanding of it has to be very much in the present, but it looks back and it looks forward and it should be a guide for action. [Start Music: SoundBox Signals Theme Music]\n \n\n57:47\tKaris Shearer:\tThat was episode two of SoundBox Signals. You were listening to a recording by Daphne Marlatt from our archive called the SoundBox Collection. I want to thank Daphne Marlatt for talking with us and for allowing us to share the recording online, and also to the Warren Tallman estate for the same permission. You can find full-length recordings online at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. I’m your host Karis Shearer and I will see you next time. [End Music: SoundBox Signals Theme Music]\n \n\n58:26\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. The episode we shared with you this month was produced by Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart for our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals, from UBC-Okanagan’s “Audio-Media-Poetry” Lab – a.k.a. – the AMP Lab. You can follow the work of the AMP Lab on Instagram @amplab_ubco. The SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. This episode was transcribed by Kelly Cubbon and Nour Sallam. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. 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In this episode, Jason Camlot – SpokenWeb Director and Professor of English at Concordia University – takes us on a reflective listening tour through recordings of the Words and Music Show as it has evolved through the pandemic since early 2020. The Words and Music Show has been organized by Ian Ferrier for two decades to bring performances of literature, art, and music to live audiences at the Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Jason assisted Ian with organizing after Covid sent the series online, and this episode takes us into the in-person and virtual sounds of the Show. In this episode, we listen to the journey of one reading series and its co-curator over the past two years. Join us in reflecting on how the pandemic has changed the ways we share and connect to each other through literature, art, and performance.\n\n00:00:06\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tInstrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How have our experiences of live artistic events changed during the pandemic? The Words and Music Show is a monthly gathering that poet and musician Ian Ferrier has organized for over twenty years. It invites artists to share spoken word poetry, literature, music, dance, and other kinds of performance. Before March 2020, Ian brought the show to audiences in the physical space of Casa del Popolo in Montreal. The pandemic sent this event online and into strange hybrid physical/digital forms, as has happened with so many events that we used to attend in our favourite venues. Jason Camlot assisted Ian in hosting the show online during this pandemic period.\n \n\n00:01:34\tHannah McGregor:\tIn addition to co-hosting the Words and Music Show Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb Network and a Professor of English at Concordia University. He uses past recordings of the show to bring us this new episode of the podcast during yet another wave of Covid contagion and shut-downs. Listening to these recordings is a call to reflect back on the many pivots this show and other live events have made over the past two years of Covid-impacted life. Jason wonders aloud whether it’s too soon (and too close to home) to yet theorize about how Covid has transformed reading events, but he suggests it might be helpful to listen back to what organizers, artists, and fans of the show have been experiencing. What does this artistic gathering sound like now? Some of the sounds may be familiar to you: Zoom glitches and tech troubles; the lonely reverberance of a small crowd clapping; coughing fits; the strange absence of ambient conversation; and the background sounds of pets and children, reminders that people are listening from usually-private home spaces.\n \n\n00:02:34\tHannah McGregor:\tArtists and creative event organizers are a tough bunch: they have and will continue to weather the storms of challenges and unknowns in order to share writing, art, and poetry with those who wish to listen. We invite you to listen to this episode with us, as we reflect on the shifting sounds of poetry readings and artistic community – and the power these events continue to have for us all. Here is Jason Camlot with Episode 5 of our third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”. [Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:03:14\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tHere we go. Four minute venue buzz. Let’s see if it works… [Indistinct Shuffling Sounds] Not a chance.\n \n\n00:03:28\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\n \n\nIt’s not working? [Laughs] Are you sharing computer sound? [Sounds of Ian and Jason Troubleshooting Continue]\n00:03:32\tJason Camlot:\tThat is the sound of me, Jason Camlot, and Ian Ferrier working out some technical effects just before the start of a Words and Music show that we hosted on Zoom in August, 2020.\n \n\n00:03:43\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\t– well, you don’t have the advanced?\n \n\n00:03:45\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tI’m not sure that I do at the moment…\n \n\n00:03:47\tJason Camlot:\tI’m Jason Camlot, a professor in Concordia University’s department of English and research chair in Literature and Sound Studies.\n \n\n00:03:55\tIan Ferrier:\tHi, I’m Ian Ferrier and as far as this conversation is concerned, I’m a poet and a musician and a curator of multimedia shows featuring literature, music, poetry, performance, and dance.\n \n\n00:04:11\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tYeah, I think we’re just gonna start this.\n00:04:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tOh, here’s Jay Alexander Brown.\n \n\n00:04:20\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tOh, there we go. [Laugh].\n \n\n00:04:24\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\t[Laugh] Yeah. Let that go for a minute before we start. [Start Music: Instrumental with Voices]\n \n\n00:04:26\tJason Camlot:\tThis episode is about all the shows that Ian and I have hosted online during the pandemic.\n \n\n00:04:32\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music Online, August 2020:\tSo, good evening everyone and welcome to the Words and Music Show.\n \n\n00:04:36\tJason Camlot:\tSince 2016, the “Where Poets Read” online listing of literary events in Montreal (curated by my colleague and regular collaborator Dr. Katherine McLeod) has posted details of nearly 800 readings. [End Music: Instrumental with Voices] The last “live” in-person event listed on the site (until very recently) was for the Épiques Voices: Bilingual Poetry Show held at La Vitrola on March 10th, 2020. That amazingly fun and moving bilingual show was co-hosted by Katherine and Catherine Cormier-Larose. I remember the show very well, not only because of the awesome readings by Klara du Plessis, Kama La Mackerel, Alexei Perry Cox, and ten other excellent poets, but especially because it was the last public reading I would attend in person for a period for a very long time. For 593 days, to be exact. More about how that stretch of time ended a bit later in this podcast.[Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding] But first let’s go back to March 2020, a time when we were just beginning to understand the implications of how the pandemic might alter our lives. Between March 12th and March 29th, the “Where Poets Read” listing showed a series of notices for “cancelled” or “postponed” shows. You would find messages on Facebook, like this one from Ian Ferrier.\n \n\n00:05:59\tIan Ferrier:\t[Start Music: Breaking News Music] [Voice Effect: News Anchor Voice] Tonight’s show is not cancelled, only postponed. We are collecting tracks from all the performers who were scheduled to present and preparing the way to present them live in this group sometime in this upcoming week. Stay tuned and stay safe.\n \n\n00:06:12\tJason Camlot:\tAnd then we see a listing for the Words and Music Show online.\n \n\n00:06:18\tIan Ferrier:\tIt took longer than a week, by the way, it ended up being towards the middle or the end of April, before we could get people online.\n \n\n00:06:26\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, this was the first one, right? Like April 20 –April 19th?\n \n\n00:06:30\tIan Ferrier:\tGee, was that it? Wow, that was a good one too.\n \n\n00:06:33\tJason Camlot:\tOr was it…?\n \n\n00:06:35\tJason Camlot:\tThe correct date of that first online Words and Music Show of the Pandemic Period was March 29th, 2020. It featured work by Brian Bartlett, Lune tres belle, Alexei Perry-Cox, Nisha Coleman, and Choeur Sala.\n \n\n00:06:50\tJason Camlot:\tSince that date (based on data some students of mine have been collecting by scouring events postings on social media) there have been thousands of online literary events (readings, book launches, public interviews and panels) hosted from locations across Canada (and across the world) using platforms such as Zoom, Facebook Live, Crowdcast, Instagram and YouTube. If you have ever attended a poetry reading (whether you enjoyed it or not), or if you have ever listened to an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast before, you will know that public readings and performance are an important kind of literary communication, circulation and community-building. Much of the collaborative research pursued across the SpokenWeb network is committed to preserving, listening to, and trying to understand the many meanings of historical recordings that document literary activity in Canada. In studying the thousands of recordings that constitute our collective archives of literary sound, we find ourselves asking, “What did this event mean?” [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] Sometimes we find ourselves asking even more basic questions, like, “Whose voice is that? [Pause] What’s that sound?” [Pause] But here we are, in a period of major disruption again to just about everything, including to literary events, readings, and gatherings. There seem to be new, urgent questions to ask: What does this pandemic mean for literary performance communities? What does it mean for the way we think about and experience literature, as compared to how we did before, when we could see each other in person without concern of spreading or catching a potentially fatal virus? Even as I articulate the question, “What does this mean?” another question arises simultaneously, not quite drowning out the first one, but certainly obscuring its intelligibility and potential. “What does this mean? Is this a question I should be asking right now? [End Music: Ambient Sounds]\n00:08:53\tJason Camlot:\tBack in May, 2020, my colleague, Katherine McLeod, and I made a podcast for this SpokenWeb Podcast series, an episode called “How are we Listening Now?” –\n00:09:07\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Zoom Doorbell Chime] Hello? [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n00:09:09\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHello? Can you hear me?\n00:09:11\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYep. Hi Katherine.\n00:09:13\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHi!\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:09:21\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tUh, no, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:25\tAudio Recording, Unknown Voice, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHello from my kitchen!\n00:09:26\tJason Camlot:\t– about what it felt like to live and listen under pandemic conditions [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] just a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic first began March 2020.\n00:09:35\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020 :\tGood evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music.\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe actually used the sounds from that first online Words and Music Show, including the performances of Nisha Coleman –\n00:09:51\tAudio Recording, Nisha Coleman, Words and Music, March 2020 :\tIt’s precarious, of course it’s precarious in the best of times. And now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together, singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle or maintaining this connection over the internet.\n00:10:13\tJason Camlot:\t– and Alexei Perry Cox.\n \n\n00:10:16\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020 :\t[Baby Cooing] [Reciting Poetry] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect and conquerous would get through to humankind.\n00:10:23\tJason Camlot:\tIn retrospect, it marked the beginning of a long series of ongoing, and maybe repetitive questions. That episode could go on and on, with only slight modifications to the title: How are we listening, now? And now? [Multiple Repetitions of “and now”] Katherine and I did revisit the episode and expand our thinking around that initial question in a scholarly article recently published in a special “Pandemics” issue of the journal, Canadian Literature. We ended our contribution to the article with a rather upbeat take on the transformative implications of the pandemic upon our scholarly and pedagogical activities. We concluded:\n \n\n00:10:58\tJason Camlot and Katherine McLeod:\t[Simultaneous Voices] Pandemic listening may be a new, tremulous classroom within which we will come to hear, unlearn, and transform our understandings and practices of listening.\n \n\n00:11:20\tJason Camlot:\tOur article is filled with theses of different kinds about pandemic listening, that were developed through a process of listening to the kinds of online conversations about literature that we were having with students and colleagues during the first months of the pandemic. Writing the article necessarily represented an exercise in abstraction and theorization of that early experience (at least I felt it was necessary in preparing the article).\n00:11:41\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic Sounds] When is it a good time to reflect on a crisis within which one is still deeply entrenched? When’s a good time to reflect on our experience of the pandemic? Is it too soon to do so? Given that we are in a fifth wave now, and that the Omicron variant has initiated a series of public responses that are reminiscent of the very early period of the pandemic, it may be a good time to listen to what we have gone through, even though we’re still going through it. Perhaps it is still too early to theorize the meaning of the pandemic, but it feels helpful, somehow, to listen to it. [Pause] In this episode, my way of listening to my recent experience of the texture of time, and to the pandemic as it existed for me for an hour or so, on every third Sunday of the month, will take the form of selecting and playing recorded moments from some of the sixteen distinct online Words and Music Show events that I have co-hosted with Ian Ferrier (from my institutional Zoom account) since March 22nd, 2020. [Pause] In selecting moments from pandemic episodes of the Words and Music Show, I have been as interested in listening to the sounds around the performance, as the performances themselves. [End Music: Ambient Electronic Sounds].\n00:13:16\tJason Camlot:\tWe were interested in the sounds that surround the show, as well.\n \n\n00:13:19\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tSo, Jason, will you be doing the fake applause?\n00:13:25\t \nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\n\nOh, I can send you some fake applause if you want.\n00:13:28\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tYeah, sure. Send me some fake applause.\n00:13:31\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tOne sec –I just –Jason, I just sent you a couple of little applause clips.\n00:13:39\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, July 2020:\tHow’s everyone’s weekend been?\n00:13:46\tAudio Clip:\t[Applause]\n00:13:47\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:13:47\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, July 2020:\tIt was like Klara just walked in on a sitcom and –.\n00:13:49\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:13:53\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tBy the way, that’s real life Casa applause.\n00:13:57\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, July 2020:\tOh cool!\n00:13:57\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tAnd I just sent you four minutes of crowd buzz too, which is like just when nothing’s going on –\n00:14:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tRight.\n00:14:05\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\t– and people are talking with each other.\n00:14:07\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tOh, hi Judee.\n00:14:07\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tHey everyone.\n00:14:10\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tThanks for coming.\n00:14:13\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tYeah! So happy to be here. Jason, that’s a virtual background. I didn’t know.\n00:14:19\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tIt is.\n00:14:19\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tIt’s quite deceptive.\n00:14:20\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tYeah. It’s the Casa del Popolo where the Words and Music show often happens or usually happens. Yeah.\n00:14:28\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\t[Start Audio Clip: Crowd Buzz] There we go! Crowd buzz.\n00:14:31\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tCrowd buzz. We’re creating a virtual atmosphere.\n00:14:35\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, July 2020:\tWow, the crowd is so, so loud. It’s hard to hear you guys!\n00:14:38\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\t[Laugh] I know. That’s why we gotta yell.\n00:14:42\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, July 2020:\tIn honour of this crowd, I’m gonna go grab myself a beer before this show starts. I’ll be right back.\n00:14:48\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\tGood idea. Alright.\n00:14:49\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, July 2020:\tIt’s so crowded. He might find there’s a line up.\n00:14:52\tMultiple Voices:\t[Laugher]\n00:14:55\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, July 2020:\n \n\nHey Kenny, I don’t know if you can hear us.\n00:14:58\tJason Camlot:\tSounds like audience buzz and different kinds of applause captured on tape [End Audio Clip: Crowd Buzz] from past live shows to give a sound of appreciation from a group of people that is practically impossible to produce when on Zoom, [Start Audio Clip: November 2021, Words and Music Crowd Buzz] because Zoom cancels out sound altogether when more than two or three people speak or make noise at the same time, at least with the standard noise cancellation settings on. [Audio Clip of Crowd Buzz continues] We missed those sounds online. [End Audio Clip: November 2021, Words and Music Crowd Buzz]\n00:15:32\tJason Camlot:\tThose first ten months of the Pandemic. Oh my god. Not only were we dealing with the anxiety and intense uncertainty of the virus, not quite knowing what it was all about, and many months away from the first vaccines. But Donald Trump still had a Twitter account (that was only taken away from him on January 9th, 2021). And on May 25th, George Floyd, was murdered. [Silence] Teaching and collaborative research activities, and community work (like being on the Board of the Quebec Writers Federation, QWF) kept me sane by giving me a sense of purpose. But the dull hum sounding feelings of utter purposelessness and helplessness were always there, in the background. Through my participation in the QWF, and with the leadership of spoken word performer and novelist Tanya Evanson, a regular Words and Music performer over the years, I became involved in collaboratively producing a show that featured Black Montreal-based performers, Roen Higgins, Fabrice Koffy, Faith Paré and Jason (Blackbird) Selman. For this QWF, Wired on Words, Throw Collective, and SpokenWeb special “Black Writers Out Loud” edition of the Words and Music Show, we invited these four amazing performers to appear on the legendary stage of the Sala Rossa.\n \n\n00:16:55\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Background Audio: Sounds of the Sala Rossa]\n00:18:01\tJason Camlot:\tOn this night for the recording of the Montreal Black Writers Out Loud event, a little more than two years later, the atmosphere at the Sala was something quite different. Venues were not allowed to have audiences at shows. We were recording the performances from the Sala stage to be webcast as a “live from the Sala Words and Music show” just a few hours later. The only people in the venue were the four performers, the audio and video technicians who were recording the sets, Ian, who was introducing the artists from the stage, and me, because it was thought I might need to Zoom cast the show from there if the recording took longer than expected. We were all masked when I said hi to the performers before they began, and then I watched in the chilly empty space leaning on the bar at the back of the room. The taps were dry. The performances were fantastic. Fabrice Koffey.\n \n\n00:18:58\tAudio Recording, Fabrice Koffey, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\n \n\n[Fabrice performs the work “Je m’appelle Serge…” alternating between French and English]\n00:19:19\tJason Camlot:\tThey were all the more amazing given that each artist has to do their set a second time because the sound messed up during the first recording session, and the error was only discovered after all four sets of the entire hour-long show had been performed. In fact Roen Higgins had to come back another day to re-record her set because she couldn’t hang around to it a second time; she had to get home to a child who was sick. So her set wouldn’t make it out to Zoom and Facebook Live that night. Faith Paré\n00:19:47\tAudio Recording, Faith Paré Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\tHi there guys. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. I wanna say thank you to the Quebec Writers Federation, to Wired on Words and Ian Ferrier, to SpokenWeb Canada and to the Throw Collective. This is really wicked to be able to be in the space again. So as well, thank you to the Sala Rossa team for taking good care of us and Fabrice and Jason and to Rowan who’s here with us in spirit. It was awesome getting to chat with you guys in September and really wicked to be performing alongside some powerhouse poets from Montreal. So thank you for welcoming me into this community as well. I have a kind of suite of poetry for you guys, which is kind of a Black feminist elegizing of the world. And it begins with an epigraph from the poet, Claire Harris. [Begins reading poetry] While babies bleed, this is not the poem I wanted./ It is the poem I could./ Poetry is the stuff of a life lived./ What I have endured is no life./ The insult of that, the salt poured into the wound my mouth was replaced with./ I know the unsolicited tips to smooth my frown lines./ I know to try a smile from every sidewalk, leering guy./ I know the flies I’m bound to catch, how impolite. /No one likes mouth on a Black girl, unless it’s sucking cock or it’s an open grave, best when both./ And when they still see a hanged man in my dangling shin, I need to fix my face/ But my face is already fixed on the doomscroll, /The hashtags wreck, the headline bolded and stampeding through my throat./ When I’m sitting with a pen./ When I try laughter/ When I take a sip of water stolen from somewhere and still smell smoke from the flash bang grenade tossed on the Black girl asleep./ The breathless call for mother of a Black girl when they barked her off balcony/ Black girl, after Black girl submerged in river after river/ Because of their dead names can’t go,/ Can’t go anywhere in the world. /Can’t go when the one door out is my mouth./ Can’t when sound is cowering inside me with canned food, ready to hide years on end./ Can’t. [Intake of breath].\n \n\n00:22:08\tJason Camlot:\tThe Sala show was an experiment of sorts, an attempt to give the effect of a live show delivered from a beloved venue for an online audience. The quality of the performances, and the quality of the audio and video were both great. But there was also something a bit eerie about the juxtaposition of a recognizable, happening venue in which nothing was happening apart from the amazing performances on stage. The silence surrounding the sets was more than just noticeable. It was audible. It was thick. Thick with quiet and absence. [Audio Clip: Person Exhales] . Jason Blackbird Selman\n \n\n00:22:49\tAudio Recording, Jason Blackbird Selman, Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\t[Jason Blackbird Selman performing “Lend me a psychedelic dream…”] Lend me a psychedelic dream./ Lend me pieces of daylight./ Lend me a destruction sweeter than anything I can remember./ Lend me open sounds, a courtyard, Sedgwick Ave. /Bury this knowledge and sound./ A beat that repeats a rhythm that has a mind of its own./ Let the mind grow,/ spread to all five boroughs like a virus, black fire, wild stone rhythm for talk,/ Speak softly. Take over the world./ It was so easy to know you once I began listening to myself,/ the verse became free psychedelic colours and psychedelic graves./ Daisies growing wild from the barrel of a gun shoot stars./ Love is an idle threat shouted to the world who is not like I when delivering themselves to themselves,/ a glass filled with years, this venom filled with love./ I love her so much because she lets me know that I am fading./Ghetto codes and grey days./ The search for search, the sound of sound./ Find yourself in flames evenings on pause, part of something, apart and in parts/ Open the first door./ Let yourself in. [End reading]\n00:25:20\tAudio Recording, Jason Blackbird Selman, Writers Out Loud, Words and Music Show, November 2020:\tGood evening. It’s good to be here at Sala. It’s always good to be here, in amongst wonderful poets from our city. And all of you are watching right now. I just wanna say thank you to KWF to Ian, Words and Music. And, it’s good that we can do this. But I also really look forward to coming back into the world and having a full audience because we appreciate your virtual support, [Start Music: Ambient Sounds] but we also appreciate your energy and face to face. Cause that does make what we do really worth doing.\n \n\n00:26:06\tJason Camlot:\tI feel honoured to have been one of a handful of people who was in the room to see those terrific live performances before an absent audience. I hooted and yeahed, clapped and cheered loudly through my mask from the back of the room. The reverberation of my solitary response was a bit sad. I could have been an installation in the show currently running at the Montreal Museum of Modern Art, entitled, “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?” For the next month’s show, Ian and I went back to sitting in front of our computers and hosted an event of performers and audience members who were sitting in front of theirs. [End Music: Ambient Sounds] As we realized that online shows meant you could invite just about anyone in the world to perform (on Zoom), I suggested to Ian that we invite the UK-based poet Angela Szczepaniak to join the December 13th, 2020 show. I had just finished editing Angela’s third poetry collection for DC books, and I knew it would be great to hear her read from it.\n \n\n00:27:09\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tShe lectures in creative writing at the University of Surrey, and she has a new book coming out soon called The Nerves Center. So please welcome Angela Szczepaniak.\n00:27:18\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tThank you so much, Ian. And thank you for having me. It’s really lovely to be here from London very late at night right now, for me. Really nice to meet you all too. So, I’ll be reading from my forthcoming book, The Nerves Center, which is a long narrative poem about a performer in the midst of stage fright while on stage and attempting to give a performance. And each act in the sequence of the long poem she, the performer is trying to speak and what she actually says, which takes a form of sound poems. The sounds poems are comprised, I guess I should say, of recordings of panic attacks, that I played into transcription software, which then assigned kind of letters and phrases and words-ish, to it. It wasn’t very good at transcribing, which was very helpful when I was reshaping them into sound poems for the page. What didn’t really occur to me until now – this is my first reading of the work or from this book –[Cough] excuse me – is that I am essentially going to be reenacting lots of panic attacks that I once had [Laugh] long ago, which is a kind of exciting night, I guess, for everyone. [Cough] Excuse me.\n \n\n00:28:40\tJason Camlot:\tIt seemed especially appropriate for the Zoom stage, which might add its own sonic glitches through wavering connectivity. I was excited to hear what the planned silences in the poems would sound like on Zoom. And I was just excited to see Angela, since it had been a while since we’d zoomed, because she had contracted the COVID virus some months before and had been knocked out of commission for quite a while, now.\n \n\n00:29:03\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tI suppose also I should say that panic attack-wise, I very helpfully caught a virus a while ago, which results in me coughing constantly. So that’s what you’re going to hear for a lot of those kind of breathy sound poems. It’s just going to be replaced by coughing today. [Coughs] Excuse me. There are ten acts all together and each one maps onto a specific self-help strategy for managing anxiety and performance anxiety. [Coughs] Excuse me. I will keep this short also given the cough. So The Nerves Center, a novel in performance anxiety. The nerves center in 10 acts, the nerves center in 131 stanzas 2,417 fantic utterances and tonight, especially for you all 9, 381 coughs – and I’m guessing on that. [Angela begins performing] Act one. Act natural. Be yourself. /Speaker stands alone at microphone pin neat, polite,/ Serenity slipping through finger twitchers./Speaker ready self opens mouth. Silence. / Mouth opens this time with resolve./ Silence snaps jaws shut. Speaker opens steady mouth. Finally./ [Exhaling] [Coughing] Regroup reapproach. [Exhaling] [Coughing] Speaker back steps, wheezes, a casual graveyard whistle./ Shuffles a soft shoe, sidles up microphone adjacent to take it by surprise. [Exhaling] [Coughing]\n \n\n00:31:19\tJason Camlot:\tAngela continued performing, despite the discomfort, from several other acts in The Nerves Centre, as we all listened intently to a combination of breathing, coughing, and rich descriptions that frame the staged readings within a vaudevillian kind of world. Angela’s book is very funny, and remarkable for its acceptance without judgement of so many failures in speech, for the sense of hope that each act brings, and for the deep compassion the book shows for anyone who may be struggling to find their voice, for anyone trying to speak and be heard. And here we were, sitting in our own isolated sets, listening to a performance of anxiety and disarticulation that was both deliberate and real, highly performative and absolutely involuntary, at the same time.\n00:32:11\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tI am going to stop there. Thank you everyone for listening. And, were it not for many, many coughing fits I would continue, but I think you get the idea [Laughs] of what this is like. Thank you.\n \n\n00:32:26\tJason Camlot:\tIn many ways, it was the most pandemicky performance imaginable. Painful, beautiful, absurd. It made perfect sense.\n \n\n00:32:34\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tAnd thank you so much for coming. I should tell everybody, Angela’s been telling us a little bit about living with COVID in the UK, which sounds pretty intense with Starbucks open and everything else open and lots of people catching it. And it’s one in the morning for you. So I thank you very much for joining us tonight.\n00:32:50\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\tThank you. Thank you so much, everyone for listening to that.\n00:32:54\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, December 2020:\tAnd if you wanna catch some more of that, I think The Nerves Center is coming out this winter at some point.\n00:32:58\tAudio Recording, Angela Szczepaniak, Words and Music, December 2020:\n \n\nYeah. Thank you.\n00:33:01\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio Clip: Fastforwarding Tape Sound] Alright, let’s speed ahead a bit. Lots of shows happened between December 2020 and the special Words and Music Show – SpokenWeb Symposium edition held in May 2021. February 21st, 2021 for Black History Month, we reprised a screening of the Sala Rossa Black Writers Out Loud show, now with Roen Higgins’s performance restored so that all four sets could be viewed together.\n \n\n00:33:25\tAudio Recording, Roen Higgins, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\t[Roen Higgins performing] Ware shell shocked, numb, sick and tired./These are the symptoms of PTSD whether we march, kneel, or speak./ Our voices are unheard in the streets, /every living thing on this earth retreats or reacts or stands still until the threat passes./ So please stop asking our people who are paralyzed to walk with you./ Stop judging others for not speaking up when their vocal chords are shot from screaming,/ Crying for babies, they never birthed yet feel the contractions of these now household names./ I can’t even say all their names as there are too many to remember, but their faces are etched in my mind/ with their mothers cry looped over this never ending soundtrack./ We are forever in labour with pain that our children will never belong or feel accepted,/ that they are guilty and being groomed from preschool to prison./ Before they leave their house they’re reminded by their mamas/ Stand tall, smile, look straight so you won’t come off hostile./ Keep your hands where it can be seen. Move slowly. Never, never run./ Don’t hang out on the streets and keep your hoodie off./ Comply. Answer their questions and cordially and politely./ Whatever you do, just stay calm and keep the camera rolling. Thank you. [End performance]\n \n\n00:35:02\tAudio Recording, Roen Higgins, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\tThank you everyone. Thank you for this opportunity. It’s an amazing time to have a show in these times to be able to come together even virtually while they say we socially distance, we do not distance socially.\n \n\n00:35:13\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Black Writers Out Loud, Words and Music, November 2020:\tThank you. Ronan\n00:35:15\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Accordion] Sunday March 21st the Words & Music Show is your online welcome to Spring. Tawhida Tanya Evanson is here with a new book. And catch poems, music, art and dance with: Emilie Zoey Baker (Australia), Raymond Jackson (New Orleans) , Marie-France Jacques (Montréal), Visual Art by Francis Caprani . Verse by Kelsey Nichole Brooks . Music by Ramela Arax Koumrouya.\n \n\n00:35:46\tVarious Speakers:\t[Collage of audio of March 2021, Words and Music Show]\n \n\n00:36:59\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2021:\tOkay. Thanks folks. Goodnight for now.\n00:37:01\tVarious Speakers:\tThank you very much Ian! Nice meeting you all. Yeah. Nice meeting you all. Likewise. See you next time. Cheers everyone. Thank you.\n00:37:06\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2021:\n \n\nBye everyone, thank you. We’re going to go off air now. [End Music: Upbeat Accordion]\n00:37:07\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Music: Various Vocals and Musical Sounds] April 18th 2021. An absorbing evening featuring: verse by Sarah Wolfson , music by Geronimo Inutiq , art by Louise Belcourt, David Bateman as Dr. Sad , a new video by Marie-Josée Tremblay , words and music by Ian Ferrier, with a wealth of words, music, video and art, an online show to help us forget 8PM lockup (or is that lockdown?)\n00:37:41\tVarious Voices:\t[Collage of audio of audio from 18 April 2021 show] Should I start now? [Laugh] Yes, you are live! [Laugher] Okay. “They love to laugh together and drink and shop, especially when they were unhappy. She was much less happy than he was.” “In those days. We had a tool for taking the cords off beats. We grew everything. Then even our little toes. If our noses went missing, we replaced them with the most obliging webs.” “I love my grandfather. I hated my parents. He painted all the time. I hung around him.” [Guitar] “We’re just too many and we’re born too fast. Sarah and Will and James and Tina and Ian and John and Michael and Eric and Ty and Sarah, Beth, and Mary.” Bye. Take good care. Bye. Goodnight everyone.\n \n\n00:38:46\tJason Camlot:\tSo now we’re entering May 2021, and the entire Concordia SpokenWeb Team is deep into planning and delivering the annual SpokenWeb Symposium, which, for the second year in a row, was supposed to bring everyone to Montreal to share work, but which, again, had to take place online. The Symposium, with the theme “Listening, Sound, Agency” was a great success, with over 30 panels (so nearly 100 papers presented) by scholars and students from all over the world who were interested in exploring intersections between literary studies and sound studies. The Symposium was great, and then the Summer Sound Institute, filled with all kinds of workshops and research showcases, was also great. But, with all of that done, I was extremely excited to host a special edition of the Words and Music Show, where anyone from the Symposium, or from our research network, could share a poem, a story, a song, or a joke. We sent out a call trying to entice people to participate. And once we had a roster, I asked Ian to prepare one of his radio promo ads for the show.\n \n\n00:39:51\tIan Ferrier:\tOn Sunday May 23rd Wired on Words partners with SpokenWeb to present a special edition of the Words and Music show.\n \n\n00:39:56\tJason Camlot:\tIf this had been a live show, it would have taken place at the Casa Del Popolo, longtime home of the Words and Music Show. Instead, we were online again. Still, it was as close as we would come, that summer, to hanging out, joking around, being silly and creative, together.\n \n\n00:40:12\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah. We have a bunch of different performances from members of the SpokenWeb network. And this is really – it doesn’t replace the gathering and party that we would’ve had if we’d been able to all gather together in Montreal, but it’s meant to have the fun feel of that kind of gathering.\n \n\n00:40:32\tJason Camlot:\tPoet and Simon Fraser University PhD student Cole Mash, hosted it in a way that made it all feel, at times, like we really were at the Casa together.\n \n\n00:40:41\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m just turning my video off so I have a better connection and then kinda having a drink. But yeah! Welcome to the Words and Music show SpokenWeb edition. I personally have actually never seen this show but I’m really honoured and privileged to be able to host it and be a part of it. I hear it’s a pretty good show. We’ve got – we have about 10 or so lucky people who have signed up for tonight’s event. So can everyone please turn their cameras off? [Pause] Okay, great. Everyone turn their mics on. [Pause] Everyone say “Words and Music” all at the same time and see how that goes. [Various voices overlapping: “Words and Music”] All right. All right. That was pretty good actually. I got to hear quite a few people. That was nice. OK. Everyone turn their cameras back on, but make a weird face when you turn your camera back on. [Pause] [Laughter] All right. Very nice. Very nice. So now that I know you’re all listening…\n \n\n00:41:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Start Audio Clip: Jason Camlot Archival Performance] My own contribution to the show is to play a clip from the archive of me performing a song at a Words and Music show that took place nearly 20 years earlier.\n \n\n00:42:00\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo thanks so much Cole. And it’s great to be back on the pin screen. [End Audio Clip: Jason Camlot Archival Performance] And, it seemed appropriate really to –rather than to do something new since we’ve been spending so much time with Ian’s archive of shows– to dig into that and to play something that – play a performance that I did back in 2003. And I was thinking about this– and this is what happens when you listen back into an archive, especially if you find yourself in it. Even if you don’t, if you were at a show or whatever– but I’m thinking 2003, that means my son was probably around the same age as Cole’s son is now. I think of Deana Fong and I think of some of my colleagues and friends now who are starting families and that’s sort of where I was at in 2003, actually, my son was probably a year and a half and my daughter was just born probably about a month before this show. And I chose to play a song that I’ve just been singing in the backyard with my daughter no less than a couple weeks ago. So she’s 16 now and taught herself guitar during COVID and has been writing songs herself. And so we’re sharing our own compositions with each other. And so this is one that I taught her and that she’s sang along with. So it’s from the Words and Music show, April 27th, 2003.\n \n\n00:43:13\tJason Camlot:\tIt was fun to introduce this clip, set it up, and listen to it so many years later with new friends and students.\n \n\n00:43:19\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, 2003\tAnd we’re just gonna play one more song. I want to thank Ian for lending me his guitar. This song is called Derbyland, and Kenny’s gonna be playing arango, which is made of an Armadillo.\n00:43:45\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, 2003:\tA dead Armadillo. [Laugh].\n00:43:47\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, 2003:\tYeah. If you hear some screaming, that’s the Armadillo. [Start Music: Guitar]\n \n\n00:44:07\tJason Camlot:\t[Music Continues: Guitar] It was especially fun and moving to have my old friend and music collaborator tune into the show and to hear his response to a recording that he never knew existed. [End Music: Guitar].\n00:44:17\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, 2003:\tYou know, I’m trying to think back to that time and everything’s a blur, but –\n00:44:22\tJason Camlot:\tMusician, Kenny Smilovich\n00:44:24\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\t– I don’t remember, like how did that end up recorded? Was that sort of the plan or did it just happen that someone recorded it?\n00:44:34\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo Ian recorded pretty much every Words and Music Show almost since its inception.\n00:44:40\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\n \n\nWow. That’s amazing.\n00:44:41\tJason Camlot:\tThis was the longest online Words and Music Show of the pandemic period, by far.\n00:44:46\tVarious Voices:\t[Audio Collage of several performances from the May 2021 show.] [Start Music: Guitar] “When the artist takes matter and builds fence around it in the name of the line, or takes matter into their own hands and abstracts, what results is a manifestation of power in the sense of imposition and not in the sense of strength.” “This poem’s called ‘Asking the Spoon to Runaway Takes Courage: A spoons work is never done. They sit folded in the time waiting as we all do to be picked up.” I should have predicted the death of this city. I couldn’t predict it. Only there had been no such creepy blocks.” Pools and pavement in black ice, random stones steam, faintly. Lime water and liquorish light. Think how the black dust Beth made men dance.” “I have no words, officer lay my tongue. You stole each one in a scamper for escape. When he begged me when your men with the gavelbang voices hounded me. Yes.” “Using my full song to the wise intoxicating yarl and thrall alike. I know the rooms, the words of white. I know the words of flaming light. The words that still the sea at midnight.” [End Music: Guitar] [Start Music: Singing] “I see my from the west down to the east. Any day now. Any day…. [Fade Out Singing] [Start Music: Guitar and Singing] “All of my friends in a plastic, all around jumping train, track, silver effects, bang all back, sleep on a bench in a park on your birthday….” [Fade Out Singing]\n \n\n00:47:11\tJason Camlot:\tAnd yet even after two hours, we were happy to linger, chat, and debrief.\n00:47:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWell, I guess at this point we’ve been together for two hours. It’s gone really quickly and it’s been so enjoyable. I just want to thank, first of all, Cole and Ian for hosting tonight. And Ian, like I said earlier also for just lending us The Words and Music stage for this evening and really to everyone for taking the chance to share something tonight, it’s –I think as Mike put it – it’s a safe environment that we’re trying to create both in terms of sharing ideas, concepts, methods, in our research and our collaborative practice, but also our creativity. And this is just an extension of that. And, since we haven’t been able to join in person this year, it just felt like it would be great to have a space where we could just share some stuff and other parts of ourselves. And I think that really happened tonight. And I’m just so happy that it did.\n \n\n00:48:11\tJason Camlot:\tTo help make the signoff period feel less harsh and abrupt, we engaged in an exercise of imagining each other offline, after the show as a way of saying goodbye, but still keeping each other in mind.\n \n\n00:48:23\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI will say finally, when Katherine and I had a workshop recently, we were sort of trying to address the issue of like, well, where do people go after they disappear from Zoom? You could spend time together and then suddenly you’re in a shared space and then you’re no longer in the shared space. So maybe as a way to lessen the blow of departure I’m gonna suggest that we do the same thing again and ask you, what’s the next thing you’re gonna hear, or the next thing you’re gonna do after leaving us tonight? Katherine, you wanna share what you’re gonna hear next?\n00:48:58\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah, sure. I’m gonna be picking up my little cat, who’s been hanging out and we’re gonna have a little chat. And then, I’m gonna hear the creaking of the door. And I also just feel like putting on some music and continuing to just move and stretch. I feel like it really made me want –I said this after the last time,I was gonna go dance –but I feel like just like moving and stretching, just some music. That’s what I’m gonna do next. Yeah.\n00:49:27\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m gonna go see if my daughter wants to play guitar outside. [Laughs] How about you, Kenny? What’s the next sound you’re gonna hear?\n00:49:36\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’ll probably have a few bites of dinner and then head downstairs and see if I can remember the chords to “Derbyland” by Tarango.\n00:49:43\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs]. Awesome. That’d be great. Klara?\n00:49:48\tAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m definitely gonna get some ice cream, which means I’ll be opening the fridge and there will be a suction sound from the fridge. [Laughs].\n00:49:55\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs] Nick, what’s the next sound you’re gonna hear after you leave us?\n00:50:01\tAudio Recording, Nick Beauchesne,\nWords and Music, May 2021:\n\nWell my cat’s meowing and I have to keep grinding at my dissertation. So –\n00:50:05\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\t[Laughs] Some grinding, just grinding. [Laughs]\n00:50:08\tAudio Recording, Nick Beauchesne,\nWords and Music, May 2021:\n\n \n\n– not for too long. I’m gonna go do something fun after, but that’s when next,\n00:50:14\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tHow about you Faith?\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Faith Paré, Words and Music, May 2021:\tProbably the sound of my roommate and I chatting. I’m probably gonna watch a movie tonight, so maybe some horror movie screams and we have some Indian food on the way. So like that kind of straw sound, you know, sucking up like the last bits of like mango lassi I’m very excited for that particular thing. Yeah.\n00:50:35\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tThat’s great. Great array of sounds. Ali, how about you? What’s the next sound you’re gonna hear?\n00:50:41\tAudio Recording, Ali Barillaro, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo probably similar to other people. I don’t know if you can see her, but my cat over there will probably wake up. So I’ll probably hear her – she’s right there. And probably my own excitement over going to eat some food. So sounds of excitement.\n00:50:57\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tFelicity?\n00:50:58\tAudio Recording, Felicity Tayler, Words and Music, May 2021:\tI’m gonna open the door to this room and walk down my very creepy hallway. And I missed somebody’s bedtime. So either I will hear silent breathing or I will hear a little voice that says “mama?”.\n00:51:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tJudee, how about you?\n00:51:19\tAudio Recording, Judee Burr, Words and Music, May 2021:\tYeah. Without you all, it’ll just be undiluted fan noises in this apartment with some like thum of traffic. Just steady cars. And I’ll probably walk outside. So I’ll get some door creak and maybe even a cricket.\n00:51:36\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tAnd Cole?\n00:51:37\tAudio Recording, Cole Mash, Words and Music, May 2021:\tWell, there’s three unbathed children awaiting me, so there’s gonna be screaming most likely. And then, after that, I hope silence.\n00:51:48\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, May 2021:\tSo it makes it a lot easier – not easy – but a lot easier to say goodbye to you all now. Thanks for a wonderful evening, everyone. And, we’ll see you soon at one of the events this week I hope. Take care, everyone.\n00:51:59\tAudio Recording, Kenny Smilovich, Words and Music, May 2021:\tThanks, Jason!\n00:52:01\tJason Camlot:\tThat particular show did feel as close to a live encounter over Zoom as I’ve had. The livest online event I’ve ever attended. Since we’re just about out of time, let me take you to the last Zoom conversation of what we thought, we hoped, [Start Music: Jay Alexander Brown singing “Beyond beyond”] might be the last online Words and Music Show of the pandemic period, September 19th, 2021. [End Music: Jay Alexander Brown singing “Beyond beyond”]. We thought that might be it, that we would never see each other again, in the flat, tiled, and often inaudible world of Zoom. We spoke to each other as if we were preparing to teleport into another dimension.\n00:52:47\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI’m so excited to imagine that we can start, collaborating, and joining together and seeing things in real life.\n00:52:57\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Words and Music, September 2021:\tIt also makes one realize just what sort of community there has been created through the online shows. So I felt that through listening to John’s piece, that it actually – it would be different to hear that on the stage. And it’s very intimate that we are able to gather here to listen to it here tonight.\n00:53:16\tAudio Recording, Jay Alexander Brown, Words and Music, September 2021:\tAnd it feels like it’s maintained a sense of community and a sense of continuity throughout the pandemic to have these. It’s – in my opinion, it’s not the same as the vibe you have in a room full of people. But the fact that this show didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth and has kept us all tethered to the phenomenon called Montreal – cuz you know, barely leaving the house, especially last year when I was more paranoid about COVID – I could have been anywhere. Who even knows if you’re in Montreal.\n00:53:52\tAudio Recording, John Sweet, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI’m just – I’m concerned though – if we go back to doing like real live performances, what are you gonna do Jason? I’m concerned. [Laughs]\n00:54:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\tI only exist here in this square. I mean – I will still be here if ever you return 20, 30 years from now. You know, if you decide to come back, here I will be.\n00:54:15\tAudio Recording, John Sweet, Words and Music, September 2021:\tAnd you’ll look exactly the same.\n00:54:17\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\t[Laughs] Exactly. Yeah.\n00:54:18\tAudio Recording, Unknown Speaker, Words and Music, September 2021::\tJason isn’t real, John.\n00:54:21\tVarious Voices:\t[Laughter]\n00:54:24\tAudio Recording, Jay Alexander Brown, Words and Music, September 2021:\tJason’s gonna show up at Cafe Resonance as a cardboard cut out.\n00:54:29\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, September 2021:\n \n\n[Laughs] That’s right. Katherine’s gonna be carrying me on a stick.\n00:54:31\tAudio Recording, Various Voices, Words and Music, October 2021:\tAudience chatter and background noise\n00:54:44\tJason Camlot:\tAfter having co-hosted the Words and Music show online for nearly two years, Ian invited me to perform at the first live show since March 2020 – a show that we thought would be a return to live events on a regular basis.\n \n\n00:54:56\tAudio Recording, Various Voices, Words and Music, October 2021:\tAudience chatter and background noise.\n00:55:10\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, October 2021:\tGood evening, everyone and welcome to our first live show in 18 months. Holy crap. [Audience Applause]. I mean, I look back at that whole time and it feels like a giant hallucination and I wonder where I was I and what was going on. And it’s so nice to see people in a room and to be able to present things for them and to actually jam with other musicians from time to time. All of this stuff is so great. So thank you so much for coming tonight. It’s really nice to have everybody here.\n \n\n00:55:42\tJason Camlot:\tI was quite anxious about participating in this show, not so much about giving a reading as about being in a room with lots of people. Anxious, but very excited as well. I had to arrive a bit late and so I sat in the back of the room for most of the first set. Then at intermission, I moved up to join some friends who were seated in the audience. [Start Music] It felt great to sit at a table and chat with people. I had a new book of poems that was about to come out. So I printed up some flyers that the press had given me and handed them out to people during intermission. Then I went up to the mic in front of people and read.\n \n\n00:56:17\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, October 2021:\t[Audience Chatter and Instrument Tuning Background Noise Throughout] Welcome to our fabulous second set. For this set we’re very, very lucky. When we started this project, the project had going online at the beginning of COVID. I was very lucky to have help from Jason Camlot who’s a fine poet and also one of the core people in a project called SpokenWeb, which is taking audio literature and making a databases up so that people can study it in 30 years and say, wow, those people were amazing, whatever they were. And he’s got a new book, which is just coming out called Vlarf. The reason you have those sheets on your table is – the books not quite out yet, but if you have one of these sheets, you get a big discount in the book, so you can get it later. Please welcome Jason Camlot. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n00:57:16\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, October 2021:\tThanks so much, Ian, thank you everyone. It’s so exciting to be with other people.\n00:57:22\tAudience Member:\tYes! [Clapping]\n00:57:25\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, October 2021:\tLet’s just give ourselves a hand for having made it through the last two years, and as Ian said, we’ve been doing the Words and Music Show on Zoom. I had a background of the Casa, always on my screen as I was hosting it from my basement. And it’s just a great feeling to be listening with people and to have the opportunity to read tonight. [Reading poetry] They keep well in winter and sometimes like jagged mounds, they appear frozen in the lake ice. /And then they suffocate in shallow pits, are digested with wood and transform into charcoal and muck./ My botanical book speaks of exogenous stems plunged into lead./ I don’t in the least want to know what that means. /I prefer to understand them as the grounds trembling scales, the soil thus sung in coral shiver./ [Applause]\n00:58:47\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio of Words and Music Show Audience Plays Underneath] In listening back to the audio of those two most recent live Words and Music Shows, the last shows of 2021. It is amazing to hear just how noisy they are with movement, chatter, tumult.\n00:59:18\tAudio Recording, Words and Music, October 2021:\n \n\n[Audience Chatter and Musicians Tuning Instruments]\n00:59:23\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio or Words and Music Show Audience Plays Underneath] This was the buzz we had been trying to emulate in awkward attempts that were comically artificial due to latency, inappropriate amplitude, and bad timing. Awkward too, because that “venue buzz” as Ian called it, isn’t just background noise. Not really. It is the sound of affect in action. [Audience Clip Swells] The sound of a kind of responsive choreography that captures what it feels like. Maybe even what it means to be together at an event where people get up on stage and share something they made just for you. [End of Audience Audio] When I interviewed Ian for this podcast during the final days of 2021, it was clear that we had no idea where the next Words and Music Show would happen – in person, online, we didn’t know.\n01:00:17\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tHopefully this latest iteration of COVID is as not as dangerous as the ones before, but it sure is virulent from the looks of it. So I feel kind of lost about that. I’ve just – I just think that – I mean the first lockdown, I don’t know how it was for you. I found I was in a bit of shock just cuz I didn’t realize how much of my life had been based on going from thinking of something to making something, to putting that thing out and seeing how it lived in the world to going back and making something else, you know? That was the core of my creative practice and all of a sudden that was gone and I –and until we did those live shows, I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it. And it was like, oh yeah, we’re back on stage. And this feels so much better and it’s so much more present. It’s so much more focused. So, I’m gonna– I’m hoping that if we get stuck again, and I very much hope we don’t, but it looks like we probably will – that we can, that I can devise something more interesting to do with that time. Something that I enjoy doing as opposed to the feeling of being stuck indoors.\n01:01:27\tJason Camlot:\tWe talked about how the past two years –and now this recent return to something like a lockdown in Quebec with bars, pubs and restaurants closed to in-person patrons – has taken its toll on the venues that have supported the Words and Music show over the years. La Vitrola (the venue where the Epique Voices show of March 10th, 2020 had taken place) was long gone. The Casa del Popolo had closed its showroom in March, 2020 and tried to make a go it as a shop for a while.\n01:01:56\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tWell, it’s still kind of unfolding. At the moment, it sounds like the two partners in Casa and Sala who were partners themselves or breaking up and they’re running through all the troubles that involves at the same time as these venues that they ran together have basically closed down. Sala is still open, but I haven’t seen anything at Casa del Popolo since COVID happened. I hear the occasional rumour that there will be something in April, but I’m not, I’m not really sure. James Goddart is working there in the office now, so I occasionally ask him, but he doesn’t know either what’s gonna happen. And that would be tough because, for a lot of us in this neighbourhood, that was a place where we could always drop in and catch something or say hello to a friend or meet for coffee or for food or whatever. We did our Mile End Poets Festival – we did at least one or two nights there for almost 10 years too. So I really miss the place.\n01:02:55\tJason Camlot:\tAnd now in the first days of 2022, we have learned that the Ressonance Café, the venue that Ian turned to for the most recent live shows, is shutting down too. The Sala has managed to stay afloat in part through the kind of live streaming and recording sessions that we did for the Black Writers Out Loud show. Just a couple of days ago, CBC reporter, Fenn Mayes published a profile piece on venue covering the long history of the place and interviewing the staff and owners about what it means to them and how they’ve managed to keep going. It makes me a little anxious to read a story like this, which might just as easily be an obituary as a feel good profile piece under the current ongoing circumstances. But the article ends on a positive of note of sorts. The final line being quote, if these walls could talk, they’d sing close quote. I mean, at least didn’t report that the Sala was closing. Even if we could do the next show in person, where would that be? Ian doesn’t know, but not knowing what’s coming next, as far as pandemic circumstances are concerned, does not create even the slightest shiver of uncertainty in Ian about the Words and Music Show.\n01:04:06\tIan Ferrier, 2021 interview\tI think, well, let’s go around the world and find [Unknown Name] from France or something, or track down some people we really like to hear and would normally not be able to bring, I think that’s one quality of it. And another quality is on the shows online. I think it would be worthwhile getting people talking, among, to each other, at the beginning of the show or at the end or something like that, or intermission just to keep part of that spirit alive. Cuz I just notice people actually like to be with each other, and they like to talk and flirt and get huffy or nod or go through all the kinds of experiences they can go through with both with people they know and the joy of total strangers, not knowing who that person is and what they’re gonna bring. [Start Music: Guitar Instrumental, Ian Ferrier, “Rail Music”]\n01:05:00\tJason Camlot:\tThere is a stubbornness of imagination. One might say a resilience of imagination to use a popular COVID period word that characterizes our continued willingness and will to keep creating, gathering, and sharing sounds and stories. It’s not so much that the Words and Music Shows must go on. It’s just a given. The show goes on.\n01:05:32\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, “Rail Music”:\t[Singing] You wake up, find yourself on a train, no memory of how you got on. No knowledge of where you’re going…[Music Instrumental Fades].\n01:06:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb Director Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. A special thanks to Ian Ferrier, and all of the hosts and organizers, artists, performers, and audience members who have engaged in online literary events over the past two years, when we have been unable to gather in person. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And if you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9620","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E6, Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium, 7 March 2022, Aubin and Ricci"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-sound-agency-a-retrospective-listening-to-the-2021-spokenweb-symposium/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Mathieu Aubin","Stéphanie Ricci","Stéphanie Ricci"],"creator_names_search":["Mathieu Aubin","Stéphanie Ricci","Stéphanie Ricci"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stéphanie Ricci\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stéphanie Ricci\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/907a6097-2e63-4d18-91c3-879fad904e7e/audio/2c7d91e4-3dcd-4c88-bfef-e21e495d7ffd/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e6-listeningsoundagency.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:51:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"49,736,351 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e6-listeningsoundagency\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-sound-agency-a-retrospective-listening-to-the-2021-spokenweb-symposium/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-03-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\" Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":[" Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["This is a mixed format episode presenting SpokenWeb members Mathieu Aubin and Stéphanie Ricci’s critical commentary after taking part in the organization of and attending the Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium. Bridging techniques from journalism and oral history, this episode includes sounds from the conference, interviews, and critically reflective discussions between Mathieu and Stéphanie. This episode was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stéphanie Ricci, with audio engineering by Scott Girouard.\n\nThis episode explores the Symposium from the perspective of a first-time conference attendee coupled with a veteran attendee; these join the voices of multiple conference participants. Mathieu and Stéphanie focus on the process of organizing, holding, and listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium, and they discuss its themes of listening, sound, and agency as they emerge through the presentations and discussions. \nThe episode begins with the theme of listening ethically and intentionally, before diving into a discussion of issues surrounding sound politics. It concludes with the topic of agency in relation to the amplification of sound as a potential means of empowerment. \n\nA special thanks to the 2021 Listening, Sound, Agency organizing committee, especially Jason Camlot, Klara DuPLessis, Deanna Fong, Katherine McLeod, Angus Tarnawsky, and Salena Wiener, whose voices are featured at the beginning of the episode.\n\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Audio Credits:\\n\\nKvelden Trapp from Blue Dot Sessions:\\nhttps://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/94421\\n\\nCitations:\\n\\nBergé, Carole. 1964. The Vancouver Report. FU Press.\\n\\nBrittingham Furlonge, Nicole. May 19, 2021. “‘New Ways to Make Us Listen’: Exploring the Possibilities for Sonic Pedagogy.” \\n\\nDu Plessis, Klara. May 21, 2021. “From Poetry Reading to Performance Art: Agency of Deep Curation Practice.” \\n\\nMcLeod, Dayna. May 18, 2021. “Queerly Circulating Sound and Affect in Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall. \\n\\nRobinson, Dylan. May 19, 2021. “Giving/Taking Notice.” \\n\\nSun Eidsheim, Nina. May 20, 2021. “Re-w\\nriting Algorithms for Just Recognition: From Digital Aural Redlining to Accent Activism.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549717254144,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9622","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E7, ‘The archive is messy and so are we’: Decoding the Women and Words Collection, 4 April 2022, Mofatt and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-archive-is-messy-and-so-are-we-decoding-the-women-and-words-collection/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/67ec6133-5296-49c5-9c61-bdd8872657fb/audio/f4d8cb13-a39c-4b77-8445-413a9cfcbfe5/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e7-archiveismessy.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:14\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,464,214 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Mp3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e7-archiveismessy\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-archive-is-messy-and-so-are-we-decoding-the-women-and-words-collection/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-04-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind-the-scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.\n\nSpecial thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU’s Special Collections and Rare Books.\n\nImage Gallery\nPage 2 of the Women and Words Conference from 1983, containing a note from the organizers. Photo credit: courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nFirst page of a timeline outlining WestWord retreat organization, application, and admittance processes. Photo credit: taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPress release for WestWord III from February 1987. Photo credit: taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for the WestWord III public events, readings, and panels, including a reading by Sharon Thesen. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nThe tape holding the Sharon Thesen reading from August 18, 1987 (MsC23-85). Photo credit: courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for WestWord V public events, readings, and panels. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for WestWord VI public events and readings. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.\\n\\n“Castor Wheel Pivot.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713\\n\\n“Dust Digger.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.\\n\\n“Flipping through a book.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/\\n\\nHeavenly choir singing sound, “Ahhh.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/\\n\\n“Palms Down.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905\\n\\n“Record Scratch.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022.  https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/\\n\\nRooney, Frances. “activist; Gloria Greenfield.” Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549718302720,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9623","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E8, Academics on Air, 2 May 2022, Kroon, Beauchesne and Miya"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Ariel Kroon","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya"],"creator_names_search":["Ariel Kroon","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariel Kroon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4d8a0871-f27e-4d7f-825d-1b9962330239/audio/5c6123d8-1c4b-451b-941a-8b331156eb91/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e8-academicsonair.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,954,349 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e8-academicsonair\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive, North West Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"\\t53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive, North West Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Sound FX/Music\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Communications – Greenwich Time Signal, post January 1st 1972.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07042099.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Doors: House – House Door: Interior, Larder, Open and Close.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07027090.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Footsteps Down Metal Stairs – Footsteps Down Metal Stairs, Man, Slow, Departing.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07037171.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Industry: Printing: Presses – Electric Printing Press operating.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07041078.\\n\\nBertrof. “Audio Cassette Tape Open Close Play Stop.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/351567/.\\n\\nConstructabeat. “Stop Start Tape. Player.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/constructabeat/sounds/258392/.\\n\\nCoral Island Studios. “28 Cardboard Box Open” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Coral_Island_Studios/sounds/459436/.\\n\\nGis_sweden. “Electronic Minute No 97 – Multiple Atonal Melodies.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/sounds/429808/.\\n\\nGJOS. “PaperShuffling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/GJOS/sounds/128847/.\\n\\nIESP. “Cage Rattling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/IESP/sounds/339999/.\\n\\nInspectorJ. “Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/398160/.\\n\\nJohntrap. “Tubes ooTi en Vrak.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/johntrap/sounds/528291/.\\n\\nKern PKL. “Limoncello.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/104864.\\n\\nKyles. “University Campus Downtown Distant Traffic and Nearby Students Hanging Out Spanish +Some People and Groups Walk by Steps Cusco, Peru, South America.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/413951/.\\n\\nLillehammer. “Arbinac.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/album/9f32a891-6782-4a63-8796-cafa323b711e.\\n\\nMichaelvelo. “Packing Tape Pull.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Michaelvelo/sounds/366836/.\\n\\nNix Nihil. “Vocal Windstorm.” Psyoptic Enterprises, 2016.\\n\\nOymaldonado. “70’s southern rock mix loop for movie.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/oymaldonado/sounds/507242/.\\n\\nPsyoptic. “Forest of Discovery.” Thought Music. Psyoptic Enterprises, 2006.\\n\\nSagetyrtle. “Cassette.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/sagetyrtle/sounds/40164/.\\n\\nSuso_Ramallo. “Binaural Catholic Gregorian Chant Mass Liturgy.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Suso_Ramallo/sounds/320530/.\\n\\ntonywhitmore. “Opening Cardboard Box.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/110948/.\\n\\nZiegfeld Follies of 1921. “Second hand Rose” [restored version]. George Blood, LP. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/78_second-hand-rose_fanny-brice-grant-clarke-james-f-hanley_gbia0055858a/Second+Hand+Rose+-+Fanny+Brice+-+Grant+Clarke-restored.flac\\n\\n \\n\\nArchival Audio\\n\\nCarlin, George. “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Indecent Exposure. Little David Records, 1978.\\n\\n“Dorothy Livesay.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 Feb. 1984.\\n\\n“Douglas Barbour.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 10 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Margaret Atwood.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 12 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Marian Engel.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 Jan. 1984.\\n\\n“Linguistic Taboos and Censorship in Literature.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 April 1983.\\n\\n“Phyllis Webb.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 16 Nov. 1983.\\n\\n“Poetry: The Sullen Craft or Art.” Paper Tygers. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 1 Jan. 1982.\\n\\n“Robert Kroetsch.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 23 Nov. 1983.\\n\\n“Rudy Wiebe.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 21 March 1984.\\n\\n“Stephen Scobie.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 26 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 4 March 1981.\\n\\n“Speech and Its Characteristics.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 March 1981.\\n\\n \\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.\\n\\nBashwell, Peace. “Weird and Wonderful Scenes from the Bardfest.” The Gateway, November 10, 1981, pg. 13. Peel’s Prairie Provinces, http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/1981/11/10/13/.\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “CKUA-AM.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/listing_and_histories/radio/ckua-am.\\n\\nFauteux, Brian. “The Canadian Campus Radio Sector Takes Shape.” Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015, pp. 37-64.\\n\\nKostash, Myrna. “Book View.” The Edmonton Journal, 17 Jan. 1981.\\n\\nKirkman, Jean. “CKUA: Fifty years of growth for the university’s own station.” University of Alberta Alumni Association: History Trails, March 1978, https://sites.ualberta.ca/ALUMNI/history/affiliate/78winCKUA.htm.\\n\\nRemington, Bob. “Banning of Radio Show Called Cowardly.” The Edmonton Journal, 26 May 1983.\\n\\n \\n\\nFurther Reading\\n\\nArmstrong, Robert. “History of Canadian Broadcasting Policy, 1968–1991.” Broadcasting Policy in Canada, Second Edition. University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 41-56.\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “A Brief History of Educational Broadcasting in Canada.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.\\n\\nDeshaye, Joel. The Metaphor of Celebrity : Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980. University of Toronto Press; 2013.\\n\\nGil, Alex. “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make” [blog post]. Minimal Computing, 21 May 2015, https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.\\n\\nMacLennan, Anne F. “Canadian Community/Campus Radio: Struggling and Coping on the Cusp of Change.” Radio’s Second Century: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, edited by John Allen Hendricks, Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 193-206.\\n\\nRubin, Nick. “‘College Radio’: The Development of a Trope in US Student Broadcasting.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 47–64.\\n\\nWalters, Marylu. CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For. University of Alberta Press, 2002.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549718302721,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In the early 1980s, the University of Alberta funded a series of experimental literary radio programs, which were broadcast across the province on the CKUA community radio network. At the time, CKUA station had just been resurrected through a deal with ACCESS and was eager for educational programming. Enter host and producer Jars Balan – then a masters student in the English department with limited radio experience. For five years, Balan produced three radio series, Voiceprint, Celebrations, and Paper Tygers, which explored the intersection of language, literature, and culture, and he interviewed some of the biggest names in the Canadian literary scene, including Margaret Atwood, Maria Campbell, Robert Kroetsch, Robertson Davies, and many others.\n\nThis episode is framed as a “celebration” of those heady days of college radio in the early 80s. In it, clips from Jars’s radio programs, recovered from the University of Alberta Archives, supplement interviews with Balan and audio engineer Terri Wynnyk. Special tribute will be given to the recently departed Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb through the inclusion of their in-studio performances recorded for Balan’s own Celebrations series. By looking back on the pioneering days of campus radio, this episode sheds light on the current moment in scholarly podcasting and how the genre is being resurrected and reimagined by a new generation of “academics on air.”\n\nSpecial thanks to Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta’s Archives and Special Collections, and to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrison, who worked behind the scenes on this episode.\n\n00:06\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. \nVoiceprint. Celebrations. Paper Tygers. These are the names of three campus radio shows produced in the late 70s and early 80s at the University of Alberta, and broadcast province-wide. All three explored how literature, culture, and politics intersect: Voiceprint was the first and longest-running of the three, about poetics, speech, and communications theory; “Celebrations” celebrated the 75th anniversary of the University of Alberta in 1983; and “Paper Tygers” was about the practical ins-and-outs of being a writer. They were created by University of Alberta Masters student Jars Balan, and had production teams and guests that ranged from other students—like the show’s audio engineer and production assistant, Terri Wynnyck—to librarians, professors, and writers. \n\nIn today’s episode, SpokenWeb contributors Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya celebrate and share the history of these three campus radio shows they found preserved in the University of Alberta archives. As Jars himself says in this episode, campus radio was an opportunity to share the kinds of thinking and conversations happening inside the university with those outside of it, too. But where were these campus radio shows produced, and how? What, exactly, were the circumstances of their creation? How were they received? And what echoes of campus radio do we hear in scholarly podcasting today? Featuring interviews with producer Jars Balan and audio engineer Terry Wynnyck, and archival audio of Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb, Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea dive into the rich history of campus radio, from conception and script-writing to the physical cutting and editing of tape. \n\nWe invite you to listen to this episode with us and celebrate those early campus radio shows, and the people who made them. Here are Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya with Episode 8 of our third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Academics on Air”. [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song]\n\n02:55\tJars Balan\tHello and welcome to “Celebrations”. [Trumpet Fanfare]\n03:33\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tEvery great Spoken Web story starts with a box of something or other…\n03:37\tChelsea Miya:\tIt’s June, 2021. The Spoken Web Alberta team has gathered together over Zoom. We’re here to witness the unboxing of the archive. Michael O’Driscoll, director of Spoken Web U Alberta, is sitting next to a cardboard box.\n03:52\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tI got these by the way, directly from Jars. I had to drive by his house and picked them up from his front porch and we had a nice socially distanced talk about things. I have been very well behaved. I haven’t even peeked. I have no idea. Ooh, what is in here? And they’ve been sitting here in my office next to me for a, for weeks now. And I, and I have resisted the urge to check.\n04:16\tAriel Kroon:\tThis is me Ariel.\n04:19\tChelsea Miya:\tAnd this is me Chelsea.\n04:21\tNick Beauchesne:\tThis is Nick reporting.\n04:23\tAriel Kroon:\tThe three of us are the producers of this SpokenWeb Podcast episode. We’re also researchers at the University of Alberta where we’ve been digitizing the “Voiceprint” series. Over hours of listening, we feel like we’ve gotten to know this forgotten campus radio show, and its host Jars, pretty well. We’re fans.\n04:41\tChelsea Miya, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tIt makes it feel more…\n04:45\tArielKroon, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tTangible?\n04:45\tChelsea Miya, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tTangible, yeah. And I think it’ll give us a sense of the amount of work but also that the chaos and energy that went into this. [Laughter]\n04:53\tAriel Kroon:\tMichael peels back the cardboard flaps and reaches inside [Sound Effect: Box Opening, Papers Shuffling] He pulls out a stack of tapes.\n04:58\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tSo these are cassette recordings [Papers Shuffling] I would assume of some of the voice of nine different “Voiceprint” broadcasts, some of which we currently have a record of and some of which are entirely new.\n05:15\tAriel Kroon:\tHe also finds stacks of brown manila folders, which resemble case files. Scribbled across each folder is the name of a different episode. And they are stuffed with material.\n05:28\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\t[Papers Shuffling Throughout] So these are clearly the background research papers that were being used to develop ideas and the concepts for the different “Voiceprint” issues that Jars was developing at the time. So there’s a lot here in terms of the context for the developmental stuff, which I think is pretty interesting. Some library reference materials, some background on the history of the printed word, cognitive relations to the printed word. So, all kinds of interesting things, for sure. What else do we have in here? And some time codes for the materials that he was working with… a handwritten set of interview questions for Phyllis Webb [Unknown Voice: Oh that’s cool!] [Pause] –Wow.\n06:25\tAriel Kroon:\t[Start Music: Ambient Atmospheric Music] When we first stumbled upon this archive, or rather were handed it in a cardboard box, we thought the celebrity guests were the coup. We had hours of interviews and performances from Canadian literary stars like Phyllis Webb. These recordings hadn’t been played in decades and hardly anyone knew about their existence. But as we listened to the tapes, we realized that Jars, the host of the show, was himself a fascinating character. Rather than centring on the poets, our episode looks back on the heyday of campus radio culture… and tells the story of how students like Jars and radio aide Terri Wynnyck broke ground by experimenting with radio as a form of public scholarship. [End Music: Ambient Atmospheric Music]\n07:17\tChelsea Miya:\t[Audio Clip: Digital Musical Notes] [Audio Clip: Students Walking, Chatting] There are about 80 different college and university-affiliated campus radio stations across Canada. And each of these stations has their own unique story and history. CKUA radio is Canada’s first public broadcaster. [Start Music: Fanny Brice’s “Second Hand Rose”] It’s story begins on the University of Alberta campus in 1927. The school received a grant from the province to start its own radio station setting up shop in the Department of Extension.Over the next fifty years, CKUA became more than just a campus radio station. From the beginning, they experimented with new formats: radio dramas, square-dancing lessons, even an Alcoholics Anonymous program. The station broadcasts to remote areas, reaching everyone from farmers to fur trappers. But even as listenership expanded, CKUA still maintained close ties with the University. [End Music: Fanny Brice’s “Second Hand Rose”] Brian Fauteux, Professor of Music at UAlberta, explains…\n08:18\tAudio Recording, Brian Fauteux, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tThe university still maintains a couple hours a week for programming, maintaining that sort of focus on radio talks and lectures as well as what they were calling good music, classical music often. This idea that they were uplifting listeners or passing on something that was the domain of the university. So it’s a very unique station in that sense. It’s sort of education as framed by showcasing arts and culture that maybe you wouldn’t hear on commercial radio.\n08:50\tChelsea Miya:\t[Start Music: Rock Music] Then the 70’s arrive. A time of self-expression and rebelling against the man. In Quebec and Alberta, separatism is in the air. The federal and provincial governments clash over broadcasting rights, and CKUA gets caught in the middle. [End Music: Rock Music] At this point, CKUA is operated by Alberta Telephones, which is illegal under federal rules. [Start Music: Instrumental] But just as things are looking dire, ACCESS, The Alberta Educational Communications Corporation, is created. Educational programs have special status under new broadcast regulations. And ACCESS offers CKUA a new license. And so the station was reborn. [End Music: Instrumental]\n09:39\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Sound Effect: Radio Signal Test Tone] CKUA was back on air and better than before! Originally, CKUA had only aired on AM frequencies, which transmit farther, but have poorer sound quality and are best suited for talk radio. [Start Music: Electronic Instrumental] Now, CKUA could broadcast with 100,000 watt transmitters, which were 200 times more powerful than what they had before, and the station aired on the higher bandwidth FM frequencies. With these new transmitters, everyone in Alberta could tune into their shows, and every note could be heard, clear and crisp. It was during this period of intense expansion and revitalization that Jars Balan joined the station. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n10:25\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tNow I did my undergraduate work uh in at the University of Toronto. I did an Honours BA in English Literature there. And my plan was to take two or three years off with a friend and fix up his van and drive to the West Coast, work at the sawmill, make a pile of money, go to Mexico, hang out, smoke a lot of pot, party, and then come back and enter an MA program. It all kind of fell through because when we got to BC the forestry industry was in the doldrums, there was no work and we came back here. I ended up working on a farm near the international airport. In the meantime I found out there were a couple of profs in the English department who are very sympatico to my literary interests: Stephen Scobie and Doug Barbour. So I met with them and I decided, well this a good place to do my MA. So I signed up for an MA in ‘77 and entered the MA program in English/Creative Writing.\n11:21\tAriel Kroon:\tThe Executive Producer of the University’s Department of Radio and Television was Roman Onifrijchuck.\n11:26\tArchival Recording, Jars Balan, Voiceprint, 4 Mar 1981:\tThe problem of sexist language is perhaps most frequently encountered by people working in the field of publishing.\n11:32\tArielle Kroon:\tAs it turned out, Jars and Roman were old friends. They had spent several summers working together as camp counselors at a Ukrainian summer camp.\n11:41\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\t[Sound Effect: Children Playing] It was kind of a bunch of us 60’s guys running a camp, a summer camp, the way we thought we should have gone to summer camp and never did at the, you know, it was pretty loosey goosey, but it was very successful and popular, but we became very good friends.\n11:55\tAriel Kroon:\tJars had just entered UAlberta’s masters program in English, when Roman approached him to ask if he had an idea for a show.\n12:02\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tThe whole purpose of CKUA was to produce programming that highlighted and showcased the work of scholars at the U of A. And so I sketched out this concept for a show called “Voiceprint”. Because I was trying to work towards a materialist approach to poetics [Start Music: Instrumental] by which I meant poetics based on a knowledge of linguistics, communications theory, nuts and bolts sort of use of language and communication strategy and how that can be translated into making poetry more effective. And so Voiceprint for me became that working document that enabled me to work out my theories. Roman liked the idea. They gave me 13 half-hour shows. We started with that in ’79 and that was considered successful. So I said, you know, I can do, I really could use an hour. And they agreed to that. And I fleshed it out into what then became 39 one hour shows in the Voiceprint series.\n13:09\tAriel Kroon:\tBefore he knew it, one show became three. Jars also hosted the “Celebrations” series, interviewing the university’s writers-in-residence, authors like Marian Engel and Margaret Atwood. [End Music: Instrumental]\n13:20\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, 1983-84:\t[Sound Effect: Trumpet Fanfare] Our guest tonight is the novelist and short story writer Marian Engel… Robert Kroetsch… Margaret Atwood… Dorothy Livesay… poet Phyllis Webb…\n13:28\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tAnd so we took advantage of the fact that they were on campus in Edmonton for me to be able to interview them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.\n13:37\tAriel Kroon:\tHis third radio show, “Paper Tygers”, was about the ins and outs of being a writer. For example, advice on how to find an agent and land a book deal.\n13:46\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, [1 Jan. 1982]\t“Paper Tygers”, a program for creative and working writers.\n13:50\tAriel Kroon:\tWhile completing his masters, Jars was also producing these three radio shows. It was like having another full-time gig.\n13:57\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tI was very lucky. I basically used the shows to pay for my education. I didn’t have to take any tutorials or anything like that. So I wasn’t beholden to my professors for any work. For me it was very important. I wanted to be independent. I was spared the agony of having to mark undergraduate papers which I hated to read and do even though I was an undergraduate once myself. By the time I finished my MA I was supporting myself freelance writing so – I was paid for the Voiceprint, they were $750 bucks a show and I got pretty good at turning out a show a week, which in those dollars was pretty good money and I was able to pay off my student debt and support myself.\n14:41\tAriel Kroon:\t“Voiceprint” was his biggest “hit.” The show was subtitled “Speech, language, communications technology, and the Literary Arts in a Changing World.”\n14:51\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, [4 March 1981]\t[Digital Musical Notes] “Voiceprint”.\n14:54\tAriel Kroon:\tThe topic seemed to strike a chord with listeners, finding a wider audience outside of the university campus. “Voiceprint” ran for three years on CKUA’s Access Radio station. At its peak, it aired every week on Wednesdays at 7pm. This is prime-time for radio shows.Voiceprint earned a glowing review in the Edmonton Journal. The reviewer, quoting Roman, calls it “Sesame Street for adults.” Voiceprint invited the public to confront the ways in which language, politics, and culture intersect. This radio series was unafraid to tackle controversial subjects, such as the subtleties of sexism in language, with a nuanced, academic perspective. As the critic from the Edmonton Journal put it…\n15:35\tAudio Recording, Re-enactment of Edmonton Journal Review:\t[Sound Effect: Typewriter keys] These programs are most assuredly not straight lectures, not a solitary patrician male voice droning on into the fog of the airwaves. “Voiceprint” is, in the jargon of electronic media, a magazine show. The format is the montage: many voices, recurring theme segments, a bit of music, readings, interviews. Jars Balan, an Edmonton poet and editor, is the producer and host. He asks the questions we want to ask of linguists, anthropologists, doctors, classicists, writers…\n16:07\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tWhen you think about it, the concept from the university’s view is a good one! All this work goes on at the university and if you’re not reading academic journals and you aren’t attending lectures, you don’t know what the hell these people are doing. And so this was an attempt to sort of get that out into a wider audience. You’d get somebody, I remember somebody saying, “so I caught your show was driving to Lethbridge from Calgary”… it obviously did reach an audience.\n16:33\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars was the host of “Voiceprint”. But the show was a collaborative effort. At least ten people worked on the production team. Some were students, like Jars. Others were UAlberta staff and professors, whom Jars recruited to produce special segments.\n16:48\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tI took advantage. There were people already involved in producing things in the Department of Radio and Television and I would use them for my program too for voices. So, Anna Altmann, who was a librarian, was somebody who was doing some other recording stuff and I said oh great, would you read these portions of the show, the scripted portions, and did various sound work, narrative work with us.\n17:13\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnna stood out to us, as listeners, because she speaks with a distinct affectation called “received pronunciation.” As heard in this clip, Anna hosted a bibliographic segment, where she would recommended “must-read” books about the different episode topics.\n17:31\tAudio Recording, Anna Altmann, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tIf you’d like to learn more about language and problem of sexism, probably the best place to begin reading is a very accessible book, titled Words and Women.\n17:41\tNick Beauchesne:\tIt turns out her mind was as noteworthy as her voice; she went on to become director of UAlberta’s School of Library and Information Science. And then there was Richard Braun who provided the definitions for some key words. Here he is discussing how sexism is ingrained in language.\n18:02\tArchival Record, Roman Onifrijchuck, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tLet’s look at those two words: male and female.\n18:03\tArchival Record, Richard Braun, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tMale, female. A very annoying thing that happens in English. An intentional misspelling, mispronunciation, to make it appear that “male” is the basic thing and upon it you add the meaningless “fe.”\n18:20\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tRichard Braun was an unusual character that I found in the classics department. He taught classics, but his real passion was etymology and he was great and he was quite eccentric, both looking and just in his manner. But he really enjoyed –I’d give him a list of words that I thought related to the theme of the show and he would look them up, the history of the word and whatever, and talk about it in a very engaging way. I wish I had a picture of him because he looked like a professor [Laughs]. Terri was the person probably I worked most closely with.\n18:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tTerri Wynnyk, the Production Assistant, was also a student at UAlberta, and the tech guru of the team.\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\t[Audio of Tape Recording Stopping and Starting Throughout] I think I was the tech guru for Jars because Jars was so technically incompetent. Jars was always living in his head, and he couldn’t figure out how to use a tape recorder.\n19:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tShe remembers the day that she got recruited to work for the campus radio station.\n19:22\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tSo I was studying political science and economics at the University of Alberta. And and one of my sociology classes, the sociology of sex roles, I met this wild and crazy guy named Manfred Loucat who said, “Hey you’ve got to come and work at the university radio station. We’re just opening it up, we’re just opening it up, it’s been closed for a year, It’s been mothballed and we’re going to start it up.” So I ended up being the news director.\n19:49\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd before she knew it, Terri got promoted.\n19:53\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tThis guy, this bear of a guy with a big beard and wild and crazy hair, cigarettes hanging out of his mouth named Roman Onufrijchuk, showed up one day at CJSR. And said, “Do you want a job? Would you like to freelance for me?” And I said, “Sure, what are you paying?”\n20:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tTerri and Jars worked on multiple shows, spending countless hours in the radio studio, which became like a second home.\n20:28\tChelsea Miya:\t[Sound Effect: Audio Crackling] Today’s podcasts can be recorded anywhere. The three of us who worked on this SpokenWeb episode live in different parts of the country: Kitchener, Calgary, and Kamloops. We worked on this show remotely, conducting interviews from home on Zoom. But in the past, campus radio was very much rooted in a specific sense of place. Jennifer Waits is a campus radio historian and a producer of the Radio Survivor podcast. Like Jars and Terri, Jennifer worked on a campus radio station in the early 80s. Only in her case, she was based at Haverford College outside Philadelphia. Her radio program had a smaller following than CKUA. It only aired during lunch-hour in the cafeteria hall. But she still remembers how excited she was, hearing her shows broadcast over the school speakers…\n21:18\tAudio Recording, Jennifer Waits, Interview, [3 Feb 2022]:\tSo I did college radio starting when I was a freshman in college and didn’t really pay any attention to college radio history at the time. But I think what happened was I must have come back to a reunion at some point and had heard sad tales about the radio station falling on hard times… like somebody sold off a bunch of the record collection that I remember being a part of lovingly kind of restoring service from major record labels when I was there in the 80s. And, and so I had this sadness about pieces of the history getting sold off and I think it’s at that point that I got really interested in digging into the history of the radio station. So I kind of embarked on this project and interviewed people from Haverford College’s radio past going as far as the 1940s.\n22:07\tChelsea Miya:\tSince then, Jennifer made it her quest to celebrate and preserve campus radio culture. She’s visited hundreds of stations across America, documenting their different stories. As Jennifer explains, the campus radio studio is a sacred space. It has its own distinct aura.\n22:25\tAudio Recording, Jennifer Waits, Interview, [3 Feb 2022]:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic] There’s often a community feeling at a college radio station, so you might have a couch that’s been there forever. Sometimes I’ve been warned to not sit on a particular couch because of nefarious things that might have happened on said couch. Often you’ve got layers of history on the walls of radio stations, so you might have stickers from bands and from other radio stations, you might have flyers from concerts that have happened or you know, material that has been sent in with records. So promotional items like glossy photos of bands and posters. So you’ll see stuff all over the walls, you’ll often see cabinets that have stickers all over them. What I love are just sort of funky pop culture artifacts. [Laughs] So there might be a troll doll in the record library or a lava lamp. I’ve seen skulls at a lot of radio stations, I don’t really know why. [End Music: Ambient Electronic]\n23:21\tChelsea Miya:\tLike Jennifer, Jars and Terri also spent a lot of time in their campus radio studio. And as they explained, the studio space became part of university lore.\n23:31\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tDid Jars tell you physically where we were located? The Department of Radio and Television was two floors below ground in the basement of the biological sciences building.\n23:40\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tWeIl it was a special place come to think of it because it was in the bowels of the biological sciences building and literally in the bowels, not in the basement, but in the second basement or sub basement. [Laughter] So you went right down to the bottom. And I mean, the building itself is this gargantuan building and you know, as all these biological specimens and in display cases on different floors.\n24:06\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tIt was a warren. It was a rabbit’s warren of offices in this nether world. [Sound Effect: Cages Rattle] We once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches and we had so much wildlife [Sound Effect: Animal Noises] two floors below ground.\n24:32\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tPeople didn’t know about it. You would really have to know where – people were shocked when they learned about it. When we’d tell ’em to come and I’d have to have a map to explain to them how to get to the studios.\n24:43\tNick Beauchesne:\tWe asked Terri to elaborate on her duties as the resident tech guru and production assistant.\n24:49\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tJars, I think, would edit the programs and he designed them, but my job was to put them together. We had a Uher tape recorder which was rarely used–it was a small, portable recorder. We had a Nagra which is a Swiss built small recorder that took small reels, but it was portable so we could take that out into the field. And I have a really strong memory of going in the dead of winter with my arm in a cast and this heavy tape recorder trudging through the snow from the Biological Sciences building to the Humanities to interview Rudy Wieb and it took me forever to get there and get my parka off and get the reels done. Poor Rudy. But he was such a prince, such a king of a man, you know, he gave me this fantastic interview. And then he helped me pack up and he even zipped me up because I couldn’t zip myself up with my hand. That tape recorder provided the best recording. Then we had two Ampex decks, reel-to-reel decks. The Ampex were used for editing, so we would listen to the interview first once across, make our notes, and then begin editing out what we didn’t want. We would cut on the diagonal, a little metal bar, it had a slot in it for the tape and a sliced whole. And we would use clear splicing tape to put the ends together. [Sound Effect: Stretching Tape, Cutting Tape] And tape them across. And then we had two Revox reel-to-reel players that handled the large ten-inch reels, and we used them for mastering. So once we had our show complete and edited, we would record the master tape from one deck to the other. The problem with the Revoxes were they had light-sensitive heads. So, if a splice was not very well done and you had a gap and the light came through and hit the head that was playing back, the playback head, it would stop, but only the take up reel would stop, not the letting-down reel. So you get this dump of tape. You just sit and babysit those.\n27:40\tNick Beauchesne:\tToday, podcast producers have access to online sound libraries with countless sound effects available at the click of a mouse. But in the heyday of alternative radio, sound design was done by hand. Campus radio producers like Jars and Terri would have to create sound effects themselves in the studio or track down physical recordings and transfer them from a record onto reel-to-reel tapes. The magnetic tape could then be sliced by hand into samples and remixed. We asked Jars and Terry about the eclectic musical stings and sound effects samples used in “Voiceprint”, “Celebrations”, and “Paper Tygers”.\n28:20\tArchival audio, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\t[Electronic sound effects]\n28:26\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, 4 Jan 2022]:\tThe sounds we used for the different subheadings of the show, were a collective effort. Some of them were my ideas. I’d go looking for something that I thought would work well there. Roman Onofrijchuk was very good, I think Terri helped out. We decided early on with “Voiceprint” [Music: Funky Electronic Reverberation] it was a funky, technical thing that we were doing to go with the sound effects for that. “Celebrations” was just my choice. I thought, well, okay, so it’s called Celebrations.\n28:49\tArchival audio, “Celebrations” Intro Music, 1983:\t[Trumpet Fanfare]\n28:50\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tA fanfare was perfect, that brassy upbeat. I was a member of the Edmonton public library and you could take out records and so I took a whole bunch of classical records that I thought I might find something on and found that particular fanfare which is identified at the end of the show. It was a combination of talents, I guess, that came in to contribute towards it.\n29:24\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tWe listened to different programming on BBC and NPR. We had a library of albums [Sound: Flipping Through Tapes] at radio and TV and of course I had I sort of had access to the stuff over at CJSR, as well. We had things like tubular bells [Bells Chime]. For “Sacred Circle”, I think we had a lot of really mystical and choral music [Choral Singing].\n29:54\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Choral Singing Continues] “Sacred Circle”, by the way, is another UAlberta radio show that Terri worked on. But that is a story for another podcast episode, another paper.\n30:04\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tAnd something would come up from the stuff that was being done at Convocation Hall because, although often they performed –my favourites were the old classics they also performed new music. And new music is very exciting because it could be atonal, [Music: Atonal Sounds] it can be twelve-tone. [Music: Twelve-Tone Sounds] We had a few sound effects albums because now you can get anything you want from the internet. But we actually had a couple of records where you that you could queue up. We got a lot of that. We nearly wore those sound effects albums out using them for every kind of sound we needed. [Music Fades]\n30:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tThese sound effects tapes are probably still gathering dust in the University of Alberta archives. The library’s inventory includes cassettes from 1979, with labels like “English meadow, night in the country,” “ultimate thunderstorm,” and “shell and gun fire.” The experimental sound design of late 1970s campus radio programs also coincides with the rise of the Canadian avant-garde sound poetry scene. The literary guests that Jars invited on air brought their own unique flavours to the show. For instance, as part of the “Celebrations” series, Jars interviewed poets Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour. At the time, Scobie and Barbour were both professors in the English Department. They performed poetry on campus under the shared stage name “Re:Sounding.” And their live shows had quite the reputation. A reviewer for The Gateway student paper describes Scobie and Barbour’s spoken word shows as “unforgettable madness.” The following is my dramatic re-enactment of the performance review:\n32:06\tAudio Recording, Re-enactmnet of The Gateway \t[Sound Effect: Typewriter Clacking] These two English professors think and act primal barbarism (pun intended)… I looked out accompanied by the sound of explosive static in the speakers to find Barbour hopping from one box to another repeatedly yelling something like “B-Bible dible-u,” while Scobie made a long spitting hiss into the microphone… this atavism went on for ten minutes. I was amazed at their vocal stamina… a crude finale to what had been for the most part a tasteful evening.\n32:38\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Sound Effect: Recording Buzz] Here’s a clip from their performance of their poem “What the One Voice” recorded live-in-studio for the “Celebrations” program in 1985.\n32:50\tArchival audio, “What the One Voice,” Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour, Re:Sounding, 1983:\t\n[Overlapping Voices] What the one voice affirms the other denies. What the one voice conceals, the other displays. When the one voice says yes the other says no. When the one voice is silent, the other voice cries. What the one voice believes, the other voice doubts. [Repetition, Voices Diverging and Swapping Lines] The voice of the left mind, the voice of the right. The voice of the right mind, the voice of the left. [Repetition, Volume Increasing and Then Dropping to Whispers]\n33:58\tNick Beauchesne:\tWhen we first heard this clip, Chelsea, Ariel and I wondered if Jars had attended Barbour’s live poetry reading series, hosted in the English Department. His answer caught us by surprise!\n34:10\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [28 Mar 2022]:\tI not only watched them perform. I performed at events with them.\n34:14\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars had created a collection of sound poems for his thesis project. Scobie and Barbour were his supervisors. Under their tutelage, he rubbed shoulders with the rock stars of the Canadian sound poetry scene. Jars remembers taking the stage with the Four Horsemen, fronted by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, who were like the Pink Floyd of avant garde poetry. Jars had invited his family to the event.\n34:40\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 Mar 2021]:\tAll these Ukrainians came, my grandmother among them. And I mean they sat there with their jaws on the floor. [Laughs]They thought these people are crazy! Making these sounds and jumping around on stage and everything like that. Sound poetry explores that area between music vocalizations and literature. I’m interested in these gray areas, I guess, which may be the best way to put it.\n35:06\tNick Beauchesne:\tOne of the great achievements of the “Celebrations” series is a very personal touch to discussing individual authors and poets, their works and their lives – especially as more time passes, and more and more of these people are leaving this world. They leave behind a special “voice print” in the form of Jars’s “Celebrations”. The “Re:Sounding” clip hits that much harder, knowing of Douglas Barbour’s passing in 2021, just a few months before this podcast episode was produced. Another clip from the CKUA archive that touched us was a reading of “Stellar Rhyme,” a poem by the great Phyllis Webb, who also passed in the year 2021.\n35:52\tArchival audio, “Stellar Rhyme,” Phyllis Webb, “Celebrations”, 1983: \t\n[Page Flipping] A ball star, tiny columns and plates falling from very cold air, a quick curve into sky. My surprised winter breath, a snowflake caught midway in your throat.\n36:15\tAriel Kroon:\tJars was also a talented interviewer, and he had a special knack for getting the guests on his shows to open up. He explains that he realized early on that being interviewed for a radio show, even a lesser-known campus show with a studio in the biology basement, could be intimidating. Once he placed a microphone in someone’s face and did a sound check, people would freeze up. So, he took a different approach.\n36:38\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tOne of the things I learned was how to ease them into the interviews. I would meet them when they came in and help them take off their coat and start chatting with them and stuff. We’d sit down, and I’d click on the microphones. And we’d just keep talking about this, that. You know, their time at the university. General stuff. Get them comfortable talking. And I’d just ask, “So tell me how did you get interested in psycholinguistics?” A light would come on in their heads saying, like, oh wow, the interview has begun! And it made it much more smooth.\n37:04\tAriel Kroon:\tOne of Jars’ most memorable guests was poet Ann Cameron. He interviewed Cameron for an episode of Voiceprint called “Women’s Language and Literature: a Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Only a few clips made it into the final episode. But the raw interview file is riveting. They talked for almost an hour. We were captivated by her candid discussion of everything from sexism to motherhood to her contempt for the label of “poetess.”\n37:32\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tDo you object to being identified as a woman writer?\n37:37\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tNo, I am a woman, and I am a writer.\n37:40\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tYou don’t mind having… I mean there are a lot of people who…\n37:43\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tI object to being referred to as a “poetess.”\n37:46\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tMm-hmm\n37:47\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tSomehow a poet, semantically or whatever, a poet has has dignity and pride and has an ability to use words and move people, and a poetess is hung on a hook of iambic pentameter and nobody bothers [Laughs].\n38:12\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tWell, it’s the ending is a… the suffix is a… has a diminutive, derivative quality to it.\n38:21\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tIt…what does really piss me off is when someone comes up and says, “Oh, I read the thing you wrote. My, you write just like a man!” And I used to choke, just choke! And now, I smile demurely and say, “Oh shit, I hope not!” [Laughs].\n38:45\tAriel Kroon:\tThe campus radio shows in the University of Alberta archive are full of gems like these, from Canadian authors who often engage with Jars on a deeply personal level, sharing stories about their work and their lives. These audio artifacts transport us back to a particular moment in the history of Canadian literature, and also a particular moment in the history of alternative radio.\n39:13\tArchival audio, “Voiceprint”, 1983:\t[Sound Effect: Warning Tone] [Announcer Voice] Warning. The following program candidly examples the subject of pornography, censorship, and linguistic taboos. Listener discretion is advised.\n39:23\tArchival audio, Jars Balan,“Voiceprint”, 1983:\tMy name is Jars Balan. And tonight I’ll be exploring the delicate issue of profanity in language and literature. Our guests include several people fascinated by four-letter words, including comedian George Carlin.\n39:36\tChelsea Miya:\tThe final episode of Voiceprint never made it to air. The subject of the episode was “Linguistic Taboos and Censorship”. Ironically, this episode about censorship was what got the show kicked off CKUA. Jars had included a clip from comedian George Carlin’s infamous monologue. You might have heard it. It’s about the “seven words you can’t use in television.”\n39:58\tArchival Audio, \nGeorge Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 1978: \n\nArchival audio, George Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 1978: Bad words! That’s what they told us they were, remember? That’s a bad word! You know: bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions… and words! You know the seven, don’t you? That you can’t say on television: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Huh? [Audience Laughter, Applause].\n40:26\tChelsea Miya:\tFor the ACCESS-run CKUA station, remember this is the ACCESS that emphasized “educational programming,” airing the Carlin clip crossed a line. They said Jars had “contravened the station’s policy on obscene language.” The Edmonton Journal criticized CKUA for being “too sensitive” about the whole issue. In the editor’s view, the “program in question was a sober academic discussion.” Jars himself is quoted in the article. And he laments the decision as “truly unfortunate.” “Voiceprint” was, he says, “serious radio” and they’d been “castrated!” Again, Jars’s words, not mine. [Sound Effect: Electronic Beeping]. And so… Voiceprint came to an end. Until, that is, it was rediscovered, four decades later, by the SpokenWeb research team. [Boxes Opening] With a little help from Jars..\n41:22\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tWell I think I got about two bankers boxes’ worth of stuff. Because I’ve got stuff in the shed and I’ve got stuff here. So, I could bring this to campus. [Tape Recording Starting]\n41:32\tAriel Kroon:\tJars gave us additional recordings of “Voiceprint”, and folders upon folders of handwritten production notes. Sifting through this material, we were amazed at the sheer amount of work each participant put into producing these shows, often without knowing who (if anyone) would be listening. Nowadays, the lived reality of campus radio from 40 years ago seems so foreign to those of us working on podcasts. For example, we are able to access listener metrics with the click of a mouse through podcasting hosting platforms, and insert audio very easily without having to cut up the physical recording media.\n42:09\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWe often hear [Laughs] all the different terms like “knowledge mobilization,” getting thrown around as really important. Well, what does that actually look like? If we’re thinking about those kinds of aspects of projects being important, we need to start seriously thinking about how we can change our research into more publicly accessible work.\n42:29\tAriel Kroon:\tThis is Stacey Copeland, one of the producers of the Amplify Podcast Network. One of the Amplify Podcast Network’s goals is to have podcasting recognized by academic institutes as legitimate scholarly work.\n42:43\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWhat Amplify is interested in doing is not only bringing scholarly podcasts to light, but thinking about how to make them count as scholarship in more formal ways as well through peer review. So, thinking about the podcast equivalent to a manuscript.\n43:01\tAriel Kroon:\t[Sound Effect: Printing Press Mechanizations] The printed journal or book has long been held up as the gold standard of academic research, how a scholar measured the impact of their research. But these traditional forms of scholarly production can be alienating. As academics, we’re removed from the process of “making knowledge” in a material, hands-on way. Much like Jars and Terri did with campus radio shows like “Celebrations” and “Voiceprint”, today scholars are using podcasting to reconnect with their research and, at the same time, find an audience outside of academia.\n43:35\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tFor me it often means learning how to better articulate my research, in general. If you can’t talk about your research with your grandma [Laughs] then you really need to start rethinking what your scholarship’s bringing to the world and what it’s actually contributing beyond your specific discipline. And, when you start to engage in something like making a podcast, it brings up a lot of those bigger conversations and bigger questions.\n44:03\tAriel Kroon:\tIn addition to her work with the Amplify Podcast Network, Stacey researches the history of queer and feminist radio. She points out how campus and community radio in the 70s and 80s pushed back against the mainstream. In this sense, shows like Voiceprint paved the way for podcasts, as a more experimental alternative to major public and commercial broadcasters.\n44:25\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWhen we’re looking at pre-Internet era, community radio and campus radio in particular played a huge role in creating any sort of space for community and any sort of political discussion that didn’t fit CBC or private commercial radio. So, spaces to have those more local-oriented conversations and also conversations around queer act activism, around racial activism, and politics and movements across different decades in Canada that just didn’t get the airtime on, say, a CBC. And when the Internet didn’t exist, these were the only spaces we could have those conversations.\n45:06\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Start Music: Ambient Music] Jars did not win his battle with ACCESS, and “Voiceprint” was ultimately banned. But he has no regrets. As Jars himself put it, the show “concluded with an exclamation point, which wasn’t necessarily a bad way to go out.” Through ups and downs, highs and lows, Jars still cherishes the memories of his time as a campus radio host. [End Music: Ambient Music]\n45:30\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tRadio is no longer the same thing that it was when these shows were produced. When I think back on the way we edited with a razor blade and tape to do the splicing and how now all of that just done with dials, digitally and you don’t have a tape even is a world of difference. And I enjoyed the tactile thing of of doing the cuts. And I got good at it.\n45:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tFor Jars, campus radio is a chance for academics to connect with the public in a meaningful way, to lend voice to larger social and political conversations which affect us all.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tOne of the things that’s changed about the university is that in an attempt to combat this image of being an ivory tower, academics now realize it’s important to reach out into a wider audience. That if society is going to support universities financially, morally, politically, they need to be able to show the worth of the learning that goes on at the university. And so sharing that knowledge, sharing that experience is very important. And I think more scholars realize that.\n46:35\tNick Beauchesne:\tAfter graduating from UAlberta, Jars continued to write and perform sound poetry. He also went on to teach remote learning courses in Australia. This was before the internet, so Jars would record his lectures on tape, and those tapes would then be mailed to students. To his surprise, being a distance educator was a lot like being a radio host.\n46:59\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tThe fact that I had to record these in a studio and sit for three hours, they are three-hour lectures, it really helped the fact that I was used to sitting in front of a microphone in a studio [Sound Effect: Recording Sounds] , and I could hold forth. I just make notes, spread them out on the thing, and talk.\n47:15\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars later returned to the University of Alberta where he was hired by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.\n47:22\tChelsea Miya:\tAs for Terri, she made the leap from radio to film, devoting her life to telling stories about social justice, women’s rights, and the arts.\n47:31\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tAfter I left radio, I became a documentary filmmaker and I’ve spent my entire career doing that. But I did love radio first and foremost: that was my passion, my heart.\n47:43\tChelsea Miya:\tWe asked Terri if she had any advice for the next generation of aspiring academic podcast.\n47:50\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\t[Start Music: “Limoncello” by Kern PKL] Voiceprint was fun! Voiceprint was so rigorous. The first thing I would pass on is: listen to people, and listen with an open mind. Don’t bring your prejudices to what you’re listening to. Listen with an open mind. And I would say, always speak. Always speak your truth. Be respectful when you speak it, but speak so that you can articulate yourself. Speak so that you can make yourself understood. Speak so that you can express your frustrations in a way that are respected, speak so that you’re not just a dumb human being on this planet, but you contribute to the rest of society. [End Music: “Limoncello” by Kern PKL]\n49:02\tAriel Kroon:\t[Music Starts: “Celebrations” Fanfare] With that, we conclude this brief profile from the campus radio history archives at the University of Alberta. We’d like to thank Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta’s Archives and Special Collections. We’d also like to give a special shout out to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrisson, who worked behind the scenes on this episode. All works cited and contributors can be found in the show notes for this episode. This is myself, Ariel Kroon, on behalf of my colleagues Chelsea Miya, and Nick Beauchesne, bidding you a pleasant good evening. [End Music: “Celebrations” Fanfare]\n49:50\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya of the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr—and next month, this position will be taken over by our new supervising producer, Kate Moffatt. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. 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Plus, the Alt Text work at the Banff Centre for the Arts: Distinct Aggregations.\\n\\nAmanda Monthei’s Life with Fire podcast\\n\\nBara Hladik – poet. artist. Facilitator.\\n\\nPlace an order for Bára’s first book New Infinity published June 2022.\\nListen to Bára’s ambient electronic album Cosmosis here on Bandcamp.\\nJoin Bára for Dreamspells (@dream_spells), a collaborative project with Malek Robbana (@melekyamalek) with a monthly new moon dreamspells event\\nregistration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-ygqTouHtaiP7HfwXvhxLi-GXljKu8o\\nBodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT)\\n\\nCarmen Papalia, An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts\\n\\nDaniel Britton on typeface design\\n\\nDisability Art is the Last Avante Garde with Sean Lee, Secret Feminist Agenda S4E22\\n\\nSoundBox Signals podcast (UBCO)\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Transcription Style Guide\\n\\nTalila A. Lewis, “Working Definition of Ableism January 2022 Update” \\n\\n‘Terminology’, Critical Disability Studies Collective, University of Minnesota\\n\\n“The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast\\n\\n“The Voice That is the Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough” produced by Katherine McLeod for ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast, 03:10.\\n\\nTranscription Tools\\n\\nDescript (audio and video editing through text, paid), https://www.descript.com/\\n\\nExpress Scribe (speech to text, free), https://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html\\n\\nOtter AI (speech to text and real-time transcription, paid), https://otter.ai/\\n\\nTEMI (speech to text transcription, paid), https://www.temi.com/\\n\\nMusic Credits\\n\\n“Wavicles” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Erudition” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Atmosphere” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)\\n“Scarlett Overpass” by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions\\nCloud Cave by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions\\nPacific Time by Glass Obelisk via Blue Dot Sessions\\nSound Effects\\n\\n“campfire in the woods” by craftcrest, ​​https://freesound.org/people/craftcrest/sounds/213804/\\n\\n“Page turn over, Paper turn over page turning” by flag2, https://freesound.org/people/flag2/sounds/63318/\\n\\n“Wall clock ticking” by straget, https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/405423/\\n\\n“Mechanical Keyboard Typing” by GeorgeHopkins https://freesound.org/people/GeorgeHopkins/sounds/537244/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549723545600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Transcriptions of podcasts provide visual renderings of audio that increase accessibility. But what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast, specifically a podcast about literary audio? In this episode, Katherine McLeod of ShortCuts and Kelly Cubbon, transcriber of The SpokenWeb Podcast, explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. In fact, their episode uncovers just how much transcription is collaboration and conversation.\n\nPart One starts with reflections from Katherine and Kelly about how they came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced their thinking throughout the process of making this episode, such as accessibility and ableism. This section also features an interview with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts.\n\nPart Two consists of an interview with Judith Burr, the Season 3 SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, about generative challenges that have come up during collaboration on podcast transcription for the podcast and how decision making has evolved over time.\n\nAnd Part Three is an interview with Bára Hladík, a poet, writer, and multimedia artist, about  the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics. Here, Bára discusses the healing possibilities of sound and the creative potential of transcripts.\n\n \n\n00:00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n00:00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. How do we make sound accessible across different forms of media? How do we read and interpret sound? What can it look like? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we create and release transcripts for every episode. These are written versions of the audio we produce that are publicly available on the SpokenWeb website. But why do we create transcripts —and what is involved in transcribing a podcast about literary audio that often includes archival recordings and experimental audio performances? This episode is produced by Katherine McLeod (ShortCuts producer and host) and Kelly Cubbon (SpokenWeb Podcast transcriber). Together they explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. They also reflect on transcription as an accessibility practice, scholarly practice, and creative practice. As the producers themselves share, podcasting is a space where we encounter ideas—where we find opportunities to contribute to dialogue and engage in ongoing conversations and creative practices. And so an episode of a podcast by producers who are part of the podcasting production team is, in so many ways, the perfect space to investigate the how and why of transcripts. Our team has often asked: what kinds of editorial choices need to be made when making transcripts for a podcast about literary sound? And how does ethical listening inform these decisions? In conversation with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University; Judith Burr, the Season Two SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and supervising producer; and Bára Hladik, multimedia artist and disability advocate, Katherine and Kelly spend this episode thinking through transcription—and how transcription itself is a way to “think through” sound and be transparent about accessibility goals in podcast production. And so whether you’re listening to the audio of this episode, reading the accompanying transcription, or both we invite you to “think through” transcription with us—here are Katherine McLeod and Kelly Cubbon with Episode 9 of the third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” [Musical Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n00:03:18\tKelly Cubbon:\t[Start Music: Flowing Electronic Instrumental] Transcript. What is a transcript?\n \n\n00:03:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you are reading the words of this podcast episode, you are reading a transcript of it.\n \n\n00:03:28\tKelly Cubbon:\tTo transcribe. To create a visual written version of something originally presented in another medium.\n \n\n00:03:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tTrans: across. Scribe: to write. Writing across\n \n\n00:03:40\tKelly Cubbon:\tTranscription, a writing across that creates new points of access.\n \n\n00:03:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt has come to mean a written copy, but really it is a creative process along with being a form of recording.\n \n\n00:03:56\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI love transcription because it is part of the making and it creates it into a new medium, so then it becomes, it almost becomes a new piece or version.\n \n\n00:04:08\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\t[…] and then to say, what does it mean to have a written version of this? And I was absolutely co-learning with Kelly as we developed best practices around some of these hard points.\n \n\n00:04:22\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\t[…] and maybe with how folks use transcriptions, there’s traces and evidence of how reading is inherently collaborative, be that audio reading or visual reading, tactile reading. And sometimes we take that for granted when we centre visual modes of reading. When we then make more inclusive sensory receptions, then there’s different ways of reading that trace of collaboration.\n \n\n00:04:54\tKelly Cubbon:\tHi. I’m Kelly Cubbon. I’m a Master of Publishing student at Simon Fraser University and a Research Assistant for the SpokenWeb Project. I’ve been transcribing the SpokenWeb Podcast since Season 2 and working behind the scenes of the podcast with our team to think through the possibilities and responsibilities of transcription.\n \n\n00:05:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd I’m Katherine McLeod. You may recognize my voice from ShortCuts, or other past episodes, and I work with Kelly monthly on the transcripts for that audio. Making this episode together has given us the chance to really reflect on this process, and to ask ourselves: what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast about literary audio?\n \n\n00:05:35\tKelly Cubbon:\tPart One of this episode starts with reflections from me and Katherine about how we came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced our thinking throughout the process of making this episode. We will talk about what role transcription plays within podcast production and within podcast studies. This section features some of our conversation with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts. In Part Two we chat with Judith Burr, the outgoing SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer, about generative challenges that have come up during our collaboration on podcast transcription for this podcast and how transcription within this podcast has evolved. And in Part Three we’ll join Bára Hladík – a poet, writer, and multimedia artist – to have a conversation about the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics.\n \n\n00:06:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThanks for joining us on this journey into the sounds of transcription. Let’s get started! [End Music: Flowing Electronic Instrumental].\n \n\n00:06:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tTranscription increases accessibility. And increased accessibility is the first and foremost reason to transcribe a media format like a podcast episode.\n \n\n00:06:43\tKelly Cubbon:\tTo grasp the work of accessibility, it is important to understand the systems and barriers that make the world inaccessible. Abolitionist community lawyer and social justice consultant TL Lewis defines ableism as: [Quote] “A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism, and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s appearance and/or their ability to satisfactory [re]produce, excel and ‘behave.’ You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” [Unquote]. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] Assumptions about how people engage with media information and stories or expectations that there is only one right way to do so places restrictions on audiences, communities, and creative possibilities, and also excludes the vital contributions of people with diverse and changing access needs. At face value, podcasts are an auditory medium. But there are many reasons why someone may find podcast transcripts useful or vital to engaging in the world of podcasting, a now ubiquitous source of media and education. As podcast creators, we should always be asking ourselves: what space are we trying to create? Who is it for? Transcripts make podcasts more accessible for: – Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, – Neurodivergent people, such as those with dyslexia, autism, ADHD, and more, – People with disabilities and illnesses. Transcripts are also useful for people with different learning styles. Working online, in hybrid or virtual settings during the pandemic has heightened some of our attention to how access needs at work and school can shift and change. Two quotes related to access we’ve come across that we’d like you to keep in mind as you listen or read along to this episode are: Access is [Quote] “the power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something… the relationship between the disability bodymind and the environment. [Unquote] – Historian Bess Williams\n \n\n00:08:56\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs Carmen Papalia states at the opening of “An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts”: [Quote] “Let’s try thinking of accessibility as a creative, long-term process. It’s not just about the built environment, but about ideas of agency and power” [unquote]\n \n\n00:09:17\tKelly Cubbon:\tWhen I began transcribing for SpokenWeb a key accessibility goal was working towards the simultaneous release of transcripts with the audio for each episode. Improving accessibility is an ongoing effort, but this is something we are now able to do on a regular basis. Part of my motivation for working on this podcast episode about transcription with Katherine has been to document some of our team’s learnings about transcription best practices, workflow, and decision making as a way to share our learning, as well as be accountable to our communities. When we release this episode, we will also be sharing our transcription style guide. [See show notes for details.] This is a living document that we regularly add to. I inherited it from Natasha Tar, another SFU student who was working on transcription. The style guide supports consistent formatting, but it is also a place where we provide context for collective decisions we’ve made when encountering common transcription challenges – we’ll touch on this more when we chat about collaboration with Judee.\n \n\n00:10:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tOur work on this podcast exists within the larger research activities of SpokenWeb. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] Within SpokenWeb, there are so many examples of transcription taking place, such as: student researchers listening to recordings of literary events are often transcribing as they listen [Sound Effect: Typing] or checking transcriptions while listening — timestamping or describing the extra-poetic speech [Sound Effect: Page Turning] — all of which are forms of creating a written record of an audio object. Transcription of oral history interviews is another example. Or artists transcribing, notating and scoring. Then, stepping back into the world of the podcast, producers transcribe their audio and script their voice overs. In making this episode, we ourselves transcribed our interviews, wrote a script, and now are creating an audio file which we will be transcribing again in order to post it on the website with the launch of this episode. For myself, having published and presented work on poetry scores for overlapping voices, I’ve always been fascinated by the interplay between performance and transcription. That approach, not to mention all of the new technologies out there for transcription, will only be touched upon in this episode, but we hope that future episodes might dive into all of these sounds of transcription. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] In this episode, Kelly and I focus on transcription as collaboration, conversation, and as an unfinished process.\n \n\n00:11:58\tKelly Cubbon:\tAnd that approach lets us focus on the format of the podcast itself, how it reaches its audiences and its potential to reach across modes of sensory engagement.\n \n\n00:12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tPodcast listening can be podcast reading. And what does that reading experience feel like? That is the question that Kelly and I wanted to talk about and we decided to do a call out on social media to hear from regular users of podcast transcripts. By the way, if you would like to share your story of how you use podcast transcripts, check the show notes for how to get in touch. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental]\n \n\n00:12:35\tKelly Cubbon:\tDr. Maya Ray Oppenheimer uses transcripts in her personal creative and educational practices. She responded to our call on social media and we were grateful to have a virtual chat.\n \n\n00:12:47\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Door Bell] My name is Maya Rae Oppenheimer, and I’m from treaty one territory, Middlechurch, Manitoba, which is near Winnipeg. And I’ve moved around since leaving Winnipeg, but I’m now living and working in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal and am an assistant professor in the department of Studio Arts with a cross appointment to Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts. And perhaps, an additional item of introducing myself is that I identify as disabled. I have several diagnosed neurodivergencies. So, one of my neurodivergencies is dyslexia. And for those who don’t know about dyslexia, it’s often described as a learning difficulty, but it’s, you know, that takes us to a social model of disability where, you know, it’s, it’s a learning difficulty because dyslexic folks have different learning tendencies. So for some that might mean that letters move on the page, words hop and jump and skip around. One thing that happens to me is I’ll often conceive of a word, but I’ll say a different one. So you can imagine in someone who works as an academic and had to go through the rigours of getting a PhD, that’s really presented some emotional and intellectual and physical challenges. And over the years, as I was trying to figure out manners and modes of consuming information and engaging with language, I found that listening to written texts was really, really helpful. And also just listening constantly to the radio, to podcasts, to soak up intonation, to soak up emphasis on language and to get a sense of the effect behind written words when I’m reading, because that’s also something that can sometimes happen with dyslexic folks is missing the ordering of language on the page to infer emphasis. So poetry can also be a wild experience! [Laughs] So in my writing practice and reading practice, I find listening as well as reading simultaneously very, very interesting because what will sometimes happen and say, for example, here, moving to a podcasting example, if I’m listening to an episode and reading the transcript at the same time, I won’t always read the word that’s being vocalized at the same time, or with the same impression. So it opens up this kind of textured moment of language, what you might describe as like a third text or maybe even elision. But I started using the word errant, which I kind of like, because errant is sort of like this wandering meaning, but it’s also very close to the word errata, but it’s not wrong. It’s just wandering in meaning. So I refer to this as my errant reading practice. As one does accruing notes I thought, well, what else can I do with this aside from considering it as something that’s been consumed. Can I analyze my own weird habit here? And then I started writing using the marginalia as text for writing my own thing. So I guess what I’m trying to say is like the errant reading of things sort of became like a transcript for writing a responsive text.\n \n\n00:16:28\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tWhat does an effective transcript look like to you? And like what would be kind of red flags for a misleading or frustrating or ineffective or unworkable transcript?\n00:16:41\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tWell, I suppose if I had to emphasize some of the qualities that can be a bit alienating are aloof transcripts [Laughs] or rigid transcripts. But very quickly by aloof, I mean, you know, if you have to search out where the transcript lives with an audio documentation. Is it even available? Do you have to ask if it’s available, do you have to get special permission if it’s available? And I feel like that’s maybe linked to the rigidity of transcripting or transcription [Laughs], which is, I think, a concern from content creators that people will copy and paste intellectual content. But what I think is an inclusive standpoint on that from a social model of disability is if you are welcoming more people into your content, then that’s the way to go. So the rigidity: I see that coming in terms of transcripts being downloaded sometimes not entirely. So maybe only the first five to 10 minutes or the beginning 30% of the content is transcribed in this weird translation of printed word publishing copyright at 30% to audio transcriptions. I also find PDFs sometimes difficult because again, everything’s locked in unless you have particular software access. I also wish that there were more open access audio to text and text to audio softwares. One that I use and recommend to students a lot, perhaps you use is Otter AI, which has a certain amount of free use. But then a lot of other apps and services are under a price point. And I think as soon as software that is meant to be inclusive is also barred by a price bracket, then that’s a problem. So I guess, you know, when I reflect on my answer to that, the rigidity relates a lot to capitalism [Laughs] and fear of misuse of content. And that’s a trouble.\n \n\n00:19:06\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah. When you were sharing, um, the kind of aloof versus rigid, that kind of was exciting to me to hear that those, that framing, because I feel like that’s a useful framing to have in mind to almost even add to a style guide that we kind of pass on to other people in a team of like, kind of almost like a, a check-in point of you know. But I was also thinking, I think a lot about like, how do we make our process transparent to others? Because, you know, a style guide can be kind of technical things like we remove and ums and uhs so that the transcript is more readable for people, in these cases, but maybe having a style guide, visible for people who use transcripts to say, you know, that’s actually not something we like, or that’s something that we would like you to include this instead. And making that almost more open access in terms of showing that our decisions are, for us to have some sort of standardization, but they need to be flexible to meet people’s needs and evolve, to meet people’s needs as well.\n \n\n00:20:09\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah. And I think what you’re bringing up Kelly is an interesting aspect of archiving and transcripts because transcripts is such a user interface, and often there’s perhaps a flow from the cultural producer/host to the user, but then that user is making a layer of interpretation and meaning. And that’s why I think having a workable document is such a hospitable mode of transcription. And I mean, I have, I take that almost to an extreme [Laughs], I realize where in, I’m not only marking the, but I do have to move things around because of my associative way of drawing, meaning and dyslexia, and really needs that mobility on the page that then does sometimes make a collaborative transcript. And I think that’s a really important piece in a conversation like this for accessibility, and maybe with how folks use transcriptions, there’s traces and evidence of how reading is inherently collaborative, be that audio reading or visual reading, tactile reading. [Start Music: Upbeat Electronic Instrumental] And sometimes we take that for granted when we center visual modes of reading, when we then make more inclusive sensory receptions, then there’s different ways of reading that trace of collaboration.\n \n\n00:21:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ll hear from Maya again at the end of the episode. But, for now, after thinking about transcripts in the contexts of broader communities, we’d like to invite you into our community of the SpokenWeb Podcast, and to hear from Judee Burr, supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast about transcription as collaboration.\n \n\n00:22:03\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI’m Judee Burr. I use she/her pronouns. I am here on Syilx Okanagan land, and what is often now called Kelowna in BC where I’m a master’s student at UBC Okanagan. I’m in the interdisciplinary graduate studies program in the digital arts and humanities theme. For my thesis podcast, I’m working on an academic podcast about wildfire and living with fire in the Okanagan Valley where I am right now. And I’m also the supervising producer and project manager of the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is how I know you guys and how we’ve all been thinking about transcription together.\n \n\n00:22:44\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThank you Judee and thank you for joining us this afternoon to talk about transcription. How did you start to work with sound?\n \n\n00:22:53\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI took a class at the Podcast Garage in Boston, Massachusetts. It was podcasting that got me really interested in doing audio work and it was The Heart is the podcast that sucked me in [End Music: Electronic Instrumental] and spoke to my queer soul and that made me want to think about what heartfelt storytelling and audio storytelling could do for environmental stories. I had been doing a lot of report writing and research that took on this tone that I felt is dry on a topic that actually feels so deeply heartbreaking and hard, and really difficult to know how to communicate about in a way it’s like move, going to move people.\n \n\n00:23:42\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThanks for sharing that. It’s always fascinating to hear about your work and what you’re thinking about kind of emotion and connecting people to stories, just really spoke to me because I’ve been thinking about the emotional experience of transcribing, particularly around the most recent episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast. Jason did an episode on reflecting on pandemic events and experiences and it was incredibly overwhelming to be sitting in my apartment by myself, for the purposes of my job transcribing something, but being really affected by the project itself [Start Music: Piano Instrumental] and the intentions around the project, as well as these kind of clips of people, banding together like we all have during this difficult to time to create community and a sense of continuity with what they’ve been doing. So, I just wanted to mention that because I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently.\n \n\n00:24:33\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI feel like every time I get a first draft as the supervising producer to just listen to and think about ways to give feedback and react to, I am so moved. Even though the episodes are so different from each other, they each reflect this really heartfelt engagement with whatever our producers are working on. And yeah, I feel a similar way when I’m reviewing a first draft as it sounds like you feel when you’re listening to it and transcribing it, Kelly. [End Music: Piano Instrumental]\n \n\n00:25:00\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYes, definitely. I think that kind of leads into our first question quite nicely. Can you tell us a little bit about your dual role as the SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, are these kind of different hats you put on at different times or is it kind of a hybrid role?\n \n\n00:25:17\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think it’s all smooshed together [Laughter] in the experience. So I’m the main touch point for the episode producers– we tend to have different producers every month that come to me with questions that I can then answer or reflect on with the task force and work with producers to make sure they feel supported. So, I’ll give producers feedback on a first audio draft, thenI’ll work with Hannah to script an introduction that we feel is appropriate for introducing the episode in the context of the overall podcast and project. Then, when I get that recorded introduction and final draft of the episode I mix and master it and then send it to you, Kelly for a transcription. Working with you and the producers to make any edits to that, doing the work of just putting all of the content, including the transcript and the audio on our website and on our simplecast tool that we used to release it onto all these podcasting platforms and organizing a listening party, where then as a larger community of SpokenWeb people and fans, we can listen to the episodes together and talk about them.\n \n\n00:26:32\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tIt makes me think too about the amount of listening you would have to be doing in that role. And in my work with you, especially on ShortCuts, I’ve always been really struck by how you’re such an attentive listener to the audio. In listening to one piece, you’re really able to pull out the overarching threads. Kelly, I was interested, for you, in hearing Judee, describe the workflow, what, from your perspective, what does it feel like on your side?\n \n\n00:27:01\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think for me the first few months of working on transcription for this particular type of podcast as an academic podcast with lots of archival material and experimental audio kind of – audio collage, different things like that was a real steep learning curve. I’ve done transcription of interviews where there might be one or two voices, maybe three voices max but trying to figure out how to use an existing style guide – which was an excellent tool, provided by the team, that had done this before – but trying to apply that to lots of different I guess use cases or scenarios that needed me to make some decisions. Chatting with Judy was very instrumental –just reframing transcription problems as kind of points of inquiry or kind of a jumping off point for our conversation of me asking Judy, “oh, does the producer maybe have any notes about the archival clip that they used? Was that something that re-occurred throughout that they were using as a theme, or was that a different track?” Things like music cues or overlapping audio or things like that, without the context myself, I could go down a rabbit hole of trying to listen 20 times to see if maybe there was a hidden thing I hadn’t heard, where in fact it was, there was often context from the people with the expertise around the episode, or the kind of academic expertise about certain archives or certain events in communities that was kind of instrumental for providing the context clues for a reader of a transcript. So it became not just technical information, but also information that would make the transcription more beneficial to people down the line for understanding what they were listening to.\n \n\n00:28:57\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAs you were talking there, I was struck by how, in the case of this podcast, because of using so many archival audio clips, there is this question around how much information to include as to where the sound is from, or what is the sound in relation to the archives, in addition to just representing the sound in a visual format for a reader. The SpokenWeb Podcast in its sort of remixing of archival sounds raises these questions for transcription, because, again, in representing the sound is when also representing the source of the sound.\n \n\n00:29:36\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, it’s so challenging with so many of our podcast episodes to think about translating it from its audio form that we produce it to be this audio product. And then to say, what does it mean to have a written version of this? And I think I was absolutely co-learning with Kelly, like, as we like went through some of these tough, like, what do we do for this part or this part? Yeah, we really were doing some co-learning there and trying to figure out: how do we develop best practices around some of these hard points?\n \n\n00:30:14\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, and also realizing too that a transcript of say a SpokenWeb Podcast episode, that there could almost be, there could almost be multiple transcripts of it. That brings me to […] something that I was also struck by in the summer workshop. In hearing people’s responses to some of the examples, it was really interesting to hear […] different ways of approaching transcription.\n \n\n00:30:37\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I think the two key examples that I used in the July workshop — and the workshop was kind of to take a peek behind the scenes of the decision making and the people involved in transcription and just say, we’re actively learning this and what our kind of primary motivations are, are first and foremost accessibility. And that, that is kind of a necessarily incomplete and ongoing project. And so it is never fixed [Laughs] and we’re kind of always learning ways to improve and be receptive to other people’s tools and resources and perspectives. But I think the two examples that I chose for that workshop, which were really illuminating and kind of spurred quite a lot of conversation, one involved an experimental sound and musical performance that was quite lengthy. [Archival Audio Clip: the Four Horsemen performing “Mayakovsky”: Several Voices Chanting] I believe it’s the Four Horsemen that the clip was from and we had people in the Zoom chat doing their own transcription and seeing what came of it. And, one person might have in square brackets: “a performance happens and there’s various voices.” Another person might do a paragraph long description of the different types of overlap of these voices. And I kind of just spurred that conversation that you were mentioning Katherine of writing something verbatim versus giving a context clue about something that happens and not overly worrying with the details. And I think for me that was illuminating of trying to balance what would be the most useful to someone reading a script. And I think, by and large, having a condensed description of something to represent a performance has been I think more useful than spending ages to interpret something that people are going to interpret in lots of different ways, and we can’t capture exactly what that sounded like for someone on a transcript.\n \n\n00:32:43\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. I also appreciate that point about the interpretations of each listener or reader. In this case, we use different words. We have different like embodied experiences of what the sound is.\n \n\n00:32:56\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tDefinitely. And things kind of like – do we call this the name of the musical file or what it sounds like? When does it become an interlude, when does it fade into the background? And sometimes that feels really significant to the listening experience, but also I’ve definitely looked back on transcriptions and thought this is – I’m possibly interrupting the reading experience of that conversation or that, archival clip or moment with too many instances of trying to be very faithful to the music coming in and out of things. So I think over time, I’ve learned to be a bit more decisive about where it would be useful to frame things like that and still indicate that there’s music happening without being overly descriptive of it.\n \n\n00:33:46\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAre some of those interruptions actually good in a podcast transcript? I’m still not sure about this. Because when a magazine or something publishes an interview with someone that’s a publication that’s meant for print, it’s never existed to be published as an audio work necessarily. But for a podcast transcript, we’re claiming to be facilitating this written version of the episode. And so I still wonder… I think it’s great to have a ranking of priorities in that and our conversations that lead us to accessibility as the main thing that we really wanna get right in our transcripts feels really good because then we can have a lot more interesting questions while still remaining faithful to the things that feel like a big priority. But, as we do this work, there have been so many interesting questions that have come up.\n \n\n00:34:46\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tEspecially for overlapping sounds. It sounds like with the music too, again, thinking of if it’s, if the music is there [Start Music: Electronic Instrumental] but it’s not sort of interfering with the experience of hearing the conversation then is it worth mentioning, but it’s also it’s there as a layer and if it’s sort of continuing it’s hard to indicate that something is sort of constant cause again, in print it’s like you can mention it, but then how to, you almost want visually for it to be a sort of painted, like an ocean underneath the words [Laughs]…\n \n\n00:35:19\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. Maybe we should have a graphic novel for each episode, instead of a transcript. Like a painting. The sound can be a painting — the sound could be like a portrait behind that thing. That’ll be easy for you to do right, Kelly, and our standard timeline. [Laughter] [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n \n\n00:35:39\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThe overlapping sound is one thing, but I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of like slightly different context to indicate.\n \n\n00:36:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a recent ShortCuts episode, my conversation with Kaie Kellough included overlapping voices and overlapping contexts. Here’s Kellough performing and then listening back to his own voice and to the context of those recordings.\n \n\n00:36:31\tKaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5, February 2022:\tSo, eventually the voice would start to like – it would sound like tape delay is nowhere. [Distorted Tape, Recording of Kaie reciting poetry: “This Prairie, this periphery is intoxicated…” ] You asked me what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it. And um, it’s, it’s strange. It’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself.\n \n\n00:36:50\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. That’s, it brings up a question I have in just good storytelling in general in audio. And I think about this with every podcast episode, how much do we need to say upfront about what the listener should expect to hear? And I think this is what you’re saying about transcripts. Is there something we should say upfront about what the reader should expect to read that makes it easier? But then also remembering how sometimes in some of these episodes it works, somehow it works not having that information up front and we’re really brought along with the story that the episode is telling…\n \n\n00:37:36\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tDefinitely, and I think maybe after wrestling for a few episodes with the music question or the overlapping voices question it was important to me to capture that in the style guide and also explain how it – the decision was made and how it relates to the mission of the podcast and the mission of accessibility, as you mentioned, so that, when that Google doc is shared with somebody else, they’re also learning about our decision making and about the podcast, not just how do I kind of fix this one thing in this one transcript. So I think that’s been really valuable to me in these, this kind of transition from season two to season three, kind of coming together to figure out what were the sticking points or the circular conversations we were having in Google docs and various notes and emails and stuff and how do we reflect those so that we can be a bit more confident about how we’re gonna approach those instances when they come up later and having that kind of option in our back pocket.\n \n\n00:38:41\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThat also makes me just think about in taking on any of these roles with the podcast, especially as graduate students, where we’re planning to have certain amounts of turnover in these roles, you’ve put so much thoughtfulness into that guide, that transcription guide that you’ll be able to pass onto a new person, but also in thinking about transitions for the producer role, I’ve been reflecting on that there was just a learning period that I don’t think I could have read my way out of either. And I want –do you feel, because as we were talking about, I think earlier some of this stuff is like a judgement call, like do – is us music important to transcribe right here? Or should I check in with the producers about this? Or certain questions. And in the judgement calls, in my role, I feel like, okay, I just needed to be in this role for a few months to be comfortable making them. Do you feel like the judgement calls and transcription are also something that they’ll –the person can read the style guide and then they also have to kind of get used to the judgement call part of it? How does that feel for you, Kelly??\n00:40:00\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I completely agree. I think that kind of steep learning curve I was talking about was also the order of listening to things, and pausing to read the transcripts that I had written. And maybe that sounds completely obvious but I was so devoted to listening verbatim and just really trying my best and getting really tangled in spending far too much time listening to particular bits of audio because I was worried I wasn’t gonna be faithful to people’s work. And I felt quite a lot of responsibility to that and making sure it was legible and something that was valuable for people reading the transcript. But I think it was in that July workshop when we were having these kinds of exercises and discussions around this faithful verbatim versus interpretation versus what is legible to people reading a transcript and one of the participants said, “well, what is it like to read the transcript?” And it just like was a lightbulb for me of oh [Laughs] the context clues need to be at the start and not tangled up throughout.\n \n\n00:41:11\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. And I think you and Megan Butchart really led that workshop. And that was an opportunity for me to see both the way that you framed those examples from a podcast as some in that problem space of “how do we think through this?” And then also learn from Megan Butchart’s work transcribing the Sound Box collection and be able to just see the different problems that people are grappling with and how to think about ethical transcription, caring transcription, accessible transcription in these different contexts. And that was a fun way for us to think about what is unique to podcast transcription and some of the problems we’ve been working through.\n00:41:55\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nThank you so much for joining us today.\n \n\n00:41:57\tJudith Burr, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. I’m so glad that all three of us were able to be here to talk about it together because it does, it just is such a nice representation of the work we’ve done together.\n \n\n00:42:10\tKelly Cubbon:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer and multimedia artist. Bára’s poetic practices often integrate found poetics from sources such as medical texts, self-help books, and medical paperwork as a gesture of transformation and reclamation amongst information that is attributed to complex bodies. She often works in multimedia arts through text, illustration, animation, video, performance and sound, exploring themes of healing, dreams, desire, care, and the body. Katherine and I were thrilled to get the chance to talk to Bára. In this conversation we talk about accessibility as an integrated practice, the healing power of sound, and transcription as a creative opportunity.\n \n\n00:42:52\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI’m Bára Hladík and thanks so much for having me. I’m a Czech Canadian writer, editor, and multimedia artist. I have a bachelor of arts in literature from UBC and I work in many different mediums of art since then and I am tuning in from Esquimalt territory.\n \n\n00:43:17\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tThank you so much for joining us Bára. So we’re going to start off with a few questions about how you came to work with sound and the role that sound plays in your life. So we’re wondering what drew you to working with sound? [End Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:43:34\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI grew up playing music around the fire with my dad and my family [Sound Effect: Fire Crackling, Musical Instruments] So like singing and guitar and just kind of collective folk music and often just humming along or shaking shakers or whatnot. So I definitely have a very instrumental background. I learned some sound production skills from someone I used to date and it was at a time where my arthritis was affecting my hands so it was difficult to play with sound in the traditional ways. So I got really into more keyboards and ambient kind of experimental sound and I definitely am drawn to sound as a way of –as I was accepting and learning the new conditions of my chronic illness and becoming okay with how I need to slow down and really, really change pace and sit with things and still transform and process without kind of like the same exertional ways we’re traditionally taught to process things. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] So sound became a way to discographies or very long ambient pieces as a way to just really heal on like a cellular level. So I think sound has a really, really amazing function to affect our bodies and our consciousness and spirits and whatnot. And retune us. [End Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:45:33\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tWhen you’re talking about sound as slowing down and just something that is, as you said, kind of like retuning it makes me think of a quotation that Kelly pulled up that you shared on Twitter by Ursula K. LeGuin.\n \n\n00:45:52\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nAnd it is “listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence. Reading is a means of listening.”\n \n\n00:46:01\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, we were intrigued, what made you share it? Because there was lots that resonated for us, but we were wondering what, what made you share that quote?\n \n\n00:46:10\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI was just reading that book [Sound Effect: Page Turning] and it grounds connection between literature and sound and listening and how reading is a way of listening through time. And, yeah, I think just the idea of art practice as a community form and how the connections between literature and sound and just being with each other as a act of resistance in the time where we are constantly overwhelmed with information and things are happening so fast and our bodies are expected to uphold a very rapid capitalist pace [Music: Bass Plucking] [Sound Effect: Ticking Clock] and our time is monetized. So I think these forms of creativity that are very old, have always been a way for us to create community and connect and communicate beyond just day to day dialogue. [End Music: Bass and Ticking Clock]\n \n\n00:47:23\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. And even the way in that quote too, though, the idea that listening –really emphasizing that listening in the making of community, it takes time, it takes time and space and that’s something that’s not just gonna happen instantaneously. And then it’s sort of reminding one that of the time and effort and the work that is involved to make those things happen.\n \n\n00:47:46\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tAnd every form has its own value and accessibility. Reading and listening are so tied and it, something may be sound in a way that isn’t so literary, but it’s still valuable. And part of reading can be quite laborious. So I find, I turn to sound when I’m too tired to read or I’ve taken in too much of that type of information but there’s stillI feel like they’re tied.\n \n\n00:48:30\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tIn podcasting written transcriptions are often a common entry point for people to start thinking about accessibility. People might ask, why do people create transcriptions if this is an audio medium? It is quite a labour intensive process to create them. It’s something that we obviously value and prioritize, but it kind of gets people asking questions sometimes about accessibility and learning about accessibility. So I was wondering, as someone who works in lots of literary and art spaces, what do you find people tend to understand or misunderstand about disability and accessibility in the arts?\n \n\n00:49:11\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tI think people often think of it as an afterthought. They’re like, okay, we’ve got this project. Okay. Like how do we make it accessible now? And it’s kind of thought of as extra. And I think that the process of creation in itself and production and development and whatnot it benefits a lot from like, if you’re thinking about it from the get go and it’s an integrative design. And I think people kind of think of it a oh, we’ll make it more accessible to this small group. But I think it actually enhances the piece for everyone, like for – in a transcript for a podcast makes it more accessible, but it also makes it really good for archival purposes. You can repurpose the information in a different way. You can make a Zine. There’s different ways that even people who are listening to the podcast and they forget just one word, they didn’t quite get it, they can go to the transcript. And I think it’s just – it’s a lot simpler than people expect, even if it’s more laborious. Because it’s more creative to share something in multiple ways, and broaden your audience and that may broaden your audience to more than people with disabilities.I feel like accessibility is often simply thought of in the terms of disability, but I think it should be thought of in terms just accessibility to people without disabilities as well. I love transcription because, even though it’s part of the making and it creates it into a new medium, so then it becomes, it almost becomes a new piece or version. And yeah, then it lends like — I almost see it as an opportunity because I’m a poet and a writer and a researcher, so I’m like, “yes, this is the juice! This is the meat.” As much as it’s good to have a recording of something is to be able to view it and listen to it. I’m probably not gonna do that, but I can glance over the transcript, pull out a few ideas. It’s just like, I feel like, a transcript is a creative opportunity. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic, Wavicles from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:51:33\tKelly Cubbon:\tThe music that plays throughout Bára’s interview comes from her 2021 ambient electronic album Cosmosis. During our Zoom chat, we took a cue from Bára’s work to take a break from our screens, pause, and listen. Afterwards, Bára was kind enough to share her process for creating the album. Here, she reflects on the creative benefits of working in multiple mediums, disability, and the healing power of sound.\n \n\n00:52:06\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tWell, this particular album – I’ve done so many different things over the years and I often work in many mediums because with my arthritis I have to be very flexible with what I’m doing. So sometimes I can’t write at the same pace so I’ve learned to work with many different mediums interchangeably so I can adjust to my body’s needs as I go. But yeah, that particular album was made over a few years. I –the process of making that album was very much using sound as a way to attune and wanting to facilitate a half hour of a process of someone just being able to be with their body and move or be with their self and their thoughts. Yeah. Very intentionally don’t have any sound –sorry, voice or words in it because I wanted it to just be very self in cosmos kind of communication. I finished the album while I was undergoing radioactive treatment at a traditional spa in Czech in the Czech Republic. And so it would be a daily schedule of different treatments, laser, magnet, hydrotherapy, but the main therapy is the radium bath. And it’s just like a bath with water from this ancient well that’s very high in radium and basically it ionizes your cells to have a rejuvenating effect. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik] And yeah, like I said, as part of the medical system there, so people with my illness actually have a month a year covered to go get this treatment because it’s so successful. So, a lot of the sound, the water sounds I actually recorded there. The whole production part of it was I had all the sound, many of the synthesizer sounds prerecorded, but the whole production sound part was like a roadblock for me. So I focused in while I was at treatment, and added a bunch of ambient sounds and whatnot. But yeah, that was very cool. And that the sound definitely of the album reminds me of being there and of going through that experience.\n \n\n00:54:37\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. Again, thank you for sharing that. And thanks for putting that into the world. It’s meant a lot to me, the album to listen to it over the course of the pandemic and I returned to it a lot. So thank you.\n \n\n00:54:48\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nOh, that’s so nice to hear!\n \n\n00:54:49\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. [Laughs] Definitely. It’s an exhale moment of returning to the body. And again, thank you for sharing the details of where you recorded and captured that sound and what it means to you as well.\n \n\n00:55:11\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tMaybe to frame my question about music and poetry just a little differently of the connections between your sort of your approaches to music, poetry, how they’ve influenced your role as a facilitator, as a community organizer, and advocacy work that you’ve been doing there. [End Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:55:30\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah, I mean, having skills and sound has been really great for accessibility because then it’s pretty intuitive to be like, oh, of course we’re gonna have a sound version and a text version, bare minimum. And yeah, seeing how to make sound more accessible, cuz often people are like, oh, if it’s read by a screen reader, therefore it’s accessible. ButI have an eye condition where sometimes the laptop’s too bright and I use a screen reader. But the screen reader in itself is very alienated because it’s very robotic. It’s very monotone. It’s not, it doesn’t feel accessible to me. It doesn’t make me feel the same as reading a piece. So thinking about sound – I’m seeing a lot of literary magazines doing this, starting to do this too, like the Hamilton Arts and Letters did a disability poetics issue and they had folks read every single piece. So there was audio recordings and the transcript is the piece. So that connection between text and sound was really cool because it really brought you into the work as well, instead of being able to experience it with a screen reader, but it being quite alienating and I think, yeah, it’s suddenly when everything has to be in this robotic tone, it can be quite discouraging. So thinking about, yeah, even making – adding ambience in the background to make it more podcast-style there’s many ways to think of the forms and I think it’s cool the connections between sound and music and poetry because they really lend a creative lens to approaching these mediums. [Start Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:57:36\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom interview, February 2022:\tYeah. That’s fantastic to hear about because you work across disciplines, you’re sort of attuned to the different potentials within those and always thinking about how you can bring them together. So it can really hear that in all of your work it’s inspiring. So thank you.\n \n\n00:57:58\tBára Hladik, Zoom interview, February 2022:\n \n\nWell, thank you so much for having me. It really means a lot.\n \n\n00:58:04\tKelly Cubbon:\tFor more of Bára’s art, writing, music, and facilitation, see her website. Her newly released book New Infinity is available from Metatron Press. See show notes for links.\n \n\n00:58:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tListening back to our interview with Bára made me think about our conversation with Maya Rae Opphenheimer, who we heard from at the start in response to a question that you asked Kelly about community building. [End Music: Ambient Electronic with Water Sounds, Erudition from the album Cosmosis by Bára Hladik]\n \n\n00:58:31\tKelly Cubbon, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tSo this question is about transcripts as part of community building. And I’ll just preface it by saying, when you were sharing earlier about having life hacks for your own dyslexia, it really resonated with me as a neurodivergent person as well. And I think when we share these things, it kind of can be a light bulb for connecting to others. And having a way of like, oh I wasn’t just doing this alone, or I wasn’t doing this kind of strange thing by myself, there’s actually people being incredibly creative and connecting to each other through these things as well. So, we are wondering how transcripts have been part of community building for you. You’ve shared some about your classroom experiences, but maybe in online spaces as well for like discussions around transcripts as a way to connect to other people rather way to be, to connect to other people’s creative practices as well maybe.\n \n\n00:59:25\tMaya Rae Oppenheimer, Zoom interview, March 2022:\tYeah, well maybe – it’s an experience I share, but I definitely would love to point attention towards a project, but it’s a duo Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat: the Alt Text Poetry Project. And I first came across their work when Shannon Finnegan was at the Banff Centre on the west coast and was looking at alt poetry as a way of writing about sculpture. And their work is very interesting that, when, you know, Shannon and Bojana are working together and thinking about alt text, it’s not just as descriptive text, but also as critical and creative writing in its own sense. So shouldn’t be dismissed as a necessary provision, I mean, or even like an optional provision [Laughs], it’s progress if we see it as necessary. But it is a valid mode of creative and intellectual writing. And I know Carmen Papalia, who identifies as a non-visual learner and as a performance artist, as well as sculptor and activist, is advocating for different ways of writing about art and engaging with art. And the idea of making a transcript for an artwork that is usually read through visual means only is very cool [Laughs]. And how we can then bring in different resonances of texture and context and association and haptics and smell — that I find as a way of extending how art is often thought to already build community, but it, sometimes, really leaves out community. So the idea of transcription, not just for audio podcasting, which I think in itself is, in the definition of a podcast, is a community building media, [Start Music: Flowing Instrumental] but to do that with art and to then think about those as gateway moments of transcribing and documenting. But as you said, not viewing that as — okay, transcription done, this is the thing — but that it’s another iteration of reading culture.\n \n\n01:01:35\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn making this episode. And listening back to these conversations about transcription, what have we learned about what transcription sounds like?\n \n\n01:01:45\tKelly Cubbon:\tWell, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation. And I think that you could really hear that in our interviews. We were all thinking aloud together about the process. And that’s what happens when putting together a transcript.\n \n\n01:02:00\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses. We could just as easily be asking, what does transcription feel like, Smell like, look like, taste like? It makes us think about how we are experiencing content.\n \n\n01:02:19\tKelly Cubbon:\tIt also makes me think about how much this episode is about making the processes of collaboration more transparent, and being able to actively share the production decisions of a podcast episode and its accompanying transcription to show that this work is ongoing and evolving.\n \n\n01:02:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s not a finished product at all in that the transcript is something that is in dialogue with the media that accompanies it. And in dialogue with those who engage with it.\n \n\n01:02:43\tKelly Cubbon:\tThe transcript is there as a point of access into the material. But really that is only the start of the conversation. [End Music: Flowing Instrumental]\n \n\n01:03:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Katherine McLeod and Kelly Cubbon. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And we are excited to welcome to the team, our new sound designer and audio engineer Miranda Eastwood. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’d particularly love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on improving transcription accessibility. And stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n \n\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9627","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E10, “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam, 4 July 2022, Collis"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/starry-and-full-of-glory-phyllis-webb-in-memoriam/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Stephen Collis"],"creator_names_search":["Stephen Collis"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61873157\",\"name\":\"Stephen Collis\",\"dates\":\"1965\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/616261ad-c0b6-4d7d-8634-17bbd4d166e8/audio/af1aede3-b3a7-4498-8c72-a223ddb811b8/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e10-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:26\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"71,197,047 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e10-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/starry-and-full-of-glory-phyllis-webb-in-memoriam/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-07-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1961.\\n\\nDuncan, Robert. Quoted in Thom Gunn, “Adventurous Song: Robert Duncan as Romantic Modernist.” The Three Penny Opera no. 47 (Autumn 1991): 9-13.\\n\\nKeats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters\\n\\nLibrary and Archives Canada. Item: Webb, Phyllis – Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)\\n\\n“The Coast is Only a Line: Phyllis Webb reading at the SFU Art Gallery on July 9, 1981.” Audio recording (cassette) in Reading in BC Collection, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\nRobinson, Erin. Wet Dream. Kingston: Brick Books, 2022.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb. Ed. John Hulccop. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\\n—. Talking. Quadrant Editions, 1982.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549727739904,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This episode is a commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). Drawing upon archival recordings of Webb’s readings, poet Stephen Collis, a friend of Webb’s, charts a path through the poet’s work by following the “stars” frequently referred to in her poetry—from the 1950s through the 1980s. Included in the podcast are two interviews, discussing specific poems, with former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah, and poet Isabella Wang, with whom Collis discusses a recorded reading of an unpublished, uncollected poem.\n\nSpecial thanks to Kate Moffatt for her production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books and Library and Archives Canada for the archival recordings featured.\n\n00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. “She was someone I needed to know, someone who made the writing of my own poetry possible.” That is one of the ways that SFU English professor Stephen Collis remembers Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Webb passed away on November 11th, 2021. Steve has created this episode as a site of thinking through and thinking with Webb’s poetry and her long and acclaimed career as her friend and her literary executor. This is another podcast episode that shows us how ideas and literary learning communities can be cultivated by preserving and caring for archival recordings. Those recorded writers continue to be vocal teachers. Phyllis Webb’s voice resounds through this episode. We hear her in the archival recordings of her beautiful and deliberate poetry readings. We hear her work flowing through Steve’s memories, analysis, and reflections. And we hear her animating the conversations that Steve records with poet Isabella Wang and former Canadian parliamentary poet laureate Fred Wah to discuss their memories and interpretations of her life and work. This episode allows you to engage with the presence and power of Webb’s legacy in these audible scenes of remembering. Steve invites us to participate in the constellations of ideas and people that are connected through Webb’s life and poetry.\n\n \n\nStephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, a memoir of his friendship with Webb. He created this episode with production support from Kate Moffatt and with additional audio courtesy of Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada. Here is Episode 10 of Season Three of the Spoken Webb podcast, ‘Starry and full of Glory’: Phyllis Webb, In Memoriam. [Musical Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n\n \n\n03:08\tStephen Collis:\t[Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] When Phyllis Webb, Canadian poet and former broadcaster, passed away last year, it felt like a cosmic event. She died on November 11 2021—remembrance day—just as a massive storm—an atmospheric river, in fact—arrived out of the Pacific, flooding farmland, overwhelming river banks, and sending hillsides, weakened by the summer’s forest fires, rushing down into gorges, washing out bridges and sweeping away homes on the floodplain. It has been a wet and grey winter. Whenever I can, I look for the stars’ rare appearance in the nighttime sky. “Passed away” is such a strange expression. Into the stars, we sometimes have imagined—that’s where the dead go, “starry and full of glory,” as Phyllis wrote.\n \n\nWhere to begin? Phyllis Webb began in Victoria, in 1927, where she was raised by her mother, later attending the University of British Columbia, studying literature and philosophy; was the youngest person, at 22 years old, to run for elected office in Canada, as a candidate for the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, lost, began to write poetry, publishing many volumes in the decades ahead, worked for the CBC, co-founding the long-running radio program Ideas, stopped writing when words “abandoned her”, as she said, in her sixties, began to make collages and to paint, carrying this practice into her 80s. That’s the one-sentence biography.\n\n \n\nBut, that’s not where I want to begin either.\n\n“There Are the Poems,” Phyllis Webb titled one of her poems, offering an answer to my question. Start with the poems. I leafed through the almost 500 pages of Peacock Blue, her Collected Poems, published by Vancouver’s Talonbooks in 2014. I felt like I was star-gazing—just looking in wonder at the familiar and fixed, constellations of words that had long guided me. I visited Phyllis at her Salt Spring Island home, three or four times a year, for the last two decades of her life. I don’t know that I can call her a mentor. That word is both too large and too small. She was someone I needed to know and enjoyed knowing, someone who made the writing of my own poetry possible—just by being there. Just by existing—and being reachable, by letter, phone, or ferry. In returning to her poems after her death, I wasn’t sure what might rise to the surface this time. The atmospheric river passed on, the night skies cleared. I saw—stars\n\n06:15\tArchival Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1964:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking In] It’s called “The Glass Castle”. The glass castle is my image for the mind that if out motive has its public beauty, it can contain both talisman and leaf and private action, homely disbelief. And I have lived there as you must and scratched with diamond and gathered diamond dust have signed the castle tents and fragile glass and heard the antique cause and stoned Cassandras call me and I answered in the one voice I knew: I am here. I do not know, but move the symbols and polished up the view. For who can refrain from action. There is always a princely kiss for the sleeping beauty. When even to put out the light takes a steady hand for the rewarded darkness in the glass castle is starry and full of glory. I do not mean I shall not crack the pain. I merely make a statement judicious and polite that in this poise of crystal space I balance and I claim the five gods of reality to bless and keep me sane. [Sound Effect: Tape Finishing, Clicking Out]\n07:49\tStephen Collis:\tThe stars were everywhere in Phyllis’s work, it turned out. If one polished the mind, however fragile it might be, however likely to increase the darkness surrounding thought, the reward was starry and glorious. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] Stars often spangle the darkest passages of Webb’s poetry—they are there in the closing lines of her poem of existential crisis, “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide,” where she invokes “the bright crustaceans of the oversky.” Poetry, for this poet, is a crucial mode of thought—and living. Her “consideration” of suicide here is related to French philosopher Albert Camus’s claim that whether to end or continue one’s life was the “only” philosophical question. Luckily Webb also had other questions to ask of her stars.\n \n\nThey are connectors, bridges, means of relating the above and below, the distant and the near—the unfathomably long reaches of spacetime that cosmic light crosses and the immediacies of the days and nights of humble human lives. So “the star in the cold, staring sky” (this is from an early poem called “Double Entendre”) is also “the star reflected in the human eye.” In a poem written over three decades later, Webb is in a more playful mood, willing to “tangle with invisible / superstrings” as she entertains quantum theory “while the planets burn” (this from the poem “A Model of the Universe,” from her final, 1990 collection, Hanging Fire). Poetry, despite being, as Webb writes, quote, “cloaked in sheer / profundities of otherness,” is about the reach over and towards that otherness. I think Webb would have agreed with the contemporary American poet Tongo Eisen-Martin, who describes poets as, quote, “the healers of the continuum.” Stars provide healing light. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n\n10:04\tStephen Collis:\tNot long ago, Simon Fraser University student Isabella Wang brought an unpublished, and to me previously unknown poem of Webb’s to my attention. That poem was under the influence of the stars too. Isabella is a fine poet in her own right, author of the wonderful debut collection Pebble Swing, which contains a sequence of poems written in response to Webb’s Ghazals from her book Water and Light. I spoke to Isabella in my office at SFU, where we also listened to the poem, “Here I Am, Reading at the Planetarium.”\n \n\n10:40\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tIsabella, how did you find this poem?\n10:42\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tSo I was working as an RA for SpokenWeb in my first or second year. And so I was introduced to the BC Readings Archive of over 5,000 tapes in the Special Collections vault. And of course, the first tapes that I gravitated towards, that I searched for were tapes of Phyllis Webb. And, this was a poet whom I had studied significantly in classes and stuff and heard so much about through other poets’ stories. And for someone I had never met and someone who doesn’t do live readings anymore, who doesn’t publish anymore, it was just surreal. And it was astounding. I couldn’t believe it when I put it into a type player [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking] and her voice came up and her readings came up of poems I had actually read. It was just amazing.\n11:42\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, at  SFU Art Gallery, 9 July 1981:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] Here I am reading at the planetarium. The planet – arium. Arium. The planet I have just discovered in downtown Toronto. Stars, stars, stars, stars. Give me poets a handfull of dust before the skies fall down. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]\n12:15\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\n[Music Interlude: Atmospheric Tones] And so later on, I had the idea to make recordings, 30 minute long recordings of her readings at past events, into individual playlist of poems so that each poem would be titled and be cut into their own kind of playlist. So that instead of going into the 30 minute long recording not knowing what to look for they could just look up any poem they wanted to listen to.\n12:44\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tNice.\n12:44\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nSo I had the idea of doing that. So “Here I Am, [Reading] at the Planetarium” was the first poem that came up for the first recording that I worked with, cuz I was cutting the poems in order. And this was the first one that she came up and of course it makes sense cuz she read this as a preface to her reading.\n13:07\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYeah.\n13:08\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nBut when I heard it, I was like, [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] I don’t ever remember reading it in the Collected Poems. And then I looked back and I couldn’t find the title anywhere in the table of contents. So of course I wrote to you and I was like, “Do you remember this poem? Have you ever read it anywhere?” And at first you thought you had read it somewhere. But then when we tried to look for it on paper, we just couldn’t find it.\n13:34\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. So my suspicion was that maybe I’d read it in the archive once in Ottawa, but I can’t be sure. And we don’t have a paper copy and don’t have access to that archive right now. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]So we’re in this position of having to reconstruct a poem on paper that we’ve never seen if we wanna create a written copy. So how do you think we go about figuring out things like line breaks or layout or anything like that with the poem?\n13:55\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. So we had the cool and fun idea of just listening to this poem separately and then coming up with our own version or two of this transliterated poem on paper and then comparing it with each other. So it’s kind of like a surprise and reveal. And we had, we ended up with really different versions of what the poem might look like, but we kind of had similar approaches. We looked, we listened to the recording, we looked at the metadata of the tape. So we knew when this reading took place. And then in that recording, Phyllis did mention that she wrote this poem for another reading that happened recently, quote, “recently”. So we knew it kind of happened between, I think The Sea is also a Garden and her book Wilson’s Bow. So we knew kind of the forms that she was working with, her styles and her line breaks her kind of, her voice. And the flow of her voice at the time. And that was one approach that we took.\n15:11\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tLike I think we had similar line breaks didn’t we?\n15:13\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tWe did have similar line breaks.\n15:14\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tDifferent layouts, but similar, like she reads with such emphasis, you could sort of hear where a line break would go.\n15:20\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. So the way I structured my version was more like in the traditional stanzas. Everything is aligned to the left. We – it had traditional line breaks. And I just worked with where her voice kind of emphasized and paused and all that. You had the idea of transcribing it in a version that kind of flows a bit more kind of in terms of the form as well. And kind of moves across the page to almost like a painting it’s more free flowing. And that was really cool because this poem actually precedes her poem. What was it? Snowflakes?\n16:03\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tSnow crystals…What is it? Field Guide to Snow Crystals.\n16:05\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nField Guide to Snow Crystals.\n \n\nYeah. So in the reading, she read this as a preface. And the right after she read that poem. [Start Music: Chimes Instrumental] And the thing is, we do have a transcription of this poem published in her book Talking. And the way Field Guide to Snow Crystals. is structured is also in that similar free flowing form, you know, lines kind of move kind of organically across the page. And so we were able to go on that a bit and see, okay, where did she emphasize and pause while reading “Snow Crystals” poem and then yeah. And so we ultimately worked with and decided to go with your version more. [End Music: Chimes Instrumental]\n\n16:53\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tI win. [Laughs].\n16:54\tIsabella Wang, Interview,3 Feb 2022:\tYes. You win.\n16:55\tStephen Collis, Interview,3 Feb 2022:\tWell, you know what, the other thing I find interesting is in snow crystals, it’s kind of one of those sciencey poems.\n17:01\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYes.\n17:01\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nShe uses scientific language and has this flow all over the page, like she’s thinking her way through these complicated sounds and words. There’s other poems like that too. I think whenever she’s dealing with scientific kind of things. The form becomes more fluid and less, you know, traditionally poetic and more exploratory maybe. And so that’s kind of what I was thinking. And I think you agreed that with this poem that might make sense.\n \n\nAnd just, just finally, what do you like about this poem? What attracts you to it? Or what do you find interesting in it?\n\n17:28\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nFirst of all, it’s such a concise poem. It’s one of her shorter poems and yet it packs so much, it just, those last lines just grabs at me The sense that this was a poem she had composed for a festival at the planetarium. Yeah. And just that alone. Right. Poets gathered to read it none other than the planetarium feels so dreamy. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n17:54\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tUnder the stars. [Laughs]\n17:55\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tExactly. I wish we had that all the time here.\n17:59\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\t[Laughs] Right.\n18:00\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nAnd then, so, and in some ways she captures that exact feeling, not only of kind of the stariness of the planetarium itself, but also the feeling of being held and supported and connected with poets, other poets kind of like a community of constellations, individual poets. And then that line, right. “Give me poets a handful of dust before the skies fall down.” It lands with that community. It lands in that burning moment.\n18:35\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYeah. And that feeling of danger and the need for each other and a fragile world. Yeah it’s Lovely.\n18:42\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. For me, it’s like that –the planetary of it, it’s supposed to be such a big space, but maybe it’s because it’s a short poem it just feels really small. It feels compact.\n18:51\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYeah. I love that. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n \n\n19:04\tStephen Collis:\tI like Isabella’s description of the way words, in the Planetarium poem, “flow across the page” irregularly, as she said, like a painting [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] (that is, like paint on a painting—the surface of the page or canvas taken as a spatial field where the elements can be arranged relationally). I suggested this was “exploratory”—a way of using the poem, perhaps, to discover something—and then, in a brilliant turn of phrase, suggested you could see this in Webb’s “sciency poems.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental] That’s a technical, literary term—“sciency.” [Clears Throat]\n \n\nLet’s have a listen to one of those “sciency” poems, one Isabella mentioned too—“Field Guide to Snow Crystals,” which Webb included in her 1982 collection of essays and radio commentary, Talking.\n\n19:58\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb,  SFU Art Gallery, 9 July 1981:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] Field Guide to Snow Crystals. Stellar rime,/ star crystals. In a sunfield / of snow. No/ two crystals exactly alike, like / me and the double I’ve never known / or the four-leaf clover./ A down drifting / of snow. Spatial dendrites,/ irregular germs,/ snow grows, scales, skeletons fernlike extensions,/ needles, scrolls / and sheathes, branches./ Lightly or heavily/ rimed / Stars on cold ground shining./ Ice lattice! For the field guides me/my / flutterhand to a fistful of/ plates, clusters, minute columns./ Graupel-like snow of lump type/ solid and hollow bullets / cup / Cupped in my hand / thrown across a fiel / “or… a series of fields folded.” A ball, star (“tiny columns and plates fallen from very cold air”)/ a quick curve into/ sky/my / surprised/ winterbreath/ a snowflake / caught midway in your throat. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]\n21:49\tStephen Collis:\t[Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] I suggest that poetic thinking—relational thinking—thinking by intuitive leaps and links—lateral connections and sudden shifts of scale, position and voice—allows not logic nor rational argument but embodied and felt movement over and through and in and along the contours of language. Webb, like many poets, works under the assumption that there is a valid pursuit of knowing that is lateral, oblique, latent, and relational and that is the work of poetry. I like how poet Erin Robinsong phrases this in her forthcoming book, Wet Dream:“we must work across realms / and poetry will be how.” In her “sciency” poems, Webb is doing just this: working across realms. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n \n\nWebb’s “Field Guide” poem takes its title, and quotes liberally throughout, from a book of the same title published by Edward Lachapelle in 1969. The use of source material this way—a kind of repurposing of found material—is such a common poetic practice that is hardly bears mentioning, although it’s clear this particular book was a rich resource, as Webb [Start Music: Chime Instrumental], in an almost painterly way, applies the unique lexicon to her page. If stars are to be my guide through Webb’s work in this podcast, the stars, here, are playing a game of as above / so below—a chemical transformation where falling or fallen snow crystals and the stars above “rime,” as she writes several times in the poem. This is an expanded sense of “rime,” which Webb adapts from poet Robert Duncan: things that look alike, or mean alike, as well as things that sound alike, can “rime.” There’s also the play on r-i-m-e rime—the accumulation of ice tufts on frozen surfaces. [End Music: Chime Instrumental] Okay—I could get carried away with a close reading of this poem; let me just draw attention to its gorgeous concluding lines—where the speaker’s “surprised / winterbreath” (all one word—winterbreath) is likened to “a snowflake / caught midway in your throat.” [Start Music: Chime Instrumental] And that’s it, the poem leaving us there, with its words in our throat, melting like a snowflake on the tongue—or a star fading out as the sun begins to blue the morning sky. [End Music: Chime Instrumental] ]\n\n \n\nI asked poet Fred Wah if he’d be willing to talk about Phyllis’s work with me for this podcast, and he immediately said yes, and that he wanted to talk about one poem and one poem only. It’s called “Leaning,” from Webb’s book of Ghazal’s, Water and Light. The ghazal or [pronounces] ghazal is a Persian form—a poem written in couplets, but in its traditional practice, following numerous other rules, including subject matter (they are usually about love). Webb’s poems are, as she often called them, “anti-ghazals.” “Leaning” is perhaps the most anti- of all the poems in Webb’s book—especially in terms of subject matter\n\n25:13\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb,  ibrary and Archives Canada:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] I am halfway up the stairs/ of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. // Don’t go down. You are in this/ with me too.// I am leaning out of the Leaning/ Tower heading into the middle distance// where a fur-blue star contracts, becomes/ the ice-pond Brueghel’s figures are skating on.// North Magnetic pulls me like a flower/ out of the perpendicular// angles me into outer space/ an inch at a time, the slouch// of the ground, do you hear that? /the hiccup of the sludge about the stone.// (Rodin in Paris, his amanuensis, a torso …)/ I must change my life or crunch over// in vertigo, hands/ bloodying the inside tower walls// lichen and dirt under the fingernails/ Parsifal vocalizing in the crazy night// my sick head on the table where I write/slumped one degree from the horizontal // the whole culture leaning…// the phalloi of Mies, Columbus returning/ stars all short out – //And now this. Smelly tourist/ shuffling around my ears// climbing into the curvature. /They have paid good lira to get in here. //So have I. So did Einstein and Bohr./ Why should we ever come down, ever?// And you, are you still here // tilting in this stranded ark/ blind and seeing in the dark. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]\n27:21\tStephen Collis:\tFred calls it “one of the best poems in Canadian literature.” And I think he should know. Fred Wah—he will cringe at me saying this—is a treasure of Canadian letters. He has had a huge influence on me and many other poets, writers and artists of the past few generations. A founding member of the TISH group of student poets at UBC at the beginning of the 1960s, Fred has gone on to a distinguished teaching career, writing dozens of books of poetry and prose. He has been recognized with a Governor General’s Award for poetry, and served a term as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Fred and I have visited Phyllis together several times, and it feels like we are deep into a many-years long conversation about her life and work. We spoke at Fred’s Strathcona home in East Vancouver.\n \n\n28:10\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tOne of the things I’m realizing about, you know, when you said you wanted to talk about the poem. And you start thinking more and more about it, you and you can’t – I can’t stop thinking about it. It just goes on and on. How aware Phyllis [Laughs] I keep thinking of SpokenWeb, spoken Webb. Webb.\n28:29\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t[Shared Laughter] Exactly.\n28:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut, Phyllis was so compositionally aware of what she was doing. That her kind of composition mentality, if you like, her cognitive ability to just putting things together. So, you know, the book at the poem “Leaning” is just, it’s part of the section middle distance.\n \n\nSo the proposition is, if you start looking at like, and Pauline in her book on Webb, she did a lot of, she did some research on this from a particular point of view. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] But, you find that Phyllis has really been thinking about this in a larger context. This is an – this’t just an incidental poem. This is a poem that fits into a kind of discourse that she’s sort of in, in a large scale thing, over years.\n\n29:28\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s right. I totally agree.\n29:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd it starts fitting into all kinds of other things. And I hadn’t, I mean, I didn’t realize, Pauline mentioned this to me that Virginia Woolf’s essay “Leaning”. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n29:45\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\tOh my gosh. I didn’t think of that either.\n29:46\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYou know? And it’s an incredible thing. I know this is Paula doing research, but…\n29:52\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\t[Laughs] Presumably, so.\n29:54\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t“The Leaning Tower” was a paper that Woolf presented to the Workers Educational association. Brighton May, 1940.\n30:01\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAmazing.\n30:01\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tShe describes the privileged socioeconomic position of contemporary British writers as a leaning tower, quote, “trapped by their education, pinned down by their capital. They remained on top of their leaning tower and their state of mind as we see it reflected in their poems and plays and novels is full of discord and bitterness, full of confusion and of compromise.” And further that “they are trapped on a leaning tower from which they cannot descend.”\n30:28\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s amazing. That’s perfect.\n30:29\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tSo this is, I’m sure Phyllis would be very aware of this, right? Yeah. Okay. This is an address to that whole patriarchal construct. And there are more feminist links in there. But the fact that she’s, this is a whole thing, like it’s whole, it’s a, there’s kind of a whole cloth here. So although I love the poem “Leaning” because of its poem-ness –\n31:03\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\t[Shared Laughter] Right, right.\n31:04\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– it’s such a great, it’s so well written. And I can read it without even paying any attention to the – or much attention to the references. Cuz the poem is constructed so musically so beautifully that I’m just – I don’t really need to pay attention to the reference. I know they’re there. Of course, once you get into the references, the thing just like [Vocalizes Expanding Sounds] – goes on and on and on.\n31:29\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\tWell they’re all men. Right. And which goes with, maybe Pauline’s reading here in this kind of patriarchal context for that leaning. Right. Cause you’ve got, I mean, what we’ve got, we’ve got, Rodin, [Start Music: Low String Tones] we’ve got Brueghel. We’ve got, you’ve got Rilke, I think hiding behind Rodan. Because Rilke was Rodin’s secretary and Phyllis loved Rilke and there’s that “I must change my life” line in the poem. It sounds – that’s pretty much Rilke right there. But then also Columbus, Mies van der Rohe, the architect and on and on. Right. Einstein. Bohr. It’s all men that we mention the poem. Yeah. I love that idea of yours and I totally agree. But you can read the poem without noticing or thinking about its references. You can read it for its poem-ness.\n32:15\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. And just, you can just say, well, oh, they’re all men. This is just this sort of, yeah. She’s kind of hitting these guys for different things, but it’s all very particular. But then as we can discover, Pauline pulled this up, in an interview with Ann Mutton, Webb explains the link between “Leaning” and “Following”,  another poem –\n32:41\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing!\n32:41\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– that isn’t – that she kept out of middle distance. She says, the leaning tower is a phallic image and once I wrote that poem, a similar image kept flashing and that was a woman from Botticelli. I then wrote a poem called “Leaning”, dealing with Botticelli and the women. However, Webb adds that it’s not a very good poem. It doesn’t have the weight. It may be fatal for me to give up this male oppression on my psyche.\n33:06\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t[Shared Laughter] Right. You need your demons sometimes like again, going back to Rilke, Rilke famously a friend said, “Hey, I can get you a session with Freud.” Cuz he was having all sorts of depressive issues and Rilke said, “No, I don’t wanna be cured. This is how I write poetry.” [Shared Laughter]\n33:25\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tWell, I think Webb is very aware of this – is playing around and that this is really a middle distance for her –\n33:31\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. Yeah. Let’s come back to that.\n33:34\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– in so many ways, and there, I mean there is this of course the feminist thing. And she does write to –it is – there’s a correspondence with Daphne. And the poem, “Leaning” is dedicated to Daphne.\n33:48\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s right.\n33:48\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tSo, there’s that. But there’s also a whole bunch of other –the way I take it, the way I played with it was through Negative Capability.\n \n\n33:59\tStephen Collis:\tNegative Capability was poet John Keats term for, as he wrote in a letter to his brothers in 1817, the creative state of [Start Music: String Instrumental] “being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, it is the ability to reside in between doubt and certainty, to carry on thinking about a problem that you don’t know the answer to. Poet Robert Duncan had something similar in mind when he spoke of poetry as “the intellectual adventure of not knowing.” [End Music: String Instrumental]\nPerhaps Fred and I get a little carried away here—we had a lot to say about this poem. In the second part of this interview we discuss what Fred calls the “germ of thought we’re still trying to unravel” which lies at the heart of Webb’s poem—“all these binaries,” as Fred says, going on to discuss the possibly dialectical space of the between—here’s Negative Capability again—and the idea that “betweenness is a place to be”—maybe the place to be.\n\n \n\n35:06\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd I’m attracted to “Leaning” because of it’s playing around with this, between-ness.\n35:13\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tI was gonna say – the space between. Yeah, exactly.\n35:15\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut there are so many other ways to play with this poem too. There’s that feminist thing which is very obvious once you start realizing that yes, these are guys, they’re all guys here. But then because we’re now in a kind of –we’re trying to address the entropy of our social climate. And I’m thinking of all the [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] sort of microrisal structures, the networks, the plants and the fungus, the mycellial networks –\n35:58\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\tThat’s in there too.\n35:59\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– and all of this requires, as the ecologists tell us, we have to learn how to balance these things, balance these contradictions. And so the poem is right in bed– and this is what, 1982, she’s writing this poem I think?\n36:15\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah, yeah. About that.\n36:18\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tShe’s right in this. She’s got a sense of that germ of thought. That we’ve now come to where we’re still trying to unravel this, all these contradictions, all these binaries.\n36:37\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAbsolutely.\n36:38\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd we keep – the poet, I think, is reminding us of this. I don’t think she’s finding, she’s not offering a solution. She’s just reminding us that it’s very imbalanced. And am I gonna have to remain under this patriarchal mindset just to keep going…or?\n37:01\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tIt’s even right there in that mentioning Einstein and Bohr, which I don’t think accidental that those two have a big argument in the early 20th century about basically reality essentially. Quantum physics and Einstein was a holdout, not loving the conclusions of quantum mechanics and Bohr was the advocate and they were not in agreement and this whole spiraling leaning tower, you know, it seems so cosmological in some ways.\n37:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut also Bohr on the atomic thing, like entropy is–\n37:34\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tEntropy. Exactly.\n37:34\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– is the basis of the atomic physics. And so, [Laughs] …\n37:41\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd it’s even here as a colonial process that entropy and that apocalyptic Columbus returning, stars all shot out. [Shared Laughter] He’s blown that cosmology away in sense. So, and we should come back to your “fur-blue stars” [Start Music: Chime Instrumental] and the “middle distance”. I think we’re in a realm of aesthetics. That’s one interpretation of middle distance, right. Is that it’s an aesthetic painterly term. If you’re looking at a painting what’s in the foreground, there might be figures in the foreground, there’s a background, you know, Renaissance painting, you’ll see maybe mountains or towers or a town in the far away, but there’s a middle distance, or who knows what it could be like animals in a field portrayed or something.\n \n\nBut the art historians will talk about and use those terms. So middle distance is also an art historical term, an aesthetic term for interpreting a painting. So I think right after, is it right after it’s first mentioned that we get…? Yeah. The next line after the mention of middle distance, is “the fur blue star” and Brueghel. And I wonder if that’s a description of a painted star, right. That might look fur blue might look, I mean, think even Van Gogh – those kind of crazy fuzzy, blurry looking stars.\n\n38:53\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. It could be. I mean, I still, as I said earlier, I don’t still don’t know what fur blue star, if it’s a particular reference in the sky. You know, if there is a fur blue star that’s in some story.\n39:10\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver ,8 March 2022:\tOr in Brueghel’s painting [Laughs].\n39:11\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut that becomes – the fact that it becomes the ice pond Brueghel’s figures are skating on. In other words, that all of these perceptions are all this the sky and the earth. Another binary. Earth and sky.\n39:28\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYes. Yes.\n39:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tTrying to find that. “A north magnetic pulls me…” So it’s a – there’s a directional thing, a geometric or a geo thing here.\n39:40\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s right.\nSo part of what I see you describing here Fred, is that you constantly transform [Start Music: String Instrumental] from one reference to the next couplet. Couplet by couplet. This constant movement and shaping in the poem going on. Constant shifting and moving to different locations, but always working with kinds of binaries. And when you get to Rodin it’s Rodin and his “amanuensis”.\n\n40:01\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tRight. Right. [Shared Laughter]\n40:02\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. So you constantly got these, this pairing or binary working through of things.\n40:08\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. Yeah. And she’s – I think she’s realizing that this middle distance is, the dynamics of this middle distance is rife just with all these binaries [End Music: String Instrumental] and the equivocation that we find ourselves in trying to deal with the binary aspect of our world.\n40:31\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah.\n40:31\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tSo this, like the ground, the here, this it’s “angles me into outer space an inch at a time”, “the slouch of the ground, do you hear that?”, “the hiccup of the sludge about the stone”.\n40:44\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t[Shared Laughter] To that the hardness of that phallic tower and the wooshing of the ground or something, another binary.\n40:55\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd at the back of mine, mine is [ostranenie?]. The stone makes the stone, the stone stoney. [Laughs]\n41:05\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah, yeah. Right. Oh amazing! [Laughs] I love that.\n41:05\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tI don’t know. [Laughs]\n41:12\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut there’s even a binary or a relationality, I guess we could say too, and then focus on the idea of the, of the middle or the, between, and that relational space. But in between the speaker of the poem and the reader, right. You, this directedness right. Are in this with me too. And at the end, and you, are you still here? That’s another really interesting betweeness.\n41:32\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tMm-hmm <affirmative>. Yes.\n41:33\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAddresser and addressee or something.\n41:36\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut it’s also that – it’s the one and the many.\n41:39\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYes!\n41:41\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tOkay. It’s the paradox. Well, not so much a paradox. I think she’s trying to – she doesn’t pose it as a paradox. She’s just posing it as a condition of this “I” and “you”. The local, the universal. The sky, the earth, the… [Laughs] –\n41:58\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tExactly.\n41:59\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– all these oppositions. And so even these – I guess what you’re suggesting is perhaps even all these men are part of this. They’re both, they’re both part of it. They’re also part of that accusation from Virginia Woolf that they’re caught in this leaning tower.\n42:18\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYes. Yeah, absolutely.\n42:19\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd they can’t come down. [Laughs]\n42:20\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah, exactly. Yeah. Does the – is the speaker gonna walk away at the end? [Laughs]\n42:25\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tWell, so I guess, in a sense, this sort of goes to buttress up my notion that between this is a place to be. Right. And that we’re actually – there are that, we’re kind of – like my metaphor of it is the cafe door.\n42:47\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tExactly.\n42:47\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tCaught in the doorway. And I’ve always been interested in trying to, or for a long time, I’ve been interested in trying to describe, or trying to figure out the character or the dynamics of where you are when you’re caught in the doorway, you’re standing the doorway. The advantage is you can see both rooms at the same time, so you see a larger view. The disadvantage is, is that you’re in the way! [Laughs]\n43:12\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tRight, right. [Laughs]\n43:13\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tGet outta the way!\nSo there’s lots of – there’s both. There’s both, once again, you’re in a middle place. Yeah. So there’s both things going on. Yeah. And trying to negotiate. So how to negotiate between this. And I’m not so sure – I don’t know if she’s coming up, thinks she’s coming up with an answer to her. I don’t think so. But that “And you, are you still here/tilting in this stranded ark /blind and seeing in the dark.” Well, the ark is, that is what the collectivity, it’s the kind of humanity all collected together. Everything’s together. But it’s stranded. [Laughs]\n\n43:56\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tNot getting anywhere, not getting outta the flood. [Shared Laughter]\n44:00\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tEven that. That “I” and “you” that becomes “we” is still stranded. So it’s in that sense, I suppose one could say it’s perhaps, not a negative statement, but she’s not coming up with an answer to this problem of balancing the binaries. I think she’s simply pointing out that there are binaries there. And we have to find some, or we’re in it. That’s what we’re in. It’s not –there is no, you know, polar black and white. [Laughs]\n44:41\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tRight. Well, I dunno if it’s anyone’s job to decide this, but I certainly don’t think it’s the poet’s job to decide that right. The poet’s job is to be in, well, I always think these days of entanglement. The post job is to identify and illuminate our entanglements. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] Here’s where we are. Here’s where, we’re what we’re all bound up and what we can’t get out of.\n44:58\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. And reacting to it with language.\n45:09\tStephen Collis:\tThere’s something of the very essence of poetry, for me, in this matter of the stars in Webb’s work—something of the supercharged task of grasping at the ungraspable—of rendering in words—what tries to escape words. To “see in the dark,” as the speaker is doing at the end of “Leaning,” is perhaps to see by starlight—faintly, but gloriously, luminously. And while the coldness of that starlight might sometimes read as isolating, I was glad to see both Isabella and Fred take up the image of the constellation in their comments—the constellation of poets in the planetarium, as Isabella had it, making vast cosmic space smaller, more intimate, and Fred’s sense of Webb’s “compositional awareness,” as he called it, of how everything in the poem fits together seamlessly, and how the poem itself fits into larger “constellations” through its wide field of references.\nBut what about that “fur blue star”? Well, for one thing, it’s an image of “betweenness” once again—of something touching both furry animals and burning cosmic bodies in their deep space orbits—that which is above, and that which lies below—and the strangeness of being human, with our capacity to partake of both the furry world and starry contemplation, shuttling between with our poems and stories.\n\nBut I’m also tempted to connect the “fur blue star” from “Leaning” with the “starry rime” (r-i-m-e) from “Field Guide to Snow Crystals.” If stars seem fuzzy to the human eye—if they radiate blurry halos in certain atmospheres—why not furry? Why not blue? Or, at the end of the day, why not … just not know, for sure, and let the image’s Negative Capability pulse on in thought and undecidability?\n\nI think, I will always be in media res, in a state of betweenness, when it comes to Phyllis Webb and her poetry. If this podcast is a tribute to her, it necessarily takes the form of an in-progress thinking through and thinking with the example of her life and work—and with other poets similarly caught midway in their thinking through her life and work. That’s the thing—despite often cutting the image of an isolato, alone on her island for all those years, Phyllis Webb was always forming constellations of poets, always a part of important poetic constellations, and always allowing new poets into her orbit. That was her star power. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n\n48:15\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Stephen Collis English professor at Simon Fraser University.\n \n\nOur podcast project manager and supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and thanks to Judith Burr for hanging around and continuing to help us out. A special thanks to Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada.\n\n \n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada, stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with Katherine McLeod, many stories about how literature sounds.\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9628","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E11, The WPHP Monthly Mercury Presents “Collected, Catalogued, Counted”, 1 August 2022, Moffatt and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-wphp-monthly-mercury-presents-collected-catalogued-counted/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/6080ec77-e13a-430d-a98b-4ceca70315bb/audio/e49a4567-fbbc-4581-9c84-c312cadf060f/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e11-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:23:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"80,203,485 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e11-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-wphp-monthly-mercury-presents-collected-catalogued-counted/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-08-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast we are excited to share an episode from The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosted by Kandice Sharren and our very own podcast supervising producer, Kate Moffatt. First aired on July 21, 2021, this episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury features an interview with Dr. Kirstyn Leuner, director and editor-in-chief of The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing. You can read more about the episode, and about Dr. Leuner’s project, on the Women’s Print History Project website.\n\nThe WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of the Women’s Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, The WPHP Monthly Mercury investigates women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.\n\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music by Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/bard.jpg, and played by Kandice Sharren\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited:\\n\\n“Francis Stainforth.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Stainforth, accessed 21 July 2021.\\n\\nLeuner, Kirstyn. “Restoring Authority for Women Writers: Name Authority Records as Digital Recovery Scholarship” in Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 13–26.\\n\\nLeuner, Kirstyn. “Dynamic Cross Reference Links in Catalog Browsing.” The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, February 2020, https://stainforth.scu.edu/dynamic-cross-reference-links-in-catalog-browsing/. Accessed 21 July 2021.\\n\\nThe Monument of Matrones. Compiled by Thomas Bentley. London: Henry Denham, 1582.\\n\\nMoss, Celia and Marion. Early Efforts. A Volume of Poems by the Misses Moss, of the Hebrew Nation. Aged 18 and 16. London: 1839.\\n\\nCatalogue of the Extraordinary Library, Unique of its Kind, Formed by the Late Rev. F. J. Stainforth. London: Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, printed by J. Davy and Sons, 1867. Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogues_of_Items_for_Auction_by_Messr/3T5bAAAAQAAJ/.\\n\\nWalker, Cheryl. American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Rutgers UP, 1992.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549730885632,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9632","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E1, As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem, 2 October 2023, Comeau"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/as-it-is-or-as-it-was-translating-the-ruin-poem/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Ghislaine Comeau"],"creator_names_search":["Ghislaine Comeau"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ghislaine Comeau\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/b3eeed87-76b0-426d-8b43-f1015d7c6472/audio/2f7aa8f6-7124-4ab7-a8ea-2bcb81f7cec3/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-1-master-v1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:31\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\" 47,542,347 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-1-master-v1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/as-it-is-or-as-it-was-translating-the-ruin-poem/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-10-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Creed, Robert Payson. “The Ruin (Modern English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSWnfuyzyM .\\n\\nCronan, Dennis. “Cædmon’s Audience.” Studies in Philology, vol. 109, no. 4, 2012, p 336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2012.0028.\\n\\nThe Fyrdsman. “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading).” YouTube, uploaded by thefyrdsman9590, 9 Nov. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRny7oyLg&t=318s .\\n\\nHammill, Peter. “Imperial Walls (2006 Digital Remaster).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Universal Music Group, 24 Aug. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0KW9CMFC_E .\\n\\nMagennis, Hugh. “Chapter 1 Approaching Anglo-Saxon Literature.” The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1-35.\\n\\nRaffel, Burton. “The Ruin (Old English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-dtP_73WTs&t=110s .\\n\\nSmith, Mark M. “Echo.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke UP, 2015, pp. 55-64.\\n\\nSilence is Leaden. “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem.” YouTube, uploaded by silenceisleaden188, 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D68n9F8Yozc&t=25s .\\n\\nStaniforth, Daniel (aka Luna Trick). “The Ruin.” YouTube, uploaded by lunatrick7098, 28 Jun. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IIoZfOR5MQ .\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549731934208,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts?\n\nIn this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature, brings us along on her quest to translate the “The Ruin” – a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter Book. In conversation with medievalists Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read and/or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed.\n\nQuest fulfilled! The episode concludes with Ghislaine’s reading of her own translation of “The Ruin.”\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(0:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Theme music ends] My name is Hannah McGregor–\n(0:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(0:50)\tHannah McGregor\tHow do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts? What is the role of the translator to create a historically accurate representation of how a poem sounded in its original contexts? Is such a thing even possible?\n(01:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature brings us along on her quest to translate “The Ruin,” a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter book.\n(01:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn conversation with Medievalists, Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed again. Now here is Episode 1 of Season 5 of the SpokenWeb podcast: As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem.[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme music plays briefly and ends]\n(02:31)\tThe Competent Mouth\t[Sound effects of two people walking down a stone pathway. A door with rusted hinges opens. One set of footsteps continues, more muffled than before. The sound of keys jingling can be heard. Someone unlocks a cabinet and takes out a large book. The book’s spine cracks as it’s opened and the sound of pages turning can be heard]\n(02:31)\tThe Competent Mouth\tSo. Here is the Exeter book. I’ve opened it to the specific pages that you asked to see: “The Ruin Poem,” – famously ruined itself. As you probably already know, the manuscript dates from the 10th century, and the damage, though we can’t be sure, suggests that throughout its centuries the book might have been used as a cutting board, a glue stand, and a gold and silver leaf press. As you see here, fire, possibly caused by a fallen brand, has also significantly damaged these last pages rendering some lines unreadable and making it impossible for us to know what this poem says exactly.\nWhere the words are lost, all we readers and translators can do is speculate or be silent. Well, I’ll leave you to it. You have one hour. I’ll be right outside.[Sound effect of a person walking away, opening the same rusty door and closing it behind them]\n(03:32)\tGhislaine Comeau (inner monologue)\t[Soft electronic music plays and then ends] I wonder…[Soft plucked string music begins to play] Do we always need to speculate or be silent in the face of damage? Should we? To speculate, I suppose, if we are aiming to recreate the past… but it’s a past lost to us and virtually impossible to verify. To be silent then… but isn’t keeping silent contributing to a loss of a part of the text’s past? [Music ends] What about accepting, representing, and hearing the damaged text as it exists to us now – without the weight of the impossibility of the recreation of an ultimately opaque past.\n(4:18)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Sound effect of someone turning the pages of a book] In the chapter Echo from Keywords and Sound, Mark Smith begins with “[a]n echo is nothing, if not historical to varying degrees. [Soft electronic music begins to play] It is a faded facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time past.” The slightly alliterative and poetic air of this passage was immediately appealing to me, and it piqued my interest. I read on, sufficiently curious in wondering where this sound chapter would go. [Soft electronic music ends] And when I, Ghislaine Comeau, student of early medieval literature, read it, I couldn’t help but think of early medieval texts, [soft drumming music begins to play] their translations, and their performances as degrees of echoes growing fainter and fainter from their original. Smith continues: “To what extent the echo can, does, or should have fidelity to the original sound is a question preoccupying historians of any period.” Indeed. I, though not a historian, do find myself so preoccupied – this preoccupation fueled by my recent fixation with the old English poem, “The Ruin” housed in the Exeter Book, a damaged 10th century manuscript, with many of its lines burned. Thinking of “The Ruin” and its ruined state, I wondered then about this idea of fidelity to an original sound that Smith speaks of. I thought about the transcriptions and translations of “The Ruin” that use ellipses or dashes or other visible punctuation to represent the physical damage and lost words, lost sounds. I asked myself, how, then, are those ellipses and dashes translated when read? For that answer, I did what any other millennial graduate student would do: I checked on YouTube. [Drumming ends] [Sound effect of someone typing on a keyboard] There I found various amateur translators, readers, and performers. The translations and sounds varied from what one commenter called “quite an awful translation” accompanied by sci-fi sounds.\n(6:28)\tYouTube audio (Daniel Staniforth (aka Luna Trick), “The Ruin”)\t[Ominous electronic music plays in the background]…Snapped, roof trees, and towers fallen, the work of giants…. [Music fades]\n(6:40)\tGhislaine Comeau\tAnother chose a dramatic piano background for his translation.\n(6:45)\tYouTube audio (Silence is Leaden, “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem”)\t[Piano music plays]…The beams are bereaved, the mortars… [Music ends]\n(6:47)\tGhislaine Comeau\t…which a commenter hailed as harrowing for the native tribes of Britain who are today ruled by foreigners. The video creator liked this comment. Both of them seemingly missing entirely that this poem laments the ruin of a Roman city. And a third chose a Gregorian type humming as the background to an aggressive reading of R.M. Liuzza’s translation, which according to the video creator “manages to capture the zeitgeist of the poem very well.”\n(7:17)\tYouTube audio (The Fyrdsman, “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading)”)\t[Gregorian chant plays quietly]…Holds the builders, rotten, forgotten, the hard grip of the ground until a hundred generations of men are gone. This wall, rust stained and moss covered…[Gregorian chant ends]\n(7:29)\tGhislaine Comeau\tNone of these three addressed the manuscript’s damage specifically with their use of sounds. And the last two either agree with or themselves assert some type of privileged understanding of the poem’s context and meaning, which they then appear to attempt to express in their performance.\n(7:29)\tGhislaine Comeau\tA more scholarly example, The Smithsonian, also has recordings of “The Ruin” in both the original Old English and Modern English translation on YouTube. In the Old English version, the reader chooses a dramatic reading and represents the missing damaged text by an elongated silence.\n(8:10)\tYouTube audio, Burton Raffel, “The Ruin (Old English)”\t[Man recites text in Old English. He pauses to indicated a section of damaged text before starting again]\n(8:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIn the Modern English version, the reader does not indicate any silences in his reading and simply reads through the poem’s translation as if it were one whole piece.\n(8:43)\tYouTube audio, (Robert Payson Creed, “The Ruin (Modern English)”)\t…Sank to a heap of tumbled stones, where once cheerful strutting warriors flocked, golden armor, gleaming giddy with wine. Here was wealth, silver gems, cattle, land, in the crowning city of a far-flung kingdom. There were buildings of stone where steaming currents threw up surging heat, a wall encircled that brightness…\n(9:08)\tGhislaine Comeau\tComing back to Smith, he writes: “The lines of disagreement among historians are fairly well delimited. On one side, there is a very tenuous claim that we can recapture and re-experience the sounds of the past. […] The alternative argument maintains that efforts along these lines are deeply misleading and insists that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual desiccation.”\n(9:08)\tGhislaine Comeau\tHe then goes on to say: “The line of inquiry also makes the case either explicitly or implicitly for the power of text to capture with fidelity and authenticity, the meaning of sounds to the people who were doing the listening at the time of their production.”\n[Drumming music begins to play]\nHow then can these translators and readers assume to know the “zeitgeist” of the ruin poem as one mentioned, or the tone with which we should read, or how the damage should be read, seeing that we have no way of knowing what was there before the damage? I needed, then, in my journey with “The Ruin” to first decide if I wanted to represent the poem as it is –  damaged, incomplete, ruined, or as it was – despite the impossibility of that.\n[Music ends of abruptly] [record scratch sound effect plays]\nBut I get ahead of myself. Before starting my translation journey, I needed to consult with the experts. I needed to know more about the place and role of sound in old English literature. So I sat down with Professors Yeager and Powell to ask them some questions.\n(10:49)\tStephen Yeager\tSteven Yeager, chair of the Department of English at Concordia University. My research specialization is Old and Middle English literature.\n(10:57)\tStephen Powell\tSteve Powell, associate professor of English at Concordia University, and I study Old and Middle English literature\n(11:05)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIn their studies, students of early medieval literature will often come across terms like “oral-formulaic theory,” and in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Hugh Magennis writes how it is thought that most surviving Old English poetic texts are literate compositions, but that they still make use of the same kind of oral derived poetic art. My question, then, is what do we mean when we talk about “oral derived poetic art”, “orality”, and “oral-formulaic theory”?\n(11:40)\tStephen Yeager\t[Soft choral music plays briefly and then ends] Oral formulaic theory goes back to the turn of the 20th century when there’s, a scholar named Milman Parry who’s looking at the question of Homer, and, you know, whether, as the joke goes, either Homer or the poet by the same name who wrote The Iliad or the Odyssey, and who this person was. Milman Parry noted the existence of many formulae that recur throughout the poem.\nStephen Yeager\tSo, for example, a rosy fingered dawn, or much enduring divine Odysseus. These kind of little phrases that appear to be the building blocks of the lines of the poem that are sort of used continuously throughout. Parry went to study Serbo-Croat oral poets and discovered that they too used these formulae and sort of posited therefore, that Homer was a poet who had essentially, extemporaneously, working out of this poetic tradition, composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were then sort of written down as more or less a transcription of what had been originally an oral performance.And that idea then really gets enshrined by his student, Albert Lorde, who wrote a book in 1960, that really kind of makes this idea mainstream. And then one of the main places actually where it really kind of gets spread is through the University of Toronto where scholars like Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and especially Walter Ong, he extrapolates from this a whole idea of oral man [soft harp music begins to play] and literate man where oral traditions and literate traditions create fundamentally different human experiences of cognition. And so that’s kind of the big version then of how oral-formulaic theory kind of really takes off and what’s kind of at stake in the study of it in literature.\nStephen Yeager\tIn old English, you have a scholar named F.P. Magoon. He essentially argued that old English poetry is similarly transcribed from oral performances. And what’s really at stake for him is that in the formulaic quality of old English verse, you have remnants of culture before the arrival of Christianity, brought with it the technology of writing and the book. So in these oral-formulae that’s how you sort of get back to the Pagan pre-Christian past.\n(13:47)\tGhislaine Comeau\tAnd what place then does oral formulaic theory have in Old English literary studies today?\n(13:56)\tStephen Yeager\tThe current consensus revolves around Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, especially as in her book, Visible Song, and, uh, A.N. Doane also talks about this concept of scribal performance. One of the things that Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe points out is that we have very few manuscripts where there are more than one witnesses of the same old English poem. And every time we do, there are significant differences between the two texts.\nStephen Yeager\tSo it seems that the act of a scribe writing something down is kind of something like Milman Parry’s oral poet, insofar as it wasn’t about reproducing an exact text, it was about kind of reproducing a kind of feeling in accordance with a kind of set of rules which, you know, allow for some improvisation. So that is, I guess my own version of what I hear in Magennis’s point is that you know, to a certain extent that division of oral and literate isn’t an entirely useful one because really kinda what we’re talking about are the rules for how texts get created, how performances take place.\n(14:55)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Soft electronic pensive music begins to play] Thinking about Professor Yeager’s comment – that the division of oral and literate is not entirely useful – [Music ends] I am reminded of Dennis Cronan’s article “Caedmon’s Audience” [Sound effect of someone flipping through pages in a book]- where he similarly explains the oral-formulaic nature of Old English poetry, noting that “surviving Old English poems are, to a greater or lesser extent, transitional texts, written compositions that utilize the meter, phraseology (including formulae and formulaic systems), and vocabulary of the native oral tradition.” Keeping this transitional nature in mind, I asked Professors Powell and Yeager “what more can we say or what more do we know about early English storytellers, oral storytelling, and performances?”\n(15:49)\tStephen Powell\t[Soft drumming music begins to play] Well, I think the literary evidence is probably the best evidence we have, or written down records or renditions of people telling stories. So that was something that was often recorded within literary texts and historical texts from the old English period. And you’ll see for example, in Beowulf repeated interpolations of other stories. And the circumstances of the telling of those stories is, highlighted so frequently in a social setting, often in a celebratory mode or at a feast or a big communal meal, you’ll have this tradition of what we call the scop who tell stories, of the past, of the culture.\n(16:41)\tGhislaine Comeau\tThe scop, in other words, poets and Bards who would perform poems and pales.\n(16:49)\tStephen Powell\tThe literary texts themselves encode this kind of performance, that, whether those are the stories that actually got written down. Then once it came to putting things into manuscripts, there’s really not much evidence of that directly.\n(17:04)\tStephen Powell\tAnother key one, as you know, is the legend of Caedmon’s Hymn. But as you also know, there’s a lot of reasons to doubt whether that’s a direct anthropological description of an event that actually happened. There’s two old English poems that are from the perspective of poets. There’s one called Widsith, where it’s basically like that Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He describes everywhere that he’s been in all of the different courts that he’s served in. [“I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash plays briefly and then fades]\nStephen Powell\tFar more extensive than any single human ever could have actually attended. There’s the old English poem, “Deor”, where a guy goes through a bunch of terrible things that have happened from folklore, and then he says, “another terrible thing that happened is I lost my job as a poet and I’m looking for a new one.” Again, you know, very, very scanty evidence. It’s a lot of work to reconstruct. I mean, there’s not much anthropological, or excuse me, archeological evidence that I’m aware of beyond like lyres that existed or what have you, [Sound effect of harp music begins] but who knows how those actually figure it in the context of a performance.\nStephen Powell\tThere’s a lot of conjecture there. I think there’s some information from the north sagas a bit more of these narrative sources. But you know, those are written hundreds of years later, quite a long distance away. And so who knows how useful they’re,\n(18:20)\tStephen Powell\tI think all the literary evidence actually does point pretty clearly to a tradition of oral storytelling. [Music ends] I don’t think that you have the story of Caedmon in which Caedmon famously leaves the banquet because he’s not gonna be able to participate. Whether or not that is a historically accurate story, it is beside the point for me. The point is that we have that record. It corresponds with records from other texts that show that there was this tradition. [Drumming music begins to play]\nStephen Powell\tAnd it stands to reason that this is a society where you had long, dark evenings and plenty of alcoholic beverages distributed to you. What else were you going to do except tell stories? And of course, with a relatively low level of literacy, most of those stories would’ve been told orally.\n(19:11)\tStephen Yeager\tThat’s absolutely true. I mean, I guess I was just saying that we don’t really know much of the details about how that actually went forward or who it was who got to tell the story or how professionalized it was. Another key moment is a famous statement by, it’s Alcuin, right? Uh, “what has Ingeld to do with Christ?” Where he’s complaining about the monks who are obviously spending all their time listening to stories about guys like Ingal, who’s a, a hero who’s mentioned in Beowulf and when they should be listening to stories about Christ. But, you know, there’s only so many of those, I guess [Stephen Yeager laughs]\n(19:48)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Music ends] Early in his answer, professor Yeager made reference to the scanned archeological evidence beyond the lyre. And I thought this a great place to turn the conversation back to sound and ideas of sound in early English works. [In interview]\nGhislaine Comeau\tOn that note, you mentioned the lyre, despite much discussion about orality, oral storytelling, oral tradition, oral-formulaic theory, alliterative verse, and so on, all of which are notions based on sound. We seem to rarely talk about sound or sounds in early English works, except of course, the occasional reference to a harp or a lyre. So what do we know about sounds in these performances or sounds in Old English poetry more generally?\n(20:33)\tStephen Powell\t[Soft string music begins to play] We know precious little, really. I mean, I think that Stephen’s point about the archeological evidence being slim is absolutely on point. And even the literary evidence that I’m harping on, no pun intended, is pretty scant on what these intertext interpolations, say in Beowulf, sound like. I think that’s really hard for us to recreate here.\n(21:00)\tStephen Yeager\tOf the many tragic losses of early medieval culture, one of the most tragic is the loss of any music, and I think it’s with the 10th, 11th century, there’s the Gregorian reform, which includes among other things, a standardization of devotional music all across Europe. And there’s no musical notation that I’m aware of before the Gregorian reform. And so it seems like all of whatever kind of local musical traditions would’ve predated that, are eliminated by it. And so it’s extremely difficult to try to reconstruct what the structure of a song was or how music worked before for this period.\n(21:38)\tGhislaine Comeau\tSo given that, you know, the scant evidence, to what level can we speculate about the place that sounds music or other, not necessarily just the harp. What place might they have had within these oral storytellings or these performances? You know, how can we imagine, can meaning like in the term of being allowed to speculate so far, how can we imagine the sounds of and surrounding sounds of an Early English text?\n(22:10)\tStephen Powell\tI think sound was important in the Old English period, and I think there’s good evidence just from the way that poetry is constructed in this period, suggests that the culture cared deeply about how things sounded. You don’t have the kind of alliterative verse that characterizes Old English poetry, where rather than rhyme poetry is connected with repeated sounds, initial sounds without being interested in sound. So I think that we shouldn’t overlook that internal evidence in thinking about the centrality of sound.\n(22:49)\tGhislaine Comeau\tCan you explain a bit or talk about alliterative verse and what it is and how it works?\n(22:54)\tStephen Powell\t[Music ends] When we think about poetry and how poetry is structured today, we tend to think of rhyme as the central feature of poetry, that we expect that the end of each line will rhyme with the next one, for example, as in a rhyming couplet. In the Old English period, rhyming was not something that was particularly important.\nStephen Powell\tIt’s not that they didn’t know about rhyme, because there’s a poem that we call the rhyming poem, which is all about rhyme and there’s some internal rhymes and other uses of rhyme. But the primary way in which Old English verse in each Old English line was structured, was around alliteration. [Soft electronic music begins]\nStephen Powell\tSo that in each line there was a key sound that was repeated, the beginning of the line or near the beginning of the line, and again, near the end of the line, and I’m oversimplifying here, but the important point is that a line of poetry was distinguishable in part by this alliteration. And that that pattern was incredibly important because the words whose initial sounds repeated were the words that were also stressed. And thus in many ways, probably the most important words for those poetic lines. [Electronic music ends]\nStephen Powell\tSo if you think about the reception of Old English poetry and you posit, that perhaps these poems were read or recited out loud, then having those repeated words that are so important within each line suggests that they were also a cue to the audience of what to pay attention to and what to listen to maybe within a noisy audience. But again, now we’re starting to drift well away from concrete evidence and making speculations.\n(24:46)\tStephen Yeager\tEverything that we know about alliterative verse comes from secondary philological work. There is not, to my knowledge, much information at the time about how to write, but I’m not aware of anything in Old English that lays out the rules of Old English verse. And what made it especially difficult to reconstruct is that Old English poetry is not lineated on the page as poetry. There are the four major poetic codices  in the Junius 11 manuscript.\nStephen Yeager\tThere is what appears to be punctuation, which kind of marks the half lines. The beginning of reconstructing Old English verse came from that manuscript. So it’s been all this, this work to reconstruct it, but this is, I think, an important point for what you were asking about how much sound mattered and the fact that they aren’t making those distinctions graphically meant that they were meant to be heard.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd probably, you know, it’s another reason to think about it as being queued to music because like in a hymnal or something, right, where it’s all just sort of continuous because you hear where the verses end or what have you. [Choral music swells and then ends] I think that there’s every reason to believe that something like that might be the explanation for why Old English verse is written in this continuous script as opposed to other forms of verse.\nStephen Yeager\tI mean, among other things, it’s important to emphasize the centrality of memorization to medieval education. And of course, you know, why does poetic verse exist in the first place, right? Like, what is the purpose of patterning sounds in such and such way? It’s mnemonic. The cultural authority of poetry proceeds from that original mnemonic function, in my own view at least, you know, that if it rhymes, it sounds true effect, rhyme as reason that-\n(26:28)\tStephen Powell\tOr in Old English alliteration-\n(26:31)\tStephen Yeager\tAs a reason.\n(26:33)\tStephen Powell\tI don’t disagree with you, I’m just thinking that in terms of thinking about sound, that, yeah, there is this memory assistance that’s provided by rhyme for us, or probably alliteration for the Old English people. But those sounds also do things for us and have an emotive effect.\n(26:58)\tStephen Yeager\tWell, I mean, so you take something that’s important and you really wanna make sure that it’s preserved for yourself for future generations. You write it down, in a verse form to help it stick in people’s minds. And then that strategy that you do then acquires the cultural authority of the important information that you use it to record.\nStephen Yeager\tI’ll go with Walter Wrong this far. Once you have your literate institutions of authority that really kind of take over that cultural mnemonic function, then the function of poetry changes dramatically. And so that, you know, what you can see is kind of the rise of poetry in the sense that we know it in kind of the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance into modernity, those two things are related. I think as poetry loses that mnemonic function, as it stops to be so important, then what poetry is changes as a result. [Drumming music begins to play]\n(27:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tFollowing Professor Yeager and Professor Powell’s insightful answers on oral-formulaic theory, oral storytelling, and the possible place and importance that sound may have had in old English texts, thinking specifically about the mnemonic function of alliteration and sound, I came come back ideas on translation, come back to Magennis and ask about a certain point that he makes in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature.\nGhislaine Comeau\tMagennis states that old English poetry is inherently difficult to date given its character. He notes how another scholar, Elizabeth Tyler, refers to the quote “timelessness” of Old English poetry in that, “rather than seeking to relate their work to a specific time or place, Old English poets cultivated a quality of timelessness, a quality that is reflected, for example, in an attachment to archaic diction”. Alongside archaic diction, Magennis also notes how a “stylistic stability” ultimately lends itself to the adaptability and reappropriation of Old English poetry for quote “ideological purposes relevant to the time”. So, with my own translation task ahead, I wanted to hear Professor Powell and Professor Yeager’s comments on this idea of “timelessness” in Old English poetry…\n(29:18)\tStephen Yeager\tSo the timelessness of Old English poetry is, you know, that comment is predicated on an assumption about a formal conservatism in Old English poetry over a long period of time, begging the question, who knows what the date was that any Old English poem was written, like the best we have are conjectures about when the manuscripts were copied. Almost all of them post-date the Benedictine reform of the 10th century, right?\nStephen Yeager\tAnd then the end of old English poetry is, the written record really dries up around 1066. Edward the Confessor dies, and there’s a poem called “The Death of Edward the Confessor,” and there’s not a lot of Old English poetry that’s written after that date. So in terms of, you know, the record of the manuscripts, we’re really talking 100-150 years. But there’s good reason to believe that many of these poems predate the Benedictine reform perhaps by centuries. And if that’s the case, then what we’re looking at is an extremely conservative verse form over hundreds of years, because it’s very difficult to look at Old English poetry and say, this is the early stuff and this is the late stuff.\n(30:21)\tStephen Powell\tAll we can really do is look at, these are the early manuscripts and these are the late manuscripts.\n(30:26)\tStephen Yeager\tYes. And like, maybe some of them are older, maybe most of them, maybe even all of them. But again, like if we’re thinking of it from the perspective of scribal performance, who knows how radically these texts were reinterpreted by the scribes who copied them down. [Light string music begins to play]\nStephen Yeager\tSo if you’re gonna posit conservatism, you know, the evidence isn’t there necessarily. The quote that you read to me is like a nice way of saying we really have no idea when any of this stuff  was actually composed. And it doesn’t give us any internal clues that help us figure it out, but I guess this is a good example of what I understood you to be kind of asking, which is what do you do in the face of all that you don’t know?\nStephen Yeager\tIt’s like, well, why don’t you just work from the example of what they did, right? They didn’t understand Latin and Roman stuff that well. They definitely didn’t read any Greek. But nonetheless, there’s this, you sort of, you take it, you assimilate it, you do what you want with it. Like the spirit of Old English literature is very, as conservative as the verse forms are, it is actually extremely experimental as well, and very open to taking something and then trying to make sense of it in your own context. So there is a sense in which developing your own performance of the text in conversation with it is, you know, in continuity with the practices of scribal performance that we see in the tradition itself.\n(31:46)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWith the certainty that we can never be quite certain of when old English texts were produced. In other words, we can never know the exact context of the cultural reception or the zeitgeist of the poems as one YouTuber had mentioned. I was reminded, again of Smith’s point, that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual sophistication.\nGhislaine Comeau\tThinking then of old English texts as echoes, or rather their translations through the time as echoes. It then became clear to me that I wanted to shift the conversation to specifically address this issue of how we translate and how we perform these texts. [Music ends]\n(32:38)\tStephen Powell\tWhen we translate into Old English. We have at our command the entirety of the English vocabulary, which is the largest vocabulary of any language that’s ever been spoken on Earth. In contrast, when Anglo-Saxon or Old English writers were translating from Latin, they had at their disposal a very small vocabulary. And there’s nothing wrong with a small vocabulary. The size of a vocabulary doesn’t really matter for a language, because any language by definition has to serve the needs of its community.\nStephen Powell\tBut what that meant was that one of the things that old English writers were tasked with when they were translating from Latin into English was creating words, finding ways to describe concepts from Latin, which had a much larger vocabulary than English did at that point. And so we don’t have to do that. And so when, you know, Seamus Heaney famously translated Beowulf, he had at his disposal all of the vocabulary of English and got in some, I would say, trouble for including in his translation parts of the English vocabulary that were not sort of English. They were more Irish, and that was sort of controversial, but it was possible for him.\n(34:06)\tStephen Yeager\tOn the most pragmatic level, that’s what translation does, is it expands and develops some language. I mean, and think about also how, I wonder how old English verse transformed by trying to translate the Psalms into Old English, for example, which there’s both prose and poetic translations of the Psalms, which are already, you know, in the Vulgate, Jerome did these like word for word translations of the Psalms that are kind of terrible Latin, but that then become the basis of Latin education throughout the Middle Ages. The other sort of bigger example I was thinking of with this question was about how the translations of scenarios and events and from the Bible and you know, from other Latin sources, change to fit the values of the culture that they’re in.\nStephen Yeager\t​​But then from the perspective of a literary critic, you know, you see how that transformation reflects those values. And so the great example of that being of gender, and so for example, the Old English poem of Judith, which introduces this, this really interesting compound word elfscin, beautiful as an elf, it’s like, what the hell does that mean? You know, why is Judith an elfscin? Which then sort of leads to, which doesn’t beg the question this time, I think, leads to the question of, what is an elf? Like, what did that mean? What sorts of cultural contexts are coming to bear and why are they useful for describing this character who’s, you know, quite troubling as a character in the original context of the Hebrew scriptures? And, you know, remains a troubling one to, you know, her reception in Christian theology.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd then all of which then reflects in this sort of thing about like, well, if we’re going to adapt this figure into old English, does she sort of turn into a kind of Valkyrie figure? You know, are we sort of drawing from other mythological cultural contexts to try to assimilate and make sense of this character? Lots of fascinating things happen around this question, not just at the level of vocabulary, though, also at the level of vocabulary, but at the level of what gets created and then how that then goes on to influence the future evolution of the literary conventions.\n(36:13)\tStephen Powell\tRight. I mean, you think about the Old English renditions of the Exodus story, for example, where what seems like a biblical text without much an Old English poet normally values gets put into the mode of Old English heroic poetry. [Harp music begins to play]\nStephen Powell\tAnd even if it doesn’t, to come back to sound, because I know sound is the basic building block here. If you think about putting these biblical stories into the sounds that are also associated with non-biblical stories, Beowulf or the Battle of Malden or something like that, then what is that doing to the biblical story? It is putting it into the cultural context in some way. And of course, we always do that, whether it’s a biblical story or heroic story, when we translate, we’re carrying it from one culture to the other, whether that culture is early medieval England or the American Midwest of the 1970s.\nStephen Powell\tThe funny thing is, not the funny thing, the complicated thing is that when we do that kind of translation, we can become more familiar with the story in a certain way, but we also, in some ways, I think, can lose understanding of the story. Putting it too much into our own cultural idiom means that we lose the original cultural idiom and we lose the sort of the original emphasis. [Music ends]\n(37:47)\tStephen Yeager\tIt kind of comes down to, it’s one of these choices that you don’t wanna make, I think. Cause you know when you’re doing this translation, what you’re trying to do is make a text more immediate to an audience that would otherwise not be able to access it. But the question is, what is that text that you’re trying to make immediate? Is it the content and the ideas that’s in the poem, “The Ruin,” for example? Or is it the original context of reception? Like, do you want to sort of feel like you’re in the hall and listening to “The Ruin” as it would’ve been listened to? And so you’re there with like the… [Dr. Yeager’s voice fades out]\n(38:16)\tGhislaine Comeau\tHere, Professor Yeager has circled back to my original question and pointed out how translation is a series of choices and how we translate will depend on what we want to prioritize for our audience, meaning rhyme, emotion, an at best, speculated socio historical context?\n(38:37)\tStephen Yeager\t[Dr. Yeager’s voice fades back in]…Was walking around and whatever. And so the rhythmic choice is the one that’s like, I’m going to bring you into a more alien unusual world. And then the one that’s this is the more direct translation is the more here’s the information that’s in the poem, or here are the ideas or feelings or expressions. One of the things that distinguishes is, who is this audience? So like, if we’re writing for a bunch of Midwestern seventh graders, we’re not gonna bring ’em into the meat hall necessarily, right? We’re gonna really just try and make it so that they can sort of understand it and enjoy it. Whereas a more specialist audience, or especially if you’re an avant-garde or like a musician from the seventies or whatever, then you’ll choose something maybe that’s a bit more challenging, but again, it’s like, it’s back to your point about aesthetic decisions, which are often audience decisions.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd again, you know, at a certain point you never want to choose just one thing. Obviously there’s gonna be a compromise, but at a certain point, something has to prevail. You’re gonna run up against something where you’re gonna have two choices, one of which is the more difficult but interesting one, and one of which is the more accessible one, and there’s gonna be a pattern in the choices that you make.\nStephen Yeager\tBut that’s basically what translation is. [Quiet Gregorian chant style music begins] So “The Ruin” is this poem, which is famous in part for the way it, the sort of serendipitous, you know, thing where it’s a poem that’s damaged and is ruined and it’s describing a ruin within the poem, right? It’s a completely accidental, like, there was no sort of authorial intent behind that, but it works so nicely to kind of encapsulate the mood, not only of Old English poetry, but of its reception, really the mode of especially 20th century scholarship in the wake of Tolkien and “The Monsters and The Critics” and this kind of melancholic mood that characterizes the field.\nStephen Yeager\tBut you know, I mean, there’s no question you can ask about trying to connect with Old English, even though it’s impossible that you couldn’t ask about literally every other attempted communication you’ve ever done in your entire life, right? Like, when has there ever been like the true melding of minds and the intention of the original person is fully communicated so that the other person completely understood it? There are varying degrees of historical distance, of cultural distance and what have you, which complicate that further, but it’s not as if there is some kind of achievable thing that isn’t achieved, it’s just that the thing isn’t achieved in multiple ways. So in fact, part of the value of studying something like “The Ruin,” to my mind is the reminder that it gives you of that sort of basic fact about all communication, that for all you may rely on your stereotypes or your shared cultural knowledge or your sort of sense of this person from whoever long you’ve known them, in fact, there’s always this effort. There’s always this, this thing that remains, and so therefore this constant need for humility and for care, in the way that you recognize the limitations of your own understanding.\nStephen Yeager\tArguably, there is no such thing as a written text that is not also a ruin in this sense, right? Because the author is remote, the person who wrote it down, like by the time it gets to you, that person has changed themselves, right? And so the person who wrote it is gone. So “The Ruin” is this kind of perfect poem, distillation, as we said, for these serendipitous reasons of what writing is. And so I think that the representation of those gaps, to my mind, the best will be just the ones that call attention to it. Whatever that choice is to make the listener aware of the gap or what’s missing is to make them aware of what this work is, which is, you know, powerful as a work of writing and sort of translating that into the other medium.\nStephen Yeager\tTo go back to my earlier point about Milman Parry, I wanted to make one final point about that, which is, you know, that he was able to do all of that work because of recording, right? He relied on the recordings of the Serbo-Croat oral poets, which he then transcribed and then identified all of the things. So, you know, you can’t have oral formulaic theory and all of the nostalgia for the oral performance and the immediacy of it. And you know, like, this is what the show really sounded like when he was strumming on the lyre or whatever. [Soft string music begins to play]\nStephen Yeager\tYou know, that nostalgia and that wish is a product of the recording technology that then makes it feel like that is an experience you could actually have because you can have it about somebody today. And there is an extent to which that desire or transparency for immediacy is the product of communications technology that promises that transparency and immediacy, but which in fact has never actually delivered on it. Because, you know, the recording then removes from the context, and then there’s suddenly a ton of stuff that you don’t know about it. And I think it’s how you represent your own relationship to the text and not about how you represent the text itself. Like, is Peter Hamill saying like, I have a PhD in old English? [“Imperial Walls” by Peter Hamill plays briefly]\n(43:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tPeter Hamill adapted part of “The Ruin” poem into a song called “Imperial Walls.”\n(43:42)\tStephen Yeager\tYou know, he’s not, he’s not that, that representation is like, I’m an artist and I’m going to take this work of art from the past and I’m gonna do my own thing with it. And so that’s completely responsible because it’s transparent about what’s happening. [Soft drumming music begins] The irresponsible is when you claim an authority that you don’t have.\n(44:04)\tGhislaine Comeau\tI, as the translator and scop, am essentially deciding to impose what I think the poem should sound like onto you, the reader or the listener. It is impossible for me to represent it as it was, as I’m not part of its context of reception. I can only translate, interpret, and present it as it is to me now. Who do I want it to make sense for and what sense do I want it to make? And even then, how do I want the poem to sound? Sad, nostalgic, wistful, a touch of hiraeth? The impossible…\n[Music ends]\n“The Ruin” poem.\nThis wall Stone is wondrous/fate and fortune have broken/and shattered the city/the works of giants/decay/roofs ruined/towers toppled/spoke gates smashed/frost on mortar/cut and cleaved/The storm shelter has fallen/eaten through by time/an earthly grasp/a hard grip of ground/imprisons the dead and decayed master makers/Until 100 generations of nations have passed/the city’s red stained gray wall stood under storms/one kingdom after another/high and steep/it fell/Still, the wall stone remains/[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]num geheapen felon/grimly ground/It shone/skilled work/ancient work/lamrindum beag/mod mo … yne swiftne/[Sound effect of fire ends]The stout minded/firmly wove with wire threads/foundations, bound wondrously together/The city dwellings were radiant/Many bathhouses/a tall pinnacle of treasure/great rejoicing/many mead halls/days full of joy/until fate/it changed all that/the slain fell widely/Days of pestilence came/death devoured all the sword brave men/their rampart foundations became waste/The citadel perished/restorers yielded sacred places to the earth/So these dwellings became dreary/and the Vermilion buildings/wood work roofs thus separated from their tiles/A perishable place fell/where once many a glad- hearted/and gold-bright man/shone with war gear/wine flushed and brilliant/splendor adorned/a bright city of this far reaching realm/seen in silver and gold/blessed in curious gems/precious stone and power/broken like a heap of stones/where the baths were/stone houses stood/A wall surrounded all/brightened breast/hot in heart/surging from far with heat/stream erupted/That was advantageous/when they let poor forth hot streams over gray stone/\n[Sound effect of fire crackling swells and dissipates]\nUn…until the ring pool hotly/where the baths were/Then this/Re,that is a kingly thing/\n[Sound effect of fire crackling swells and grows]\na house/a city/\n[Fire crackling ends]\n(48:15)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Low electronic music plays] The SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(48:28)\tHannah McGregor\tOur producer this month is Ghislaine Comeau, a PhD student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Thanks to James Healey, our sound designer for the intro and outro, and Miranda Eastwood for the sound design on Ghislaine’s episode. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to Dr. Steven Yeager and Dr. Steven Powell for lending their voices and expertise to this episode.\n(48:55)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins in background] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9633","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E2, Listening in Uncertainty, 6 November 2023, Paquette"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-in-uncertainty/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Nadège Paquette"],"creator_names_search":["Nadège Paquette"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nadège Paquette\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/61a67aba-7902-445e-834a-7360ff36afd9/audio/886b9d5b-fe0b-439e-b083-1d8e46196a01/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-episode-2-full-master-oct-26-v12.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:22\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,557,106 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-episode-2-full-master-oct-26-v12\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-in-uncertainty/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"6 November 2023\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music:\\n\\nTom Bonheur https://www.instagram.com/dj.g3ntil/\\n\\nKovd, Kvelden, Tell What You Know, Ivory Pillow, and Fever Creep by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/\\n\\nPodcast:\\n\\n“The Wordless Place” Lulu Miller https://radiolab.org/podcast/wordless-place\\n\\n“Why Podcast?” Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html\\n\\nShort Film:\\n\\nAnointed, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Dan Lin https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/videos-featuring-kathy/\\n\\nFilm:\\n\\nPulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa\\n\\nAdditional sounds from:\\n\\n“Interview with Tanya Tagaq,” Alicia Atout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FupatQbcTeM\\n\\n“Open Dialogues: Daniel Heath Justice,” Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBN8_IGuuw\\n\\n“Monster 怪物,” United for Peace Film Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OJulGi1Rg\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nBouich, Abdenour. 2021. “Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words.” Transmotion 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.980.\\n\\nButler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (1): 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650409349213.\\n\\nChion, Michel. 2017. L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma. 4th Edition. Armand Colin.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey, and Hannah McGregor. 2022. Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count. Vol. 27, no. 1. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html.\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun. 2019. “Introduction: The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?” In The Race of Sound, 1–38. Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpntq.4.\\n\\nGoodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of lived abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=018751433&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.\\n\\nHaraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press.\\n\\nHudson, Seán. 2018. “A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Horror Films.” Film-Philosophy 22 (3): 448–64. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0089.\\n\\nJLiat. 1954. Bravo. Found Sounds. Bikini Atoll. http://jliat.com/.\\n\\nJustice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.\\n\\nKurosawa, Kiyoshi, dir. 2001. Pulse. Toho Co., Ltd.\\n\\nLamb, David Michael. 2015. “Clyde River, Nunavut, Takes on Oil Indsutry over Seismic Testing.” CBC. March 30, 2015. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/clyde-river-nunavut-takes-on-oil-industry-over-seismic-testing-1.3014742.\\n\\nLin, Dan, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dirs. 2018. Anointed. Pacific Storytellers Cooperative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVpExaY2Fs.\\n\\nMadwar, Samia. 2016. “Breaking The Silence.” Text/html. Up Here Publishing. uphere. Https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence. 2016. https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence.\\n\\nMiller, Lulu. 2022. “The Wordless Place.” Radiolab. https://radiolab.org/episodes/wordless-place.\\n\\nMorton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis (Minn.): University of Minnesota Press.\\n\\nRaza Kolb, Anjuli Fatima. 2022. “Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic.” Journal of Victorian Culture 27 (2): 292–301. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac017.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. 1 online resource (319 pages) : illustrations vols. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6152353.\\n\\nSontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics.\\n\\nTagaq, Tanya. Split Tooth. Viking, Penguin Random House, 2018.\\n\\nTasker, John Paul. 2017. “Supreme Court Quashes Plans for Seismic Testing in Nunavut, but Gives Green Light to Enbridge Pipeline.” CBC. July 26, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-ruling-indigenous-rights-1.4221698.\\n\\nYamada, Marc. 2020. “Visualizing a post-bubble Japan in the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi.” In Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film : The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades, 60–81. Routledge contemporary Japan series. Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2279077.\\n\\nYusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549734031360,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this audio essay, Nadège Paquette adopts a posture of not-knowing as an alternative to the Western drive toward knowledge accumulation. Nadège asks: can not-knowing help us learn to live and die more justly in compromised worlds?\n\nThis episode navigates this question using an associative method which links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage. Listeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to end time stories including Lulu Miller’s podcast and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film, and stories of endurance, with Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Spokeweb Podcast music ends] My name is Hannah McGregor.\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod and each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:50)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month our producer, Nadège Paquette sonically explores what not-knowing sounds like, and feels like, as an alternative to constantly accumulating knowledge. The episode enacts the possibilities of not-knowing, using an associative method that links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage.\n(01:13)\tKatherine McLeod\tListeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to works that dwell in the unknown, including a story shared by Lulu Miller on the podcast Radio Lab, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film Pulse, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Anointed,” and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook Split Tooth. Collectively, these works of art give us a language for experiences that, in fact, exceed language, and invite us to pause in the space of uncertainty.\n(01:42)\tHannah McGregor\tHere is the second episode of season five of the SpokenWeb podcast, “Listening in Uncertainty.” [SpokenWeb theme music swells briefly and then fades]\n(02:04)\tNadège Paquette\t[Pensive music begins] Hi, I’m Nadège. I’m speaking from Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montreal. I’m a white settler and a seeker of ways to live and die with other humans and non-humans on a damaged planet. [Music fades out] I find this process of naming my partial speaking and listening positionalities important.\nNadège Paquette\t[Sound effect of crickets singing at night followed by the call of a crow] Naming is the way we’ve been taught to apprehend the world, but it might also have the effect of making us fear what we can’t name. This sound work is about the potential of not naming things to linger in uncertainty. It’s about listening through discomfort, tuning in to fear and surrendering to silence. [Cricket sounds stop]\nNadège Paquette\tAttempting not to name things with spoken words is, however, a contradictory project. I can’t escape language, so I try to let it exceed the meaning I expect of it. [Light percussion music fades in] The question I’m asking throughout this episode in exploring the limits of my understanding is: can not-knowing help us learn to live more justly in compromised worlds? Since in Western sciences, the paradigm of knowledge accumulation is coming to its limits when facing the conditions of global warming, can a posture recognizing the bounds of our understanding be more fruitful?\nNadège Paquette\tBecause while we know a lot about climate change, we’re still unable to act and slow down its processes. This podcast is a sort of collage where I make associations between ideas, sounds and stories. Associations are the glue making sometimes seemingly disparate elements stick together. My hope in calling my process associative is to avoid the expectation that this podcast as a form of narrative should be linear: that is, made of a series of observations where one ideologically evolves into another to reveal a single, coherent meaning. Associations might be more about not knowing where the next idea will take us. [Music fades out]\n(04:20)\tNadège Paquette\tThe episode will be divided into two parts. The first section follows two stories where characters are faced with the unknown and react with fear.  [Ominous music begins] These are stories where a certain version of the world ends, a world where things can be known and mastered through language. There’s the story of a child’s night terror told by Lulu Miller in a podcast episode, as well as the story of people disappearing through computer circuits, which takes the form of the film Pulse by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  [Music ends]\nNadège Paquette\tI’ve associated both stories because of the effect of fear they describe and produce. I’ll talk about how fear can be created by acousmatic sounds and uncomfortable intimacy, as well as how we might attempt to tame fear through naming and interpretation.  [Calm electronic music begins]\nWhile the first section is about narratives we could call apocalyptic, the stories of the second section are about surviving and healing after yet another apocalypse, the first being the decolonization of the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. [Music ends]\n(05:37)\tNadège Paquette\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner recites a poem where the tale of a son playing with fire meets an account of living on the Marshall Islands, which have been used as sites for “testing” nuclear bombs. [Calm electronic music fades back in] Tanya Tagaq reads her novel where a daughter protects sea creatures from seismic testing. I want to think here about those things that Western science has called “tests” but which are in fact “the real thing” because they are actively destroying worlds. I want to reflect on the challenge that Indigenous knowledges pose to the notion of real versus fictional world and consider how certain worldviews which escape hegemonic frameworks have been deemed by colonial powers to be illegible and thus less real. [Music ends]\n(06:30)\tNadège Paquette\tBefore diving into stories of fear and stories offering healing, I want to talk about the form of podcasting, about sound’s particular ability to produce effective and embodied responses in listeners. [Dark pensive music begins] I also want to present my method in this episode, how I try to practice what Kaisa Kortekallio calls “becoming-instrument” in order to attend to different associations and what they mean. The medium of sound and the form of podcasting here allow me to invite you to experience effective engagement. [calm but ominous music begins] Sounds create moods and emotions; they can make us feel connected to each other or scared and wary. In both instances, the creative form of intimacy, the feeling of being close to someone or something, or the feeling of being too close. In their series…\n(07:25)\tStacey Copeland\t“Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing.”\n(07:28)\tHannah McGregor\t“Sound-based scholarship,” and…\n(07:30)\tStacey Copeland\t“Making Podcasts Count”\n(07:33)\tNadège Paquette\t…Academics and podcasters…\n(07:34)\tHannah McGregor\t“Hannah McGregor”\n(07:35)\tNadège Paquette\tand…\n(07:36)\tStacey Copeland\t“Stacy Copeland” [music ends]\n(07:37)\tNadège Paquette\tUnderstand podcasting to be a mode of affect transmission. That means that the affects produced by sound and voice through the quality of their pitch, timber volume and rhythm, stick to the listener and moves them in ways that written form might not accomplish. [Electronic pulsing evolving into soft ambient music] Sound and voice thus activate different ways of understanding and apprehending our academic research. While listening to this podcast, can you attend to your affective responses? Does the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps] Does walking allow you to listen intently? Is music your favorite mood altering method? But also, how do you affect those sounds? How might your listening bring you to identify the sounds in a way that limits them? Dylan Robinson, xwélmexw writer of the Stó:lō people and author of the book, Hungry Listening, teaches me to be attentive to the ways in which I listen with hunger for meaning.\n(08:48)\tNadège Paquette\tThis hunger I inherit from my French settler ancestors, who arrived on this continent starving for food, but also for Indigenous lands, knowledges, cultures, and labor. Robinson explains that the drive to satisfy that hunger makes one lose contact with their sense of relationality and reflexivity.  [Eerie music fades in and out]\nRather than holding on to the Western imperative that, as Robinson writes, “all knowledge should be accessible at all times,” I attempt to sit with the limits of my understanding of Indigenous intelligence, voice, song, and stories. My limits can be heard in my imperfect pronunciation of the word xwélmexw, meaning “first nation person” in Halq’eméylem, but also in the fact that I access Indigenous knowledges, not through relations with Indigenous people, communities, lands, and waters, but through texts, and texts that I read in English, which is a colonial language.\n(09:58)\tNadège Paquette\t[Dark pensive music begins] I hope that my engagement here with Indigenous thinkers and stories is respectful and fruitful, but I recognize that it might not always be the case. To tune into influences I might not usually perceive because of my positionality and training, I attempt a form of reconfiguration that literary scholar Kaisa Kortekallio calls “becoming-instrument.” Becoming means that one’s own self, body, and mind is always in the process of being done and undone. [Music fades out. Brief chords and sounds from a printer play]\nInstrument means that mind and body like musical instruments and scientific instruments can be calibrated to perform a creative outcome or attend to certain phenomena. [Soft ominous music begins] Kortekallio writes, “the self instrument is tuned and tweaked in order to become more impressionable, that is, more receptable to the various effects of textural ecologies.” Or, in this case, to the effects of sonic ecologies, to the effects of sounds, beings, and environments relating to each other.\nTo become-instrument, I actively calibrate myself to become more resectable to the associations that might arise between sounds, stories, and concepts. [Music fades] While their association might become apparent to me, my understanding doesn’t exhaust the potential of these relations. [Eerie music begins] The association I make between the two first stories I will discuss in this episode is their interest in the affect of fear. Naming things can be a way to manage our fear of the unknown, to make it less threatening and more familiar. But, what if this fear of the unknown was indeed acquired because of language, because what we can’t name then becomes threatening? [Music ends]\n(12:01)\tNadège Paquette\tI came across this idea when listening to Radiolab’s episode, “The Wordless Place” where co-host…\n(12:08)\tLulu Miller\t“Lulu Miller”\n(12:08)\tNadège Paquette\t…Relates the first months of navigating the uncertainties of COVID-19 with her wife while their year and a half old son was still peacefully dwelling in the uncertainties of the wordless place. Naming, Miller explains, is…\n(12:25)\tLulu Miller\t“…This thing we do all the time, which is to group things together that don’t belong under one word, to preserve a sense of order, or comfort, or control.”\n(12:33)\tNadège Paquette\t[Tense light percussion music begins] This also happens with sound. Most people think about sound by reducing it through naming. It is one of the central premises of The Race of Sound by music scholar Nina Eidsheim. When we hear a sound but can’t identify its cause, we may ask the acousmatic question, “What is this?” The term acousmatic signals this perceived rupture between the sound and its source. Asking the acousmatic question reveals the assumption that there can be an answer to it. That the thick event of a sound and especially in Eidsheim’s research, of a voice, can be captured by a word encompassing its source. [Music ends] This belief that by naming we come to know what we name is reassuring. [Eerie music begins] Miller believes it is what reassured her son after he had a particularly intense night terror. Miller’s wife was able to appease him only by bringing him in front of a photograph of a Coptic tapestry and naming the things she thought she could see.\n(13:39)\tLulu Miller\t“‘Goat,’ she said tapping the glass, ‘flower, snail.'”\n(13:44)\tNadège Paquette\tMiller suspects that her son’s night terror was linked to his recent inquisition of words, which suddenly made him feel that the unknown was a threat. [Music ends]Neurologists say we’re wired to fear the unknown, but, what if, Miller asks…\n(14:02)\tLulu Miller\t“What if that fear only starts with the advent of words?”\n(14:06)\tNadège Paquette\tWe could say that causal listening, that is listening for the cause of the sound, and then naming the source is a process that attempts to remedy our fear of the unknown.\n[Strange sounds rapidly rise and fall]\nFilm theorist and composer Michel Chion explains that we’re engaged in causal listening when we ask: what is making a sound? What is the thing, object, being, or phenomenon, producing the sound, and where is its source located? [Dense eerie music begins] Causal listening or the ability to interpret sounds and identify their possible causes is both learned culturally and wired to our survival instinct. Instinctively we understand that loud noises almost always mean danger. But culturally we also learn to identify some loud noises as coming from unthreatening sources, and we’re thus able to respond to them accordingly. Music and drone fade out]\nIf I hear loud noise and it triggers fear in me, identifying its cause might bring my fear to dissolve. Naming, once again, is a way to regain a sense of control. [Pensive percussion with sirens begins] The horror film genre is one that attempts to elicit fear in its audience by using unnerving sound effects, but also by playing with the process of revealing a monstrous or threatening force which previously remained partially hidden. In the Western branch of the horror genre, film plots are generally built around this process of making known the unknown.\n(15:48)\tNadège Paquette\tMany Japanese horror films, however, reject this framework. J-Horror films produced in the 1990s and 2000’s participate in an aesthetic movement centering non-symbolic or non-representative frameworks. It is not the meaning behind the film or the source behind acousmatic sound that is horrific, but the lack thereof. [Music fades out] The lack of source and lack of meaning are frightening. Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is an important figure in J-Horror. [Ominous soundscapes from Pulse begin] In his movie Pulse, released in 2001, the sources of fear are many and remain partially unknown. Sonic drones, acousmatic voices, and the sound of computer circuits exchanging information are dislocated from their sources which evade understanding and create fear.\n(16:49)\tNadège Paquette\tPulse is set in the 1990s posed-bubble Japan at the beginning of the Internet. [Ominous soundscapes continue, with sirens] People are disappearing in Tokyo, leaving only a dark stain on the wall, like the ones left after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing which had burned human silhouettes on stone walls. It seems that there’s a computer virus infecting users and turning them into ghosts. Or it could be that the realm of the spirit has attained its capacity and is now overflowing, through internet circuits, into the realm of the living. Soundscapes fade out] Pulse’s ghosts have been interpreted as symbols of the hikikomori. Hikikomori are young adults, mostly men in their 20’s and 30’s, withdrawing from society by refusing to leave their room for months or years at a time.  [Eerie music begins] The phenomenon has been described as an epidemic that Japan faces since the 1990s. Some explained the situation as a backlash to the strict demands of the Japanese conformist society, which hikikomori are unable or refuse to fulfill.\n(18:02)\tNadège Paquette\tNaming the fearful apparition of a ghost by a known phenomenon, that of hikikomori allows for the reestablishment of the boundaries of the known. Yet the symbolic interpretation leaves out many other possibilities. By focusing on the meaning of the film, it’s affective power is left out. In other words, fear and everything unspeakable in the movie are overlooked. What I’m trying to explain here echoes Susan Sontag’s argument in her essay “Against Interpretation.” She explains that interpretation, too often, favors content over form and thus centers meaning and neglects the work of art’s affective quality. Sontag writes that “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.” But this nervousness is avoided when the work of art is reduced to its content, and its content to our interpretation.\n(19:01)\tNadège Paquette\tIn this sense, a non-symbolic reading would allow for the work of art to retain its capacity to make us nervous, to make us feel the effect of fear which uncertainty creates. To perform a non-symbolic reading of the film, I have to decenter abstract meaning to focus on the film’s materiality and my embodied experience of it. [Music fades out]\nWhen I listen to Pulse’s sounds, I hear layers of complexity. [Birdsongs and sawing sounds overlaid begin] I hear layers of human, machine, element, and animal entanglements. I feel confusion and fear. So why do I like it so much? [Abrupt silence]  I tune into those entanglements and those feelings of discomfort, and I feel the excitement of knowing that there is more to the movie than what I understand, that there is more to the world than what I can experience. [Birdsongs and ominous music fade in and out] In Pulse, what travels both through circuits and through sounds are unsettling presences that exceed human understanding.\n[Ominous soundscape from Pulse play]\n(20:14)\tNadège Paquette\tWhat I like so much about the film might be that it makes me feel what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “intimacy.” According to Morton, intimacy is what best explains ecological awareness. Ecological awareness cannot be reduced to the profoundly confirming feeling that we belong to something bigger. [Strings rise and fall] The feeling of belonging is accompanied by the sentiment of intimacy, which is the sense of being close, even too close to non-human presences like ghosts, nuclear radiations, or global warming.\nIntimacy is the sense of having other presences “under one skin,” explains Morton. [Eerie strings continue] Global warming gets under my skin and in my lungs when I breathe the summer air in Montreal. An air heavy with the small particles from the smoke caused by forest fires intensified by global warming. In Pulse, Ryosuke, a university student, experiences intimacy when gesturing to put his hands on the shoulders of a ghost in the hope that they will encounter no resistance, that they will traverse the ghost’s body, that it’s immateriality will convince him that the ghost doesn’t exist. But Ryosuke’s hands stop when they touch the spectre’s shoulders, which they can’t traverse. [Sound bite of object shattering]\n(21:55)\tNadège Paquette\tThe spectre is material and it is too close to Ryosuke, who becomes infected by the virus and himself eventually becomes a ghost. [String music returns] Perhaps dwelling in uncertainty and living through the effects of fear, nervousness, and uncomfortable intimacy allow me not only to intellectually challenge the Western paradigm of knowledge accumulation, but also to embody this challenge, to feel it. [Music fades out]\n[Soundscapes from Pulse are superimposed with sirens] Pulse ends on an apocalyptic vision of Tokyo burning. The city is deserted by the protagonists and a few other humans that are leaving on a ship to try to find a place on earth the virus hasn’t infected yet. While the end of the film is also the end of the world, the story remains open because the film resists a single overarching interpretation. The story remains open because of the non-human presences traversing its soundtrack.\n(23:07)\tNadège Paquette\t[Soundscapes fade out and soft music begins] The stories in this second section, they too are about the end of the world. But they go further than just opening to a new one. They teach me how to survive in the aftermath, and how to live with others in damaged worlds.\nI have associated the following stories because they all offer a representation of a weapon which Western powers have called a “test.” [Music fades out] We could define a test as an experiment which is carried out to establish the performance of something before it is taken into its intended use. The word “test” can be used to sustain a binary between the fictional world, where the test is performed, and the real world, where the tested thing will be used. Following Morton, I tune into the materiality of nuclear bombing by listening to a recording of the Caste Bravo nuclear weapon “test” that was launched on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954 by the US Army. [Drone sound fades in and out] Timothy Morton writes, “Words fail to describe the horror with which I heard the first few seconds. I had to tear the headphones off my head.” [Sound effect of someone tearing their headphones off] [Silence] What is maybe even more horrific than the sound of the explosion itself is the seconds of silence preceding it.\n[Dense silence that lasts too long for comfort, from the recording of the Bravo “test” followed by the explosion]\n(25:41)\tNadège Paquette\tCan I tune into this silence to hear what is to be annihilated by the explosion? Can I hear the attempted silencing of the Marshallese people’s protests? Are the 26 seconds of relative silence before the detonation enough to remember the 72 hours the US army waited before gathering the islanders? Are the 26 seconds enough to remember the 236 Marshallese who were exposed to the atomic fallout and transported to the American military base where they were to be used as “test” subjects?\n[Eerie music fades in]\nInhuman geologist, Kathryn Yusoff writes, “The fallout coated Marshallese bodies, ground, trees, breadfruit, coconuts, crabs, fish, and water.” The islanders were returned to the islands to study them as what was called fallout “collectors.” Human and non-human islanders were taken to be instruments serving to record the effects of such “tests” on human life and Pacific Island ecologies. But Yusoff reminds me that there is no such thing as a nuclear “test.” [Music ends]\nThe Marshall Islands are not a laboratory and the islanders are not “test” subjects, but people still living in radioactive intimacies causing high rates of leukemia, neoplasm, and thyroid cancers. [Tense electronic music beings] When the US army describes the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands as a form of “test,” the islands are constituted as a sort of fictional world whose destruction is not real. “Test” is a way of naming a form of nuclear colonialism and warfare. It derealizes the life of Pacific Islanders and constructs this ecosystem as a fictional world. The military can get a practice before having to perform in the real world. [Music ends] In her poem anointed…\n(27:52)\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner\t“Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner,”\n(27:54)\tNadège Paquette\t…Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, and educator returns to Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. She remembers it as a whole island with breadfruit trees and “women who could swim pregnant for miles.” [Sound of waves from  Anointed] She remembers the nuclear warfare waged against the island. She wonders if she will find an island with stories or a tomb.\n(28:24)\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner\t[Tense orchestration begins] “I’m looking for more stories. I look and I look. There must be more to this than incinerated trees, a cracked dome, a rising sea, a leaking nuclear waste with no fence, there must be more to this than a concrete shell that houses death.”\n(28:46)\tNadège Paquette\t[Orchestration fades out] Jetñil-Kijiner is looking for stories that weave the relationships that matter to communities of humans and more than humans, but her story tells me that Morton’s account of the recording of the Bravo “test” and Yusoff’s account of “nuclear colonialism” don’t, is the story of ongoing life in cohabitation with disrupted landscapes. [Energized electronic music starts] Jetñil-Kijiner tells the story of a turtle goddess who gifted one of her sons, Letao, a piece of her shell anointed with power. Letao could use the shell to transform himself into anything he wanted and he became kindling to create the first fire that almost burned the islanders alive. [Energized music fades and soft music begins]\nThere’s another shell story. Made of concrete, this one is supposed to shield the islanders from the toxicity of nuclear waste collected and dumped in a crater two decades after the end of the “testing.” There’s another weapon that calls itself a “test” and needs stories to weave an alternative discourse to the one of warfare, conquest, and colonization.\n(29:59)\tTanya Tagaq\t“Wait, I need to talk to Sedna and tell her to keep her treasures. Humans have damned themselves and it has nothing to do with Satan. It has only to do with greed. What will Sedna do when she hears the seismic testing?\n(30:26)\tNadège Paquette\tThat was…\n(30:27)\tTanya Tagaq\t“Tanya Tagaq.”\n(30:28)\tNadège Paquette\tAn Inuit artist, improvisational singer, avante-garde composer, and author reading from her novel Split Tooth. [Tense percussion music begins mixed with the sound of ice melting]\nThe novel’s protagonist was telling Sedna’s story before being interrupted by the intrusive memory of seismic testing. “Sedna is the sea goddess that came before Christianity.” Seismic testing is the technique used by companies to survey the Arctic Ocean for oil. Airguns are fired into the water from a boat. How the sound waves bounce back up from the ocean floor is captured by the ship sensors to be analyzed for indications of possible oil layers. Airguns are blasted every 15 seconds every hour of the day for several months. [Eerie string music begins] They produce sounds that can reach 230 decibels at close range. That’s louder than a jumbo jet and sound travels faster and further on the water.\n[Dense electronic music starts] 150 decibels can rupture a human ear and anything over 80 decibels means reduced intellectual capacity, slow digestion, altered diction, accelerated breathing, and heartbeat, as well as symptoms of neurosis such as anxiety and depression. Music fades out]\nSo when those extremely loud sounds traverse the arctic ocean, they hit creatures living in the waters, including marine mammals that use sound to communicate such as narwhals, belugas, whales and seals. [Music with harsh percussion begins] Narwhals have been disoriented by disturbing sounds in an area where there was seismic testing going on. They changed their migration patterns and found themselves stuck under thick sea ice where they drowned. [Music ends]\n(32:24)\tNadège Paquette\tAround 2011, seismic testing companies approached Jerry Natanine, mayor of Clyde River, Nunavut. [Music with harsh percussion returns] When he told his father and uncles about the project, they were, like Tagaq’s protagonist, assailed by the intrusive memory of seismic testing. They remember when, in the 70’s, Panarctic Oils carried out similar tests without consulting the local Inuit communities. The next spring when they went hunting, they noticed the seals were displaying strange behaviors. They did not flee or even react when hunters would approach them. They had pus exuding out of their ears. They were deaf.  [Music and sounds fade out] [Silence]\nI couldn’t find sounds of seismic testing on the internet, so I tune into this silence and to what it means. Do narwhals belugas, whales and seals hear a deafening ringing in their ears after airgun shootings and before they can hear nothing else? Do the calves miss their parents’ voices? Are marine mammals deaf so that I can listen to silence induced by noise reduction on my oil soaked headphones connected to my oil soaked computer in a warm library, thanks to heating oil, rendered even more cozy by oil soaked noise absorbing carpets? [Silence]\n[Watery sounds and eerie ambient music begin] When Tagaq’s protagonist wants to tell Sedna to keep her treasures from greedy companies practicing seismic testing in the Arctic, the protagonist is not proposing a form of symbolic reading of Sedna’s story. Sedna is not a character in a fantasy world who would be valuable only if she symbolized a real person, event, or phenomenon in the real world. Sedna is an-other-than-human being living in the protagonist’s world. And the categories of real and fantasy here represent a Western rationalist reading that dismisses Indigenous ways of knowing. Tagaq’s protagonist interacts with Sedna’s story and other Inuit stories to remind us as writes…\n(34:57)\tDaniel Justice\t“Daniel Justice.”\n(34:58)\tNadège Paquette\tCitizen of the Cherokee nation and professor of Critical Indigenous Studies, “that there are other ways of being in the world and those we’ve been trained to accept as normal.” Split Tooth might be what Justice calls a “wonderwork,” a story that brings the past forward and integrates a possible future for Indigenous peoples. In Split Tooth’s possible future, Sedna might hear the seismic testing, and if she does, she might keep the sea creatures in her miles long hair to protect them from the sound, but then the human inhabitants of the Arctic would starve. [Music and sounds end] [silence]\nNatanine, Clyde River’s mayor, explains that the community needs seals, narwhals, whales, and fish. The community and its mayor took the seismic “testing” companies to court to oppose their activities on Inuit land. In 2017, they won their case in the Supreme Court of Canada, which forbade further testing underground that Inuit treaty rights were disregarded, Inuit people inadequately consulted, and their relationship to marine animals dismissed. [Pensive percussion music begins] When companies performing seismic “testing” fail to consider how it will affect seals and other marine animals, the colonial worldview where animals are subordinate forms of life, whose bodies are killable and available to human use is given priority.\n(36:39)\tNadège Paquette\tAn Inuit worldview where animals are essential partners in Inuit life, is positioned as a fictional world where “tests” can be performed for the benefit of the real world down south. For the human and animal inhabitants of Inuit lands and waters however, seismic testing is not a “test.” Seismic “testing” is already a form of violence that corporations owned by non-Indigenous interests perform. Tagaq’s novel refuses such binary separation between real and fictional world. I thus want to resist the urge to categorize Split Tooth by giving it the name of a particular genre like fiction, memoir, or poetry. Those categories of the Western literary tradition might not help me encounter the work on its own terms.\n[Eerie music fades in] Tagaq’s story is told through a web of Indigenous perspectives. It is a collaborative work that she weaves with her band, community, ancestors, animal and mineral neighbors, with Inuit songs and worldviews, and stories like Sedna’s story and that of Arqsarnic, the Northern Lights. It is what Justice would call “stories that heal.” They contrast those healing stories with the colonial story of “Indigenous deficiency,” which has been told too many times to mask settler’s guilt and shame. [Music ends] According to this colonial story, many Indigenous people are suffering from poverty, homelessness, and addiction, not because of intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and genocide, but because Indigenous individuals supposedly lack in “character or biology or intellect.”\n(38:33)\tNadège Paquette\t[Energetic electronic music begins]  Split Tooth is not a story of lack but of partial positions and fulfilling relationships. The protagonist is busy with collective reinvention and remembering. Her pain and fear come with pleasure, healing and cunning plans. I love how the novel brings dualities in uncomfortable proximity: humans are both hating and loving, harming and caring.\nHumans are also animals, animals take erotic forms and attract humans. Predators are also prey. Spirits leave and come back to their bodies; bodies are shapeshifters.  [Music fades] Listening to Tanya Tagaq’s amazing audiobook Split Tooth late at night, day after day, her soft rhythmic voice began to feel like a haunting. Her “S” sounds were encircling my limbs like tendrils and I started reading my own work with the cadence of her voice.[Dark pensive music begins] I’m even doing it now.\nTagaq reveals harsh realities and traumatic events with a soft voice and a juvenile tone. [Dark music ends followed by playful music] The voice that she shares with the protagonist seems to me at times childlike, and at times wise and old, and sometimes mischievous and even cruel. Her voice goes from one to the other with only the slightest variation in tone, rhythm, or pace. [Music stops]\nI can’t separate the hero from the villain in Tagaq’s story, and this brings me to reflect on my own position as a white settler. I too am neither simply innocent nor guilty in the ongoing colonial story. I am implicated in the conditions creating trauma and violence in Indigenous communities, and me and my ancestors have benefited from colonial systems. Attending to the discomfort I feel when faced with the ambiguity of Tagaq’s characters helps me sit with the discomfort I feel when reflecting on my own position. I hope that this emotional engagement can help me be more accountable.  [Pensive music fades out]\n(40:49)\tNadège Paquette\t[Soft energized  music begins] Letao’s story and Sedna’s story as told by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Tanya Tagaq are complex webs of situated Indigenous knowledges talking back to imperialists and colonial stories of man as maker and destroyer. Just as stories like Letao’s and Sedna’s have always been important to the Marshallese and Inuit people telling them, they will have to be important to non-Indigenous people like me who would like to cohabit with humans and non-humans within the conditions of global warming. Those stories make speculative leaps toward other worlds that have existed, exist now and might exist in the future. Rational knowledges and facts are not sufficient to live with others on a damaged planet, so the challenge Indigenous stories pose to Western understandings of what is real and what is fiction has to be taken seriously.\nStories might allow us to walk that thin line between knowing too much and knowing too little. While humans of the 21st century know a lot about global warming, we seem to be unable to act. If rational knowledges, facts don’t bring action, can I turn towards unknowing? [Music intensifies and ends] [Soundscape from Pulse fades in and out] Pulse’s strange sounds like Letao’s and Sedna’s story are not exhausted by any symbolic reading I might make of them. I manage, in the understanding I have of them, a space for feeling nervous, a space not to name things or to cultivate distrust in the names I give.  [Eerie music begins]\nThe sounds in Pulse like the stories in Anointed and Split Tooth are palimpsestic, layers sedimented one over the other, like the layers of soil saturated with plutonium on the Marshall Islands, like the strata of oil, gas, and sedimentary rock in the ocean bed, like the layers of bodies infiltrated by strontium90, like levels of memories, practices, and knowledges collected in stories. [ Nadège’s voice echoes] There must be more to this. [Music fades out]\n[Soft electronic music fades in] Thank you for listening. Voices are from Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, Lulu Miller, Daniel Justice, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Tanya Tagaq. Music is from Tom Bonheur, merci Tom, and from Blue Dot Sessions. Soundscapes are from Pulse directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa with music by Takefumi Haketa. The recording of the Castle Bravo “test” is from JLiat’s website. Additional sounds from RadioLab, and Anointed, a film by Dan Lin and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. Thank you. [Electronic music fades out]\n(44:20)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play quietly] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(44:34)\tHannah McGregor\tOur producer this month is Nadège Paquette, a master’s student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n(44:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to Spokenweb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.  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This audio is part of  literature professor Linda M. Morra‘s podcast, Getting Lit with Linda – The Canadian Literature Podcast, hosted and written by Linda, produced by Linda and Marco Timpano.\n\nIn Episode 7 from Season 2, Linda begins with the sound of her father’s old espresso machine, to explain how she sees — or hears — sound working in Magnetic Equator (published by McClelland & Stewart) by international poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough. You can hear a sample of his sound poetry here. This episode includes a small excerpt read by Kellough himself (with permission by Kellough). In the “take-away” section, Linda talks about a biography she recently read by Sherrill Grace, about Canadian author Timothy Findley (published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press). If you’d like to know more about sound poetry, and about Kaie Kellough as a sound poet, check out Adam Sol’s blog post about Kellough on “How a Poem Moves.”\n\nGet this episode and more by following Getting Lit with Linda – The Canadian Literature Podcast on all major podcast platforms.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor.\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod, and each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:50)\tHannah McGregor\tWe have a very special episode for you this month. We’re doing a crossover with friend of the podcast, Linda Morra. I call her ‘friend of the podcast’ because she’s friend of ours, Katherine.\n(01:03)\tKatherine McLeod\tShe is. Linda Morra is a Canadian literature scholar. She does research on Can Lit and archives. And the episode that we’ve chosen for this crossover episode is an early episode from her podcast called Getting Lit with Linda, the Canadian Literature podcast. And it’s an episode that really does a deep dive into a new work of Canadian literature. She does a deep dive into the book, Magnetic Equator, a book of poetry by the Montreal based poet Kaie Kellough. And on this podcast more recently, she’s been speaking with the authors and doing interviews with them and Getting Lit with Linda has become more live.\nBut here we really see her and hear her diving into the work itself and really listening to it, listening to the book, and listening to the sound of the language. When I spoke to Linda about which episode we might choose for this podcast, she recommended we take a listen to this one and I’m really glad that she did because it really is an episode that’s immersed in sound, not only in the sounds of Kaie Kellough’s book, but also in Linda Morra’s sonic world. And the episode actually starts with some terrific sounds of Linda’s coffee maker.\n(02:24)\tHannah McGregor\t[Hannah laughs] It does, and also with the gorgeous sound of Linda’s voice I was really struck when you pointed out to me, Katherine, that this, that Getting Lit with Linda started as a pandemic project. So the podcast started in 2020. As you said, it has grown and developed into conversations with authors about their books. But I really think you hear in this episode that sense of the role that podcasts played for so many of us in the pandemic of creating these threads of connection from our spaces of isolation.\nYou can hear how embedded Linda is in the domestic space from which she’s speaking and she invites you into the sonic landscape of that space with this kind of intimacy and this closeness for, you know, down to everything from the sound of the coffee maker to the sound of her voice, her proximity to the microphone. It feels so intimate, almost cozy, and then sets you up so beautifully to really come with her into this collection of poetry and into the kinds of sonic landscapes that Kaie Kellough is also navigating.\n(03:43)\tKatherine McLeod\tYes, I think that Linda would be terrific on the radio.\n(03:47)\tHannah McGregor\t[Hannah laughs] Absolutely.\n(03:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m saying it on record right here and now. So, yeah, let’s have a listen to this crossover episode, an episode of Linda Morra’s podcast, Getting Lit with Linda, the Canadian literature podcast.\n(04:05)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd this is season two, episode seven, “The Languages and Sounds That are Home; Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator”. \n[SpokenWeb theme music swells and then fades quickly]\n(04:24)\tIntro to Getting Lit with Linda plays:\tLit! Canadian Lit, that is! Join Linda as she talks about authors in Canada and sometimes with them. Using her expertise to shed light on recent and not so recent writers. And now, get set for Getting Lit with Linda!\n(04:40)\tLinda Morra\tHi, this is Linda Mora, the host and writer of Getting Lit with Linda. I’m sipping an espresso this morning, one that was made from my father’s old espresso machine. It’s a fairly unwieldy, almost Victorian era piece of equipment that whistles and groans as it produces my morning coffee. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know what I’m talking about. There’s no reason to use or even to love this particular machine. I’m an espresso aficionado and therefore I have several contemporary machines from which I could choose, but I’m really partial to this one because it’s dialect and its rhythms, however clunky they may seem to others, remind me of when my Italian father was still alive and he loved this machine and he loved his espresso. So I do too. And by the way, in case you wanna know, I take my espresso with a teaspoon of raw sugar and a hint of cinnamon.\nThe machine used to take up a lot of space on his kitchen counter, the very house I also grew up in, although that house is gone now too. Still, the morning espresso wasn’t something we just shared. It provided us with a ritual, a context, meaning, a tacit understanding. So what I have now is the language of this machine, the memories it evokes as it grinds and moans and the comfort it offers me.\nThis story does actually have something to do with today’s poet Kaie Kellough, which I’ll return to by the end. I’m happy to let you know that I have an audio clip by Kellough too today. I’ve actually met him in person at a writer’s event in Montreal, Quebec. I had already heard about his work and I was sufficiently impressed by him as a person to invite him on the spot to come and speak to my students at Bishop’s University.\n(06:29)\tLinda Morra\tHe agreed. And so he came as part of this inaugural event for a Student Writing Weekend in the Eastern Townships, what we were calling SWEET, at which he would perform before about 60 students and faculty members.\nNow, I often have no idea what writers will be like when I invite them to the campus. I do love good writers, of course, but that doesn’t mean I know what to expect for events for the Morris House Reading Series, that’s a literary program that I’ve coordinated for over 14 years. I’ve even learned to be rather cautiously optimistic about which writers I invite because some past experiences were … well, to put it gently, underwhelming. Not all writers feel comfortable presenting their work in public venues – it simply requires a different skill set than, say, writing poetry or a novel in private.\nThe other thing is … well, Lennoxville has its own culture. It’s a fairly English speaking community in a French speaking city in a French-speaking province –Lennoxville is a borough of Sherbrooke – so I never know what I can expect on that side of things either. I just hope I’ve made the right choice and that everyone’s happy.\nSo: back to Kellough in Lennoxville. He apparently meandered about the town before the event and found himself near the train tracks just off campus. And so, at the event proper, he held up a discarded, misshapen steel peg that he found nearby the tracks – it was bent in such a way that it looked like the letter “J” – and then he riffed off that “J” in ways that were completely astounding. The students were mesmerized; the very instant Kellough completed his performance, the students were drawn up and out of their seats; they leapt up together as one and erupted into sustained applause.\n(08:20)\tLinda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it. Now anyone who has seen him perform the alphabet – yes you heard that right, the alphabet – will have a very good idea of what I’m talking about – if you’re out there wondering what I mean by that, I’ve included a link to one of his performances in the show notes. One of the comments on that page suggests that this particular video is “dope” – and it really IS pretty “lit.”\nThe moment documents the fact that Kellough is, among other things, a practitioner of sound poetry – an adaptation of the expression “word sound power” that comes from Jamaican dub poetry. Sound poetry relies upon the phonetic aspects of human speech, its acoustic properties, and it enjoys these lexical distortions and contortions that draw attention to the sounds of language rather than its meaning—it can, at times, take on singsong-like properties, sometimes sounding rather musical (think of nursery rhymes, but without the recognizable diction), and it certainly makes for a rather rhythmical and fascinating performance. In terms of the Canadian poets, the most famous of these include bp Nichol, Bill Bissett, and Steve McCaffery. Now I know I’m over-simplifying a rather vast body of work: I just want to allude to it briefly, because Kellough is one of its practitioners, although it’s not the focus of my discussion today.\nWhy? Because if we narrow our view to just this aspect of Kellough’s literary production, we’ll greatly limit our understanding of his accomplishments, and of his extraordinary talent and range. Kellough writes poetry and prose – and he’s already published three books of poetry, one novel, and one collection of short stories. Indeed, he sees these genres as informing each other. Even so, it’s not just the range of his output, but the real quality of it too – and  in all genres.\n(10:38)\tLinda Morra\tI’ve said it before in previous episodes that I don’t allow awards to determine what I think about works of literature, but I do think in this case the sheer number of awards that Kellough’s work has attracted are indeed merited. His novel, Accordéon, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and his short story collection Dominoes at the Crossroads won or was shortlisted for so many – include the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal and the Scotiabank Giller Prize – I just stopped counting.\nThe book I’m focusing on today, however, is Magnetic Equator (and in case you’re interested, It did actually win the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, but that’s not why I chose it). You’ll see why in a moment. Magnetic Equator is divided into 10 parts, which draw upon elements of Kellough’s life—it is at least semi-autobiographical. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, moved to Calgary, where he spent his adolescence, and in adulthood relocated to Montreal, Quebec, where he’s lived since 1998. But the collection doesn’t begin with Vancouver –it reaches back to his ancestral roots, to Guyana, South America, the place from which his maternal grandparents emigrated.\nThis shifting of geographical contexts matters, generally of course, but also specifically when we look at this collection. The multiplicity and complexity of geographical contexts, their respective cultures, at turns, impress and oppress their subjects—how much we take on the colours of our context, that then intermingle when we relocate and migrate, creating new palettes, new hues and tones. It means, of course, that questions of belonging also become more complicated – less easily resolved – and sometimes rendering one’s sense of place in more precarious ways that highlights one’s vulnerability.\nAs one might expect, the cultural influences of Guyana mark Kellough’s upbringing, so that, as he says in an interview with CBC books, he remembers how much it affected so many facets of his life.\n(12:53)\tLinda Morra\thow his grandparents in Canada, for example, prepared Guyanese meals – how “there were pictures and maps of Guyana. There were books by Guyanese authors. Guyana was something that was discussed. It was real, it was an important presence.” Within the collection, he thus speaks about being “inside a narration contrived / to read like non-fiction,” how “one word emigrat[es] from another’s vowels” (11).\nHe draws attention to the connection and intersections between people and language, their lineages and migratory patterns, how we are birthed, not only through biology, but also through inherited narratives and stories.\nThe title is in part a reference to the equator, above which Guyana is only marginally north. If you’re thinking right about now that the title magnetic equator is therefore somehow related to Guayan’s proximity toward the equator, you’d be right. Most of you will know about the earth’s magnetic field lines, the North Magnetic Pole and the South Magnetic Pole, and how the north end of a compass will point downward in the northern hemisphere – that’s called positive dip; when it points upward in the southern hemisphere, that’s called negative dip. However, when the locus of points have zero dip, it is called the magnetic equator. Guyana.\nThe title is suggestive, therefore – that pull towards that equator, toward Guyana, but metaphorically–toward finding one’s cultural lineage or one’s sense of home where the gravitational pull is zero. You won’t be pulled in any direction, when you’re at home. But how do you find home, when you’ve been displaced, or when its physical counterparts and markers have moved or removed?\nIn part, Kellough is reimagining Guyana as one source of his identity – and more broadly speaking, to apprehend those matrices that offer a deeper, richer understanding of identities because, as he observes in interview, “you had all these different cultural groups that came to Guyana and then mixed there.”\n(15:16)\tLinda Morra\tIn an interview about this particular collection, Kellough has said that he sees the multifaceted, complex language of the text itself as offering a kind of context: “language as landscape.” He remarks on its playfulness, its vastness, “a language that holds a variety of different registers at the same time — from more formal English, to slang, to bits of patois and to French.” The collection is above all else about language that’s been marked by diaspora, occasioned by different contexts and experiences, by different cultural lineages and identities.\nHe charts family histories, personal and political, and geography to show how the “density of times past” acts on and produces who we are: “the assemblages of others who are you, a being made of beings.” In reading this part, I immediately thought of the episode on Madeleine Thien and the means by which our bodies are an accumulation of memory, familial, cultural, and political. The interweaving, however, goes beyond that – he even remarks on how “nocturnal insects” intertwine with “our breathing, continuous and shifting, supple, they never stiffen into strict metre, but always evolve.” Of course, this is a reflexive remark that has a bearing on the shape of poetry, that also never stiffens into strict metre, but rather is fluid, allusive, and in flux.\nThe first section is a clear and direct reference to the country: the opening section, in fact, is titled “kaieteur falls,” a direct reference to the tallest single drop waterfall, 226 metres or 741 feet high (that’s about four times higher than Niagara Falls, if you want a point of comparison in Canada and the US). Located in Kaieteur National Park, and a section of the Amazon rainforest, it is clearly also related to Kellough by virtue of his first name – there is a fascinating link to be made here, between person and place, between Kellough and Guyana proper.\nIn the first few poems of the second section, titled “mantra of no return,” Kellough explores the legacies of slavery and of the human cargo carried in ships across the Atlantic, using the holds of these ships as a starting point for larger considerations (as a kind of aside, it made me think of Zong!, that’s the work of another poet whose work I love, M. NourbeSe Philip, and I’ll probably dedicate an entire episode to her in the future): So he observes, “The world is itself a cargo carried in the hold of this verse.” End quote.\n(18:14)\tLinda Morra\tHe suggests here how his verse is both a means of conveyance, and a means of communication—and his subject, not just Guyana, but the globe. His poetry is both indictment and tribute, both memory and  record, both personal and collective.\nThe next section, titled, “high school fever,” is poignant, tracing his adolescence experienced in the Canadian prairies, and the misery of the boy who contemplated suicide in the back seat of a car, quote “breathing carbon monoxide as exodus” end quote; he reminds us that, however much we may be “in” a place, we are not necessarily “of it,” no matter how long we might live there. This is a period that involves Desert Storm, and the Oka crisis, and apartheid, and dance me outside, and Yasser Arafat. It is a time of confusion, anger, experimentation; a time that is interspersed with racial, social ,and  political injustices. But it’s also a time when the poet becomes attentive to racial inequities and injustices, keenly listening to, quote “their black mouths [that] opened over my ears.” End quote.\nIn a section after this, titled “Zero”—strategically located in the centre of the collection—the poet has clearly made his way to Montreal, with its “babel” of voices, the “languages spilling out the summer windows,” although the section really takes a wider view—and not just a perspective that is personal, embracing the totality of experience from BC, to Calgary, to Montreal. No, the view is much wider than that. Here is Kellough, reading a small part from this section:\n(20:06)\tAudio clip of Kaie Kellough reading:\t“The Athabasca Glacier recedes into prehistory, dinosaur ice trickling into time’s crystal and wink, reception weakening the further we from the city, clear static between stations.”\n(20:22)\tLinda Morra\tListening to the mellifluous voice of Kellough is part of the pleasure, I think. The Athabasca glacier is part of the Columbia Icefield, located in the Rockies; and this is therefore an invitation for us to consider a much wider perspective, one that’s expansive, that invites us to go back in time, so that we may assume a broader view. The fact that this section is titled “zero” is pertinent, in view of the title of the collection. Remember: when the locus of points have a zero dip, we are at the magnetic equator. But how do we arrive there? How do we produce the “unity of worlds,” to quote the title of the last section of this book? How does Kellough arrive there – when there are multiple story lines and histories and contexts, geographical and otherwise? In the case of this collection, through his own language—the magnetic centre point.\n  And more broadly, through a language that is textured, that resonates and nudges at the conscious and unconscious mind, that provides us with story, history, lineage, context, a sense of belonging even in physical displacement, our magnetic equator—even if it does just happen to be, in my case, an old, clunky old espresso machine that whispers about a life and a memory that remain a part of who I am.\n[Upbeat jazz music fades in and fades out when Morra begins to talk]\nThis is the takeaway section of the episode. I want to recommend to you today a biography I’ve been reading. It’s about novelist Timothy Finley, and it’s titled Tiff by Cheryl Grace. I’ve been reading several biographies of late because of my own research to write the biography of Jane Rule.\nSo the first thing that I can tell you is that this book is beautifully researched and written. A good biography needs to tell a well-researched story, and so the second part of that equation, the story also needs to be well-crafted as it is in this case. The story’s well told because Grace clearly cared about her subject, not just about Finley’s work and contributions as a writer, although those are also foregrounded. She weaves in these great details about Finley’s life, his real love for the environment, his engagement with human rights and his own personal struggles with depression, which consistently held my attention.\nHope Against Despair was one of his mottoes, and it’s one that I’ve personally been carrying around with me ever since I read it. Generally, Grace has created this evocative portrait of Timothy Finley, a writer who’s left a legacy in literature in Canada. [Theme music begins to play quietly in background]\nThat’s it for today’s episode. Please join me in two weeks time when I speak about Lorena Gale’s, Je me souviens. Thanks for joining me.\n(23:16)\tOutro to Getting Lit with Linda plays:\tThat was Getting Lit with Linda, hosted by Linda Morra. If you have a topic you would like to see covered, write to us at gettinglitwithlinda@gmail.com. Until next time, we hope you continue to get lit!\n(23:43)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play and fades] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(23:57)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month we’ve featured episode seven from season two of Getting Lit with Linda, written and hosted by Linda Morra and co-produced by Marco Timpano. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n(24:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWebCanada.\nStay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds out.\nSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[plays and fades out]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9638","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E4, “Two girls recording literature”: Re-listening to Caedmon recordings, 4 March 2024, Levy and Shwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/two-girls-recording-literature-re-listening-to-caedmon-recordings/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"url: http://viaf.org/viaf/5331160310460458300001\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/21077709-c3ab-4c7d-967f-cfb748bd1868/audio/140742fe-4320-4020-89fd-d0e6e88378a0/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"two-girls-final-mix.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:02:57\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,447,255 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"two-girls-final-mix\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/two-girls-recording-literature-re-listening-to-caedmon-recordings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-03-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Featured graphic credit: photographs by Phillip A. Harrington, courtesy of Evan Harrington\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nOnion, Charlie. “Caedmon Spoken-Word Recordings go Digital.” Wag: a magazine for decadent readers,\\n\\nJune 2002, http://www.thewag.net/books/caedmon.htm. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration.” NPR, December 2002,\\n\\nhttps://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration.\\n\\nAccessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon.” HarperCollins.com. https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/caedmon. Accessed 14\\n\\nNov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading: Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings,\\n\\nMarianne Moore, William Empson, Stephen Spender, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur reading #604.” n.d. Sound recording. MSC199 #604.. Simon Fraser University Sound Recordings Collection, Simon Fraser University Archives, Burnaby, B.C. November, 2023.\\n\\n“Mattiwilda Dobbs – Bizet: FAIR MAIDEN OF PERTH, HIgh F, 1956 ” Youtube, uploaded by\\n\\nsongbirdwatcher, June 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxZZtxM8ykam-Rml9Q7ij4J2OIWLrx3lUB.\\n\\nEtude 8 Dimitri by <a href=”https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/227639″>Blue Dot Sessions</a>\\n\\nFrost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking.” Poetry Foundation,\\n\\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking. Accessed 30 January 2024.\\n\\n“File:Mattiwilda Dobbs 1957.JPEG.” Wikipedia,\\n\\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mattiwilda_Dobbs_1957.JPG. Accessed 14 February 2024.\\n\\nHarrington, Philip A. “[Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen of Caedmon Publishing Company pushing a\\n\\nwheelbarrow full of boxes of their recordings of modern literature in New York City]”. December, 1953.\\n\\n“How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers.”\\n\\nWriters and Company. CBC, July, 2023.\\n\\nhttps://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-two-young-women-captured-the-voices-of-literary-greats-1.6912133. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“January 20, 1961 – Poet Robert Frost Reads Poem at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration.” Youtube,\\n\\nuploaded by Helmer Reenberg, January 15, 2021,\\n\\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILGO3gVlTU.\\n\\n“Oread.” H.D. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48186/oread. Accessed 30\\n\\nJanuary 2024.\\n\\n“The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading 2LP Caedmon TC 2006 Vinyl Record.” Boundless\\n\\nGoodz,\\n\\nhttps://www.ebay.com/itm/374791681072?itmmeta=01HPJMRA2M8G311HNSS83Q5Z2G&has\\n\\nh=item5743533430:g:ESgAAOSwdLVkomcL&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8OcrOX8GrjGcCK\\n\\nd73gETrLCg9HgtTomQcdBFQsfuKIbZJCerwOPQAP8v95zLuLDTLfzKCEpHr6ciRZXXlKA1iJ\\n\\nKJQIZBNBP68Ru6LBfSoa%2FfPEP7%2Fa%2BIRslUZ5i2RDM4SZwOC2l6XlwBx5qb9ihywjJ\\n\\nIDK71WKdGDo8mhOnddK0NPBgnn26N5JH6N9DSuSkFkjy7BoQeE7hzXcLV76vAmN2Q6IK\\n\\nkpjLN5l%2B4M36eDSYpXhiFfxsmyok%2Bn1aYfEds46k8%2FfPX0doDJv7qXPKwVi5g99nrS\\n\\nnyZ95AdrCWpR3Tj3%2FkxYp0wlrb2dQ%2F%2FuEaktQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBMwqHh1\\n\\nLRj. Accessed 14 February 2024.\\n\\nWilliams, Williams Carlos. “The Seafarer.” University of Washington,\\n\\nhttp://www.visions05.washington.edu/poetry/details.jsp?id=18. Accessed 30 January, 2024.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549744517120,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In February 1952, Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, two recent graduates of Hunter college, founded Caedmon records, the first label devoted to recording spoken word. In this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon records. They pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957 from and now held in SFU’s Special Collections. Michelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson, of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis, of SFU’s English department, about William Carlos Williams’ reading of “The Seafarer.” As they listen to the poems together, they debate what it means to listen to as opposed to read these poems, with the recordings providing what Holdridge described as a “third-dimensional depth, that a two-dimensional book lacked.”\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music fades]\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and –\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod. Each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n(00:50)\tKatherine McLeod\tCaedmon Records. Did you know that Caedmon Records was the first label to sell recordings of poetry? Well, you might have known that, but did you know that it was started by two women? I didn’t know that before listening to this episode.\nIn this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon by listening to an interview with its founders, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, an interview that was conducted by Eleanor Wachtel for CBC Radio.\nIn listening to this episode, I was struck by how we are hearing the history of this formative record label for recording spoken word, hearing it as a story being told out loud on the radio.\n(00:01:35)\tKatherine McLeod\tMichelle and Maya then pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell’s legacy by listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957. They listen to two experts and talk about what they heard.\nMichelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple-Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis of SFU‘s English department about William Carlos Williams’s reading of the “Seafarer.”\nAll of the archival audio in this episode is held in SFU‘s archives and special collections. But this Caedman record that these poems were recorded on, Caedman Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, was a popular one. And as I listened, I went over to my bookshelf and pulled it out. Yes, I happened to have a copy of this very same record. I take it out of its cover, I put it on, lowering the needle –\n(00:02:35)\tAudio\t[Static audio starts playing]\n(00:02:42)\tUnknown\tIf I told him, would he like it? Would he like it if I told him? Would he –\n(00:02:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tHere is episode four of season five of the SpokenWeb Podcast. “Two Girls recording literature: Re-listening to Caedmon Recordings.”\n(00:02:56)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice]\n(00:03:06)\tMichelle Levy\tIf you have ever rummaged through a box of cassettes in a library, or secondhand bookshop, or flipped through LPs in a thrift store, you will probably stumble across a Caedmon recording. These feature poets, playwrights, and fiction writers reading from the work originally released on vinyl and later on cassette.\nCaedmon is a record label founded by two women, Barbara Cohen Holdridge and Marianne Roney Mantell, in 1952. Recent graduates of Hunter College, Holdridge was working in book publishing, Mantell in the music recording industry when they heard that Dylan Thomas was reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. They attended this reading and finally prevailed upon him to record with them. And the rest, as they say, is history. The creation of the first business to capture audio literature for a mass audience.\n[Soft piano begins to play in the background] In this episode, we want to bring to the surface the critical role that Holdridge and Mantell played in this early history of spoken word recordings.\n(00:04:14)\tMaya Schwartz\tThis episode begins with a brief overview of Holdridge and Mantell’s founding of Caedmon. The women told their story in a marvellous interview with Eleanor Wachtel. Given now over 20 years ago, in 2002, to celebrate Caedmon’s 50th anniversary and recently rereleased to celebrate Wachtel’s incredible 33-year run as host of the CBC’s Writers and Company.\nWe draw from this interview to allow us to hear Holdridge and Mantell telling their story in their own voices.\n(00:04:46)\tMichelle Levy\tIn the second and longest part of this episode, we pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from one of their recordings, held in SFU’s special collections, The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, an anthology first released in 1957.\nMaya and I each selected a few poems from this collection that we enjoyed listening to and asked two colleagues, both of whom were scholars of poetry, as well as poets themselves, to share their thoughts on the recordings. I discussed Robert Frost’s reading of “After Apple-Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University. Maya chatted with Steve Collis of our English department at SFU about William Carlos Williams’ reading of the “Seafarer.”\nWe talked about what it meant to listen as opposed to reading these poems on the page. What elements of the poet’s performance surprised us, as well as a range of other details, from the pronunciation of certain words to the speed at which they read? We notice, for example, how Frost ignores line breaks in his reading, whereas Williams gives great emphasis to them. These elements of the poem’s delivery provide what Barbara Holdridge described to Wachtel as third-dimensional depth.\n(00:06:04)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth that a two-dimensional book lacked.\n(00:06:19)\tMichelle Levy\tIf you look at a Caedmon recording, you’ll find little contextual information. In the treasury held at SFU, we no longer have the original LP or cassette. It apparently has been discarded and re-copied onto a new cassette. Further, we have only half of the treasury, the third and fourth sides of the LP, as it was first released. The first and second sides, which included Dylan Thomas’ “Christmas in Wales,” do not make it into our collection.\nIn the Writers & Company interview with Holdridge and Mantell, however, we learn crucial details about their motivations for recording poets.\n(00:06:55)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI came to this concept as a result of attending too many classes in literary criticism. I had a strong sense that what I was hearing and what I was reading had to do with the critic and not with the poet or the author. And here was an opportunity to create, or to find another original firsthand source: what the poet or author heard in his or her mind.\n(00:07:26)\tMichelle Levy\tHere, Mantell explains how they’ve worked with authors prior to recording.\n(00:07:32)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI think also we didn’t just take them and sit them in front of a microphone. We spent a lot of time beforehand with the author in an effort to shake off that sense of tightness, uptightness, and fear that one gets in front of a microphone, particularly an author who says, “Oh, I’m not a performer. I’m…” It’s okay, we’re here. Just talk to us.\n(00:08:01)\tMaya Schwartz\tIn addition to meeting and recording authors, Holdridge and Mantell were also running a business. Here’s what they had to say about that experience.\n(00:08:11)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tIt was wonderful. Men were not hostile. They were very accepting. We found a young banker, a vice president, who eventually lent us money. We used to trundle our little cart named “MattiWilda” from our offices on 31st Street to the RCA plant on 24th Street and bring it back, loaded with heavy boxes of records, long-playing records, and along the way, dozens of men would spring to our sides to help us up the curb and down –\n(00:08:47)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\t[Overlapping] We couldn’t have done it by ourselves.\n(00:08:49)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\tYou named your cart?\n(00:08:49)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tMattiwilda.\n(00:08:51)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tWell, why not? Why not?\n(00:08:52)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\t[Laughs]\n(00:08:53)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tShe was named after Mattiwilda Dobbs, who was a reigning soprano of the time.\n(00:08:58)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\tI see.\n(00:08:59)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\t[Inaudible: I would go that woman, but one better.] I think we probably succeeded where men would’ve failed because we were women. On the one hand, men were chivalrous. On the other hand, when they attempted to put us down because we were two girls, etcetera, etcetera, we outwitted them, we outsmarted them, and, occasionally, we drank them onto the table. [Interviewer laughs] So I think, in a major way, we were successful precisely because we were women.\n(00:09:32)\tMichelle Levy\tIn their recordings. Mantell and Holdridge create a rich archive that survives for our exploration today. Maya and I listened to the recordings. I found a few poems that intrigued me, including Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” a poem that seems so deceptively prosaic, like a lot of Frost’s poetry. I settled on it, however, after finding that Susan Wolfson, a fellow Romanticist, had recently written an article on Frost, including a discussion of this poem and agreed to discuss it with me.\n(00:10:03)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah. I’m Susan Wolfson. I teach at Princeton University in the Department of English.\n(00:10:10)\tMichelle Levy\tThank you for coming. A question for you just before we get to this specific recording: Do you recall if you had heard Frost reciting his poems before in other recordings?\n(00:10:23)\tSusan Wolfson\tNo. I mean, Frost gave readings his entire life. I remember his reading at Kennedy’s inauguration with great difficulty ’cause the sun was in his face,\n(00:10:37)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping, Robert Frost at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy]\nThe no order of the [inaudible] –\n(00:10:38)\tSusan Wolfson\tSo he couldn’t read the poem that he wrote for the occasion but just sort of pulled-\n(00:10:42)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping] I can’t stand the sun.\n(00:10:45)\tSusan Wolfson\tThe problem gift outright.\n(00:10:45)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping] New Order of the ages that got –\n(00:10:49)\tSusan Wolfson\tBut I was in high school when that happened.\n(00:10:53)\tMichelle Levy\tWe begin with listening to Frost reading “After Apple-Picking.”\n(00:10:58)\tRobert Frost, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tMy long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take. / Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear. / My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder round.\n(00:12:01)\tRobert Frost, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tI feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired. / There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. / For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth. / One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Where he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, / Or just some human sleep.\n(00:12:51)\tMichelle Levy\tSo there we go. What comes to mind listening to that for you?\n(00:12:56)\tSusan Wolfson\tYou know, one surprise to me was his reading against every edition of the poem that I found to say, “cherish in hand, let down, and not let fall.” I’m wondering if in reading it, whether he, I don’t know, whether he was, he had this in memory, but in memory, he may have just decided to revise that line, or he may have misremembered it on the cue of the repetition.\nAs I said, I was a little struck by the monotone and the rapidity with which he read. And for a formalist such as Frost, who famously said things like “poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net” or that “you have to have a metrical pattern for the rhythm to ruffle against.” I mean, he’s not a formalist, but he’s certainly very form conscious and form attentive.\n(00:13:54)\tSusan Wolfson\tI was struck by how often he didn’t pause at the end of lines. In some cases, the enjambment was quite dramatic, “a load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much,” I mean makes that almost continuous, goes past the period. But this is a poem that is remarkable for varying its line lengths between 12 syllables and two syllables, with all being the shortest, one and the longest, one being the first. And that kind of wavering and the way that interplays with the surreal temporalities where you think you’re in a past tense, then you’re in a kind of present tense of remembering a past moment, and then you’re in a kind of dreamscape where those temporalities overlay, it would seem that poetic form is very much involved in those evocations too.\n(00:15:00)\tSusan Wolfson\tBut Frost reads this at such a pace that it almost sounds like prose. I know that he is committed to the kind of vernacular of poetry rather than poetic diction, which is fine. I mean, it makes his poetry sound authentic, genuine, and accessible. But I didn’t expect it to sound like prose. So that was my take.\nBut that sense that words still have a kind of constitutive magic [Music starts playing in the background] they create and produce an experience; they don’t just refer to it or represent it. And the presence of Frost is just a kind of magical enactment of that.\n(00:15:49)\tMichelle Levy\tWe then discussed how Frost recorded his poem in a studio, and we wondered whether the lack of an audience contributed to the monotone, with the result, when listening, that you lose the line breaks as well as the rhymes.\n(00:16:02)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah, those are lost. And the rhymes that really are the kind of line-end punctuation, whether this is not like the verse, it is metrically various.\nAnd, that’s part of its astonishment, that the way in which these lines seem organic with thinking and yet, use, avail themselves of the resources of poetic form to give a kind of pulse and poetic charge to the language. That is part of its sensuous appeal.\n(00:16:45)\tMichelle Levy\tWe then address the deceptive simplicity and accessibility of Frost’s poems, how they contain elements of recognition but also surprising depth.\n(00:16:55)\tSusan Wolfson\tIt’s a kind of ruffling of the surface that you can take these poems on. That’s why they’re so teachable: there’s immediate access to it. And then, you kind of show the students that the ground they think they’re standing on is less stable than they’d like. The joke about the road not taken is that it’s identical to the road taken. So this epic portentousness has made all the difference. It is sort of Frost’s own joke about wanting to have those allegorical moments landmarked, signposted, in your life. He’s got a great comment that what’s in front of you brings up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew. Putting this and that together, that click, that’s the poetry. And sort of almost against these sort of portentous alls that almost is just a really interesting Frost mode. That it teases, it tiptoes, it borders on, but it doesn’t insist.\n(00:18:04)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music begins to play.]\n(00:18:10)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd there’s that line that you quoted in your essay from Frost as a teacher who said that “the role of poetry is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize.” And I love that idea; it’s very Emersonian, too, but what do you think about this poem that we recognize, and is there something in particular that we recognize when listening that we don’t necessarily when reading, although that’s another layer we don’t have to get to, but in terms of this poem, what do you think some of those deeper truths are that the reader or the listener might recognize?\n(00:18:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tThe meditation is part of the every day. It’s not just something that poets do, and poets do in extraordinary moments, but that there there is a way in which this poem, which is really just about something as quotidian as apple-picking, is already possessed with a kind of mental landscape, or mental landscaping of it that takes possession, that you can find yourself thinking about just quotidian events that stay with you. That wonderful sort of memory as he’s drowsing off, before he is imagining the source of sorcerers apprentice explosion of apple after apple that I am drowsing off. I mean, there’s another present tense, right, that he is – “I didn’t fill” and then suddenly, “but I am done with apple picking now.”\n(00:20:00)\tSusan Wolfson\t“Now” is so weird because it just means that he’s not done. It’s just this moment. So does that “now” mean existentially, now I am never gonna pick another apple again, I’ve had it with apples? Or is it just for the day? And as he’s thinking about that, and the scent of apples, which is so immediate, “I am drowsing off.” So you think, okay, well, that’s a departure from apple picking. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take.” Has nothing to do with apple picking.\n(00:20:58)\tSusan Wolfson\tHe is on his way to the orchard, and it’s a moment of whimsy and optical illusion that he indulges in, a different way of looking at the world just for a moment. And that’s what he’s dreaming of. And as he’s sort of recollecting that, it dissolves back into his dream, “what form my dreaming was about to take.” And then the form that his dream is about to take is apple-picking with a vengeance. I mean, this is partly a Wordsworthian spot of time that is captured in poetry and reproduced in the composition of the poetry itself. It comes back as an event of apple-picking in the poetry. Keats is interesting because it’s hard not to think about autumn without thinking of Keats, but Keats is not a labourer; he’s an observer.\n(00:21:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tSo when he’s looking at the boughs that load and bless, you know, they’re loaded, blessed with fruit. I mean, he’s real; his work is poetic labour, but he’s not on a ladder. Doing apple picking. Frost has a different relationship with that. This is much more Wordsworthian say in which the kind of physical events of stealing eggs from a nest high on the crags where the wind is blowing you sideways or feeling the oars tremble in your hands as your joyride in a boosted boat suddenly possesses you with a certain kind of tremor, of guilt or possible punishment if you’re busted. That’s a kind of visceral memory that Wordsworth has that he turns to poetry to reproduce because it’s so thrilling in just that, even to remember it, that he feels it all over again as he’s writing about it.\n(00:22:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd this is a kind of immersive, at the moment, but the moment is everywhere in Frost. It is both the day’s labour, but then after apple-picking and trying to go to sleep and not yet being asleep, but the day replaying and in surreal dimensions, in that kind of half space of mind between sleeping and waking, which, of course,, is a space of poetry. That’s what the poetic composition fills up and overfills. Even that funny little thing about the woodchuck at the end, “one can see what will trouble the sleep of mine.” That “what will trouble” whatever sleep it is, which is to say that maybe it’s not sleep at all, but it’s gonna be this sort of possession of one’s mind by the day’s labour. “One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Were he not gone,”\n(00:23:49)\tSusan Wolfson\t“The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe it’s coming on, / Or just some human sleep.” Of all the animals to pick, I mean, woodchuck, a creature defined by its labour, right? I mean, that’s the eponym. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? I mean, that’s, you know, he knows that he knows that riddle. And yet, even the woodchuck gets to hibernate. I mean, really, to get as close to death as you can. And just as a way of getting through the winter. Whether it’s like his “long sleep,” and that plays against “my long two-pointed ladder,” right? That brings that word back, but now it’s sleep rather than labour. His “long sleep, as I describe it coming on,” and what a great piece of ambiguous syntax.\nWilliam Emison would chew on this line, right? Because the “as” is both comparative and temporal at the same time, in that his long sleep at the moment that I am describing it is coming on, and as a comparison that I can’t quite make, or just some human sleep. And human sleep, the joke of this poem, is not quite sleep. It’s, you know, psychic rehearsal over and over again.\n(00:25:19)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd, to go back to that idea of recognition, there is something about the physical exhaustion that launches him into this more mystical semi-sleep, un-sleep space, which I find interesting too because it’s almost like he’s, you know, I think about like an over-exhausted to toddler, right? Who can’t settle for themselves?\n(00:25:43)\tSusan Wolfson\tHe’s done it all day, and of course, this is every day. You don’t just have one day when you pick apples, right? This is a seasonal chore.\n“And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now.”\nThat does sound like an existential proclamation. And yet there’s this sense that there is just too much and that he is in default, that he has broken a contract to get every damn apple. Even those prepositions, “after apple-picking,” that it almost, by the time you’re at the end of the poem, “after” has this sense of going after, I mean, of, in other words, of pursuing almost as a poetic subject. It’s the poetic sequel as well as the temporal sequel. But after apple-picking, with apple-picking, I’ve had too much of apple-picking. When a phrase gets repeated three times, it’s, it’s not done with, it’s –\n(00:27:02)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd I’m thinking through your discussion and listening to you recite some lines that are very different from Keatsian’s wonder at the kind of bounty of the harvest, right? There’s a kind of exhaustion. He’s overwhelmed.\n(00:27:19)\tSusan Wolfson\tKeats is not labouring. He’s not part of the labour. Yeah. He’s not part of the harvest force. So until then until, what is it? I don’t have it. Oh, I should have it memorized. This is sort of a moment that just is for Keats; the joke is you think it’s gonna go on forever.\nSo, “To bend with apples the moss cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; / To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”\nIt’s Keats’ joke about this moment that seems infinite but isn’t. He’s looking at a world that is just still burgeoning and producing life. That’s a very different kind of autumn genre from the labour genre. The other thing about companies being fruitful and multiply is that you have now entered into a world of hard daily labour, which will never be over. That’s the penalty of having lost Eden because of an apple. So, that sort of patched into this too. Not with the world of sin but this is the world of labour.\n(00:28:41)\tMusic\t[Intrumental music begins to play in the background.]\n(00:28:59)\tMichelle Levy\tSo I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to end with you asking you to read the poem, and then maybe we can just pick up any threads that come out of that reading. Anything that we haven’t discussed. But it would be lovely to hear your recitation.\n(00:29:17)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah, part of it is that the slow time of reading and of immersion in the labour is something I would kind of want to bring to this, in comparison to, say, Frost’s seeming interest to get from the beginning to the end as efficiently as he can. So I’ll read it and see what you think.\n(00:29:44)\tSusan Wolfson, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tAfter Apple-Picking.\n“My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass.”\n(00:30:31)\tSusan Wolfson\t“It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take. / Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear. / My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder round. / I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired. / There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. / For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth. / One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Where he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe it’s coming on, / Or just some human sleep.”\n(00:32:11)\tMichelle Levy\tI heard the rhymes [laughs] in a way that I didn’t hear before. “Bough,” “now,” “all in all,” I mean, they really are punctuated.\n(00:32:21)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd the repetitions that roll up with the rhymes, too. Yeah, I think that those are part of it. That’s the kind of pulsing or rhythm of the mind of a poet in composition, is that you are picking up words as words for their sensuous value, as words.\nAnd rhyme and meter are one way to bring that value to language. That’s even the sort of the particular local knowledge of knowing the difference between stem end and blossom end. Now that’s a good case of something. If you think about it, you realize that’s exactly why you can tell that difference. It’s a stem, oh yeah, therefore the flower was there, and the fruit grows up behind the flower.\nBut that’s a sort of casual local speak that may not be the literacy of every reader, and you kind of have to meet Frost halfway just to have the mind of Frost, that you know that difference. So that’s the sort almost, that’s one of those cases where you almost know, and then, you know, as soon as someone says it to you,\n(00:33:41)\tMichelle Levy\tYeah, it’s a beautiful description, and you get that repetition within the line that echoes. There are so many apples, but yet there’s this particularity about each apple. Each apple has this pattern of the two different ends, but each apple is different.\n(00:34:00)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd “every fleck of russet showing clear.” That’s the language of someone who’s looking at the apple, the way he looked at that pane of glass. Each apple is a sort of event for him.\n(00:34:13)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd you did a lovely job of slowing, really slowing down at the end, to really linger over those last couple of lines.\n(00:34:22)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah,\n(00:34:23)\tSusan Wolfson\tWell, there’s a sort of point of sleep where language begins to come minimal. But I still think that comparison to the woodchuck is just a hilarious piece of wit. It’s almost tonally inappropriate that he could have just said the woodland bear or something like that. There’s something he could fit in two other syllables of the brown bear. But, the idea that this creature of labour, whose very name comes from his labour is, I just think, hilarious, that he gets to sleep,\n(00:35:05)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd as you said, there’s a slight touch that even though we have the ladder pointing towards heaven, and you have this invocation of the fall, as you say, he doesn’t quite take us there. It’s, he’s –\n(00:35:20)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah [overlapping]\n(00:35:20)\tMichelle Lee-ve\tHe’s provoking us. He’s suggesting it, but ultimately, is that what the poem’s about? Or is it –\n(00:35:26)\tSusan Wolfson\tKicking an apple, a ladder pointing towards heaven, which means the sky. But there’s a whiff of the metaphysical there. That is part of the kind of dream world, too, that the one thing the ladder isn’t doing is it’s not Jacob’s ladder. You’re not going up that ladder to heaven. So it’s almost like a joke that this ladder is part of the instruments, part of the tool shed of labour.\nAnd you know, it does come with a slight default or transgression, a barrel I didn’t fill. But that’s not on the level of sin. If anything, if you’re trying to work this out on the map of Eden, you’re in trouble of picking more apples as your salvation. It’s almost a joke about that too.\n(00:36:18)\tSusan Wolfson\tI just kind of like this poem for the way in which ordinary language becomes a kind of record of memory, of dreaming, of labour, of self-ironizing and existential self-reckoning in relation to poetry that is embedded in multiple traditions from Genesis to Keats, to romanticism, to poems of labour, and yet doesn’t insist that you do the math. When you add this up, all those aspects of human language and human poetic tradition kind of impinge or press on your sense of how to read this poem, how to understand this poem. And then part of reading a poem like this, that’s loaded with temp, station for you to do that kind of work, is to feel the temptation and then feel that that’s not really what’s going on. That this isn’t an allegory of a fall of man.\n(00:37:29)\tSusan Wolfson\tI mean, the New England word for autumn, Keat’s poem is too autumn, not too full, but the New England word, the American word for that is fall. And so that also sort of comes in as a kind of tacit understanding that we don’t have a fall without the fall. But it’s not about that. It’s just about the kind of every day, kind of mulling that can make magnified apples appear and disappear. It can be magnified. It takes possession of your mind. It’s surreal, it’s real. It’s a dream; it’s waking. It’s just great. It’s just a great sort of experience going from word to word and line to line.\n(00:38:13)\tMichelle Levy\tThank you so much. It’s been a wonderful conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time to work through the poem so thoughtfully with me.\n(00:38:25)\tSusan Wolfson\tWell, it was so much fun.\n(00:38:25)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing]\n(00:38:41)\tMaya Schwartz\tHi there. It’s Maya, your co-host for today’s episode. For part two, I interviewed my professor, Stephen Collis.\n(00:38:49)\tStephen Collis\tI’m Stephen Collis, a poet, and I teach poetry at Simon Fraser University.\n(00:38:53)\tMaya Schwartz\tWe sat down in his office at SFU to chat about the poem “Seafarer” by William Carlos Williams. I began our conversation by asking Steve why he chose this poem. But first, here’s the Caedmon recording of Williams reading the “Seafarer.”\n(00:39:12)\tWilliam Carlos, recording for Caedmon, part of the “The Poets of Anglo-Saxon England” collection, 1955\t“The sea will wash in / but the rocks – jagged ribs / riding the cloth of foam / or a knob or pinnacles / with gannets- / are the stubborn man. / He invites the storm; he / lives by it! / instinct with fears that are not fears / but prickles of ecstasy, / a secret liquor, a fire / that inflames his blood to / coldness so that the rocks / seem rather to leap / at the sea than the sea / to envelope them. They strain / forward to grasp ships / or even the sky itself that / bends down to be torn / upon them. To which he says, / It is I! I am the rocks! / Without me, nothing laughs.”\n(00:40:15)\tMaya Schwartz\tWhy did you choose this poem? I sort of gave you two to choose from. Have you read it before? What, sort of initially struck you?\n(00:40:23)\tStephen Collis\tI don’t remember having read it before. So that may be part of the attraction. Again, that a poet I’m reasonably familiar with, if not, have studied exhaustively. So it was just one I don’t really know of. And, but it’s everything that attracted me to it is in the reading of it. In the way he reads it, which is extraordinary. I don’t know. Should I just jump right into why that is because that’s for the next question? Because it’s the quality of his voice, which I knew it had that quality from maybe other recordings, I guess, and it’s kind of a known thing, if people know about that kind of poetry, they know that he had a funny voice, i.e. it’s relatively high pitched. It’s kind of fragmented and rough and ragged, and we have recordings of him as an old man, right?\n(00:41:08)\tStephen Collis\tBecause this is the 1940s or fifties or something like that, so he’s probably in his seventies. But I think he always sounded that way, [laughs]. He, as a younger person, kind of sounds like some sort of grandmother or, I mean, doesn’t he? So I kinda like that. I like that there’s a contrast in it between the kind of vaguely male-ish sexuality that’s in it, which he’s sort of known for, too, I guess. And this crackly grandma voice, which is kind of funny, [laughs].\nSo one, that’s one thing, the quality of his voice being so fragile and kind of unattractive, right? You don’t wanna listen. So, nonetheless, in that kind of ugliness of his voice, seeming fragility and vulnerability, I’m kind of attracted to that aspect of it.\nThen the other thing is the excessive pausing, which is, I love when a poet reads their line breaks or leans into their line breaks in such a way that he really does here. That first line, you just, you get the first line, you feel like you wait forever for the second line. Hang in there [inaudible], and I know there’s more, buddy. What’s it gonna be? What’s, what’s coming here? That’s fascinating to me, too.\n(00:42:18)\tMaya Schwartz\tThe pauses line up with the line breaks.\n(00:42:20)\tStephen Collis\tFor the most part. They don’t completely, and I think poets, there are poets who never read their line breaks, right? That’s not the point. They scoot right through them. Maybe that’s because there’s a narrative element, or whatever, or it’s just the lines aren’t enjambed. There isn’t a natural kind of pausing, a phrase that the line breaks.\nThen there are poets who, whether or not it’s enjambed, they like to hang on the line break. And I tend to like that. I tend to like the kind of pressure it puts on the voice and the reading when you have that tension there; it kind of goes back to that thing like what T.S. Eliot said about, was it T.S. Eliot? No. Who was it? Robert Frost says that writing poetry without rhymes is like playing tennis without a net or something like that.\n(00:43:08)\tStephen Collis\tA rhyme meter is like playing tennis without a net. And there’s just some, I get what he means. Like, I think it’s, I definitely don’t write rhyme and metered poetry myself, but, and I tend to prefer poetry that isn’t rhymed and metered, but unless I get what he’s saying, he’s saying is, you need this sort of abstract tension framework to work against.\nAnd that’s what line breaks are providing here. Just there’s this frame of the short lines going down the page, and the poet is pushing against them every time. So, a couple of times, he does push right through them and runs under the next line or two pretty quickly, but it’s rare in this poem. And he mostly pushes right up hard against those line breaks, and you really feel him pushing them.\n(00:43:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tDid you notice anything else about the way that Williams read this poem? Like his accent or inflection tone, speed, or emphasis?\n(00:43:56)\tStephen Collis\tTotally. There’s something in the accent, too, which, for us sitting here in Canada, maybe is just generically American about it. But then there’s a wonderful emphasis on certain words. There are the words he just draws out, right?\nLike he, obviously the first line, but individual words like “instinct,” right? “He invites the storm; he / lives by it! / Instinct,” and he kinda says it like that; he just pulls on that word, which is fascinating. And no real reason for it, I don’t think. It’s not like, it’s like a heavy syllable, a weirdly metered kind of word. But he really leans in; he does that a couple of times, “ecstasy,” maybe a little bit, and “liquor,” right? “A secret liquor,” basically really getting the “K” sounds. So he’s playing to the score he’s written for himself.\nHe’s really leaning into those notes you can really play hard and draw out in the reading of it, and it does build toward the ends, right? You get that exclamation mark near there, the end, but he’s, or get too near the end. But his voice does start to rise in volume, released at the end as he tries to bring it to this dramatic moment where the rocks speak. You know? “It is I!” [Laughs]\n(00:45:14)\tMaya Schwartz\tThat’s a hilarious reading.\n(00:45:16)\tStephen Collis\t[Laughs] I know. It really is.\n(00:45:17)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd then it settles back down again, “Nothing laughs.”\n(00:45:20)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Which is such a weird last line in the poem, right? Like, “nothing laughs,” I don’t get the, I walk by thinking I don’t get the joke. Was I supposed to laugh?\n(00:45:29)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah.\n(00:45:29)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing in the background]\n(00:45:35)\tMaya Schwartz\tDo these sorts of different emphases change the way that you interpret the poem?\n(00:45:40)\tStephen Collis\tYeah, that’s a good question. To some extent, I think they do. And a lot of that, to me, rides on those two words at the end of a line. It’s probably the longest line on the page, but it’s, they strain, are the words, I would say.\nAnd, this definitely draws our attention to the straining, the tension in the poem, like literally physical tension that he’s playing with, really heavily emphasizing those line breaks, really drawing out the pauses at the end of his lines, or leaning into a word like “instinct,” which just draws out into this much larger space than it should be on the page. That those words they strain really leap out at me as marking this, or reminding me that this is a poem about this kind of tensions that the writer seems to be really interested in. I mean, they’re elemental, you know, it’s sea and land, but they’re encapsulated in his voice and how he reads the poem.\n(00:46:40)\tStephen Collis\tDo you think that listening to the voice of the poet brings us closer to Williams himself?\n(00:46:46)\tMaya Schwartz\tWell, that is pretty wonderful. I love poetry readings. I know a lot of people will say this, it still feels like it’s a necessary part of poetry, that it’s being read aloud by the author. And you always notice something. If you’re familiar with a poem on a page and you have not yet heard the author read it, then you hear them read it. There’s always something revelatory to that. Sometimes disappointing, ii’s like “really? You’d read it like that?” And I don’t, I wouldn’t do that, or that interests me less now that you’ve done that to it.\nBut it is, there’s a quality of, well, it’s got to do with body, embodiment, I think. And poetry to me is very embodied language. And you need to be in the body that felt, heard, breezed, spoke it the way they felt they should or needed to, or would on that occasion. I think that’s significant. So there is, you’re getting a sense of William’s body there, of his breath and his attention and his voice. And, again, that’s what all those heavy line breaks do too. They reemphasize that straining of the voice to get outta the body and take up that oral space of the room around it.\n(00:48:00)\tMaya Schwartz\tThe founders of Caedmon have said that their goal was to capture as much as possible what the poets heard in their heads as they wrote.\n(00:48:08)\tStephen Collis\tNice.\n(00:48:09)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd I think that, yeah, you did a good job of signing up what we gained from knowing what it sounded like to them. And there’s also sort of a challenge, or like a, there’s also a benefit to not knowing, I think so, too. Is there anything that you think is particular to this poem that makes it well suited for that recording? And it might explain why Williams would choose to read it and have it be recorded?\n(00:48:36)\tStephen Collis\tSo it might have been a poem that, he just liked how this one played when he read it a lot. He is like, I like how I get to play with the tensions and line breaks here, but he works in his ear or in his body, and, then there’s the, does this poem ring or chime off of, or evoke those other seafarer poems in some way? And then maybe he was enjoying that.\n(00:48:58)\tMaya Schwartz\tI asked Steve to say more about how he thought Williams might be evoking earlier seafarer poems.\n(00:49:05)\tStephen Collis\tWell, there’s such an interesting tradition there, because there’s the old English, Anglo-Saxon, really early poem, “The Seafarer” that is anonymous. We don’t know who composed it, but we have it.\nAnd Ezra Pound did a translation of it in the very early 20th century at some point there. And Pound’s translation is interesting for a couple of reasons. Like he sort of trimmed off any Christian references in it and sort of made it more of a, I don’t know, kinda like a pagan poem, I guess.\nBut he really, really did work so hard to get that kind of Anglo-Saxon field poem via word choice and via alliteration, and really making sure it was like a chewy, deep resonant poem in the mouth as it were. But I was thinking that the Williams poem maybe has more to do with H.D. than Pound. The three of those people, they knew each other since they were children, right?\n(00:49:58)\tStephen Collis\tThose three poets, they all went to school in Pennsylvania together, and maybe vaguely, they all – Pound dated H.D. for a tiny while. Maybe Williams dated her for a tiny bit too. So it’s, this whole kind of weird sort of high school romance thing behind their poetries’ love triangle. I know, it’s pretty hilarious. And they remain kind of frenemies their whole lives, right? And were very aware of each other their whole lives. So H.D. becomes famous as the quintessential imagist in that era, the poems are these really paired down small, compressed, refined visual entities.\nBut, so if, can I read you H.D.’s, like five or six lines long? This is the one I think of when I think of Williams’ “Seafairer”, I don’t hear Pound’s so much. I hear this poem, called “Oread,” which is like a sea nymph or a sea spirit of some kind. “Whirl up, sea— / whirl your pointed pines, / splash your great pines / on our rocks, / hurl your green over us, / cover us with your pools of fir.” This exact same scene as it were, where Williams poems is set where the sea and the land meet. But they’re also similarly kind of interpenetrating and taking on each other’s qualities. So in the H.D. poem, it’s really clear that the sea has land-like qualities. The sea has pines, the sea has rocks, right? So there’s this really kind of meshing of those, these supposed opposites. They do a bit of that in the Williams’ poem too.\n(00:51:33)\tMaya Schwartz\tThey both seem to have this, almost like they’re talking to the other thing in the poem, like a conversational —\n(00:51:38)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, , I think, I love that word, “ganet.” [Laughs]\nWilliam asking there, he kind of sounds like a ganet. I don’t know what a ganet sounds like for sure. But Williams kind sounds like a seabird. So there’s a little bit of that, but I think they’re both interested in this kind of, dare I say, kinda like a dialectical tension between these opposites sea and land. I think Williams is keyed more into a gendered opposition too.\nHe, in the “Seafairer,” he doesn’t refer to the sea as feminine, although that’s a, maybe, a traditional trope. But he definitely refers to the rocks as masculine. The rocks are a “he,” and they are given his voice to pronounce things at the end. And that feels to me kind of like, a Rejoinder Williams would have for H.D. I’m responding to your sea-ish poems and picking up that same imagery and tropes, but I’m kind of reasserting a kind of maleness. He’s less interested in, let’s say.\n(00:52:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah. Let’s talk about the, the last line. Yeah. how do you interpret that? “Without me nothing laughs.”\n(00:52:56)\tStephen Collis\tI mean, there’s this a this is where I was, I guess I’m getting with the gendered thing. There’s this kind of authority the rocks are claiming over the sea.\nThere it is. I, I who I’m the rocks without me, nothing laughs, you know, laughing is such an instinctual and again, embodied thing that we often don’t have a lot of control over. [Laughs] [Maya agrees]\nIt’s something that just ripples and bubbles up like the sea perhaps might be going too far here [laughs]\nBut the voice, the speaker of this poem is asserting this control. But it’s a weird thing to focus on, you know, to go from this, the awesome power of the sea to like, you know, no giggling. Yeah, you dare giggle in front of me until I tell you it’s okay to giggle here. Yeah. It’s, it’s, yeah. I don’t know. It’s, do, do you have a sense, do you have a take on that last line?\n(00:53:46)\tMaya Schwartz\tI don’t know. I feel like especially listening to him say it, but it sort of seems like it knows that things laugh without him.\n(00:53:58)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Right behind his back.\n(00:53:59)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah. It’s sort of like a –\n(00:54:02)\tStephen Collis\tYeah.\n(00:54:02)\tMaya Schwartz\tLike he has to say it, but it is still got this sort of like awareness.\n(00:54:07)\tStephen Collis\tI mean, it’s not a punchline as a word. But  I wonder if there is just a tiny little wink and nudge and irony there.\nJust laughter, you know? We’re talking about here. It’s not, it’s not this huge elemental, godsend storms and powers that are being invoked. Just a little self-control. Because it does have a nice book ending to the poem in general. Like, so you, especially the way he reads it, right. The sea will wash in and you get this infinite seeming pause before you get, but the rocks is a, there’s a real hard turn in the poem there to rocks. And we come back to it is, I  own the rocks at the end, but again, laughter’s not what you’re expecting at this point. No, it isn’t. It’s either a super assertion of power, but like, I even demand control of your you know, inadvertent muscle reflexes, or is it just, and maybe it’s both probably often in poetry, it’s a little bit of both.\n(00:55:10)\tStephen Collis\tThis sort of pathetic drop into just, eh, it’s just, you know, just don’t laugh at this. Just don’t take this as a joke. Right. Even though we all know it’s kind of a joke that I’m, that I’m striking a big pose here. Yeah. And my outrageous exaggerated pauses and jam is all part of that, you know, weirdness. That’s nothing about reading line breaks. What’s weird about leading rhyme breaks is, you know, sure, we hesitate and stumble when we speak, but to do it in this kind of almost rigid sense to always be pausing in your speech is drawing us an incredible attention to the performance of speaking words.\nSo there is a little bit of laughing at that, at the end, isn’t this ridiculous? And I wonder what that relationship would’ve been like in terms of like, did they just go, “oh, William Carl Williams is gonna read at nine/six, let’s go ask, see if we can record it”.\n[Soft music starts playing in the background]\nIs that, or I wonder what’s going on there? What are the relationships?\n(00:56:09)\tMaya Schwartz\tThey had both just graduated from Hunter College. And they had degrees in Greek Uhhuh, and they heard that Dylan Thomas was going to read Of course. And they were like, “it’d be sick to record ’em.”\nI don’t know where they got that idea from. And they went to, they didn’t record him at the “Y,” they tried to get in contact with him, and it was like a series of passing notes.\nAnd then they tracked him down to the Chelsea Hotel, [Stephen says “Oh my God.”] and they sort of used his drinking to, I think one of them called, they couldn’t get in touch with him, and one of them called him at like 4:30 in the morning when he was just coming back from [Stephen: Get out] a night out and, and [Stephen: drunk as hell] he agreed. And then he missed all there.\n(00:56:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tFinally he showed up and he was, they were drinking “madame” in a bar. And he agreed to, for them to record some of his poems, and he gave them a list and it wasn’t enough. They wanted something for the B-side. And he was like, “oh, I have this story: child’s Christmas in Wales.”\n(00:57:07)\tStephen Collis\tOh, that’s what it is.\n(00:57:08)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd it was the popularity of that story. [Overlapping, Stephen: Yeah.] Which never would’ve been what it is without them recording it. And I guess it was a selling factor, and they were from having him able to get other people. I think they got Lawrence Olivier to read.\n(00:57:22)\tStephen Collis\tCool. It’s got a great history of that project, doesn’t it?\n(00:57:26)\tMaya Schwartz\tMm-Hmm.\n(00:57:26)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing in the background]\n(00:57:31)\tMaya Schwartz\tIn the interview with Wachtel, Mantelle and Holdridge strongly resist the notion that they discovered spoken word poetry. But they do acknowledge the role that Ceadmon played in not only creating an industry for recorded literature, but also in changing the way that poetry is written.\n(00:57:48)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI think that when we began in February of 1952 with Dylan Thomas, we were not creating the notion of spoken poetry, obviously poetry, and its, its reading anate the discovery of writing, or the invention of writing, I should say, by a long time.\nIt was poetry that people used to remember their history or to recreate their history as it were. Homer wasn’t written, Homer was spoken or sung. But I think that over the generations, with the particularly, with the invention of type, and the profusion of published books, the kind of disappearance of the sound began to take over.\nAnd although there was a movement towards poetry readings, which Dylan was part of, it was perhaps a symbiotic relationship. The market was there for our records, and the records created the market. And I do believe that once Caedmon became part of the mainstream, certainly of literary life, I think the writing of poetry changed.\nI don’t think that poets from the late fifties wrote in the same way they were too much aware of the prevalence of, of recorded, or at least of spoken poetry.\n(00:59:21)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tReally, at least two generations have grown up knowing Caedmon records. They, strangers come up to me all the time and tell me what an impact those recordings made in their lives. And this was really the beginning of the spoken word revolution. This multimillion-dollar audio industry that we have now, owes its inception to two girls recording literature who felt that it was a contribution to understanding.\n(00:59:52)\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n(01:01:50)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Low electronic music plays] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThis month’s episode was produced by Maya Schwartz and Michelle Levy. The SpokenWeb podcast team is made up of supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber,Yara Ajeeb, and Co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine MacLeod.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins in background] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n \n\n \n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9639","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E5, They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 1 April 2024, Hammond"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/voices-in-the-waste-land/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Adam Hammond"],"creator_names_search":["Adam Hammond"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/308766715\",\"name\":\"Adam Hammond\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/af327536-5076-40e0-83ef-a37528358ece/audio/636c6309-17a2-415c-855f-91d3f499cd9b/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-mix-sw-ep5-.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:41:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"39,878,229 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-mix-sw-ep5-\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/voices-in-the-waste-land/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-04-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23201562\",\"venue\":\"University of Toronto\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8\",\"latitude\":\"43.66773375\",\"longitude\":\"-79.40030507952156\"}]"],"Address":["170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8"],"Venue":["University of Toronto"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549748711424,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.\n\nIn this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Intro\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:17)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and —\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tFor many of us who have studied, taught, written, or simply enjoyed poetry, we know that some poets’s work comes alive in performance. I remember a professor in my undergraduate insisting that we read 17th century English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost aloud since that was how Milton wrote it. He was blind and composed it through dictation.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Adam Hammond, associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, makes the same argument for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” Elliot’s poem, he asserts, is written as a collection of voices thrown together, and it’s in the oral performance that these different voices can be heard depending, of course, on the performance decisions of the reader.\n(01:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tLuckily for us and for Hammond, a lot of people have read “The Wasteland” out loud, including Eliot himself. Even luckier new digital humanities tools, like “Drift” and “Gentle,” now add computational listening into the Modernist Scholars toolkit, allowing us to ask new questions about poetic performances, including the ones that frame this episode. Is Eliot’s reading as dry, monotonous and hopelessly formal as it might sound to a contemporary listener? Or can computational listening help us to hear it a little differently? Here is episode five of season five of the SpokenWeb Podcast: They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.\n(02:25)\tMusic\t[SpokenWeb theme song begins playing.]\n(02:35)\tAdam Hammond\tI will never forget the first time I heard T.S. Eliot’s voice, he was reading his poem “The Wasteland.”\n(02:41)\tBob Dylan, reading the first four lines of “The Waste Land” for his XM Radio show “Theme Time Radio Hour”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”\n(02:52)\tAdam Hammond\tOkay, I’m just messing with you. That’s not T.S. Eliot. That’s Bob Dylan. This is T.S. Eliot.\n(02:59)\tT.S. Eliot, reading the first few lines of “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”\n(03:14)\tAdam Hammond\tI remember the exact thought I had the first time I heard T.S. Eliot’s voice. I thought he was American. I remember the second thought I had as well. I thought he was young. And I remember the third. I thought he was cool. I was 19 in Christian Lloyd’s first year English class at Queen’s University’s International Study Center in Herstmonceux Castle in England. I was supposed to study engineering, but I was able to convince my parents to let me defer my acceptance to Waterloo when I got a scholarship to live in a castle in England for a year and study English. It’s what I wanted to do more than anything. I was there because I loved modernism. I had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell in high school. They all seemed so badass — so free and brave and defiant.\n(04:06)\tAdam Hammond\tI’d also read T. S. Eliot. I loved “Prufrock.” Even though it spoke about old men with trousers rolled, it seemed like a young person’s poem, about young people’s problems. Like having the courage to be yourself, or rather about not having the courage to be yourself — about “putting on a face to meet the faces that you meet.” I felt like I had taken Eliot’s implicit message in deciding to follow my heart and study English. Prufrock was an unreliable narrator. You were supposed to resist his old-mannish ways; rolled-up trousers were bad. .\n(04:44)\tAdam Hammond\tBut then I was in first year, and we were reading “The Wasteland,” and it seemed infinitely more badass than “Prufrock.” Younger and freer and braver and more defiant. And then my roommate and I found a recording of Eliot reading “The Wasteland,” and he sounded pathetic. He sounded old and lame with a terrible fake British accent.\n(05:04)\tAdam Hammond\tIt was worse than that. He was Prufrock’s dad. It took me years to recover from this.\n(05:14)\tAdam Hammond\tMy name is Adam Hammond. I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. I never went to Waterloo. I continued to scam my parents all the way through undergrad, saying I would go to law school, that English was the perfect pre-law degree, but that a Master’s was useful prep for all the research lawyers were expected to do. I don’t even remember what excuse I used to justify doing a Ph.D, but I did one.\n(05:39)\tAdam Hammond\tI wrote my dissertation on three writers, one of whom was T. S. Eliot. I did this because he fit the idea, not because I loved him. I still hadn’t recovered from that experience of hearing his voice. Then, in 2011, right as I was finishing my Ph.D., something wild happened. The venerable printing house Faber and Faber — the very place where Eliot himself worked as poetry editor, serving as modernism’s ultimate gatekeeper — collaborated with an app developer called “TouchPress” to make an iPad app version of “The Wasteland.”\n(06:12)\tAdam Hammond\tIt sounds like this would be a bad thing. But it wasn’t. It was amazing. It completely changed the way I saw the poem. It made it cool again. It had interviews with celebrities, and I mean celebrities had not only heard of “The Wasteland” but they liked it! It had notes you could make disappear. You could swipe right on the words of the poem, and like magic, the thing that’s typescript would appear, scratched to smithereens by Eliot’s pal Ezra Pound. But the real killer feature — the best thing about “The Wasteland” app by far — the clear single reason that I started loving “The Wasteland” again — was that fact that the app included readings of the poem. You touched a line, and you heard it.\n(06:58)\tAdam Hammond\tThere were a bunch of readings. They were by actual celebrities. One of them was by Viggo Mortensen. One of them was by Alec Guiness. Another was by Fiona Shaw. Jeremy Irons was on there. You could hear the entire Wasteland, all 433 lines of it, read to you by Aragorn, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Aunt Petunia Dursley, or Scar! And some of these voices, let me tell you: they were cool. Check this out.\n(07:29)\tViggo Mortensen, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”\n(07:47)\tAdam Hammond\tThat was exactly how I always wanted Eliot to sound. It was my fantasy of the poet’s voice. American, young, and tough. As I put it in an article I wrote for the Toronto Review of Books shortly after the app came out, Mortensen was the anti-Prufrock. It sounded like he was reading the poem from the seat of a Harley Davidson. There were reasons aplenty for nineteen-year-old me to get excited about “The Wasteland.” But there were also reasons for thirty-year-old me, as I then was, to be excited. I had just finished a dissertation about modernism and the phenomenon of dialogism. That was the word that Russian literary critic Mikhail’s Bakhtin used to describe literary texts made up of lots of genuinely competing voices. The characters in a dialogic novel — Bakhtin’s prime example being Dostoevsky — they got into real debates. They disagreed with one another. They disagreed with their author.\n(08:44)\tAdam Hammond\tThe outcome of their debates were totally unpredictable. It was like they were autonomous – independent of their creator. For Bakhtin, dialogic novels were little snow globe versions of healthy democracies — mini public squares. In my dissertation, I argued that modernist dialogism had a political edge: that in an era of rising authoritarianism and mass control, its purpose was to train its readers how to think for themselves, how to cut through all the bullshit, find their own voice in the maelstrom. .\n(09:17)\tAdam Hammond\tAlthough Bakhtin thought dialogism existed only in novels, one of my prime examples of a dialogic text was “The Wasteland.” I didn’t really see “The Wasteland” as a poem, you see. I saw it as a kind of novel without a narrator. It was an even more extreme form of dialogism than Dostoevsky. There were voices everywhere! But there weren’t even quotation marks. Everything was a voice, but unlike in a Dostoevskian novel, you couldn’t even say for sure where one voice stopped and where the other began.\n(09:47)\tAdam Hammond\tWhen one voice passed the mic to the other voice. This is what I wrote in my review for The Toronto Review of Books — the part where I was explaining why I was so excited about all the audio readings in “The Wasteland” app: “The focus on oral performance [in the app] works especially well with The Waste Land, because it is a poem that demands so emphatically to be read aloud—and indeed only really makes sense once you begin to consider it in the light of oral performance. As Eliot’s original title for the poem, He Do the Police in Different Voices, reminds us, the basic unit of The Waste Land is the voice. But though the poem is built from multiple distinct voices, it does not tell us where they begin or end, or what each is like, nor does it provide a dramatis personae or indicate its speakers. These voices thus only really become apparent in oral performance, where the reader must decide on their cast of characters, and give each one a recognizable personality. Every reading of the poem is thus an interpretation of some of its most fundamental questions.”\n(10:56)\tAdam Hammond\tYes, that’s right, Eliot’s working title for “The Wasteland” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices” — a reference to something someone says about a character in Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend,” who animates his reading of newspaper stories by giving the police men funny voices. And this is all more evidence — because it’s a very cool title — of Eliot’s fundamental and latent badassness. I’ll show you what I mean about the voices in the poem. This is Alex Guiness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, reading the opening of the poem. Listen carefully and you’ll hear him switching into the voice of “Marie.”\n(11:35)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(12:35)\tAdam Hammond\tNow listen to Fiona Shaw — aka Aunt Petunia Dursley — read the same part. She does the voice even more clearly.\n(12:44)\tFiona Shaw, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(13:38)\tAdam Hammond\tViggo Mortensen sure sounds cool, and I can’t help it if he’s still my favourite reader of the poem, but it’s pretty hard to tell if he’s doing a voice there.\n(13:45)\tViggo Mortensen\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(14:34)\tAdam Hammond\tBut hold on. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland.” He’s the one who called it “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” He knew all about the voices. So does he do them? For better or worse, that exact same recording that I heard way back when I was nineteen and living in a castle in southern England — it was on the app, too. So, does Eliot do Marie’s voice in the opening of the poem? I hate to do it to you, but let’s listen to it again.\n(15:04)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(15:59)\tAdam Hammond\tMy answer is: I don’t know, sorta. Like he wants to, but he’s too shy. Too bad at performing, too much of a poet, not enough of an actor.\n(16:12)\tAdam Hammond\tAround the time the app came out, I finished my PhD and became obsessed with the so-called “Digital Humanities.” I started a couple of digital projects for exploring multi-voicedness in “The Wasteland” around this time. I made a website called “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” of course, that presented the poem as a play. Working with a big class of undergraduates, we decided on one way of dividing the poem up into characters and then we created a digital edition with names and special fonts for all the different voices. I also did a computational text analysis project with two computational linguists, Julian Brooke and Graeme Hirst. We used a variety of natural language processing techniques to see where a computer might detect voice switches in the poem. All those moments where the computer thought the mic was being handed from one character to another.\n(17:01)\tAdam Hammond\tThe results of this were really interesting. Approaching the poem with the mind of a machine, the algorithm we developed found switches in places I hadn’t ever imagined them. And on reflection, a lot of these seemed really on point. For instance, I had always heard a switch at “winter kept us warm,” but the computer didn’t see one there. It thought there was a switch at “summer surprised us,” where I personally had never seen a switch. But then listening back to Alec Guiness, that’s exactly where he goes into the voice of “Marie.”\n(17:33)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain;”\n(17:39)\tAdam Hammond\tThe algorithm had opinions and I found these opinions worthwhile.\n(17:45)\tAdam Hammond\tIn a 2005 article on computational analysis of literature, Julia Flanders wrote that we shouldn’t look at computers for objective answers about literary interpretation. As she put it, computers shouldn’t be seen as “factual substantiator whose observations are different in kind from our own — because more trustworthy and objective — but rather computers should be seen as a device that extends the range of our perceptions to phenomena too minutely disseminated for our ordinary reading.”.\n(18:18)\tAdam Hammond\tThey’re not there to confirm our subjective readings of a poem as objectively true. They’re there to challenge our readings with their own readings, which are no more objective than ours, but are definitely different based on things we humans don’t even notice when reading. What I couldn’t do at that time was analyze the audio recordings from the app. I could only look at text, but I was definitely curious about analyzing these audio recordings. I had my own human feelings about which readings on the app were the most dynamic or the most polyvocal or just the coolest. In other words, I had feelings about which reader did the police in different voices better than the others. What I didn’t have was any computational voice to bounce these ideas off of.\n(19:10)\tAdam Hammond\tIn the decade that followed the tools that I dreamed of were developed, many of them by teams led by a poetry scholar named Marit MacArthur. Working with scientists, programmers, humanists and students, she led the development of a set of computational and theoretical tools to analyze audio recordings of performances of poetry. MacArthur’s method works from only two data points: pitch and timing. To get the timing information, we used a program called “Gentle,” designed in collaboration with MacArthur. Basically, we fed the program all of our recordings of all of the app’s performances of “The Wasteland,” and it told us exactly when each word in the poem was spoken and how long the gaps were between these words. My research assistant Jonathan Dick, manually corrected the output of each of these, which was a huge job. This timing data allowed us to calculate how quickly each reader reads in words per minute. Are they fast or are they slow? It calculates the average length of their pauses. So how long do they wait between words? It tells us how often they pause, and it also tells us what kind of rhythms their pauses create. Are they monotonous or do they change like, like, that.\n(20:40)\tAdam Hammond\tLike a William Shatner kind of a complexity of pauses. We used another program called “Drift,” also designed in collaboration with MacArthur, to get pitch information. “Drift” divides the recording into segments of 100th of a second long and gives the fundamental frequency in Hertz for each of these segments. This data can tell us the pitch range in octaves of a given performance. So this just tells you how [Adam deepens his voice] low does the reader go and how [Adam hightens his voice] high. It gives you the pitch speed also in octaves, so this would be like [Adam exemplifies the pitch speed]: if you go from low to high steadily, there’s a speed. And then pitch acceleration, which is like [Adam mimics an engine-like sound] when the pitch changes in these kind of quickly accelerating fashions. All of these can be used as measures of like how dynamic or dramatic a performance is. In a path-breaking 2018 article, “Beyond Poet Voice” in the journal Cultural Analytics, MacArthur and her collaborators Georgia Zellou and Lee M. Miller proposed four dimensions of poetic performance, and argued that these can be described quantitatively using only this timing and pitch data.\n(22:01)\tAdam Hammond\tSo one dimension they called “formal,” that’s readings with predictable rhythms and slower speech. So that’s all from the timing data. They also had a dimension called “conversational.” This is someone who reads with less predictable rhythms and faster speech. So again, you can get all of this from the timing data. They had a dimension called “expressive.” This is someone with a wide pitch range and highly contrasting pitch – up and down, high speed, high acceleration. The final dimension they called “dramatic,” which features long unpredictable pauses, again, timing related. With these tools and theories in place, we were equipped to dig into exciting research questions about the performances on “The Wasteland” app. And to get answers to these questions, both from human readers and machine readers. Our broad questions were: number one, where do readers of “The Wasteland” do voices? Where do these voice switches occur? Where does one voice pass the mic to the other? Number two: how do readers of “The Wasteland” do voices? What aspects of timing and pitch do they alter to indicate voice switches? Number three, this is a big question: Is dialogism or multi-voice a property of texts or performances? Is it inherent in the text or is it something that is only brought out, even created, in performance?\n(23:34)\tAdam Hammond\tFor the digital tools in particular, we had two questions. Number one: can analysis of pitch and timing information capture the way that different readers do voices or is there something other than just pitch and timing that you need to really understand this? Can this data tell us more about the way that readers do these voices than regular human listening can? Can the computational analysis reveal features that humans, more specifically literary scholars who know “The Wasteland” really, really well, can’t notice? Can they, for instance, shake my long held belief that T.S. Eliot is a terrible reader of his own poem? Here’s what we did. Me and my research assistant, Jonathan Dick, each listened to every reading on “The Wasteland” app and wrote up detailed answers to a series of questions about our subjective impressions. Number one: using subjective criteria, place the reader along the dimensions, formal, conversational, expressive, dramatic, including hybrids of these that are identified in the article beyond poet voice.\n(24:37)\tAdam Hammond\tNumber two: come up with two to three moments or passages that you feel best exemplify the above analysis. Number three: note any cases where the four dimensions or the explanation of these dimensions seem inadequate. Number four: briefly described how well, and just “how,” each reader does the voices in the poem. Number five: pick out a couple of passages where the reader clearly does a voice or conversely remarkably fails to do a voice. So that was our questionnaire. I’ll give you a couple of examples we agreed on using a passage from the poem that really brought out the differences. For instance, we both thought that Fiona Shaw was an expressive, dramatic reader, using a wide pitch range, highly contrastive pitch and incorporating a bunch of dramatic pauses. Have a listen,\n(25:28)\tFiona Shaw, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d.”\n(26:05)\tAdam Hammond\tWe also both thought that Viggo Mortensen was a formal inexpressive reader. He speaks slowly. His rhythms are steady and predictable, and he doesn’t do much with pitch.\n(26:16)\tViggo Mortensen, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. / Tereu”\n(26:46)\tAdama Hammond\tBy the way, as a kind of control, we also had the old MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” read the poem, and we analyzed his reading, too. Subjectively, we called it “formal-inexpressive,” just the same as Viggo.\n(27:02)\tMacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading “The Wasteland”\t\n“Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! / Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d.”\n(27:16)\tAdam Hammond\tThen it was time to run the numbers and see how it all shook out computationally. Jonathan and I, and the computer, in many ways weren’t far off in our interpretations of the performances. The computer agreed that Shaw was expressive-dramatic, hardly a surprise. But the computer thought Viggo’s rhythms were a bit more varied that we’d given him credit for: the computer agreed he was inexpressive but, based on his timing data, called him conversational rather than formal. Notably, the computer saw Fred the same way, as conversational and inexpressive. But there was one reader where Jonathan and I just couldn’t agree: Eliot. Have a listen to Eliot reading that same passage. Where would you place him?\n(28:06)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu”\n(28:43)\tAdam Hammond\tJonathan thought that Eliot was formal and inexpressive. In his notes he said, “Eliot is a formal speaker. His tone is neutral and slow. He is also less expressive since his pitch range is rather narrow and non-contrasting. Indeed one might describe him as monotonous.” Jonathan’s impressions agree with what a lot of critics have thought about Eliot over the years. For example, Jason Camlot, in his 2019 book “Phonopoetics” speaks of Eliot’s “calculatedly numb or mechanical delivery”; his delivery, Camlot says, “is robotically liturgical, or […] mechanically oracular”. Now that’s exactly how 19-year-old me felt about Eliot’s reading, and that’s exactly what I hated about it. And yet when I listened to Eliot again to put my subjective responses together, I couldn’t help but disagree with my younger self. In my notes I wrote, “He’s all over the map. There is a lot of formal, but I get the sense that this happens when he’s in ‘formal’ voices. I almost always have the sense that he’s trying to ‘do’ a voice. He is conversational in several voices. One failing he seems to have is varying his rhythms, which are generally monotonous. Definitely, he is expressive in parts, but I get the sense that he is more trying than succeeding.”\n(29:47)\tAdam Hammond\tNow, I wasn’t alone in hearing voices in Eliot’s reading of “The Wasteland,” or at least the attempt to do these voices. For instance, to go back a century, when Eliot read “The Wasteland” to his friend Virginia Woolf at her house in 1922, she wrote up some subjective impressions of her own in her diary. She wrote, “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity.” “One was left,” Woolf said, “with some strong emotion.” Virginia Woolf seems to have considered Eliot an expressive-dramatic reader.\n(30:51)\tAdam Hammond\tAlas, the computer disagreed with Virginia and I. Even Mortensen and Fred got to be formal and conversational. Eliot’s reading was the only one the computer saw as formal and inexpressive. But maybe I just wasn’t running the numbers right. For all of the results I’ve talked about so far, the computer was giving us results for the whole performance. On average, it would look at timing and pitch data for the full poem, all 20 to 30 minutes of it. It’s a long poem. And then give us data like average pause, length, rhythmic complexity of pauses on average, average pitch acceleration for the whole 20 to 30 minute performance. But maybe that wasn’t what was most interesting or useful in terms of calculating the numbers because the poem is made up of lots of different voices after all. What did I care about average numbers for the whole poem?\n(31:53)\tAdam Hammond\tThat would only make sense if there was only one voice for the whole poem. It would be like putting the Norton Anthology in a text analysis algorithm and getting it to tell me what the average style of a hundred different writers was like. Useless, right? You wanna look at the style for each of the individual writers. Now, what we needed to do was compare the way that the different readers did particular voices. How are they reading here and how does that compare to how they’re reading over here? Do they vary the voice from passage to passage? So for the next stage of our analysis, we identified three passages in the poem that are clearly in different voices. We started with a very formal conventionally poetic passage. We call it the “burnished throne “passage. Then a very informal passage, the famous bar scene, and then a passage made up of a wide variety of voices all stuck together, the “Madame Sosostris” passage. Now we would expect a good reader, a reader who really does the voices, to make a huge contrast between the “burnished throne” voice and the “bar scene” voice. If they really get the poem, they’ll do everything they can to make these voices sound different from one another.\n(33:14)\tAdam Hammond\tWell, can you believe it? Analyzing all the performances of these three passages with our pitch and timing tools and then comparing the numbers between passages, Eliot is actually the one who varies his reading the most. In terms of words per minute, pitch speed, pause rate, average pitch, his readings are right up there as the most contrasting. Whereas someone like Fiona Shaw is varying her voice all the time all over the place, Eliot is the one, or one of the ones, who varies his voice the most from passage to passage. So have a listen for yourself. Here is Eliot reading the conventionally poetic “burnished throne” passage.\n(34:01)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)”\n(34:19)\tAdam Hammond\tAnd here he is reading the colloquial “bar scene.”\n(34:23)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can’t. But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”\n(34:42)\tAdam Hammond\tOkay, he’s not the best actor, but you see he’s really trying to do a cockney accent in the bar scene. The computer also placed Elliot among the most dynamic readers for the Madame Sosostris passage. That’s one where there are a lot of voices and we expect a lot of internal variation. This is one where the overall numbers for the passage might actually be interesting. Indeed, although the computer saw Eliot’s performance as overall formal and inexpressive, it actually interpreted his performance of this passage as dramatic and expressive. Let’s listen first to Alec Guinness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, reading this passage and you can really hear the way he does the voices. There’s a difference between a kind of a neutral and narrator like voice. A prophetic voice that speaks the lines “Those are pearls that were his eyes!”, and the Eastern European-accented voice of Madame Sosostris herself.\n(35:39)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.”\n(36:39)\tAdam Hammond\tThe computer saw Guinness as the most dramatic and expressive of all readers in this scene. But guess who it saw as the second most dramatic and expressive? Our friend T.S. Eliot. And really, if you listen, you can see why. Eliot does all the same voices as Guinness. He does that narrator at the start. He does the prophetic voice for the “pearl’s eyes” line, and he does Madame Sosostriswith that same accent.\n(37:06)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.”\n(38:09)\tAdam Hammond\tI think I may hear another voice right at the end there, a Cockney man that Guinness doesn’t do.\n(38:16)\tAdam Hammond\tSo where does all this leave us? Well, for one thing, thanks to MacArthur and our collaborators, we now have accessible and powerful computational tools for analyzing poetic performances. The computational analysis of pitch and timing data, permitted by tools like “Gentle” and “Drift,” produce results that correspond well to human listeners’s subjective impressions. In other words, to tools work, which is important. These subjective impressions vary between individual listeners or even between the same listener over time. When I heard Eliot when I was 19, all I heard was a fake English accent and the worst example of a monotonous formal poet’s voice. Jonathan listening today heard something similar, but the me of today disagreed with both, hearing a genuine attempt, however clumsy, however awkward, to really do all the different voices in the poem.\n(39:09)\tAdam Hammond\tAnd I mean, he was a poet, after all. He was not a famous actor. When they were casting “Star Wars” and the “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter,” no one was knocking on Eliot’s door. Okay, he was long dead by then, but you get my point. Maybe we need to cut Eliot a little bit of slack.\n(39:28)\tAdam Hammond\tI think this whole experiment shows why some of us are so drawn to computational analysis of literature and literary performance. Whether you’re working with text or audio, computational tools provide different ways of attending to the work of art, different ways of listening and reading. Computers just notice things that humans don’t, and sometimes those differences can be really interesting. They give us another voice, another perspective to bounce our ideas off of. I still don’t think Elliot was a good reader of his own work, but I do think that he was trying to be a good reader of his own work and the computer seems to agree with me.\n(40:11)\tAdam Hammond\tThanks so much for listening, and if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, please feel free to draw me a line.\n(40:16)\tMusic\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n(40:28)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(40:40)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Adam Hammond. The Spoken Web podcasting team is: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n(40:58)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9640","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E6, Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, 6 May 2024, Fyfe"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ultimatumpoetry/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creator_names_search":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/075e405d-1616-4d26-9c4a-9e1e778fe290/audio/a4f35390-9169-4a4a-8feb-9448945d3207/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-master-spokenweb-notes-from-the-underground.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:44:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,018,357 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-master-spokenweb-notes-from-the-underground\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ultimatumpoetry/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-05-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.\\n\\nFURTHER READING / LISTENING\\n\\nAubin, Mathieu. “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.\\nLord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021.\\nStanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.\\n“What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival.” Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023,\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549750808576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.\n\nUntil recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary  event from the margins.\n\nThis episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.\n\n00:00\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\n00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:35\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n00:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn this month’s episode, our producer, Frances Grace Fyfe, takes us into the sounds of “Punk Poetry Archives.” The recordings are from the festival called “Ultimatum.” They constitute one collection that Concordia’s SpokenWeb team has been digitizing and cataloging. And at the same time, a SpokenWeb-affiliated and SSHRC-funded research team, led by Mathieu Aubin, has been working through research questions that emerge from these very same recordings.\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat project, “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides,” decided that a sound-based format would be ideal for sharing their research.\nEnter Frances Grace Fyfe, who joined the team for the production of this episode and, in many ways, becomes a listener to all of the archival work that the “Listening Queerly” team has been doing.\n01:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs Frances Grace tells us the story of “Ultimatum Through the Archives,” we hear stories of what “Listening Queerly” can do with archival audio. And we start to hear “queer listening” as a practice emerging from within and in relation to the research team members themselves.\n01:54\tHannah McGregor:\tLet’s get ready to listen to this month’s episode. And yep, it’s our first episode to come with a profanity warning, but it is an episode about a “punk poetry archive,” after all. Here is producer Frances Grace Fyfe with notes from the underground, sex, drugs, and rock and roll at the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”\n02:15\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental Music Overlapped With Feminine Voice]\n02:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\t[Audio Recording Begins] [Electronic Music Plays]\nWhat comes to mind when you think of a “poetry reading”? For most people, a poetry reading is a boring, stuffy event where you have to sit quietly and clap politely while a poet intones at length. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, it was the poetry reading that was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance.\nAt the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival,” which first took place in 1985, literary all-stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while revelling in drunkenness, doing cocaine, and sleeping with one another.\n03:11\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tThe event–which ultimately dissolved into financial difficulty and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors–broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have yet to be paralleled today.\nThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n03:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tUntil recently, most recordings from the “Ultimatum Festival” were predominantly kept in personal archives and often considered lost to many people who were part of the events. These recordings weren’t available for research until recently when a team at SpokenWeb began to digitize and archive them. In today’s episode, we’ll listen back to some of these recordings and learn about the unique approaches this team is taking to bring this event back to life.\nYou’re listening to: “Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”\n04:02\tMusic:\t[Electronic Music]\n04:06\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Announcer at the Ultimatum Festival speaking in French] musique de “Boys Du Sévère” qui vont jouer vendredi soir–\n04:06\tAlan Lord:\t[Audio Fades Away]\nIt was, you know: “blow our minds. You’ve got 15 minutes and get the fuck off stage.”\n04:21\tJerome Poynton:\tIt was like a huge show, you know, big, big show. But it was completely insane what we were trying to do.\n04:28\tFortner Anderso:\t[Overlapping] Overt sexual and bodily function of her (referring to Sheila Urbanoski) work, was like, whoah. You know, we’re not in Kansas anymore.\n04:38\tSheila Urbanoski:\tI remember at the end of it, somebody said, “how would you describe Ultimatum?” And I said two words: chaos, cocaine. [Background noise echoes “love”]\n04:47\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Background noise continues echoing “Love”]\n04:50\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Alan Lord presenting “The Ultimatum” in French/English] Nous allons faire l’inauguration, alors si je peux, uh, si je peux faire l’inauguration d’Ultimatum 2. Let’s, uh, well, je ne sais pas. Let’s go.\n05:09\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Upbeat music plays in the background]\n05:21\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tOK, so we’re here at Foufounes Électriques. Can you just describe the scene for us?\n05:26\tElla Jando-Saul:\tYeah, I mean, it’s a pretty spacious kind of place. Over here by the entrance, we have a bar. There’s, you know, an ATM machine. There are a couple of foosball tables sort of speckled around the room.\nAs I understand, the bar was smaller and there would’ve been sort of a clear performance stage. There was a lot of performance art happening at the time, and it wouldn’t have been as nicely decorated.\nIt was sort of like your typical run-of-the-mill, grimy bar, whereas it’s quite nice right now. Like it feels clean in a way where I don’t imagine that’s how it would’ve been.\n06:02\tFrances Grace Fyfe\tYou’re listening to Ella Jando-Saul, one of the researchers on the team who is digitizing and listening back to the tapes from Ultimatum. I asked her to bring me to the site where the festival originally took place. Les Foufounes Électriques–literally, “The Electric Buttocks”–a punk bar on Montreal’s Saint-Catherines Street.\n06:20\tFrances Grace Fyfe\tWhat I want to know is, how did this grimy punk bar—which only a few years after the festival ended would go on to host “Nirvana” to a sold-out crowd—become the site of one of the most avant-garde, performance events in Canadian literary history? Well, to understand Ultimatum, we have to go back to one man, Alan Lord.\nLegend has it, Alan, then a young engineer, had a vision to put together a festival that would bring together poets as well as artists and musicians from across Canada and the US with one goal: to break boundaries in poetic performance. So who is Alan Lord, exactly?\n06:57\tElla Jando-Saul:\tHe’s just a guy in engineering. And he gets into the punk scene, and then he gets into the poetry scene. And then he uses his funds from engineering to put together a festival, because, like a guy suggests it, one day. And then it sort of snowballs from there. And he starts dedicating basically all of his time and money to creating this series of festivals because punk is what gives him life and [Ella laughs] engineering is what gives him the funds to do this. And, when I say it gives him the funds, like sometimes he’s not paying his rent so that he can fly in some New Yorker for an evening.\nSo, that’s Alan Lord. Basically just a guy with motivation. And money.\n07:37\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIt just seems a bit bizarre to me that somebody would become so obsessed with putting on a poetry event that they would get nearly bankrupt themselves doing it.\nCan you speak to what was going on in his head at the time?\n07:53\tElla Jando-Saul:\tWell, let me go into the long version, and again, this is mostly pulled from his book. But you know, he’s in classes at McGill, and he sees this guy who has a Ramones badge, and he’s like, “oh my God, someone else in engineering is also into punk.” He starts getting into the Montreal punk scene, which is developing at about exactly this time, mostly in Old Port and mostly in Anglophone scene.\nThe Francophone bands that do exist are often singing in English, and punk becomes like the thing that really matters to him and the thing that’s taking up all of his time. And so he loses his full-time job that he had, and he also drops out of school, like right before his final semester. I think around, it’s around this time, he probably like starts a band and stuff. And then he meets Lucien Francoeur. Lucien Francoeur really teaches him about poetry. So he comes to him through the punk scene. But Francoeur is mainly a poet who’s got folded into this punk scene.\nAnd so he teaches Alan Lord about all of the great poets, Rimbaud and Burroughs [Ella laughs]. And then Alan Lord sort of digs deeper into this whole poetry thing. Meanwhile, he also goes from Rimbaud to learning about William Burroughs to learning about Herbert Hunke and John Giorno and the whole like, Beat scene.\n09:09\tAlan Lord:\tThe Toronto Research Group and also the “Antar gang” we used to call them “La Revue Antar” gang. There was the, uh, Pierre-Andre Arcand, he was called. His nickname was (). He did interesting stuff with machines and altering his voice like a vocoder and stuff. So yeah, that contingent from Quebec was really interesting.\nThey were this little clique of four or five guys, they were doing avant-garde stuff. Yeah, they were a fun bunch. And also the people from “Sound Poet,” people from Toronto for avant-garde literary stuff.\n09:48\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tHere’s Alan today, talking about some of the performers he invited to the first “Ultimatum Poetry Festival.”\n09:54\tAlan Lord:\tAnd there was this one guy talking about sound poetry. This guy, it was actually just sound, Jean-Paul Curté. He was like a professional sound sculptor and artist, and I have no idea how he got there… I have no idea who gave me the idea to invite him? Or maybe he called me up or something. I don’t know. But he was very interesting.\n10:21\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tOne thing you have to understand is that, before the first Ultimatum festival, the poetry scene in Montreal was divided pretty clearly along English and French lines.\n10:30\tFortner Anderson:\tIt was an odd time, you know in the early early 80s and late 70s. I mean you could still find very many people in Montreal, English people who would absolutely refuse to speak French. Lived their entire lives, but couldn’t say “hello.” And were extremely upset that they might now have to start saying “hello” because of the circumstances. And also, at the same, time was the palpably revolutionary feelings or, impetus of Quebec’s society the two communities, there was a big, big gulf between them.\n11:12\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Fortner Anderson, who came to Montreal from the United States and became involved in the Anglophone performance poetry scene. He was hired by Alan Lord to handle grant applications and other organizational tasks for the second Ultimatum festival, which took place two years after the first, in 1987.\n11:29\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnglophones and francophones were sort of doing different things in say the 60s and 70s. Anglophones had the Vehicle Art Gallery, and there were some francophones involved there, but it was mainly Anglophone space that was a space for like, experimental performance art kimd of stuff. And, on the Francophone side, you had this, like, very heated political moment. A lot of performance of poetry was related to politics at the time, so you have the “Nuit de la poesie,” become a recurring event around the Quebec separatist movement, and it’s a place where you can show that Quebec has an identity, that Quebec has a culture. Here I mean this is Francophone Quebecois people thinking of Quebec as a Francophone nation.\n12:21\tRené Lévesque, Archival Audio\t[René Lévesque talking about the separatist movement]\n…un grand parti souverainiste Quebecois.\nNous pouvons même devenir un peuple qui va s’étonner lui-même de ce dont il est capable…\n12:29\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnd so bringing in, like, Quebec’s own francophone literature and performing it, sort of using poetry to express your political idea to a large audience.\n12:39\tAlan Lord:\tI always found the Anglo crowd of Montreal very insular. And they sort of weren’t interested or whatever in what was happening on the French side. Through thinking about all this, I realized, I was happier and felt more at ease and comfortable and also challenged by the French language people here, seemed to be more open. And also there was the “Joie de Vivre,” and they were a pretty rambunctious bunch. I mean, including fistfights between poets. I mean [Alan laughs] poetry was rough on the French side. It was literally blood on the floor. The “sound des poets,” crazy stuff.\n13:27\tElla Jando-Saul:\tYou know, Toronto had this whole established literary community, all of the big literary magazines. A lot of the stuff that’s happening is in Toronto. So it seems like from the anglophone perspective like Montreal has its place sort of outside of the hub of the main tangents of Canadian poetry.\n13:46\tFortner Anderson:\tIt was a group of close-knit friends and at the time, and there was a number of interesting things about it. One of  them was of course, that Alan was mostly engaged within the French community. And the English community, of course, had, by that time, left.\nIt was a mass exodus of English reactionaries to Toronto. And so the city for the few English poets who remain was kind of left to ourselves. Their Quebec culture was focused on the independence issue, the English community had lost its relevance within the time, and so it was a remarkable kind of freedom which developed.\n14:30\tAlan Lord:\tWe were interested in the exploration of culture and experimentation. It was basically to entertain, to keep the attention of the public because usually, it was like “Don’t drag me to another boring poetry reading. I’m sick of those blah blah blah.”\nI remember boring poetry reading as much on the English side as the French; they’d be going on for half an hour on a poem. On the Anglo side, after every sentence of a poem they take 15 minutes to explain the line. I mean, that’s exactly what I didn’t want and in my little contract of the first festival; “you’ve got 15 minutes. Blow our minds, you’ve got 15 minutes, and get the fuck off the stage.”\nSo, I was kind of insisting that they keep everyone’s attention and do something interesting, and not, don’t bore the public and that worked out. I mean anybody who was there was certainly not bored.\n15:38\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh”]\n15:44\tFortner Anderson:\tI mean, Ian Stephens was an extraordinary poet. But then he had a big band, for the time. So there, too, it became apparent that one could take the power of the pop band and, as a poet and literary performer, use it to create something that had a big impact on the stage.\n16:17\tSheila Urbanoski:\tIt was dark, scattered chairs, people stumbling around. Everybody was smoking because you could smoke back then. No one sat there and listened. No one did that. It was very much like constant milling around and talking. A lot of the performances had to be quite captivating in order for people to shut the fuck up and listen.\n16:40\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Sheila Urbanoski, who lived in Saskatchewan before moving to Montreal, where she became involved in the art scene and the crowd at the Foufounes Électriques right around the corner from her apartment. Like Fortner, she also worked on “Ultimatum II” staff, as the office manager.\n16:55\tFortner Anderson:\tWith “Ultimatum,” there was work that was exciting, vibrant, and pushing the limits. You know, you would go in, and you would get confronted with images which you could not escape from because the performer was embodying them, incarnating them in such a way that the audience was touched and invigorated by that work.\n17:20\tElla Jando-Saul:\tI think it really comes down to the idea of an urban poetry festival relevant to a young urban audience in Montreal. Bringing in an experimental technology angle really gives some extra spice to the performances. I mean, Alan Lord himself had been experimenting with computers and what you can do artistically with them.\n17:43\tFortner Anderson:\tOne of the things that he did, which I thought was quite extraordinary, was to arrange for the 3-camera video recording of the festival. That was a lot of money. They didn’t get paid, but [Fortner laughs], beside from that, that took a lot of organization.\nAnd it was quite intelligent in that not very many people knew that it was only with a 3-camera video recording; that you could make something that could be edited into something usable in the future.\n18:23\tElla Jando-Saul:\tFor some of them, I think this was the first poetry event they had recorded, and they were like “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s cool. It’s interesting. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was the goal. It was like when he says “urban poetry,” he’s really talking about making poetry relevant to a young, urban audience. A lot of that is like, do something they don’t expect.\n18:47\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Tape of experimental computer performance at “Ultimatum” festival, followed by cheering and clapping.]\n18:58\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tAn underground culture usually needs distinct places and spaces where people with shared interests can gather. For the avant-garde underground scene that clustered around Alan Lord, that place was the Foufounes Électriques.\n19:09\tElla Jando-Saul:\tIt opened up, I think in ’83. It was a punk bar. It did all sorts of artistic events. They did I think weekly events where artists would paint live, and you could watch them paint live. At the end of the night, you could buy the painting. So that was sort of their thing. They were doing all sorts of different types of performance, and it became a place where Alan Lord and his friends were hanging out, and it seemed like the logical place. I think he knew the owners and the managers and whatnot. So it was sort of obvious that they would do it there because that’s where they were spending time.\n19:44\tSheila Urbanoski:\tNow, I got involved with that whole mess because I knew all those guys. I was hanging out with [inaudible], [inaudible] were very good friends of mine. And Alan was always around as well. So I kind of just got sucked into the vortex.\n20:05\tAlan Lord:\tThe Foufounes Électriques was interesting from ’84 to 1990—a countercultural, interesting, bubbling milieu of the alternate arts.\n20:19\tSheila Urbanoski:\tYeah. There was a lack of direction, so we made it up, and that’s fine. But the vibe at the time of having a club-like atmosphere, that was very common in the city. It was probably in the Foufounes Électriques or Poodles or Les Lézards to have this – what they used to call it, literature – it’s was more like a performance or a spoken word thing, and very much, we’re at a club, people may listen, they may not.\n20:55\tJerome Poynton:\tMontreal probably had more than a Food electric, but that was the main one. Smaller basement venues. They’re not even necessarily venues, but people working on stuff and having fun with stuff because it was about having fun. It’s like playing dress-up. Theatre productions at that time were like a more glamorized version of “Let’s play dress-up.” But it was like, okay, let’s put on a play, let’s do this.\n21:19\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re hearing from Jerome Poynton, who accompanied the poet Herbert Huncke from New York to Montreal. Huncke was one of the few poets associated with the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and John Giorno, that Alan Lord invited to participate in the festival. But Alan Lord wasn’t exactly a famous poet himself. How is it that he got all these people to come perform in the first place?\n21:41\tElla Jando-Saul:\tSo he ended up, through a series of events, personally meeting Herbert Huncke, then William Burroughs, and then John Giorno.\nJohn Giorno, it seems, sort of had a hand in giving him the idea for “Ultimatum I.” From that point on, it seemed only natural to have him perform there, and once you know one beat poet, you can connect yourself to other beat poets through personal connections. Invite these people, who then become big headliner names. It wasn’t like “I had this event; it’s got Montreal people; can I maybe reach out to this more famous person.” It’s like, “I know this really famous person. Maybe I can make an event that fits them inside it.”\n22:22\tFortner Anderson:\tThe the cultural elements of New York City. That’s where Alan and the rest of us looked at for inspiration at the time. And this is where the extraordinary work was taking place. So there was that, but there was also an intermingling of that with the avant-garde Quebec culture. And so that was quite a heady mix at the time.\n22:47\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIt seems this heady mix of celebrities and laypeople, Montrealers and New Yorkers, and Anglophones and Francophones wasn’t without its tension.\n22:56\tSheila Urbanoski:\tWell, my favourite anecdotes of all time was I got asked, I can’t remember the guy’s name, Louis, at Foufounes Électrique, because Burroughs didn’t speak any French. He said, “Oh, could you help out because Louis didn’t speak any English? Could you help out with this old guy?” And I went, “That’s William fucking Burroughs.”\n23:15\tAlan Lord:\tGinsburg and Francoeur were reciting from memory the opening passage of “A Season in Hell,” and that blew me away. Ginsburg was doing it in French, so they probably had an understanding of French. But there’s a difference between France French and Quebecois. Maybe with the Quebecois, I think, they probably understood.\n24:07\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Presenter speaking in French]\nJ’espère qu’un jour on pourra dire ‘Herbert Huncke’ sans sans avoir faire de reference à la Beat Generation, avec ses rois Ginsberg, Burroughs, tout ça. Maintenant, j’ai fait un dernier vol. À la prochaine fois, c’est Herbert Huncke tout seul.\n[Herbert Huncke performing at “Ultimatum” festival]\nOkay. Well, lemme just say first, Paul, what has happened this evening in the past week? It’s kind of a hard act to follow. Oh, well, alright. In the mic, he says. Okay. Can you hear now? Yes. See, I have a problem with this lighting situation here.\nRegardless of all that, I lost my place. How do you like that? (“Look into the mic”) I will in just a minute. Some people can already go. Are you satisfied now? Okay. I really wanna start off with one particular story here because I feel that it will fit into the general theme of the so-called gathering or festival, whatever group of creative people doing things, trying to do things, young people, it’s very, very encouraging for an old man like me. You know, I want to think that things have progressed–\n25:29\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tPoetry, just like the underground scenes that clustered around “Ultimatum” and the Foufounes, also thrives on a tension between exclusion and inclusion. Poets can decide to omit certain words to build drama or generate certain feelings in their readers. People who study poetry have words for these kinds of omissions: “metaphors,” for example, can imply something without saying it outright, while “ellipsis” omits words that the reader is meant to glean from context.\nSimilarly, people doing literary audio studies are developing new techniques to “listen” for what is implied, but not necessarily heard, in recordings from poetry events. For the team at Concordia’s Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project, listening back to the tapes from “Ultimatum” also means listening back to what is unsaid.\n26:25\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Jean Paul Daoust performing “Numbers” in French]\n[Rough transcription] À côté, sans arbres, jeans, veste en cuir, bouche d’élève bâillée,les mains sur ses cuisses, un dérangement.\n26:25\tMisha Solomon:\tMy name is Misha Solomon, I’m a queer listener for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project.\n26:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tMisha is here to demonstrate this particular listening technique in the recording at “Ultimatum” by the poet Jean Paul Daoust.\n26:37\tMisha Solomon:\t“Numbers” is a poem about three men having an anonymous sexual encounter in Parkland Fountain at 4:00 in the morning, and that sexual encounter being essentially broken up by police as dawn comes. I think there would even be an argument that this poem is an aubade, maybe even a dawn poem, in that it’s about lovers being separated by the coming of dawn. I think queer listening could be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. I think that my approach to queer listening is just listening to content with my ears perked to the potential of queer content or queer angle. And I think that can, sometimes, be as simple as this poem, where a couple of lines in, it becomes very clear that this is about a gay male cruising in the park being read by a gay man.\n27:33\tMisha Solomon:\tAnd those are both also relatively explicit instances of queer listening that they’re textual, but I think that one could engage in queer listening in even the non-textual elements. And the nonverbal elements of trying to find the queerness within. Within the sound texture, within the recording, within the audience, even, based on their reaction.\nI think the poem’s approach to sex is somewhat summed up by a line at 10:15 on the tape, the line being “sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it.” I think that is sort of a thesis statement in terms of the poem’s approach to sex.\n28:16\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[From Jean-Paul Daoust’s “Numbers” performance: Sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it]\n28:24\tMisha Solomon:\tOne thing I’m noticing is that the three characters in the poem are not numero un, numero deux, numero trois. They’re number one, number two, number three; that they’re referred to only in English. And I think there is a sort of distancing that English allows for and that he (Jean-Paul Daoust) also uses English just to express these more poetic concepts, even if they’re sort of expressed in a kind of maybe “campy” or maybe overtly aphoristic way.\nBut, like the idea of sex that I talked about earlier is, “sex is throwing your soul into someone else, laughing about it.” To throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it. Or when you’re born, you’re gonna die like it or not, like you and I; these big ideas are presented in English. And I think it is sometimes easier to present those big ideas in a language that doesn’t feel as much your own.\nI mean, I think that we talk…you know, we think about liminality, we think about queerness at the margins, we think about bringing things together, therefore a mix of languages is in some ways queer, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t know that I’m that engaged in the relationship here between bilingualism and queerness in terms of the content of the poem, but I will say that obviously both things are challenging norms of writing and poetry.\n29:43\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo, listening happens in at least three major ways.\n29:49\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Mathieu Aubin, who heads up the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides Project and oversees the team of researchers who engage in the practice of queer listening.\n29:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tOne is listening to the audio materials in the collections that we’ve been engaging with. The second is activating that kind of dialogue, that happened at that time through oral literary history, to use, which is a more contemporary but retrospective form of listening. The third is listening within the project’s team. And I think that that’s what I hoped for from the beginning. I imagined and hoped that it could provide an opportunity for hopefully LGBTQ plus identifying students to be part of the dialogue. And get to learn something by listening.\nWhat led to this project was finding out about a box of tapes that existed tied to a couple of literary festivals that happened in Montreal that were bilingual. There were festivals held in 1985 and 1987. The first one happened at Foufounes Electriques , and as someone who loves hardcore punk metal music, I’ve been to Foufounes a few times well before I ever heard about “Ultimatum.”\n31:16\tMathieu Aubin:\tIn fact, I remember going there the first time and going to a particular room and there was no band actually playing, but the music was really good. And I could see people actually “throwing down,” which is a specific form of dancing that’s part of the post-hardcore scene, and I think, needless to say, I also participated in that dance. So for me, it was really exciting, and I knew that Bill Bissett, who I had studied and also, you know, gone to know a lot over my PhD, was part of it. So I was interested in learning more about what the series of festivals had to offer.\n31:58\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tCan you just say a little bit about what it was about representations of queerness in this particular poetry series that felt like a useful or important avenue to look at from a scholarly perspective?\n32:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think that when I say listening queerly, I’m saying listening from my queer positionality to events and performances that may or may not be by LGBTQI-plus folks, but with that critical and lived experience lens. I’m listening from that positionality. You’re invited to listen from that positionality, I think that everyone on our team is listening from their positionality, which is why I thought the project would be really interesting to see, is what each member brings to it, and what they hear.\nAnd that’s more the focus, knowing very well that the two festivals were not identified as queer events but that queerness was still manifesting itself and part of the creative communities. And that’s sort of like bumping up against each other that was happening. And so I think looking for those things rather than just saying, “yeah, we had this reading series without thinking about queerness” is ignoring that aspect of that history. I’m careful to differentiate identity politics from the concept of queerness. Which the term (“queer”) historically, was used in very derogatory terms and was, of course, reclaimed and whatnot. But a queering of something is to push against the boundaries of normativity, and following that thread, I think that what the events of “Ultimatum” were doing was indeed pushing the envelope, like pushing against normativity.\n34:09\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tI see this emphasis on celebrating what’s marginal in the way some of the participants recall the event. Here’s Jerome poin on his own definition of queerness.\n34:19\tJerome Poynton:\tWell, just openness, openness to the illusion of normalcy [Jerome laughs], just to use non-judgmental. That’s the direction you strive for anyway.\n34:33\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tSheila Urbanovsky also talks about how performers were playing with gender expression at the festival\n34:39\tSheila Urbanoski:\tWith Patrice [inaudible], we were known as the country partners at the time, and we did a lot of performance work together as drag acts. So Patrice is, you know, a male presenting gay man, and I am a cis woman, and so it was a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body. So we did a lot of drag acts together as twins.\n35:06\tMisha Solomon:\tRemember that queerness isn’t new, even if it didn’t used to be called queerness, and obviously, we’re dealing with queerness from a time where it’s not like it’s hard for us to believe that people were gay in 1980, whatever. But to remember that this isn’t new, and also that you have that there are these queer foreparents, I think specifically in a sort of gay male genealogy, that there is this whole missing generation of gay men and queer people, broadly due to their deaths from HIV, AIDS. And so for me as a gay man living in a sort of quote-un-quote post-AIDS world (and I mean that it’s only a post-AIDS world for the very privileged) to sort of be reminded of a gay experience before my time is, I think, essential.\n35:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think that within cultural scenes at the time in which, and now I’m using it in the sense of sexuality and gender here, queer poets were a part of it. I think that those people, you know, had a sort of coolness to them. I don’t think that they were ostracized whatsoever. I think they were very much members of those communities and that, you know, the people didn’t care. But what does that mean at that time outside of those communities or scenes? You have policing; you have fashing, you have surveillance, you have larger media, mainstream media discourse, and vilifying people because of their sexuality during the AIDS crisis. Right, those things are incongruent with each other but coexist.\n36:51\tArchival Audio from a news report on the AIDS crisis\t[Clips from new reports reporting on the AIDS crisis, Ronald Reagan’s response to the AIDS crisis] “Lifestyle of some homosexual men has triggered an epidemic of some sort of rare form of cancer–” [Sound fades]\n37:09\tJerome Poynton:\tLarry Rosenthal built a tremendous collection of books in San Francisco during these times because so many houses were being emptied. It was so you could see it in New York, you know, and thrift stores. There were just things in them that were just too good, you know? You know too too much. Too much, too fast. Because people were dying, and so their apartments were emptied out. I don’t think I was the only person that was aware of that. Other people saw that, so that changed the performance scene and also, so many of the great performers didn’t make it.\n37:56\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh” at Ultimatum festival] “Crying, won’t do any good, crying won’t do any good–”\n38:06\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIn taking part in queer listening, the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team is drawing attention to something implied but not made explicit in the “Ultimatum” recordings: the way queerness was central to underground scenes at a time when queer people were often oppressed in overt and vulgar ways by larger society.\n“The oppression of queer people,” Sarah Schulman writes, “goes hand in hand with the larger process of cultural homogenization that was occurring around this time.” “Although AIDS,” she writes, “devastated a wealthy subculture of gay white males, many of the gay men who died of AIDS were individuals who are living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art, and social justice.”\nTheir devastation from AIDS in the 1980s occurred alongside gentrification in major cities like New York, where apartments left behind by those who had died of AIDS were often privatized or subject to dramatic rent increases. Schulman argues that a vibrant downtown scene requires diverse, dynamic cities in which queer people can hide, flaunt, learn, or influence. The underground scenes for whom ideas of queerness were so central relied on cheap rents and access to space is no longer guaranteed today.\n39:20\tElla Jando-Saul:\tI think it was David Sapin or something who said “Oh, I lived in a four-bedroom apartment in the Plateau, and we each paid $20 a month.” I think now they’ve subdivided the apartment into a couple of different apartments, each of which costs $600 a month. You know you do the numbers with inflation, and that doesn’t make sense. Montreal was a really cheap city to live in, and spaces were very cheap. “Ultimatum I” had like a $15,000 budget to put together an event that lasts four or five days with 50 artists, and you want to fly in Herbert Huncke from New York and put them up in a hotel to be able to do that, and then also have all of these marginal poets who are not going to draw a huge audience. So you can’t rely on ticket sales like, yes, you’ve brought in John Giorno and Herbert Huncke, but you’ve also got these nights with almost unknown francophone Montreal poets who are unpublished. To be able to make that happen, you need a cheap city.\n40:16\tAlan Lord:\tThe Foufounes Électriques was interesting from 84 to 1990. After that, they sold, the original owners sold it at a certain point in the early nineties, I think.\n40:30\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnd when it was bought by someone else, that person was like, “I wanna make money off of this property I just bought.” And you know, what doesn’t make money, is experimental performance poetry. So goodbye. And then, like two years later, “Nirvana” was playing there.\n40:47\tSheila Urbanoski:\tAs much as I remember, sort of made up as we went, just ’cause we didn’t know any better. And I am a little disappointed. I don’t know what it’s like in Montreal now, but I personally find a lot of literature events now to be quite dull because people just kind of sit there. They don’t assume because there was an element of engaging, even if you weren’t actively listening. I mean, everybody in Foufounes Électriques saw you hit the floor when Karen Finley started putting you up as okay. I mean, that’s just like everybody just went, “What the… [Laughs]?”\n41:26\tAlan Lord:\tAnd now there’s just nothing special there. There’s no ambiance. There used to be something in the air. You know, when my buddies and I were hanging around there, there was nothing. Not really.\n41:49\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens’s “Underflesh” performance continues playing] “Don’t talk anymore. We don’t love anymore. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t fuck anymore. We don’t–”\n[Stephens vocalizes, and instrumental music continues]\n[Audience cheers and someone thanks Alan Lord for organizing the event]\n43:17\tHannah McGregor:\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis month’s episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Past and present team members include Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and Misha Solomon.\n43:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tA special thanks to the entire team for their appearances on this episode and their help in sourcing audio clips. And finally, a big thanks to Scott Gerard for mastering and for the original sound compositions for this episode. The Spoken Web podcasting team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n44:13\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9641","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E7, ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon, 3 June 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c9448971-5d6f-4edc-8389-6965f8c8fcd1/audio/cd747ce4-9bf8-4436-a9e9-a0a6013b5185/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"(52,728,937 bytes)\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-06-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SHOW NOTES \\n\\nTRACE at Theatre Passe Muraille\\n\\nSteve Roach, Quiet Music 1\\n\\nFalse Knees, Montreal-based graphic artist drawing birds talking\\n\\nÉliane Radigue\\n\\nKishi Bashi, “Manchester.” (Did you catch that this song is about writing a novel and Erica had just talked about novels? Not to mention the bird references. There are many more Kishi Bashi songs to listen to, but linking this since we played a clip from this one in the episode for these serendipitous reasons!)\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549755002880,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this month’s episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts is taking over the airwaves.\n\nShortCuts is the monthly minisode that takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a short ‘cut’ of audio. In this fifth season, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been presenting a series of live conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium – and in this full episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moynan King, Erica Isomura and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of our then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt and our then-sound designer Miranda Eastwood, who was there behind-the-scenes recording the audio and who joins in the conversations too.\n\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with the question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite an eclectic playlist and do check the Show Notes below for links.\n\nIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of Season Five of ShortCuts for conversations with Jennifer Waits, Brian Fauteaux, and XiaoXuan Huang. And, of course, this month’s episode with the longest ShortCuts yet: “ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.”\n\n00:01\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersection of sound, poetry, literature, and history, created by scholars, poets, and students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this month’s episode, Shortcuts is taking over the airwaves. Shortcuts is a monthly minisode, or short episode, distributed on the same podcast feed. Produced by me, Katherine McLeod, Shortcuts takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a shortcut of audio.\nAnd it wouldn’t quite be Shortcuts without the Shortcuts intro. So, let’s press play on the music and begin.\n01:23\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to Shortcuts. In season five of Shortcuts, you’ve been hearing Shortcuts Live, conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium.\nFor this episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moyen King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of Kate Moffatt, our then-supervising producer. And you’ll hear Miranda Eastwood, who is there behind the scenes recording the audio. Miranda even jumps into the conversation from time to time.\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with a question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite a playlist and do check the show notes for those links.\n02:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of this season five of Shortcuts. There, you’ll find the other Shortcuts live conversations from that same symposium. You’ll hear Jennifer Waits talking about the magic in the archives of college radio stations and Brian Fauteux on widescreen radio. Yes, widescreen radio. And Xiaoxuan Huang speaking about “hybrid poetics” and much more in that conversation.\nSo, without further ado, here is the longest Shortcuts episode yet: Shortcuts Live, Talking About Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.\n03:04\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Music fades away.]\n03:10\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, hello and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. I am recording this with Moynan King at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta.\nMoynan, thank you so much for joining us today.\n03:26\tMoynan King:\tOh my gosh, thank you for having me.\n03:28\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah! Um, oh, and I should introduce myself quickly because this is not the voice people usually hear on SpokenWeb Shortcuts. I am Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer, stepping in for our intrepid usual host, Katherine McLeod.\nSo, to get us going here, Moynan, would you just introduce yourself for us briefly?\n03:47\tMoynan King:\tYeah. My name is Moynan King. I’m a theater artist, performance artist, writer, you know, sometimes academic. I’m doing a postdoc at Western University, and the subject of my postdoctoral studies is “Queer Resonance.” So, I’m exploring the concept of sound as queer, queerness as sound, within communities and also within performance practices and art in general.\n04:24\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Yeah. I cannot wait to chat and hear more about this. But I think we’ll kick off by listening to what you’ve brought for us today.\n04:33\tMoynan King:\tSounds good. So, for the listeners, it’s about a minute and 20 seconds. [Overlap from Kate: Perfect.] So, we’ll just have a listen.\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio of harmonizing voices starts playing]\n06:09\tMoynan King:\tI guess that’s where it stops. There’s just a bit of dead air at the end.\n06:14\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. The listeners won’t be able to see this, but I had to literally put my hand on my chest. I was feeling that in my chest while I was listening. That was so fantastic.\n06:26\tMoynan King:\tThank you.\n06:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, I was gonna say, tell us, what we were just listening to?\n06:29\tMoynan King:\tOkay. So, this is a track called “Ghosts,” and it’s a composition by Tristan R Whiston from a show that Tristan and I co-created called “Trace,” that we started to develop back in, oh my gosh, 2012.\nIt started as an installation performance. We toured it across Canada. So we went to Regina; I know you’re from Saskatchewan. [Overlap from Kate: I am]. In 2015, we went to Regina, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, and Montreal. There’s someone else in our booth from Montreal. [Miranda Eastwood laughs]\nAnd then we put it away, put it in its massive storage cases, and then Theatre Passe Muraille just asked us to remount it. And when we did that, we turned it from being an installation into a play. So, we tore it apart and put it forward. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nAnd, so, what you’re listening to here is a track composed by Tristan Wiston; composed by him and of him.\n07:32\tMoynan King:\tSo, Tristan is a trans singer, performer, community activist. And over the course of his transition – that is over the course of the period during which he started taking “T” [Referring to Testosterone] – he recorded his voice almost every day, repeatedly singing the same songs and, you know, talking and singing and kind of expressing himself into this recorder and then also singing repeatedly over and over these songs.\nAnd one important thing to know about Tristan is that prior to transition, he was an incredible soprano singer. And so had one of those perfect high-pitched voices. And for many, many years, Tristan and I worked together in a group, Toronto-based group called “The Boy Choir of Lesbos.”\nAnd, so, we used to, there were a bunch of us, and we would dress as boys and we would sing in, you know, the harmonies of an Anglican boy choir. [Overlap from Kate: Right.] And so, we would sing and that was just sort of part of the collaborative history of Tristan and I. [Overlap from Kate: Incredible.]\nSo, Tristan came to me, and I think it was around 2011, and said, “I really wanna do something with these tracks. I wanna do something with all this material that I have.” And he’d already, then at that point, done a podcast. Well, you know, I guess at that time we didn’t call it a podcast. I think it had a different name, right? [Laughs]\n08:57\tKate Moffatt:\tAn audio essay. A piece–\n9:00\tMoynan King:\tYes, yes. An audio essay. Thank you.\n9:03\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, you’re welcome.\n09:03\tMoynan King:\t–called “Middle C,” and that was with the CBC [The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] – I mentioned that because I believe it’s still in the CBC archives. But he brought it to me because he wanted to do something more experimental with it, something less linear.\nSo, we started to work with all these tracks. And so, we did like tons of listening over, you know, a long period of time and kind of compartmentalize things. So, the important thing to know about that track, and in fact about “Trace” the show, is that all of the sound is made from Tristan’s voice–\n09:38\tKate Moffatt:\tWow–\n09:38\tMoynan King:\tAnd so a lot of the sounds that you hear in this track are fragments taken from different periods, different stages of his transition. And one of the big discoveries we made with, originally working with these tracks – and to be clear, Trey Justin is the composer. [Overlap from Kate: Okay.] So, but in a way maybe I, you could kind of call me a “doctor.” A “compositional dramaturg,” you know, because we worked so much together on the creation of the show, and those compositions were being created at that time. But so just to be clear, this is Tristan’s composition, but that I was involved in the process of it. And so yeah, that’s what you were listening to.\n10:21\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. That’s fantastic. And I’ve already got so many questions around things like the amount of audio that you end up with, like the recordings that become almost like an archive of sorts, that you’re then kind of like working with and engaging with, you know.\nI just think that’s so, so interesting. Wow. Okay. I don’t even know where to start with this. I feel so delighted. So I guess, and I would love to kind of tap into a little bit of that kind of collaboration that you were talking about. I’d love to hear more about that and maybe to think a little bit too about kind of like the role that listening is playing in that I feel like, you know, when it’s multiple people, at multiple ears, and especially working with that much audio. Anyway, I, anything there, that you would like to kind of speak to? I feel like that’s so rich.\n11:13\tMoynan King:\tYeah. It’s so interesting because I think just to address the topic of collaboration, you know, that it’s a collaboration. This piece, “Trace,” is a collaboration, you know, first of all for Tristan with himself [Laughs], you know–\n11:30\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, yeah, yeah, yeah–\n11:31\tMoynan King:\t–With all of his selves, you know, over time. [Overlap from Kate: Totally.]\nAnd then of course with me and, also thinking about collaboration and, artistic collaborations, Tristan and I like to say we’ve been working together since the late 19 hundreds. And because I think saying it that way gives you a sense of the depth of our collaboration and the amount of time and how much we have both changed in many, many ways. And also, how we have not changed in many other ways. You know?\n12:06\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n12:08\tMoynan King:\tSo, when we, and so when we were, when we created the first piece and, so it’s, again, it’s called “Trace.” And we are the co-creators of it. He kind of takes up certain roles and I take up other roles, but we always developed the thing together. You know, we really had a vision of creating this very immersive piece. And I still love that style, and I’m really committed to that style, like immersive installation, performance, that sort of stuff.\nBut when Theater Passe Muraille, which is a theatre in Toronto, it’s a very old theatre. It’s been around since I think the 1960s. And the space is certainly conducive to certain kinds of performance, but it’s very much a, like theatre, you know, with an audience and a playing space–\n12:56\tKate Moffatt:\tYes–\n12:56\tMoynan King:\tAnd so, what was exciting for us as collaborators was when Theater Passe Muraille approached us to remount – and you can’t see the air quotes, but I’m doing them [Laughs] – remount “Trace,” we just said “Yes.”\nBecause, you know, coming outta the pandemic, we’re like, “Oh God, great. Yes. Like, let’s just do a show. Oh, yeah.” You know, everything has been so crazy, and you all know what I mean.\nSo we just said “yes.” And then of course, at our first meeting, we were both like, “Yeah, but we’re not gonna do the same show” [Laughs]. We’re not even [Laughs], we’re not even gonna tell Theater Passe Muraille because we don’t want any questions. We just wanna do what we wanna do. But the important thing to understand, I think, about this piece, in terms of its like thematic, and this is very much connected to the topic of collaboration and community and the concept of becoming, this is something we were working with a lot that it’s an ongoing process of inventing and reinventing yourself, you know?\n13:57\tMoynan King:\tAnd this idea of like coming out, which is something we do over and over and over again, you know. And there’s a line in the new “Trace” where Tristan’s talking about his sister’s gender reveal party for a child, and then he says “I, nobody ever threw me a gender reveal party. I have to do it myself all the time.” [Laughs]. You know, kind of…And so this idea, it says, connected to this. And so these themes of, these taking the themes of Tristan’s unique experience as a performer and as a singer, and then kind of applying them to broader experiences and to the idea that, to ideas that are familiar to everyone, then that is that non…that stasis is counter to life. That, as long as we are alive, we are changing, and we are becoming. We–\n14:54\tKate Moffatt:\tNever stay the same–\n14:54\tMoynan King:\tYeah. And so the piece had to change too, because the last time we had performed it prior to this was 2015, and we had changed.\n15:02\tKate Moffatt:\tAbsolutely. [Overlap from Moynan: You know?] Okay. And actually, that was the next question that I wanted to take up was you talked about changing it from an “installation” into something.\nAnd it was interesting ’cause as you were, as you were telling us, you even were using your hands to indicate how you had to kind of “break it down,” and you moved your hands in a sweeping motion, and then you were like, and then you pushed away from yourself. You said we had to put it forward, right? [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.]\nYou had to really reorient yourself [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.] for the piece. And I thought that was so interesting ’cause to go back, even to my own, like my hand going directly to my chest, like a couple of seconds in, I was like, I could feel it in my chest and then I could feel it in my mouth and it was somehow just this extremely embodied listening experience.\nSo I would love to hear more about what that was like, having to think about the ways in which this piece and the show itself even like that, it’s just the embodiment of the archive that’s creating it. And the process that it was. And anything I did this last time, I very, I’m good at asking twisty questions. So anything there that you’d like to take up? I’d love to hear more about.\n16:07\tMoynan King:\tWell, I think there are a couple of key things that you brought up there. And one of them is that shape, changing the shape of a piece. And, for the listener that, yes, when I was talking about the installation, I kind of moved my fingers into sort of circular motion to sort of indicate like a space within which…And then when I talked about the theatre as Kate said, I put my hands and pushed away. So it’s like putting something out towards the audience so much, and I’m directly addressing you.\nAnd so changing the shape of a piece changes the fundamental quality and essence of the piece. Right? [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.] And then I’ll, I’d like to also talk about the archive a little bit more after that. [Overlap from Kate: Please. Yeah.]\nBut when we decided to do that, just to sort of give you a bit more information, there is some stuff online, which I can give you a link to some of these sounds, are online if anybody wants to listen to more of them.\n17:09\tMoynan King:\tBut, the idea we started with was this idea kind of an idea of Tristan walking through a forest of his own voices. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nYou know, you have in your studio here the YSM5s [Yorkville Sound YSM5 are compact powered studio monitors] beautiful speakers. We had 10 of those. When we created the piece, you know, we first showed it in the summer of 2012 and then toured it in 2015.\nWhen we did that, we had to hire someone to create custom software for us in order to channel the 12 different tracks to 12 different speakers. Sorry, 10, 10, sorry, my numbers come from another iteration. But anyway, so the 10, the 10 speakers, and of course now you can just do that on QLab [QLab is a cue-based multimedia playback software], right? Like, it’s like, and so interesting just in terms of change and time and how the technology has changed along with us, and how in 2012 we were so cutting edge, you know?\n18:09\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right–\n18:10\tMoynan King:\tAnd now basically it’s something anybody can do if you can have 12 if you can own the 10 speakers [Overlap from Kate: Right, right.] [Laughter] and the cable to get them, not a small thing to do. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah, yeah.]\nNot a small thing to have access to those things. So we were really working with this idea of change and, a lot of the key songs that Tristan was singing over and over as his voice changed were very water-related. Okay. So one of those, the “Waters Wide,” and the other one is called, I think, called “I Am Sailing.” And so interesting. And so we used that theme, and we created kind of a beach scenario, and we had these three huts, and one of them was sort of Tristan’s “Command Central,” and he operated the entire show.\n18:56\tMoynan King:\tAt some point in our development rehearsal process, I remember coming into rehearsal one day and just saying to Tristan, “You have to do everything.” So it’s like, it was like, I, you know, we were creating the piece together, but then when it actually came to the performance, he had to control everything.\nAnd I feel like that was really connected to the thematic of it, that it was, everything was coming out of his body and that this environment represented his whole body. And then he was kind of like the homunculus, if you know, that you would know that term as someone who studies that era. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.]\nAnyway, that’s what that was. And then we also recorded, set up booths, and had an interactive element where the audience recorded their voices, too.\n19:44\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s very cool.\n19:45\tMoynan King:\tSo trying to share with the audience this experience that Tristan had of sitting and recording your own voice. And so we set it up with like fragment sentence fragments and ask people to finish them. So we have this incredible archive segue. Here I go segue.\n19:59\tKate Moffatt:\tYes, segue. That was beautifully done.\n20:02\tMoynan King:\tVoices from across the country of people completing the same sentences. And it’s a massive archive. And we use it, we use it in Toronto at the end of the show, so we finish the show with it.\nBut I feel like there’s another thing there. It’s, and I don’t know, [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.] it’s untapped. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.]\nI don’t know what it is. So then when we went to do the second iteration, or no, sorry, the latest iteration, because really even in 12 to 15, there were a number of iterations and turn the show out. So again, I’m pushing my hands out in front of me to, for an audience. Early on in our developmental discussions, we started thinking about a lot, about time and change and how much we’ve changed and our archive. So then we reached back further into history prior to, you know, Tristan’s transition in the end of the “Boy Choir” into the deep, into the “Boy Choir” archives.\n20:53\tMoynan King:\tSo we used that material.\nAnd so in 1997, we had done a production, the “Boy Choir of Lesbos and Lord of the Flies.” So we did a production of “Lord of the Flies.” [Overlap from Kate: Oh, wow.]\nAnd we luckily have this incredible VHS [Video Home System] tape of it. So, you know, I mean, back when we were doing VHS, we were like, “Oh my God, it’s not film,” [Laughs]. And now we’re like, “Oh my God, it’s VHS, it’s a VHS,” [Laughs].\nSo that’s really exciting. And so we brought in these archives of the “Boy Choir” and integrated these images with this new material. And then in the process of that, at some point, once we decided to bring in the “Boy Choir,” we thought, “Oh, we need a new choir. We need to make a new choir.” And we need to make a choir that both Tristan and I could be in. So we created this non-binary choir that we then called the “Epic Choir of Trace Land.” [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so the show, our show in Toronto ends with the “Epic Choir of Trace Land,” and we plan to keep the “Epic Choir” going, actually. So–\n21:58\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m obsessed with this. I love that so much. This is incredible. And just, you’re talking and I’m like, I’m almost getting, I’m getting goosebumps. Because this is like, you’ve got so many different kinds of archives happening here. And like, intersecting and almost like creating a new one. And I just think this is, it’s so rich, it’s so the possibility, everything here. Oh, wow. And the embodiment and the, oh, all of it. It’s so good. Okay. Last question to wrap up here. [Overlap from Moynan: Okay.] I wanna ask [Overlap from Moynan: Yes.]: What you’re listening to now, like either at the conference or just kind of generally what’s, what are you listening to?\n22:34\tMoynan King:\tSo interesting, because that was the question you asked me. And the reason I brought this was because our show just closed on Sunday. [Overlap from Kate: Oh, yeah.] So all I’ve been listening to is “Trace,” right? Like, we just closed. So I’ve been listening to that.\nAnd then of course, you know, I don’t, I presented at the conference yesterday, and right now I’m engaged in a process of creating what I call “meditations.” And so other than “Trace,” I’ve been listening to meditations and to meditative music. And of course, working on my own material with that. But like last night when I went to bed, I listened to Steve Roach’s “Quiet Music 1.” Highly recommend it [Laughs[, go on YouTube, “Quiet Music 1,” play it quietly. Yep. 1970s experimental electronica. Yep. So that’s it.\n23:38\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Moynan, thank you so much for sitting down and talking to us about this today and for playing the clip. This has just been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you again.\n23:48\tMoynan King:\tThank you very much, Kate. Thanks for listening and thanks for inviting me. It’s wonderful to be here.\n23:53\tKate Moffatt:\t[Background ambient music starts playing] Yeah. This was so good. Thank you. Alright. Yay.\n23:58\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n23:58\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I’m gonna hit stop, which I did last time.\n24:00\tMusic:\t[Ambient music plays faintly]\n24:10\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. So, hi and welcome back to Shortcuts. This is another episode of Shortcuts Live at the University of Alberta.\nWe are here for the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium, and we are actually sitting outside if you can hear [Laughs] if you can hear some of our wonderful ambient sounds right now.\nIt has been so insanely beautiful and hot this week. I think it’s about, what do we say, 27 degrees right now? It’s warm.\nMy name is Kate Moffitt. I’m the project manager and supervising producer of the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And I am so excited to be joined by Erica Isomura today. Erica, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?\n24:52\tErica Isomura:\tSure. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Erica, and I am a writer, a poet, and currently an MFA [Master of Fine Arts] student, actually at the University of Guelf. I like drawing, gardening, being outside. I currently live in Toronto, but I was born and raised in New Westminster in Vancouver.\n25:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI love New West [Laughs].\n25:20\tErica Isomura:\tYeah, and it’s really great to be here in Edmonton in Treaty Six Territory. I’ve been really enjoying being here.\n25:25\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s been so, so lovely. It’s been a great week. Amazing. Okay. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. I don’t know if you wanna say a couple words or if you wanna just, are we gonna jump in?\n25:33\tErica Isomura:\tLet’s just jump into it, and we can chat about it afterwards. So hopefully the volume is up on this. [Wrong audio plays] Oh, sorry. That’s the wrong audio [Laughs].\n25:45\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s okay.\n25:48\tErica Isomura:\tThat was cool, though, [Laughs]. [Overlap: That was it.]\n25:52\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio recording of chirping and nature sounds]\n26:39\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. Thank you so much. Please tell me what we were just listening to. I feel like there are so many cool layers here because we’re currently sitting outside. What was that?\n26:45\tErica Isomura:\tThat was recorded on a road trip that I took with my sibling to Prince Rupert. We drove from our hometown all the way up north to a three-and-a-half-day drive to Prince Rupert, which is on the northwest coast.\nAnd that audio was of a group of European starlings that were gathered on this, under this dock, on this building where I think a ferry comes in. And so there were so many birds. I hadn’t seen so many like European starlings gathered together before. And it was really cool to see a bird that was also familiar.\nSince being here in Edmonton, I’ve actually seen magpies for the first time. I definitely took some video footage of them on my way to the campus, and I hadn’t seen them before. So it’s always exciting to see new birds and also cool to see birds that you’re familiar with.\n27:44\tKate Moffatt:\tI wanted to ask, ’cause I know I attended your fantastic plenary panel yesterday. And thinking about the ways in which I guess I just, I’ve been thinking about kind of like nature and nature sounds all week and how we listen to it and how we re-listen to it after when we record it, and kind of how we end up being these sort of like mediators between that sound as it’s originally happening and then, and listening to it later.\nSo, can you speak a little bit more, maybe just about listening generally? It could also be the role of listening in what you pick, choose to record, pick up, and how you plan to revisit it or your research.\n28:22\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, it’s interesting ’cause I don’t really, it’s interesting being at this conference ’cause I don’t really consider myself a sound artist. So I haven’t considered myself in that way before. Although I did this, this sound project that, you know, we brought to the conference this week. But then when I stopped to think about it, there’s such a sonic, important sonic quality to poetry and to writing and storytelling. Which is much more, you know, I do identify with those things as a writer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about non-visual ways of engaging with stories this past semester, I was TA-ing [Working as a “teacher assistant”] an “Intro to Storytelling,” “Intro to Creative Writing” class for first-year students. And a lot of new writers are really focused on visual cues in their work. [Overlap from Kate: Interesting.]\nLike, “so-and-so” sees this, it’s green, it’s round, you know like they’re not, there’s like a textural element that sometimes it’s a bit flat. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so that was a big part of revising with students who were learning how to engage with creative writing was bringing in sonic qualities, bringing in texture and touch, and you know, feeling–\n29:40\tKate Moffatt:\tThat there’s more than just looking–\n29:41\tErica Isomura:\tThere’s more than just looking. I was thinking about that while I was listening to this sound and trying to think about what sound I’d want to share because I’m trying to work on a project that engages with drawings and writing.\nSo it’s a graphic project that follows the road trip that my sibling and I took and engaged with a lot of the land-based history. And I was thinking, “Okay, how will I, how will sound be part of this visual project, in a book?”\nA book is so, it’s just, it’s just different, you know? Like, people sometimes will include “SoundCloud” links to listen to “spoken word” in their books or, you know, “QR codes.” But sometimes I find myself not, it’s not necessarily the most organic of processes to pull your phone and scan it or a hundred percent. You know, even if you go on a CD with the book, sometimes you just kind of ignore it. Right–\n30:35\tKate Moffatt:\tEspecially now you’re like, where’s the closest CD player?\n30:37\tErica Isomura:\tTotally. Right. So I’m not an audiobook person. I do listen to podcasts, but yeah. So it’s interesting to think about it. Like just different qualities that bring us into place and space and that interests me.\nSo most of my sound recordings in my phone are probably more nature-based, though I do find the intersections of, like urban landscape noises really interesting. Just the mixture of things that you’ll hear on the street. [Overlap from Kate: Absolutely.] Or even, you know, the crunching of footsteps when you’re out in the forest. There is, you know, thinking about our relationship like I guess the Anthropocene or our imprint on the land. And, you know, the sounds that we make, too.\n31:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. A hundred percent. And it’s so interesting, as you were talking about that, it started to make me think about like, how we capture things. Because yeah, I guess my question is kind of like having that recording from that trip, like how does that take you back as opposed to a picture of you or like a picture of those birds under that underpass. Yeah. Anything there that you would like to respond to? Please Go ahead.\n31:50\tMiranda Eastwood:\tActually, could I jump in? [Overlap: Yeah. Oh yeah.]\nJust because you’re talking about, you know, you get a CD in a book, and you’re not, you’re not probably gonna listen to that or a link or a QR code. It disrupts the relationship that you have with reading because that’s what people agree to when they open a piece they’re reading.\nSo the, even the idea of bringing in a different form of media is almost not, well, you break that relationship, I think, and the idea of sound and going to listen to something like specifically for sound, you’re engaging in a different relationship to whatever text you’re exploring. Right. Which I feel like that kind of pulled into your question about materiality and how like, I guess what your, what your general thoughts on those different types of relationships are.\n32:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, I think that what I was thinking about when we, when I, when you made that comment, Kate, and this relates to this too, is thinking about how do you represent sound on the page. Right. You know, like I think in poetry, there’s such interesting things you can do with white space, like… [Overlap: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.]\nWriters and poets just talk about staring at a blank page. Just the possibilities of form and prose are typically like nonfiction prose, and fiction prose. It’s very blocky and chunky and there isn’t a lot of space for that creativity necessarily. Maybe there is, and maybe I’m not thinking about it. We did have a presentation with Jordan Abel a few nights ago, and I think he’s doing some interesting work with novels and space on the page for sure.\n33:28\tErica Isomura:\tLike disrupting the genre. But yeah, I think there’s so much opportunity for that in poetry. And I think as I’m drawing more and thinking about graphic forms there is the opportunities to visually kind of represent sounds and sound effects on the page, through shapes and through visual cues and kind of blending things in a way that’s really interesting.\nThere’s a comic artist I love on Instagram who actually lives in Montreal. I’m not really, I’m blanking on his handle, but he draws a lot of birds and like, they’re very funny comics. And bird, I think–\n34:11\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI know who you’re talking about ’cause I think I’ve seen these bird comics before of these birds just kind of doing their own thing–\n34:18\tErica Isomura:\tDo you know their name?\n34:19\tMiranda Eastwood:\tHis name? No, I don’t.\n34:19\tErica Isomura:\tHe was just at TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival], but I didn’t make it to his table. But they’re funny, they’re hilarious. They’re great conversations. Like the birds are talking about us.\n34:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, I have seen this. Oh. And I can’t remember the handle either. Oh, wow. How many grad students does it take?\n34:33\tErica Isomura:\t[Overlap] End of the, end of the–\n34:35\tKate Moffatt:\tWe’ll put it in the blog post for the episode.\n34:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. But yeah, thinking about representations of sound on a page, you know, and Yeah. The non-human kind of elements. And it’s just so funny to think about what the birds are; the birds are watching us too, you know? Right. We’re not just watching them.\n34:50\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right. Yeah. Which even I think absolutely a hundred percent goes all the way back to Spy’s keynote on the first day. Right. Like, talking about that kind of like awareness of what’s around you, and not just your awareness of it, but it’s awareness of you, and how that’s informed and what it’s been informed by. Incredible.\n35:05\tErica Isomura:\tSo I think that the first sound that I actually accidentally played was, it was water from up north, from probably from the Skeena River ’cause I was, I think the previous audio was a clip from a cannery that I had visited.\nI was trying to record some sounds from a tour I did at the North Pacific Cannery, but also, I can’t remember if they had turned on the machine, of the canning machine that was supposed to be on display there, but wow. I didn’t want it to go into the spoken-like tour part [Laughs] for the audio.\nI’m actually really glad that I have some of those clips and I forgot about them until you prompted me to bring a sound clip. Amazing. So it was cool. And I’ll have to definitely re-listen to all those.\n35:46\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that. Okay. Speaking of listening, I think a last little question here to wrap up this amazing conversation is: what are you listening to right now? Like in your research or just more generally, what are you, what are you listening to?\n36:00\tErica Isomura:\tI’m listening to, like, kind of these like non, like a lot of music without vocals as I’m writing. [Overlap: Ooh.] I call them my “coworking,” like my “writing working” playlists. [Overlap: Yeah.]\nI was listening to Kishi Bashi earlier today in my hotel room, and he’s a violinist, kind of like a pop violin. So he loops his violin and sings, and he has a band, and he’s an amazing live performer. Thinking about sound–\n36:34\t[Sound of Kishi Bashi’s song “Manchester” starts to play]\t[Vocals]\nI wrote me a book. I hid the last page. I didn’t look. I think I locked it in a cage. I wrote a novel because everybody likes to read a novel…\n36:54\tKate Moffatt:\tErica, thank you so much for sitting and chatting with us today outside in this insanely warm weather. Thank you again.\n37:01\tErica Isomura:\tThank you, for, to both of you for hosting me.\n37:05\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect. Yeah, we got a little windy. [Overlap] I liked our little what was going on there.\n37:11\tErica Isomura:\t[Voices fading] Do you think it’ll be okay?\n37:13\tMusic:\t[Musical Interlude]\n37:17\tKate Moffatt:\tReally just gonna be a conversation where we chat about what we listen to. Did you have any questions before we start?\n37:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tNo, I think I just go with it.\n37:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Has it been recording this whole time?\n37:31\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYeah.\n37:31\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I love that because, at one point, we need to capture that little recording where I’m like, “Here’s like a quick and dirty version of what Shortcuts is. I’m gonna say hello, and I’m gonna be like, Hey, I Kate, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be great…\n[Voice fades]\n37:49\tKate Moffatt:\t[Music fades]\nHello, and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. We are at the University of Alberta for the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium, which we’re at the, we’re on the last day. And it’s been super incredible. We are very excited to have been here. But this is Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer and project manager for the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And today, we’re sitting down with Rémy Bocquillon. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Beautiful. can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Rémy?\n38:19\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Well, thank you for this podcast. And I mean, the whole symposium has been amazing. So that’s, that’s a great experience. I’m so tired, but [Laughter] yeah. So, I am not in sound studies at all. I’m in sociology and sociology theory based in Germany. I work with sound quite a bit as kind of how to use sound, and sound art in my methods of how to do research. So not an analysis of sound, but more like how to do it. And for the SpokenWeb, I have been the artist in residence. So I’ve been very fortunate to prepare a sound installation, which is just across here.\n39:01\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, yeah. Yeah. We’re currently sitting in a big room in the, I think it’s the Cameron Library. We’re right beside the Digital Scholarship Center where the institute is taking place.\nAmazing. Thank you so much. We’re so excited to chat. We’re gonna listen to something. Did you wanna, did you wanna play that for us? Do you wanna say anything about it first?\n39:17\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, so just pay it, and then we can chat about it.\n39:21\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect.\n39:24\tAudio of Êliane Radigue\t[Audio of Êliane Radigue speaking in an interview: Il est tiré le temps prolongé, le temps ralenti, pour étirer le temps, il faut le ralentir. Et c’est sans doute ce qui permet de mieux saisir ce qu’il contient dans le présent. En fait, la grande vérité du temps, je crois, est celle de s ‘inscrire aussi totalement que possible dans le présent.\nEt la meilleure façon de bien pénétrer le présent, c’est de s’y installer. Et forcément une autre durée intérieure à ce moment -là s’établit, une durée qui est presque sans limite. Et on tente de faire cela avec les sons, c’est un petit peu un artific, parce que le son a son discours, son mode de déroulement temporel.\nMais là, effectivement, je triche sans doute un peu en étirant les choses. En fait, une pièce ou une œuvre, quelle que ce soit le nom que vous lui donniez, peut -être une mesure serait peut -être une seule mesure, mais une mesure en l ‘occurrence de 80 minutes, puisque c’est la durée de Psi 847.\nLe refus de l’anecdotique, je crois que c’est très simple, ça ne m’amuse pas. L’anecdote ne m’amuse pas. Et en fait, je fais des choses pour mon plaisir. Merci d ‘avoir regardé cette vidéo.]\n40:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah.\n40:51\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Tell us like, what was that, what were we, what were we just hearing?\n40:54\tRémy Bocquillon:\tSo, it’s an interview from Êliane Radigue who was, she’s still active, is a composer, an electronic musician. She’s one of the pioneers in electronic music and drone music. She’s done a lot of music with synthesizers.\nThis recording is from the 70s, 76, 77. It was broadcast on French radio back then, and today it came out as a record. So that’s, that’s actually–\n41:27\tKate Moffatt:\tLike today, today? [Overlap from Rémy: Today, today. Yeah.]\nLike May 5th, 2023, today. [Overlap from Rémy: Exactly. Yes.] Wonderful. That’s so cool\n41:32\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat was perfect. Like on point for this kind of event. And in this particular recording, she’s talking about time and her perception of time and how, in the stretching of sound, in drone music and electronic music, she has the feeling to manipulate time or to be in time to be in the present. So that’s, that was, yeah. Yeah. It’s, and I love her voice. I love how, how she, she talks about sounds. That’s fascinating. Yeah.\n42:00\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. I’ve kind of got goosebumps from that. That’s, that’s amazing. That sounds so cool.\nCan you give us a bit of, is that kind of what she’s talking about in the interview? I was gonna ask like, is she very much discussing kind of like this, that idea of like stretching time, this is that what’s in the interview?\n42:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, exactly. So she starts out by saying like, that to stretch out time and to play with time, you have to slow it down. And this idea of “slow down” and like that’s at the heart of what we do drone music, for instance.\nBut she did it in the seventies. She was really working with a synthesizer and very meticulously and had this kind of hard work and technique of trying out and having the pieces go on for hours. And a bit later in the interview, she even says, well, one piece can, it’s like one measure, one meter, but it’s like one that lasts 80 minutes. And so that’s, so that’s how long she takes to unfold the sounds.\n43:01\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so wonderful. For the listeners, you can’t see, but Rémy likes using his hands just to stretch, to stretch out time, to stretch out the measures. It’s, it’s been, it’s very, it’s very wonderful.\n43:10\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Sorry, it’s not very radiophonic [Laughs].\n43:12\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, it’s fantastic. That’s so wonderful. And I guess I would love to hear more about how, I guess how this, maybe these ideas that you’re, that are in the interview are intersecting with like your own research and kind of your own work, but also maybe in particular like this interview and like listening to this interview.\nLike, does that intersect too kind of with, ’cause obviously you’re very excited about it, and that’s fantastic. I’d like to just kind of hear more about how it maybe intersects with your own work.\n43:40\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. So that’s a very interesting question and very compelling on certainly many levels because there’s this personal – yeah, I mean, as I said, a lot of her voice –  and I think she because she’s such a pioneer in electronic music… I mean, she has been, in the fifties, working with people like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, who were in France and beyond the first to do musique concrete and this kind of stuff, to integrate different sounds into music – and she was with them and then continued to work on longer forms. And then from the 2000s actually moving away from this synthesizer and doing more acoustic stuff. And that’s where probably it resonates more with my own work because she works a lot with this kind of connection between the instruments, the bodies, and how, in the unfolding of a piece of the music, you have this kind of network happening. A combination of different actors and bodies crafting the sound and crafting the music together how gives you a different sense of experience and of the feeling of space of time. That’s what she’s talking about actually, but really in the performance – how to do this on the spot.\n44:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd that’s what I found very interesting in how, through sound, you have this kind of connection between different bodies… And I call this as kinda modulating this kind of spacetimes through sound. You can just, yeah. Stretch it out and have this kind of very particular moment in time.\n45:24\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s fantastic. And it’s so interesting to me too that you brought this interview where she’s talking about it rather than potentially bringing a piece like you were mentioning, like there’s that piece that’s 80 minutes long, but it’s one measure. Is that what you were saying? [Overlap: Yes, yes. Yeah.]\nObviously, we’re not going to play an 80-minute coupon shortcut, but yeah, I think it’s. I love that you brought this interview clip. So I guess, and you can take this kind of as metaphorically or as literally as you’d like, but when you listen to this clip, what do you hear?\n45:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh, I hear a tremendous artist talking about the practice. And that’s something rich is very interesting because so often you don’t talk about the practice that much. And she’s doing that in such a way that you can see how she’s, or you can hear, how she’s working and how she’s very much like going into the material, really going into the synthesizer, into the sound. And, and I think that’s why these kinds of interviews are very interesting.\nBecause she – and I mean, that was on, so it’s in France culture, which is public radio, and this kind of experimental composer. So that’s interesting as well back in the seventies to have this kind of composer talk about their practice, and to have this person in a very maned world, like experimental music, like talk about her practice and having her practice also recognized and acknowledged. So that’s very important as well.\n46:54\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. And what do you think, like, would it be different to read about the process versus hear this interview where she’s talking about it? Like, is it different to listen to it than to read it?\n47:07\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat’s probably where you could actually tell me that because you, you maybe don’t understand that much. You said you don’t speak French, but you hear a voice–\n47:18\tKate Moffatt:\tWhat did I hear? [Laughs] –\n47:20\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI could jump in on that actually ’cause I was thinking just the way, the way she was speaking slow, not “ma” [The speaker uses the sound “ma” as a vocal filler], that kind of… I haven’t listened to her music obviously, but like to me, it almost sounded like she was mirroring, echoing, paralleling the process of that music and the way she was speaking about it, which I thought was very like, now I wanna listen to that music because of the way she spoke about it. And the process was like in the way she was vocalizing the process almost that, sorry that was my thought–\n47:55\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, that’s lovely. And for, for listeners, that’s Miranda who’s been hopping in occasionally on these Shortcuts conversations, and I’m so, so, so glad they are. Miranda is our audio engineer and sound designer for the podcast. Yeah.\nAnd I guess for me too, like Miranda, you have some French, well, lots of French; you know French. Whereas, whereas I don’t, and I feel, but I feel like I, I did hear very much the same, the same thing, like it, I I don’t think I’d realized beforehand that, that they were a composer or a musician.\nBut you do kind of get that, that sense. It did also feel very – I’m trying to think of the right word – rich, but also almost very like, internalized. Like it was something that I could just felt. So almost intense I guess, about the way that she’s speaking and, and the way that, that she was describing, I guess her, her process. It did sound very musical somehow.\n48:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYes. The pace, I mean. as you said, intense. And towards the end of that clip she’s very opinionated. She says the anecdote doesn’t amuse me, so just don’t do it. So that’s why she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the way she has this kind of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:02\tKate Moffatt:\tJust don’t do it [Laughs].\n49:03\tRémy Bocquillon:\tInteresting. So that’s why she, she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the, the way she, she has this kind of, of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:16\tKate Moffatt:\tI could feel it in my mouth while she was talking. Yeah. Like I could feel it in my own mouth. Yeah. There’s like a, when she was speaking a musical quality. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something very embodied about it.\n49:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd I don’t know if it’s, because back then in radio you had a different kind of rhythm in interviews as well. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because nowadays it’s very fast-paced and you have this kind of difference. So maybe it plays as well. But you see on YouTube you have this kind of documentary where she shows what she’s doing and that’s interesting because of this kind of modular synthesizer and she has this kind of stop clock. And so she’s very much in tune with this idea of time keeping time, but also letting time unfold. And that’s, so in a way that’s totally embodied in her practice, but also how she talks.\n50:02\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s in the interview. Fascinating. I was gonna say, there’s this taking of space of time to, to give it that rhythm, which as you say might be radio conventions kind of changing and then shifting, but regardless that it’s, that it’s there and we hear it and respond to it. Right?\n50:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, totally.\n50:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI’ve got two, two kind of final questions. And they’re very much related.\nOne of them is to just, I’d love to hear like a little bit more about how listening both to things like interviews, like process or this, but even in like your own work ’cause you were saying that you’re a sociologist more than like a sound study scholar, but that obviously sound is there. So like, I’d love to hear about the role of listening in your own, your own research, in your own work.\nAnd then maybe just finish off with like, you know, what you’re listening to right now, whether that’s research related or, or otherwise\n50:50\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh yeah, [Laughs]. Okay. Yeah. So listening in the work is, I think, central in different kinds of different aspects. I mean, in this kind of symposium we have been listening to a lot of things, to a lot of people, to a lot of sounds. And that’s the main aspect of it. Just to listen to each other, I think. And, but in sociology, more directly, it’s also about how to listen and how to actually leave space again to different voices and to different actors and maybe actors we don’t actually hear. So how to work with that.\nAnd how to leave space to those voices, to work with them in different ways. And that bridges to a kind of different way of doing sociology, which is making those kinds of new associations through sound, and which is also a different relation to knowledge and how knowledge production and distribution which is political, which is critical, which is ethical, I think, as well in how to bring this kind of multiplicity of actors, whatever you want to call them, in sounds, and having them like inhabit and then like move, move around.\n52:05\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd what I’ve been listening to, oh, that’s a hard question–\n52:08\tKate Moffatt:\t[Laughs].\n52:09\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. I mean, on my way here, I’ve been listening to a very well renowned French rapper called Orelsan, it’s one of his albums, like last year, two years ago, is very popular, so it’s not like “underground dark things,” [Laughs], but there’s this one song, I don’t know, it just like lift my mood and I love it. So [Laughs], yeah. Taking the bus. That’s what I was listening to.\n52:34\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. I love it so much. We’ve, we’ve collected quite the little, little almost like a little playlist as we’ve been asking folks what they’ve been listening to. I think we’re gonna have to try and put something together at some point here. This has been so wonderful, Rémy. Thank you so much for bringing, bringing this wonderful clip that I love that it got released today. That feels very serendipitous.\n52:53\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThank you. [Overlappinhg] Thank you very much for having and for coming to chat with us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.\n52:56\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n52:57\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n53:02\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Low electronic music plays] You’ve been listening to Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast. This episode featured conversations with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. Thank you for all of your sounds and your time. Thank you to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for putting such care and energy into recording these interviews onsite at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium.\n \nIf you’re at this year’s SpokenWeb symposium, there will be a live recording of an episode coming up as part of the symposium events. So if you’re there, do attend and be part of the audience. Either way, stay tuned, and we’ll look forward to hearing that episode on this feed next month.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast team is: supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say “hi” on social media. Stay tuned to your podcast feed, and as always, thanks for listening.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9642","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E8, Algo-Rhythms, 1 July 2024, Miya and Beauchesne "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/algo-rhythms/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Chelsea Miya","Nicholas Beauchesne"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya","Nicholas Beauchesne"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nicholas Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/audio/3bb27e3c-35f3-4c40-8683-92081ab60ff5/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-mix-spokenweb-june-21-2024-algo-rhythms.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:42:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"40,345,225 byte\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-mix-spokenweb-june-21-2024-algo-rhythms\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/algo-rhythms/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-07-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SOUNDFX & MUSIC\\n\\nThe score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. “Elegia.” On Remembrance. Created with the Murmurator software in collaboration with Eli Stine. SoundCloud audio, 5:25, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/elegia.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. “From “From ‘David’”” From Three PFR-3 Poems by Jackon Mac Low for percussion quartet and speaker; performance by UVA percussion quartet. SoundCloud audio, 4:13, 2017, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/from-from-david.\\n\\nPixabay. “Crane load at construction site.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crane-load-at-construction-site-57551/.\\n\\nSherfey, John, and Congregation. “Nothing but the Blood.” Powerhouse for God (CD SFS60006), Smithsonian Folkways Special Series, 2014. Recorded by Jeff Titon and Ken George. Reproduced with permission of Jeff Titon.\\n\\nSicchio, Kate. “Amelia and the Machine.” Dancer Amelia Virtue. Robotics: Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo. Music: Melody Loveless, Kate Sicchio. Vimeo, uploaded by Kate Sicchio, 2022, https://vimeo.com/678480077.\\n\\nARCHIVAL AUDIO & INTERVIEWS\\n\\nAltmann, Anna. “Popular Poetics” [segment]. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 25 Oct. 2022.\\n\\nJackson, Mac Low. “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin.” Performed by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, bpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974. PennSound, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mac-Low/CDs/Doings/Mac-Low-Jackson_09_Vocabulary-for-Mattlin_Doings_1982.mp3.\\n\\nO’Driscoll, Michael. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 23 Aug. 2022.\\n\\nOnufrijchuk, Roman. Performing “Tape Mark I,” a computer poem by Nanni Balestrini. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.\\n\\nSicchio, Kate. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 4 Nov. 2023.\\n\\nWORKS CITED\\n\\nBalestrini, Nanni. “Tape Mark I.” Translated by Edwin Morgan. Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts. Studio International, 1968.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. From “From ‘David’” [score]. 2017. http://kevindavismusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/From-From-David.pdf.\\n\\nDean, R. T., and Alex McLean, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Oxford University Press, 2018.\\n\\nHiggins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. University of California Press, 2002.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 23 January 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.c, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 19 September 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.d, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.\\n\\nJohnston, David Jhave. “1969: Jackson Mac Low: PFR-3” [blogpost] Digital Poetics Prehistoric. https://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/26/1969-jackson-mac-low-pfr-3-poems/.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. 1973. Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, CC-47567-68576.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty, edited by Anne Tardos. University of California Press, 2008. https://doi-org.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/10.1525/9780520933293.\\n\\nO’Driscoll, Michael. “By the Numbers: Jackson Mac Low’s Light Poems and Algorithmic Digraphism.” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008, edited by J. Mark Smith. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013, pp. 109-131.\\n\\nRusso, Emiliano, Gabriele Zaverio and Vittorio Bellanich. “TAPE MARK 1 by Nanni Balestrini: Research and Historical Reconstruction.” The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, June 2017. https://zkm.de/en/tape-mark-1-by-nanni-balestrini-research-and-historical-reconstruction.\\n\\nStine, Eli, and Kevin William Davis. “The Murmurator: A Flocking Simulation-Driven Multi-Channel Software Instrument for Collaborative Improvisation.” International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2018. https://elistine.com/writing-blog/2018/4/14/the-murmurator.\\n\\nFURTHER READING / LISTENING\\n\\nHiggins, Hannah, and Douglas Kahn, eds. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. University of California Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520953734.\\n\\nNoll, Michael. “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated,” LEONARDO, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55-65.\\n\\nReichardt, Jasia, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity. 1968. 2nd edition. Studio International, 1968.\\n\\nRockman, A, and L. Mezei. “The Electronic Computer as an Artist.” Canadian Art, vol. 11, 1964, pp. 365–67.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549758148608,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?\n\nIn this live episode recorded during June’s 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium, producers Nicholas Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.\n\nThank you to interviewees Michael O’Driscoll, Kevin William Davis, and Kate Sicchio, as well as the live studio audience.\n\n00:04\tSpokenWeb Podcast Intro\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:17\tMaia Harris:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n00:31\tMaia Harris:\tMy name is Maia Harris, subbing in for our usual hosts for a very special edition of the SpokenWeb podcast, recorded live at the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium here on Treaty Seven Land.\nEach month, we bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\nHow can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?\nIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we will venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.\n01:18\tChelsea Miya:\tThanks, Maia. Hi everyone. I am Chelsea Miya.\n01:22\tNicholas Beauchesne:\tAnd I’m Nick Beauchesne. And this is our live studio audience. . .\n01:28\tLive Studio Audience:\t[Cheers and applause]\n01:36\tChelsea Miya:\t[Beat music plays and fades]\nThanks to the “algos,” or algorithms, used in social media to curate content and drive engagements. Most people have at least heard the term, even if they have little understanding of what it means.\nThe concept of an “algorithm” predates computers, originating back in the ninth century. An “algorithm” is understood to mean a set of rules for executing a particular task or a set of operations. You can create an algorithm for getting ready in the morning, baking a cake, or driving to work. As we’ll see later in the episode, algorithms can even be used to generate poetry, compose music and choreograph dances.\n02:14\tNicholas Beauchesne:\tThe clip you’re about to hear is from the University of Alberta campus radio show “Voice Print.” You can learn more about the series and its early contributions to experimental literary radio on the SpokenWeb podcast episode: “Academics on Air.”\nThis particular voice-print episode was themed “Printing and Poetry in the Computing Era,” and it aired in 1981. The archival recording anticipated the hopes and fears for automated computer-generated art that, in some ways, have come to be realized in the present.\n02:45\tAudio from the “Popular Poetics” segment of The Voiceprint episode “Printing And Poetry In The Computer Era,” 20 May 1981; Read By Anna Altmann.\tAlthough documentation is lacking, it is probable that computer poetry was invented simultaneously at various locations in the 1950s by engineers occupied in such language tasks as mechanical translation during the 1960s. However, these developments came to the attention of poets and literary scholars, who then began to explore the literary possibilities of computer technology.\nAlthough somewhat disturbed by the implications of such activity, these pioneers were more fascinated by the superhuman inventiveness of the computer and by the inability of the reader to distinguish with certainty between machine and human products. Although no recognized masterpieces of cybernetic literature have yet been produced, it seems only a matter of time before computer poetry becomes a respected form of verse in its own right. Indeed, the possibility exists that a future Milton or Shakespeare is at this very moment studying computer science at a technical school or university.\n03:44\tNicholas Beauchesne\tThe Milton or Shakespeare of computer poetry may not have arisen yet, but one contender could be open: AI’s ChatGPT, which debuted in 2022. Other AI chatbots entered the mix soon after. Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Co-pilot, and even Adobe Photoshop have an AI-assisted editor mode. These technologies raise fundamental, ethical and existential questions about what constitutes art.\nCan a programmer or a program be a poet? They can certainly try. As ChatGPT told us in the form of haiku:\ncraft with words untold\nChatGPT offers aid\npoetry unfolds\n04:26\tChelsea Miya:\tOur first guest is Mike O’Driscoll, and he’s the Director of SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta. He’s an authority on early experiments in procedural or algorithmic poetry as he explains the “Dada” movement—and that’s “Dada” with a “d,” not a “t” as in “data”—was an anti-art movement. These early coders became infamous for their avant-garde performance pieces. The instructions were generated randomly, not with digital tech since this was before bits and bytes, but with everyday analog tools: paper, a pen, and, oddly, a hat.\n05:04\tMike O’Driscoll:\tTristan Zara, one of the leaders of the “Dadaist” Movement, would pass a hat around the room—think about a Vienna Cafe 1916—and invite audience members to put a word into the hat and then the hat would be gathered and as the words came out of the hat that would construct the poem. That’s a “procedural” poetic. That is a way of making a poem according to a particular rule-driven methodology that might or might not be modified before, during, or after, in terms of human intention and other creative roles that the human participants might play.\n05:48\tChelsea Miya:\tFast-forward to the 1960s. IBM [“International Business Machines”] had just debuted powerful new computing machines, and almost from the get-go, the company founders imagined using these machines to create art. They invited a number of artists to their laboratories, including Jackson Mac Low.\n06:08\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIn Southern California in 1969, Jackson was invited to participate alongside computer technologists in the production of some poetry, which he dubbed the “PFR-3 Poems” [PFR: Phonemic Face Realizations]. These were using film readers that could be read automatically by a computer program that would essentially take the inputs that he produced and randomize them in different ways so he could enter up to a hundred lines of text with up to 48 characters per line. The program would identify units of that text, whether words or sentences and then randomize those and produce poems by displaying on a screen every 10th line produced through that algorithmic procedure. So, that was a very early instance of Jackson Mac Low engaging computer technology to produce a poem.\n07:09\tChelsea Miya:\tAs Michael O’Driscoll explains, this was not Mac Low’s first experiment with computational art, as described by a poet who worked like a computer before computers. Mac Loew had been experimenting with rule-based language games for years.\n07:25\tMike O’Driscoll:\tJackson had already been working by hand for six years before that on what he called his “diastic writing through” method, which was essentially an algorithmic procedure that uses source texts and seed texts or index text to determine which words are pulled out of the source text and displayed on the page of the poem. That procedure depends specifically on the very exacting rule of matching letter positions in words in the seed text to letter positions in words in the source text to determine the material that becomes the poem. That’s a process that Jackson was doing by hand from 1963 and did for the next 26 years by hand. And if anyone wants to try this, I welcome them to try it. But the manic patience it takes to do this is astounding and impressive.\n08:25\tNicholas Beauchesne\tJackson Mac Low was not the only artist who experimented with algorithmic methods. He was part of an experimental art movement called “Fluxus.” Like the “Dadaists” who came before, the Fluxus of the 1960s was more interested in the process of making art than the finished piece. In fact, the art was never finished.\n08:46\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIt’s important to note that much of that performance work was done through collaborative processes that demanded or asked of the performers and the artists a certain level of attentiveness and attunement to each other in terms of what was going on in the moment. So there’s this deeply relational aspect to what’s going on there. There is also a modelling of certain kinds of social or political formations. And so what Jackson is doing there is bringing the procedural into contact with human agency and with human community.\n09:25\tNicholas Beauchesne\tOne of the best examples of Mac’s process in action is a vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Here’s a clip of a live performance featuring an all-star cast of readers, including Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Hagan, and the unmatchable BpNichol.\n09:46\tAudio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\tShare name, nation share name, nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat. Tell them tell us anymore. Tell them Stare, stare. Helen, stare. Tell stare. Stare hen. Be lamb eel. Tell, tell them. Tell them laws tell them rain eel brain reliable metal la, reliable trash, reliable trash, reliable trash, stellar trash, reliable trash, termination. See, stellar trash. She Athens, taste me, taste me.\n10:55\tChelsea Miya:\tAs our live audience can see projected above us, here is the “score” for the performance. The page, as I’ll describe it for our listeners, is a jumble of words, some written in tiny, cramped font, other larger, some angled in different directions, or flipped upside down. Each word is a variation or riff on the name of the person the poem is dedicated to: Sharon Belle Mattlin. Some configurations of letters from her name morphed into elation, emanation, mint, share, shame, and so on. The performers were free to interpret, explore, and respond to these freewheeling scores at the moment of the performance. But always within the bounds of agreed-upon rules.\n11:42\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIt’s a brilliant field of text in which what Jackson has done, is written in by hand all of the words derived from the dedicatee of the piece. The performers that can then move across that page in ways that they are inclined to do, whether they are articulating work words or singing or in the case of instrumentalists that you could hear the flute music. In that case, they are transposing the letters to particular notes that Jackson has determined for them in advance. And so, what you’re getting, in that case, is, again, quite a rule-bound production of the text and its performance. But also, that opportunity for the performers themselves to move across and through that work in ways that they intuit and that they conduct in response to their fellow performers.\n12:46\tChelsea Miya:\tAlgorithmic processes are increasingly reshaping our world. So, we asked Mike what Mac’s work can teach us about the role of human decision makers in our data-driven society.\n13:00\tMike O’Driscoll:\tJackson works deliberately at the limit between “chance” and “choice,” between “procedure” and “intention.” He does so in part to trouble that boundary, to disturb or even deconstruct the boundary between the machine and the human, between the automatic and the “age-gentle.” And he does so for very deliberate political reasons.\nIn part one, I contend that Jackson draws attention to what I’ve been calling the ideology of machine agency. That notion that machines that algorithms, that computers are somehow themselves operative, are somehow themselves “age-gentle.”\nBut this is, in many ways, a kind of illusion that the presumption of machine agency is itself ideological, is itself something about which we should beware.\n14:02\tNicholas Beauchesne\tMike O’Driscoll is editing a new collection of Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems, which will feature over 100 never-before-published poems. This new version by MIT Press will hit the shelves in Fall 2025\n14:17\tAudio from “Tape Mark I” by Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint episode “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; performed by Roman Onufrijchuk.\tAeons deep in the ice. I paint all time in a whirl bang. The sludge has cracked aeons deep in the ice. I see gelled time in a whirl. The sludge has cracked all green in the leaves. I smell dark pools in the trees crash. The moon has fled all white in the buds. I flash snow peaks in the spring bang, the sun has fogged\n14:52\tChelsea Miya:\tMac Low’s computer poems continue to be performed and encoded in new ways. Next, we’ll hear from Kevin William Davis, a contemporary composer and cellist based at the University of Virginia. Davis is a big fan of Jackson Mac Low, and he was particularly captivated by his computer poems.\n15:12\tKevin Davis:\tYeah, poetry is actually a really big inspiration of mine. I mean to me, I can read orchestral scores, I can kind of like see them and imagine them in the way that one might sit with a book of poetry maybe sound some of it out, on a score on the piano, maybe you would actually read some of the poetry out loud.\n15:34\tChelsea Miya:\tDavis’ Musicology students didn’t at first share his enthusiasm for poetry and they were kind of baffled when he brought a book of poems to practise. But when they started scoring Mac Low’s computer poems, working line by line to transform the words into sounds, something clicked.\n15:51\tKevin Davis:\tAs a music teacher, I see people struggle with notation constantly. It’s a very difficult thing to turn symbols into movements, in time. And when they were doing these, this Mac Low stuff, it was effortless. That directly, I think, inspired my thinking about, “OK, what if I then turned speech back into music?” Can I get these . . . can I get these uh [laughs] percussionists to execute rhythms that are more complex than they could with actual musical notation?\n16:29\tNicholas Beauchesne\tMac Low not only adopted methods from computing, also music theory. He studied with composer John Cage and sound, as we heard, was integral to the performance of his work. The Fluxus movement itself spanned multiple countries and multiple fields of practice—not just poetry, but also sculpture, dance, and music.\nSo, when Davis and his students decided to remake Mac Low’s PFR (Permutation, Replacement, and Form) poems in a different genre, creating music from the printed words, it was a very Fluxus thing to do.\nInstead of transcribing the words into notes, they created a series of sonic doodles. The new, re-created score looks on the page like a series of loops and squiggles, each shape corresponding to lines from the poem.\n17:15\tKevin Davis:\tMy concept of this was transformation of elements of the poem into movement, which then would result in sound. And so for literally like the drums are tracing out the letters of the poem on the surface of their instruments. And so just different ways, some of them almost silly, just different ways of transforming this movement into sound in that process. Yeah, I spent a lot of time with the words like saying the words. The four poems that were in the collection that I have were each very different. They were very much like movements of a musical work.\nAre we allowed to pause for a second? I think this would be an easier discussion to have with the book, which I was like, I should have grabbed that book.\nHold on just a second. So Know it’s around here somewhere.\n18:06\tChelsea Miya:\tSo behind me are stills from the interview that I did with Kevin over Zoom. And at this point in the interview, Davis left the frame and rummaged around in the background.\n18:18\tKevin Davis:\tOh, here it is.\n18:20\tChelsea Miya:\tAnd he pulled out a copy of Jackson Mac Low’s Collected Works: Thing of Beauty (2008). The pages are scribbled with notes for his performance, just like he would do for a score. Davis’s favourite poem, the one with a lot of annotations, is “From from David.” He confesses he was more than a little nervous about performing the speaking parts. But for this particular poem, he felt it was important to read the actual text.\n18:48\tKevin Davis:\tI’m so much more comfortable playing a musical instrument than speaking. And especially speaking as performance. There are things you find in the experience of reading one of those kinds of texts over and over. It seems like in a lot of ways more about language itself more than just any kind of emotional idea he’s trying to get across. It’s a kind of anti narrative really.\nWhile like I said before, in the reading. I tried to strike a tone. The funniness is just being like kind of pummelled by this absurdity of, you know, just these different transformations of this very simple idea of like is this is David asking what happened. [laughs]\n19:26\t[Audio From From “From ‘David’” Composed By Kevin Davis From Three PFR-3 Poems By Jackson Mac Low For Percussion Quartet And Speaker, 2017; Performance By UVA Percussion Quartet.]\tWhere did David ask what happened? How did David ask? Where did David happen to have asked me? Asking what had been, happened. David asks, had anything happened when David asked who was there? When David asked, how did David ask what happened, what had been happening when David was asking what had been happening, what was happening when David was asking happened? How had David been asked what had happened? When did David ask what had happened? Whom—\n20:08\tKevin Davis:\t[Live reading from the interview] It’s from David. David asked whether anything had been happening. Whom did David ask? What happened?\nWell, it’s like I messed up a couple times. I really, when I did it, especially in the recording and performance, I had to practise some to be ready. It’s not a tongue twister exactly, but it almost gets in that territory. There’s just so much repetition, it can get a little difficult. This one more than any of them is really a lot like reading music. Even the most notated classical piece involves improvisation on the part of the performer. It may be just in small ways.\n20:44\tKevin Davis:\tAnd it made me think about that. This feels like the kind of improvising you do when you play Mozart or Bach or something. And then you kind of like put little ends of phrases that you’re you. But in the moment, if you know it well enough, you’re able to play with it. You’ll all do this end this way this time.\nAnd what I love about this one is that some of the lines have question marks and some don’t. And so you can play around with this thing that’s often unconscious that we do, where we indicate a question through raising the pitch.\n21:23\tNicholas Beauchesne\tDavis’s reading of Mac Low’s computer scores was, in part, inspired by his experiences growing up in Appalachia. One of his first experiences with the live performance of music and voice was at his Baptist Church. When he read Mac Low’s poems, he imagined the relationship between instruments and the voice, the way the spoken text echoes the sounds, as a kind of congregation.\n21:47\tKevin Davis:\tWe did these things, called responsive readings. Have you ever heard of these? So there’ll be whatever text or sometimes Bible verses, and then the pastor will talk and then the congregation, the words will be in bold and you’ll go back and forth. And there are all these hetero-phonic artifacts of like people sort of speaking together. I found them compellingly odd, and it was. It’s such a different way of interacting than singing.\nMe, as a little kid, I thought it was really interesting. Well, it’s just this sound of like 200 people’s voices of all ages kind of like having this resonance together. But like it’s all soft on the edges because of the different ways that people are speaking. And whenever they hit like a “tee” then it’s like “tuh-tuh-tuh.” Right. It’s kind of like dancing around the room, whereas the vowels will all be kind of like these kinds of flowing singing things, you know, like sounds.\n22:51\tChelsea Miya:\tDavis doesn’t just perform computer poems. He also, on occasion, helps write computer programs. Interactive sonic events, people sounding together, have always intrigued him. After reflecting on the parallel practices of church congregations and Fluxus artists, he got to thinking: could these social dynamics of sonic performance be captured and re-created computationally?\n23:20\tAudio from “Elegia” from On Remembrance, 2020; composed by Kevin William Davis using the Murmuration software in collaboration with Eli Stine.\tI worked with a friend, Eli Stein, who’s a fantastic programmer. We came up something that’s a flocking algorithm, a bird flocking algorithm. Fifty little particles of sound, and then they just kind of flock around. You just use that flocking as kind of like a starting point. An agent of kind of chaos to spread things out and then you can stop them, freeze them.\n23:56\tChelsea Miya:\tHave you ever seen flocks of starlings? They move together in this hypnotic way, dancing across the sky, almost like jellyfish or giant misshapen bubbles, stretching and contracting. That behaviour is called Murmuration. And that’s what Davis and his partner dubbed the software: The Murmurator.\nIt’s a tool for creating interactive, multi-channel sound installations. In developing the software, they experimented with increasingly elaborate speaker set-ups, bigger “flocks” so to speak: 50 speakers, then 100, in various configurations.\nOnce you execute the program and the flock takes flight, the particles of sound will move, seemingly independently. The human user, however, is working behind the scenes, “conducting” the performance as it happens by adjusting the settings and creating different flocking patterns.\n24:57\tNicholas Beauchesne\tThere are echoes of these sonic dances in the Jackson Mac Low performances we’ve been hearing. Lately, Davis has been thinking more and more about human-computer interaction and its implications for art and creativity. He’s particularly fascinated by watching computers play games.\n25:16\tKevin Davis:\tI think a lot about chess and how, you know, people were at first very disturbed that no human could beat a computer at chess anymore. But there’s been this evolution of chess playing computers, especially through machine learning, where they’re starting to come up with chess ideas that are coming from an alien planet or something. It’s not things that anybody would have thought of.\nKevin Davis: I would wind up watching these games on YouTube that were like computers playing computers. And first of all, that’s existentially weird, like watching, right? But it’s a strange alien kind of beauty that’s coming out of these games.\n[START MUSIC]\nSo what has happened is now those ideas have reintroduced all kinds of like openings that people maybe had forgotten. There are these ways that like technologies can inspire creativity and actually give people ideas solutions to artistic or creative ideas that they hadn’t considered. Maybe find a part of yourself that you were not able to access.\n26:43\tAudio From “Tape Mark I” By Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint Episode “Printing And Poetry In The Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; Performed By Roman Onufrijchuk.\tThe landscape of your clay mitigates me coldly by your recognizable shape. I am wronged the perspective of your frog feeds me dimly by your wet love. I am raked.\n26:59\tChelsea Miya:\tOur last guest is a choreographer and performer, Kate Sicchio, Associate Professor of Dance and Media Technology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Sicchio explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real-time systems (“About”). We asked her how she made the leap from dancing in her own human body to dancing virtually with technology.\n27:27\tKate Sicchio:\tWay back when I was a high schooler, I had this internship, it was the nineties of the.com boom. So, I worked at what was then a web start-up. It’s so different than what web start-ups are now. [Laughs] But basically, I had this internship where I had taught myself some HTML to make my own geo-cities page. And so they’d give me giant Photoshop files and I would code them into HTML. So that was like my after-school job. And then I also was a dancer. So I would go for my after-school job to dance class and um did a lot of ballet and modern. And then went to do a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in dance and was like, I don’t, I’m not interested in this technology thing, whatever. I’m just gonna be a dancer. And then about halfway through my undergraduate degree, I got injured and I had a bunch of knee surgeries\n28:20\tKate Sicchio:\tI still have knee problems. My knee is really swollen right now as we speak. Um but I had to take six months off from dancing. So I went to my school’s multimedia department. I was like, I know HTML. Do you have any classes I can take? And they were like, take anything. [Laughs] So I started doing actually a lot of video work at the time and then these other sorts of different interactive classes and then when I was well enough to dance, someone kind of mentioned kind of offhand to me like, oh, well, why don’t you combine the dance courses and the multimedia courses? Why don’t these two things come together? And that was my epiphany moment. Like oh yeah, these things could come together. I really started, yeah, working a lot with um in particular video projections and making them interactive in real time. From there I went to the UK to do a master’s degree in digital performance. I kind of kept going on that trajectory and now I’m still doing it like 20 years later.\n29:30\tChelsea Miya:\tCan you describe some of the collaborations that you’ve done with robots and the things that are exciting but also challenging about working with robot collaborators and duetting with them in a sense?\n29:43\tKate Sicchio:\tI work a lot with um Dr. Patrick Martin who’s now at University of Richmond, who is a roboticist. We created our first piece together, it was performed in 2022, called Amelia and the Machine.\n[Audio starts playing. From “Amelia and the Machine,” 2022; danced by Amelia Virtue; robotics by Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo; music by Melody Loveless and Kate Sicchio.]\nSo, that was a duet for a small manipulator robot, which is basically a Rumba with an arm. [Laughs]. And it’s not very tall, it’s under 2 ft tall. Um And then Amelia is the dancer, Amelia Virtue. So, the aim of that piece was just to like, can we do this, can we put a robot and a person on stage together and what will that mean?\nSo, we’re really interested in the idea of human-robot teams. And a big part of that for me is I want them to improvise together. How can they like inform each other’s decision-making about movement together? We actually created this machine learning algorithm where Amelia could teach the robot a new gesture on stage by manipulating its arm.\n30:48\tKate Sicchio:\tSo she literally like grabs the arm, there’s sensors on the motors that can see where she’s put it. She only has to do that three times and then it’s learned it, it stored it, it can call it back later in the performance. So that was our small moment of improv in that piece.\nBut actually to do that became its own engineering accomplishment and that actually became like a new machine learning algorithm, which we call dancing from demonstration algorithm. So, so we had this like small like discovery of this algorithm in the process of making this piece.\n31:26\tChelsea Miya:\tThe role of empathy seems to come up in your design process in terms of imagining how these robots and robot bodies would move differently and perceive the world differently and us differently.\n31:43\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah, I think that’s part of it. Well, I guess you just realize so quickly that they’re not human. [Laughs] And like it’s a thing that comes up a lot. I’m asked like, why don’t you put costumes on your robots? And I’m like, they’re not people, they shouldn’t be seen as people. Let’s not like make them cute little characters. [Laughs]\nEven like the moving of the robot arm, we call it an arm, but it’s nothing like our arm, it doesn’t have the same joints or the same movement pathways. So, even when you’re choreographing the robot arm, you’re just moving five motors. And you become very aware of that very quickly. Like, it’s not an arm.\n32:24\tNicholas Beauchesne\tKate explains that audiences connect to the robot performers in surprising ways. Often, the people who come to her shows will respond in emotional, affective ways to the machines on stage.\n32:36\tKate Sicchio:\tSo, I think because Amelia and the machine start with her physically touching the robot, it really sets up this like very intimate relationship with the robot. And she’s very careful. She’s like is very intentional, right, in teaching it the gesture. She wants to get it just right. So here’s this person touching and teaching this robot. And it does become this like, yeah, they clearly have established this relationship together, Amelia and the robot. And people have read this in all kinds of ways. So, I have a young son. So, um he was a toddler when that piece came out. So everyone was like, this is about you and your son because the robot’s the size of a toddler. And I was like, no, it’s not! But [laughs] But um, but yeah, they just saw a woman and this toddler-sized machine and this intimate thing of teaching a toddler-sized thing. So it automatically read like that to a lot of people. And then also this, um, yeah, this clear thing where they’re dancing together but not like, um, often not in unison that sets up this relationship that they’re different but working together, um, that people really read into as well, yeah.\n33:49\tChelsea Miya:\tHow does being a choreographer give you different insights into technology and code that might not occur to a traditional coder?\n33:57\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah, there are a few ways, I think. One is just expert movers. So I try to teach this to my dance students all the time. You’re an expert mover. People need you to share your insights on the body. So there’s a lot of like systems that are being made now. Even our phones, right? Like we carry around a computer on our body all the time. We have all these gestures that we do to make it work. But these aren’t necessarily being come-up with by people who are very into using their body, right? They might be computer scientists or if you’re lucky, they’re UX designer who’s interested in the body. But usually they’re a UX designer who’s more like, oh, well, if it takes more than three clicks, people get bored. [Laughs] Right? But our interfaces are becoming more and more about the body.\n34:55\tKate Sicchio:\tAnd so there’s this place where dancers’ knowledge really could feed into how we design our technologies. Also, how we understand them. So um I’m really interested in things like how gestures hold meaning or even like an emotion, right?\nSo like if I’m like doing something really heavy and sudden it’s gonna look like a punch, right? So like if I’m gonna design like a gesture on my phone that’s heavy and sudden it’s like I’m angry. That has a whole yeah, design approach to it, right? Or I love to pick on the gesture of Tinder, right?\nSo you’re constantly flicking just like light and indirect and kind of careless. When we say, oh yeah, yeah, I’m swiping. There is a carelessness to that. This isn’t how you’re gonna find a spouse [laughs]. Because you’re just throwing people away. [Laughs]\nSo, yeah, I think about dancers as being able to bring that knowledge to tech and design.\n35:56\tChelsea Miya:\tI was curious too about like, whether your work changes the way you observe and perceive like technology in the, in the world. Do you ever, like, see machines, machines or tech and be like, wow, that’s a beautiful dance?\n36:06\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. Yeah. Actually I do all the time. [Laughs] Yeah, I’m trying to think of something I’ve seen recently where I was like, oh I love this. But yeah, I have. I see these like machine choreography everywhere.\n[Audio from crane loading at the construction site.]\nOh, I saw some really beautiful—they’re always building. Oh, I guess in every city now. But in Richmond we have a lot of building going on. So these cranes were moving, um, and sort of like shifting. They were like counterpoint cranes on the skyline. [Laughs] And I was like, oh look at that dance. [Laughs] Yeah.\n36:39\tChelsea Miya:\tThere is something hypnotic about technology and the way that it moves and this sort of kinetic aspect.\n36:46\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. I think that’s like a draw as a choreographer for me for sure. Because you, you say robot and everyone assumes these kinds of like sudden jerky movements, but they’re so smooth and they do have dynamics and they do have potential for like moving in different ways. That’s what gets exciting as a choreographer. It’s not like just sequencing. You can make a range of dynamics and all the stuff that gets exciting as a mover. Yeah.\n37:18\tNicholas Beauchesne\tKate performs live coated dances where the code itself is projected in real time on the walls ceiling. Even the performer’s bodies. She’s sometimes seated at the side of the stage at a desk with her laptop. Yet even when she decentres herself, her embodied interactions with the computer program, her finger strikes on the keys, even sips of water she takes are a crucial extension of the dance in this nexus of performer performance and audience of process and product. We again, think of the Fluxus movement. We asked her about that movement enduring legacy today.\n37:57\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. And I was also talking about Fluxus prompts the other day in terms of like people talking about AI prompts, like oh, for Midjourney or whatever, giving it a prompt. And I was like, is this just a new way of doing Fluxus art? Like that’s only what they did. They just wrote prompts, right? [Laugha[\nAre we all just Fluxus artists now? Yeah [Laughs].\n38:19\tNicholas Beauchesne\tWhether used for poetry, music, or dance, or any other creative medium, algorithms have such generative potential. Algorithmic art is so peculiar in that it is seemingly chaotic, random, and illogical, yet intensely rule-bound and orderly.\nWe would like to leave the last word to another computer artist, the Italian poet and programmer Nanni Balestrini. The following poem, entitled “Tape Mark I,” is a computer-generated remix of three source texts: Michihito Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, Paul Goldwin’s The Mystery of the Elevator, and the philosophical treatise attributed to the sage Lao Tzu’s, the Tao Te Ching (Balestrini 55). The original “experiment” was performed on an IBM 7070 computer at the Electronic Centre of the Lombard Provinces Savings Bank in Milan in October, 1961 (55). The reader is Voiceprint producer Roman Onufrijchuk, who also read the previous two interludes of computer poetry. Onufrijchuk has an admirable knack for mimicking the monotone, mechanical voice of an imagined computer author and reader.\n39:28\tAudio from “Tape Mark I” by Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint episode “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; performed by Roman Onufrijchuk.\tWhile the multitude of things comes into being in the blinding fireball, they all returned to their roots. They expand rapidly until he moved his fingers slowly when it reached the stratosphere and lay motionless without speaking 30 times brighter than the sun endeavouring to grasp. I envisaged their return until he moved his fingers slowly in the blinding fireball, they all returned to their roots, hair between lips and 30 times brighter than the sun lay motionless. Without speaking, they expand rapidly. Endeavouring to grasp the summit.\n40:08\tSpokenWeb Theme Song\tCan you hear me?\n40:11\tMaia Harris:\tThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Chelsea Miya, a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University’s Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Nicholas Beauchesne, a musician and instructor at the University of Alberta, who also engineered this episode’s audio. The score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.\nNick Beauchesne engineered this episode’s audio and the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium.\nParticipants are our live studio audience.\n41:08\tLive Audience\t[Cheers and applause]\n41:11\tMaia Harris:\tOur usual hosts are Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod, our supervising producer is me, Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcriptionist is Yara Ajeeb.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada.\nStay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for Shortcuts, with the amazing Katherine McLoed, short stories about how literature sounds.\nYou were a wonderful audience.\n41:52\tLive Audience\t[Cheers and applause]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9647","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1 Trailer, Welcome to SpokenWeb, 18 September 2019, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e7410595-5a7c-4602-9105-dfab11d89b95/spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,043,270 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["(0:03)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n(00:16)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like?\n(00:19)\tRoy Kiyooka\tThose possibilities of utterance that is more than parochial.\n(00:25)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\n(00:28)\tG. McEwen\tPlace the needle in the proper groove and then just let the\nthe record speaks for itself.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tThis is SpokenWeb, a podcast about how literature sounds. I’m Hannah McGregor and every month I’ll be bringing you stories from across Canada that take us into the archives of our literary history.\n(00:50)\tDorothy Livesay\tMostly, I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the\ndifferent, uh, things.\n(00:56)\tHannah McGregor\tI hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca or wherever you get your\npodcasts.\n "],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549762342912,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9648","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3 Trailer, Welcome to Season 3! Our Trailer, 20 September 2021, Burr and McGregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-3-our-trailer/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Judith Burr","Hannah McGregor"],"creator_names_search":["Judith Burr","Hannah McGregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Judith Burr\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/4df61375-c766-4dc5-8d86-ca0f12d5fc53/audio/f79cc9ff-2d57-41a0-a9e2-aaf1fbbc5216/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e0-trailer-2021.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,018,043 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e0-trailer-2021\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-3-our-trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-09-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Clips Featured:\\n\\nKPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from\\nS2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”\\n\\nMavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from\\nS2E9 “Mavis Gallant Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”\\n\\nMathieu Aubin, in\\nS2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”\\n\\n“Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, and Katherine McLeod in\\nS2E8 “Talking about Talking”\\n\\nPenn Kemp, from\\nS2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\\n\\nWisdom Agorde, from\\nS2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1: The Language of Talking Drums”\\n\\nKlara du Plessis, from\\nS2E1 “Deep Curation: Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice”\\n\\nStacey Copeland, from\\nS2E5 “Cylinder Talks – Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”\\n\\nTreena Chambers, from\\nS2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”\\n\\nMusic –\\n“Slapstick” by Moon Juice\\nfrom Blue Dot Sessions\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549762342913,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Another season is upon us! At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we continue to bring you episodes that journey into literary history and explore our contemporary responses to it. This season, researchers from across the SpokenWeb community – and a few special guests – produce audio stories that creatively engage with literary recordings in the SpokenWeb archives and put this archival history into context. We will dive deep into clips of preserved sound, reflect on the power of poetic performance, and consider how sound studies can inform our understandings of history and literature. We will look closely at both the individuals and communities that have shaped our literary world. We will consider how our podcast episodes can be a form of scholarship. We will listen closely together.\n\nThis podcast is for everyone who holds a love for literature, sound, archives, or history – and for all those who love learning something new by listening. We hope you’ve enjoyed our past episodes, and we can’t wait to share this new season with you – coming to your podcast feeds on October 4, 2021!\n\nWe would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Start Music: Upbeat Instrumental] What is it about a voice –.\n(00:07)\tAudio Recording, KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from S2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”\t…and the voice said, “walk” –.\n(00:07)\t\nHannah McGregor\n– that can bring Canada’s literary past back here into the present?\n(00:13)\nAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from S2E9 “Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”\n[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking Into Recorder] You see I’m a fetishist, the watch has to be there and not there.\n(00:15)\nHannah McGregor\nWhat might have been forgotten if no one had pressed record or listened to these voices in the archives?\n(00:24)\nMathieu Aubin, in S2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”\n[Sounds of a printing press] Like a cacaophony of lesbian liberation print sounds.\n(00:27)\nHannah McGregor\nOn the SpokenWeb Podcast, our producer researchers have investigated the stories behind the sounds [Audio Recording: Intake of breath] we’ve saved. [Audio Recording: Intake of breath].\n(00:36)\nAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, from S2E8 “Talking about talking”\n[Audio Recording: Intake of breath, repeated] Listen to Black women/ As a Black woman.\n(00:39)\nHannah McGregor\nWe’ve immersed you in the mystique and –\n(00:41)\nPenn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\n[Underlaid sound] [Repetitive non-verbal sounds as sound poem is performed].\n(00:41)\nHannah McGregor\n– joy of Penn Kemp sound poems.\n(00:43)\nPenn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\n–can I hear you please? [End Music: Upbeat strings and cello]\n(00:46)\nHannah McGregor\nWe’ve grappled with questions of sonic communication in our episode, Drum Codes.\n(00:51)\nWisdom Agorde, from S2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1”\nThe talking drum travels several kilometres. [Audio Recording: Talking Drum] [Start Music:  SpokenWeb Instrumental]\n(00:57)\nHannah McGregor\nWith the deep curation of poetry readings –\n(01:00)\nKlara du Plessis, from S2E1 “Deep Curation”\n[Audio Effect: Voice Echo] I wanted to really curate a poetry reading.\n(01:02)\nHannah McGregor\n– with teaching audible history in “Cylinder Talks”–\n(01:05)\nStacey Copeland, from S2E5 “Cylinder Talks – Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”\nInviting students to engage in audio production.\n(01:08)\nHannah McGregor\n– and, with the ethics of listening.\n(01:10)\nTreena Chambers, from S2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”:\nYou don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for just for the sake of listening.\n(01:19)\nHannah McGregor:\nNow in season three of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we continue this audible research and storytelling. We have new stories to look forward to, more histories of Canadian writers and poets, more on the technologies of talking drums, and more explorations of the places that preserving sonic history can take us as tools of memory, teaching, and wonder. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. We hope you’ll subscribe and join us for season three of the SpokenWeb Podcast coming to your podcast feeds on October 4th. [End Music: SpokenWeb Instrumental Music]\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9649","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5 Trailer, Welcome to Season 5!, 18 September 2023, Harris, Healy, McGregor, McLeod and Mix"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Zoe Mix\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/6511fd80-29e0-41f2-8ad9-dda3420119fd/audio/a6369593-95d4-46c0-a56e-c005845f0179/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"trailer-v5-master.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,675,682 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"trailer-v5-master\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["The SpokenWeb Podcast is back for another season as we continue our quest to uncover “what literature sounds like.”\n\nWith a whole new line-up of episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network, we’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing, voice, and poetics, and much much more.\n\nOur fearless host Katherine McLeod is back and will be joined by Hannah McGregor, host of Seasons 1-3. Welcome back Hannah!\n\nWe have something for everyone curious about the affordances of literature, sound, history, and the amorphous “archive,” so join us for monthly episodes of innovative audio scholarship.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout! Cheers to Season 5 ~\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Soft strummed guitar music plays and ends]\nWhat does the SpokenWeb podcast sound like?\n\n(00:10)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet percussion music begins to play] In the fourth season of the SpokenWeb podcast, we conversed with a living archive.\n(00:15)\tComputerized Voice\tHello, and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to firsthand perspectives on living with wildfires in the Okanagan Valley.\n(00:24)\tSharon Thesen\tBy the time, I think, they started trying to put it out, it was out of control.\n(00:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe dove deeper into the sounds of data.\n(00:32)\tAdegbola\tHow much more a role will language play in the information age?\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe asked, what is sound design?\n(00:40)\tMiranda\tText, forms, travel, forms constrained, various forms overlap and intersect.\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe explored the impact of recording technology on how poetry finds its audiences.\n(00:53)\tFred Wah\tIn those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(01:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe considered the stakes of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n(01:06)\tJentery\tWe might want to, for good reason, debunk the idea that listening is cheating or that, you know, books are not meant to be listened to.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we heard what libraries actually sound like.\n(01:15)\tDan Hackborn\tLike [Dan makes a nasally “wah” sound with his mouth] and like a [Dan makes a continuous “thunk” sound with his mouth].\n(01:20)\tKatherine McLeod\tOh, and we also went to talk therapy. [Percussion music ends abruptly]\n(01:25)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay, well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way.\n(01:30)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Percussion music begins again] My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m the voice behind Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. And I’ve been the solo host of the SpokenWeb podcast for this past season. This season I’ll be joined by Hannah McGregor, who is back. Yes, you might recognize her voice as the host of seasons one through three. Welcome back, Hannah.\n(01:51)\tHannah McGregor\tThank you, Katherine. It’s great to be back. And I am so excited to co-host season five with you and to work with our new production team: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healey, and returning transcriber Zoe Mix.\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season we’ll continue exploring what literature sounds like with all news stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb Network. We’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing voice and poetics, and much more. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And join us for season five. [Percussion music ends and guitar strumming music plays and then ends]\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549763391488,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9653","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.1, Introducing ShortCuts, 19 October 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/164da98e-4bd6-41fa-8a64-d4bd8f238820/audio/5b19bf3a-ad35-4448-9807-a46a7ca621f7/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-s2e1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:06:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"5,847,293 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-s2e1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"– Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 18 Feb 1972, featured in ShortCuts 1.2\\n\\n– Daryl Hine, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 1 Dec 1967,  featured in ShortCuts 1.1\\n\\n– bill bissett, reading on CKVU-TV Vancouver, September 1978, featured in ShortCuts 1.6\\n\\n– Kaie Kellough, reading at The Words and Music Show, 20 Nov 2016, featured in ShortCuts 1.3\\n\\n– Daphne Marlatt, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, featured in ShortCuts 1.5\\n\\n– Gwendolyn MacEwen, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 18 Nov 1966, featured in ShortCuts 1.7\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549763391489,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Welcome to ShortCuts. To kick off the new miniseries season, Katherine invites us into an audio remix of short clips from deep in the archive to consider: what does it mean and what is possible (technologically, phenomenologically, ethically, poetically) to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio-criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? \n\n\n00:00\n \n\nMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:11\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. These minisodes take you on a deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. And this season we’re going to be exploring even more audio collections across SpokenWeb’s network. So we’re headed into audio archives and we’re taking a shortcut. We’re getting there quicker through a ‘short cut’. A cut. [Sound Effect: Scissors] Or a clipped piece of audio. Usually around two to three minutes in length. Sometimes it’ll be a poem or sometimes the social noises around a reading that tell you about what it was like to be there.\n01:59\tAudio Recording, Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer:\tUm, well, okay. Do you want to — oh, do you want to try it? Try improvising to, um, to, to, to, to a trip that’s here. I’ll let you read it. You seriously want to do that? Yeah, it’s just going to be some sounds.\n02:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was poet Maxine Gadd speaking with Richard Sommer about an improvisation with poem and flute that they then performed.\n02:17\tAudio Recording, Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer:\tYeah. Are we on? Sorry. Go ahead.\n02:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt was a clip featured in Minisode 1.2 from our first season.\n02:24\tAudio Recording, Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer:\tWhat? The flute. I think it’s over there. Rich is going to make some, some noise with my flute. I’ll make some noise at the beginning of microphone. Okay. Which one you want?\n02:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts brings you sounds out of the archives and into your ears. And what will you do with those sounds next? What you do with sound is one way of making scholarly criticism about sound. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s hear what ‘short cuts’ from last season sounded like. And let’s hear them spliced together. Spliced together. In this remix of highlights from last season, you’ll hear a sonic version of an introduction to ShortCuts.\n03:07\tAudio Recording, Daryl Hine:\tWell I also —this year or was it last —returned to my place of origin, British Columbia.\n03:20\tAudio Recording, bill bissett:\tThe wonderfulness of the Mounties, our secret police. They open our mail. Petulantly, they burned down barns they can’t bug. They listen to our political leaders phone conversations. What could be less inspiring to over hear? [Crowd Laughs]. They had me down on the floor till I turned purple. Then my friends pulled them off me. They think breastfeeding is disgusting.\n03:44\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellogg:\t[Overlapping Audio Begins] [inaudible] All of the, all of the seeped down century from slavery. Appearances to the contrary that had appeared in a far flung summer of empire. The idea of the slum above it, that born yesterday or at 12 pack of empties. That born yesterday was finished or a bubble in that seat. [inaudible] archived by teenage brain wave of autobiography. A wave of conservatism has crashed. Oldsmobile cutlass supreme.\n04:42\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt:\tOn the corner, there half indecisive tarnish of atrophied atheists, one, a house sign, a place to enter. Where I make tea, your lips on the future caught. So, you could read me.\n04:59\tAudio Recording, Gwendolyn MacEwen:\tThis is a poem, which oddly enough, came out in a Mexican magazine in Spanish not too long ago looking completely unrecognizable, to me. It’s called “I should have predicted.”\n05:18\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Electronic] That remix was a series of short clips from our first season of these minisodes. Who are you listening to? Try to guess! Or head to spokenweb.ca to find out. Share which sound caught your attention by tweeting with the hashtag #spokenwebpod. I’m Katherine McLeod. And these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. And a big shout out to Manami Izawa who designed the beautiful logo on the minisodes new web space. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9654","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.2, The Poem Among Us, 16 November 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-poem-among-us/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7a7388b9-3da3-43e8-9875-942a1b0b9b15/audio/2344e96b-cb76-4795-a9cb-3ef9f26d7aa9/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2ep2-the-poem-among-us.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:27\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,144,155 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2ep2-the-poem-among-us\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-poem-among-us/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-11-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549764440064,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month’s ShortCut is an archival recording which transports us into the feeling of being at a live poetry reading. A feeling we are craving (right now in November 2020) as the covid-19 pandemic and social distancing continue. What is it that we are really missing about the live listening experience? The poetry? The poet? The anticipation of the event? The hum of the room?\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the introductory remarks made by Muriel Rukeyser at her reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:25\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SpokenWeb blog, this series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:12\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts: short stories about how literature sounds. Our shortcut this month is an archival recording that manages to transport us into the feeling of being at a live poetry reading.\n \n\n01:34\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser Reading [Unknown Speaker] :\n \n\nI now introduce Muriel Rukeyser [Applause].\n \n\n01:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis is a feeling that many of us are craving right now in November 2020 as the pandemic and social distancing continue. To be in a crowded room listening to poetry. [ Audio Recording of Muriel Rukeyser Begins] But what is it that we are really missing about that experience? The poetry? The poet? The anticipation of the event? The shared experience of attending? The hum of the room? The unknown? Poet Muriel Rukeyser puts it beautifully and inquisitively when she says that we go to poetry readings —\n \n\n02:22\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tAll right. It’s partly out of curiosity and looking at the person and I go to see what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat on these rhythms is set up and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is shared —\n \n\n02:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs you can hear, she is creating this thought there as she is speaking.\n \n\n02:48\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\t— something is arrived at. Come to something with almost unmediated. That is the poem among us, between us, there. We are reaching each other.\n \n\n03:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat makes these words even more contingent upon their situated utterance is that she’s saying all of this at the very start of a reading, one that she gave in Montreal on January 24th, 1969. Imagine attending a poetry reading and the poet starts by delivering a long and seemingly improvised reflection upon why we go to poetry readings at all.\n \n\n03:29\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tAs you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems where you’ve got some marvelous summer night? Why do people come and listen to poems?\n \n\n03:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd then she asks us to think about what we are listening to at a reading. Rukeyser suggests that we are listening to the poem there in that moment. And Rukeyser makes this argument in a manner in which we cannot ignore it’s unfolding in time in that moment. “Something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at.” There. How do we get there? Rukeyser takes us there with a question: how many of you —\n \n\n04:11\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tHow many of you here has ever written a poem? What’d you put up your hands, please. Thank you. I’m always nervous before I asked the question. I asked the question now in all rooms, no matter how few or many people there are, and if they’re universities I generally look around to see whether the basketball team is there. But there’s always the moment of silence and looking around first. And then generally quite slowly, almost all the hands go up. Maybe four or five, do not put up the hands. And if I wait around afterwards and with any luck and favourable wins, the four or five people come up to me and will say something like, “I was 15. It was a love poem. It stank.” [Audience Laughter].\n05:12\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tBut the thing is, it’s a human activity. We all do it. We lie about it, you know, and they lie about it to us. And the fact is we all write poems. It is something we do. We come to this part of experience as you get a very, very rainy evening. Why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems? All right. It’s partly out of curiosity and looking at the person. And I go to see what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms is set up and the involuntary muscles and you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at. We come to something with almost unmediated. That is the poem among us, between us, there, we reaching each other. You giving me whatever silence you are giving me. And it comes to me with great strength, your silence.\n \n\n06:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are reaching each other. You are giving me whatever silence you are giving me. And it comes to me with great strength, your silence. With these words, Rukeyser helps us understand what we’re missing in virtual readings. How can the audience give silence to the reader? Muting oneself is hardly the same.\n \n\n07:04\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser:\tSo there’s mediation. It is not a description. It is not only the music and it —although certainly the reinforcement of sound. The sound climbing up and finally reaching a place. The last word. The sound that begins with the first breathing. The breath of the title. Keats doing “Ode to a Nightingale”. We hardly ever say “ode”. Nobody says “nightingale”. But Keats having said that, never has to say it again. It’s a bird. If you find it in these things, but from the beginning, from the first moment, that is the first breath. The thing that is made of. Suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that is, what’s your lives have been. Is a very short one closed song.\n \n\n08:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhen creating spaces for poetry to be shared now, how can we safely create a space for the poem to be a suggestion, breath, what my life has been, whatever that, what your lives have been? And well Rukeyser’s words are particularly relevant for our current times, her opening statement also helps us understand what we are listening to whenever we’re listening to an archival recording. One that is far removed from the event itself. Following Rukeyser’s line of thought, in archival listening, we listen to a relationality unfolding creating space for the poem to be among us, between us, there.\n \n\n08:58\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Instrumental Electronic] I’m Katherine MacLeod and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9655","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.3, Audible Time, 21 December 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audible-time/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/896a5664-84c6-47d0-8fb6-b8d0b6d6726a/audio/4a72e0c1-e6fc-4fd5-acb5-c4919e45f777/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"minisode-s2e3-time.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:11\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"8,818,239 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"minisode-s2e3-time\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audible-time/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Berrigan, Ted. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 4 Dec 1970, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/ted-berrigan-at-sgwu-1970/\\n\\nHine, Daryl. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 1 Dec 1967, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daryl-hine-at-sgwu-1967/\\n\\nHindmarch, Gladys. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 21 Nov 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gladys-hindmarch-at-sgwu-1969/\\n\\nSimic, Charles. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 19 Nov 1971, \\n\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/charles-simic-at-sgwu-1971/#2\\n\\nWright, James. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1968, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/james-wright-at-sgwu-1968/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549765488640,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In trying to listen for time, this ShortCuts minisode listens for the New Year in SpokenWeb’s audio collections. What hopes do audiences have for the new year? And how do archival recordings help us understand our affective relation to time in our present moment?\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from recordings of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, all available to listen to here: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/ and listed individually below. \n\nShortCuts minisodes are developed from ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG and the post that inspired this one is here.\n\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:12\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tHow can you hear time? When listening to a recording? Can you be listening for time? In a set of recordings of a reading series, such as the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, there’s an audible marking of time whenever a host of a December reading mentions that the next reading will take place in January. The new year. What hopes did the audience have for the new year? How do these archival recordings help us understand hope in our present moment?\n \n\n01:53\tAudio Recording, Daryl Hine, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 1 December 1967:\tI negotiate the steps of paradise leaping to measures that I cannot hear. Thank you. [Applause]. [Announcer] I want to thank Mr. Hine and also announce that the next reading is on January 26 by the American poet, John Logan.\n \n\n02:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was a clip of the end of Daryl Hine, reading “The Trout” in December, 1967. What was the audience thinking? And what did they imagine for January, 1968? What did Hine imagine? What if these were the last words of poetry that he read out loud in front of an audience in 1967? The words suddenly feel weightier when thinking of them in that way, a feeling that I would argue we can hear in another reading that ends up being the last one of 1968 in the Sir George Williams Series. It’s a reading by James Wright on December 13th, 1968.\n \n\n03:14\tAudio Recording, James Wright, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1968:\tSuddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom. Thank you. [Applause] [Announcer]I just like to express all our thanks to James Wright for sharing his poetry and his curses and blessings with us tonight and to remind you that the next reading in the series is by Muriel Rukeyser on Friday, January 24th. Goodnight.\n03:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat did the audience hear when they heard —\n \n\n04:01\tAudio Recording, James Wright, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1968:\n \n\nSuddenly I realized that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom.\n04:08\tKatherine McLeod:\t—? What hopes did they have for 1969 as they listened? 1969. The last reading of that year in the Sir George William Series was introduced by George Bowering and the anticipation of the new year comes up right at the start.\n \n\n04:23\tAudio Recording, George Bowering (introducing Gladys Hindmarch):\tAnother Vancouver night in the series. This will be, this is a final reading of the fall series and will be picked up again in January. And as you know, from the propaganda sheets, or presenting what I consider to be the center of the Vancouver writing scene. Gladys Hindmarch has been in that scene for 10 years and was associated with all those, with those people who’ve got all kinds of names over the last few years such as the West Coast movement and the Tish movement and the New Wave Canada and that sort of business…\n \n\n05:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tBy the way, Bowering and Hindmarch read together virtually on December 16th, 2020. I mentioned that to mark time here in this minisode. Back to the archive:1970. Let’s see how this year ends in poetry, or at least in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. The reading by Ted Berrigan on December 4th, 1970 is cut off so we don’t know if it ended with an announcement about the next reading. But it did end with Berrigan reading this poem. These are the last words heard in this last reading of 1970. It is the end of a poem called “People Who Died.”\n \n\n05:50\tAudio Recording, Ted Berrigan, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 4 December 1970:\tKilled by smoke poisoning while playing the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital during a fire set by a 16 old arsonist/ 1965. Frank. Frank O’Hara hit by a car on Fire Island/1966, Woody Guthrie, dead of Huntington’s Chorea/ In 1968. Neil. Neil Cassidy died of exposure sleeping all night in the rain by the railroad tracks of Mexico/ 1969.Franny Winston, just a girl totaled her car on the Detroit Ann Arbor freeway returning from the dentist / September, 1969. Jack. Jack Kerouac died of drink and angry sicknesses in 1969/ My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now. [Applause].\n \n\n06:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are listening to what it felt like to hear those words in 1970, and to feel those deaths as recent. We are hearing time and what it felt like to feel in that time. In the Berrigan poem, that feeling is one of loss, a feeling that so often counters a feeling of anticipation. We hear that anticipation in my last example, the end of a reading by Charles Simic in 1971.\n \n\n07:26\tAudio Recording, Charles Simic, Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 19 November 1971:\tThe greatest mistake. The words I allow it to be written when I should have shouted her name. Thank you. [Applause]. [Announcer] The next reading will be on January 14th – Dorothy Livesay will read at that time.\n \n\n07:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf I were in the audience in 1971, I would be looking forward to that reading by Dorothy Livesay in 1972. Listening for time in the archives reveals moments such as these. Ones in which hope is audible. That listening is something we can learn from as we anticipate a new year. We don’t know what is ahead. And, even as I speak these words now – recording them under my blanket fort at home – I hope they will be heard. [Music Begins: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Though, in what context I do not know right now, I play the role of the host in these archival recordings by marking time here and now, and by imagining a future time. In the role of the archival listener, I also know how it feels to hear a future time imagined as hopeful. It’s a powerful feeling to look forward to something, to share that feeling, and to listen back, hearing people looking forward to something. Thanks for listening and here’s to more listening together in 2021."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9656","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.4, You Are Here, 18 January 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d8a35593-1877-46bf-94c7-d64f56737bdb/audio/faa70c17-eb76-4ddb-b635-578765ff8576/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e4-shortcuts-you-are-here.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:09:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,450,101 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e4-shortcuts-you-are-here\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/you-are-here/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-01-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/\\n\\nRobinsong, Erin. “Anemone.” Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. Coach House Books, 2020. Find out more about Watch Your Head as a book and online project here.\\n\\nRukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” (audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series). SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\\n\\nFind out more about poet Muriel Rukeyser by visiting Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549765488641,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts minisode listens to one of the January readings that we heard about last time: a reading by Muriel Rukeyser that took place on January 24, 1969. Along with listening for mentions of January in the recording, this minisode listens to how Rukeyser’s reading enacts the very connection that she describes – a connection being created between the poet and the audience during a live reading.\n\nThe audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the recording of Muriel Rukeyser’s reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969.\n\n00:00\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. You are here. Last time we listened to clips from the SpokenWeb audio collections in order to try to hear time. Or rather to hear an anticipation of the new year, a marking of time. Whenever the host would say something like “our next reading will take place in January”.\n01:42\tAudio Recording, George Bowering:\tThis is the final reading of the fall series, and we’ll be picked up again in January…\n01:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we are now, in January. And let’s imagine that we are at one of those January readings that we heard about last time.\n01:55\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer 1\tI’d just like to express all our thanks to James Wright for sharing his poetry and his curses and his blasphemy with us tonight, and to remind you that our next reading is with Muriel Rukeyser on Friday January 24th. Goodnight.\n02:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tArriving to the reading, most likely in big winter coats, the audience has been looking forward to it. And now it is here…\n02:25\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer 2\tI’ll now introduce Muriel Rukeyser [Applause]…\n02:26\tKatherine McLeod:\tRukeyser is in front of us, reading her poems, in Montreal on January 24th 1969. Along with knowing that it took place in January, we can hear a sense of time in the recording. Let’s listen to this clip as our “short cut” into the archives for this minisode. She has just read “Elegy in Joy,” ending with these words that lead her into a story about something that marks this recording in time.\n03:00\t[Simultaneous] Katherine McLeod and Audio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\t“Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion and the world unbegun.”\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tI thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico, and yesterday when I heard a story. It’s a story of what happened at Christmas time. I was in Mexico, I wonder whether you saw it. I heard of it yesterday in New York, as a little, three line story, in the back page of the New York Times, saying that the largest underground bomb-test was about to be held in Nevada in the States. And to that test, came five scientists, in Utah, in the States, to protest, to picket, to try to stop it. And another person who protested was Howard Hughes, who owns most of Las Vegas at this point, and had his own reasons for protesting. These protests did not stop the testing. The test was made. It was the largest underground test made yet. Do you know this story? There was a crack.\n04:29\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tThere’s a crack in the earth, big enough, they said — the way we talk — big enough for the Empire State Building. There’s a crack there, and deep under the crust there’s a three foot crack of some kind, and the rocks are still falling, and they say there will be earthquakes in various parts —unpredictable parts — of the world as a result of the shift of the under-crust. Now, last night, before I came here, on TV — late news in New York — they said that there’d been a quake in the Fiji Islands. I have no idea what the relations between these things are, I give it to you simply that something has happened to shift the under-crust – there will be unpredictable results. This is under the ground, the way we are bound to each other, we are also bound to each other through the air and the fall out has come over Canada – this is also a part of the story that I heard yesterday, and you, I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story…\n05:33\tKatherine McLeod:\t“I can see by your nods, you know this part of the story.” By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are. We are listening to the relationality created there in that room. Now, if this is sounding familiar, you might recall that in minisode 2.2, we listened to how Rukeyser introduced this very same reading. She talked about why on a cold January night we come out to listen to poetry…\n06:06\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\t…it is partly out of curiosity, and looking at the person. And I go to see – what is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms…\n06:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd because of something else that is created while listening together…\n06:22\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tWe come to something with — almost unmediated — that is, the poem among us, between us there…\n06:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn her reading, there are poems in which one is acutely aware of being together, listening, even while listening to the recording apart. So how did her reading create that effect? Well, I would say that the story that we just heard of how we are all bound to each other does precisely that by asking us to think about our relation to one another. But that was through a story, an extra-poetic diversion between poems. What about in the poems themselves?\n07:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s listen to one more ShortCut from that same reading – a poem called “Anemone.” It’s one that not only exemplifies the creation of connection between the poet and the audience, but it’s also one that expresses the ecological attention of her story: the ways in which we are bound to each other through the earth and, in this case, through the ocean. In a recent collection of poems called, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, there is another “Anemone” poem by Canadian poet Erin Robinsong – and I would say that Rukeyser’s “Anemone” poem could be in this collection too as she too is responding to the climate crisis in her own way in 1969.\n08:23\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969:\tAnemone, my eyes are closing. My eyes are opening. You are looking into me with your waking look. My mouth is closing. My mouth is opening. You are waiting with your red promises. My sex is closing. My sex is opening. You are singing and offering the way in. My life is closing. My life is opening. You are here.\n09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Muriel Rukeyser reading “Anemone” a poem that creates a space of listening that is, at once, oceanic and intimate. And a poem that says to the listener: “You are here.”\n09:22\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Music Begins: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] I’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [Music Ends: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9657","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.5, Connections, 15 February 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/connections/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3148f131-297d-46ab-b27b-43f491dfea81/audio/99fc3d91-86dc-4af8-a138-9b6dae6bcace/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:13:41\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"13,132,739 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/connections/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-02-15\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Keenaghan, Eric. “Interchange – How to Be Anti-Fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry.” Interchange, https://beta.prx.org/stories/355960.\\n\\nMalcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/\\n\\nMuriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/. \\n\\nRukeyser, Muriel. “Elegy in Joy.” Waterlily Fire: Poems, 1935-1962. Macmillan, 1963.\\n\\n—. “Käthe Kollwitz.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006. \\n\\n—. The Life of Poetry. Current Books, 1949.\\n\\n—. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” (audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969), https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549766537216,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections. Rukeyser once said that poetry is “a meeting place” and this minisode suggests that, like poetry, a podcast is a meeting place. Listen to find out how we arrive at this meeting place and listen, once more, to the voice of the poet who spoke these words: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”\n\n\n(00:10)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb‘s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:14)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts. This season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a recording of American poet Muriel Rukeyser. [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] We’re going to stay in that recording, immersing ourselves in it, for one more minisode. We’re going to do that for two, no three, reasons: one, this recording lets us talk about spontaneous and unexpected moments that can happen during a reading and then end up being recorded; two, this recording lets us reflect on what this medium of a minisode on a podcast feed can do to create connections; and, three, this recording lets us continue to ask the question taken up in the past two minodes: How can we hear time? [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]. With that, let’s begin our archival listening to specific clips in the reading by Rukeyser.\n(02:08)\tSpoken Web Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(02:08)\tKatherine McLeod\tOn a cold January night in 1969, Muriel Rukeyser started her reading in Montreal by asking the audience to consider …\n(02:27)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tAnd as you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you’ve got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?\n(02:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn minisode 2.2 we listened to those opening remarks and we thought about how it creates a relationship between the listener and the poet, or really between the listener and the event of the reading. One of the poems she read that night was “Anemone.”\n(02:53)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\t“Anemone. My eyes are closing, my eyes are opening, you are looking at me with your waking look…”\n \n\n(03:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to that poem in minisode 2.4 as a way of hearing the relationality that she spoke of as being created through the poetry reading, and how it was enacted through that poem. We also considered how an archival listening creates a connection between the past and present. Rukeyser’s critique of nuclear testing in 1969 speaks very much to our current climate crisis.\n(03:30)\tKatherine McLeod\tAfter making those minisodes, I shared the link, I tweeted it out, and I was elated to see a notification [Sound Effect: Phone Notification]: “Muriel Rukeyser has liked your post” No, it wasn’t Rukeyser herself haunting my Twitter feed, but it felt as though she had heard it – it was the Twitter account of the archival project, Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. They had listened to ShortCuts and were excited about the recording that existed of Rukeyser – a recording that they had not yet been aware of.\n(04:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tMuriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive is holding a symposium during the same week when this minsode will go live – the entire symposium is based around Rukeyser’s series of “Elegies.” I assumed that there would be many recordings of Rukeyser reading from “Elegies” but it turns out that there are not – in fact, there might be very few – or even one. I know there is because, yes, it is on that very same 1969 reading by Rukeyser here in Montreal. Not only does this recording have a rare sound in that Rukeyser reads from “Elegies” but also when she introduces it she notes that she has never read it like this before. She cuts it up, and we’ll listen to her read the poem “Elegy in Joy” as our short cut [Sound Effect: Scissors Cutting] this month…\n(04:55)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tHere’s one piece of a long poem. It’s the last of a group called “Elegies,” which one hardly dares name anything anymore. It’s called “Elegy in Joy.” And it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. “Elegy in Joy.” Now green, now burning, I make a way for peace. After the green and long beyond my lake, among these fields of people on these illuminated hills gold, burnt gold, spilled gold and shadowed blue. The light of enormous flame, the flowing wide of the sea. Where all the lights and nights are reconciled. The sea at last. Where all the waters lead and all the wars to this peace. For the sea does not lie like the death you imagine. The sea is the real sea. Here it is. This is the living. This peace is the face of the world. A fierce angel who in one lifetime lives fighting a lifetime, dying as we all die. Becoming forever, the continual God. Years of our time, this heart. The binding of the alone, bells of our loneliness, finding our lines and our music. Branches full of motion, each opening in its own flower. Lines of all songs, each speaking in its own voice. Praise in every grace, among the old same war. Years of betrayal, million deaths breathing its weaknesses and hope buried more deep, more black than dream. Every elegy is the present freedom eating our hearts, death and explosion, and the world unbegun.\n(07:29)\tKatherine McLeod\t“Every elegy is the present” – what an ending to that poem. But, that is not how the poem ends on the page. However, by choosing to “cut it up,” as she says, she creates a new version — a version in sound — that lets those lines ring out, as though they were the end of the poem. “Every elegy is the present” is a line that reminds me of how she ends the entire reading by asking the audience to encounter the present moment. She reads “The Speed of Darkness” which ends with a question: “Who will speak these days, /if not I, / if not you?”\n(08:09)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tThinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours, no of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you? [Applause]\n(08:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe juxtaposition of those three sounds I find incredibly affecting: the powerful call out to you, the barely audible “thank you very much,” and the roar of applause that goes on for some time. I listen again and again to that…\n(08:50)\tAudio Recording, Muriel Rukeyser, Montreal, 1969\tThank you very much.\n(08:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI am in that room and can see her standing at the front with the microphone and her papers; and it is as though the entire room takes a collective breath between the reading and the applause, an in-between space, an in-between sound. That voice who had just spoken these words with such volume: “who will be the throat of these hours?” A phrase that reminds us of the body as the source of sound. This is the same voice, the same body, who wrote and spoke these words within the past year of this reading: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”\n(09:40)\tKatherine McLeod\tNow hear the applause again, all 25 seconds of it. If we listen to it all the way through we hear the announcement of the F.R. Scott reading on February 14th, bringing us back in time to the present moment of the reading, and back to Montreal with F.R. Scott the Montreal modernist. Let’s hear all of that again.\n(10:07)\tKatherine McLeod\tWho will speak these days, /if not I, / if not you?… Thank you very much… [Full applause for 25 seconds].\n(10:46)\tAudio Recording, Unknown Announcer at Muriel Rukeyser Reading, Montreal, 1969\tWe wish to announce that the next reading will be by F.R. Scott and that will be on February 14th at the same time in the theatre in the basement of this building. Thank you. [Audience Background Noise]\n(10:57)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Start Audience Background Noise Underlaid] As you can hear, the recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room, this is the sound of the audience, this is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as there are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event. We are hearing what Rukeyser has described as defining the poem: the poem as a meeting place. It is a point that Jane Malcolm makes in her brilliant analysis of this recording. Do check the show notes for that reference. And it is a point that I hear again, listening now. A meeting place…\n(11:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI think of the conversations that I’ve had recently with Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive and I hear it almost as one of these conversations happening after the reading; but, it didn’t happen after a reading, it happened after a listening. That makes me imagine what connections can come of future sound-based criticism as forms like the podcast continue to circulate and to be heard. The podcast, like poetry, relies upon its “moving relations” – to quote a phrase of Rukeyser’s – moving relations within itself and with its listeners. And, to me, it seems that, like poetry, the podcast is a meeting place…\n(12:41)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(12:44)\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m Katherine McLeod, and these minisodes are produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about ShortCuts and The SpokenWeb Podcast. And head to Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive to find out more about the symposium on Feb 19. If you are tuning in after the symposium, thank you for listening and for being part of these connections. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives. [Audience Background Noise Continues And Fades]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9587","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E8, How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence, 4 May 2020, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/fe25911a-e576-402d-ae9c-4b96143ad40a/sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,630,039 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-8-how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence-v4_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/how-are-we-listening-now-signal-noise-silence/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-05-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\" -73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References\\n\\nDolar, Mladen.  A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.\\n\\nLabelle, Brandon.  “Auditory Relations.”  In Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.  New York: Continuum, ix-xvi.\\n\\nPeters, John Durham.  Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999\\n\\nPetriglieri, Gianpiero.  Twitter Post. April 3, 2020, 7:43 PM. https://twitter.com/gpetriglieri/status/1246221849018720256\\n\\nRowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.\\n\\nSchafer, R. Murray.  The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.  Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.\\n\\n“Sounds from the global Covid-19 lockdown.” Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/\\n\\nPoetry Recordings\\n\\nAntin, David.  “The Principle of Fit, II” (Part I). 26.:32. June 1980. Recording at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. PennSound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Antin/Antin-David_The-Principle-of-Fit-II-Side-A_DC_06-80.mp3\\n\\nCox, Alexei Perry. Poems from Finding Places to Make Places. 42:39. The Words & Music Show, March 22, 2020.\\n\\nColeman, Nisha. “The Church of Harvey Christ.” 40:53. The Words & Music Show, March, 22 2020.\\n\\nPlath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Originally released on The Poet Speaks, Record 5, Argo, 1965. YouTube audio. 3:56. Posted December 29, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549767585792,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. In this episode, co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod explore how our contexts and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19.\n\nJason asks his literature and sound studies class at Concordia (via Zoom teleconferencing) how their listening practices have changed, and it just so happens to be the same day they are also discussing the importance of in-person performance before a live audience in the talk poetry of David Antin. Meanwhile, Katherine is noticing that many live poetry readings are now moving online. How are we listening to the world around us, and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? As Katherine and Jason explore these questions together – in recorded, remote conversations – they notice that our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal.\n\n00:00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. From quieted city streets once filled with the hum of commuter traffic to seven o’clock cheers for essential workers to compressed audio on your latest Zoom call, the soundscape around us is changing. Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we invite you to listen in close to the changing soundscape that connects us all.\n00:01:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe join episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod as they explore how our context and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19. With work meetings, in-person poetry performances, dinner parties, and more moving online, our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal. It has us asking: how are we listening to the world around us and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings, now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? To explore these questions together, here are Katherine and Jason with episode eight of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” [Theme Music]\n00:02:39\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tCan you hear me?\n00:02:40\tKlara du Plessis:\tYes.\n00:02:41\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tAlright.\n00:02:43\tAudio Recording:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] [Audio, a robotic voice.] To normal. To normal. To normal. Public health. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] [Past Recordings Played One After Another]\n00:02:45\tJason Camlot:\tUh…\n00:02:49\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tHello.\nKlara du Plessis:\t\n00:02:49\tJason Camlot:\tShould be able to hear you…Oh. I think I have it on.\n00:02:54\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t\n00:02:56\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tSo K     lara says she can hear me.\n00:02:58\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, I can hear you.\n00:02:59\tOana Avasilichioaei:\tOkay, good.\n00:03:00\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\t     Stay home. Keep at least two metres from each other.\n00:03:04\tAlexei Perry Cox:\t[Baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence  , would get through to humankind.\n00:03:12\tIsabella Wang:\tOh my gosh, you read one of my favourite poems.\n00:03:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I’m just going to pause ’cause my internet just said something about, I think we got a little off sync — [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:03:19\tJason Camlot:\t[Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] Yeah, you just froze, you just froze there … [Overlapping Voices]\n00:03:19\tAudio Recording of Justin Trudeau:\tFrom each other. From each other. Stay home from each other.\n00:03:26\tKlara du Plessis:\tBut what I’ve been noticing is that I don’t wanna be listening to things and I’ve been feeling mostly overwhelmed.\n00:03:26\tDeanna Radford:\tThere we go. Can you hear me?\n00:03:45\tNaomi Charron:\t[Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin.\n00:03:45\tHeather Pepper:\tWe’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight!\n00:03:45\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping, Distorted and Breaking Up] Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Where’d they go? There was a certain fit. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano]\nA kind of adjusted togetherness.\nVarious Voices:\tJason     s frozen. Side by side. Side side side. …For me,      hearing voice      has really been more important, in this moment. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n00:04:14\tJason Camlot:\tThursday, March the 12th: that was the last time that I had an in-person conversation in close proximity with someone other than my wife or two teenage children or one of our two little dogs. That was my last 40-plus weight training class. It was sparsely attended, but still there were eight of us there plus our instructor, Lisa Marie. We elbow-pumped instead of high-fiving when the workout was done. We already knew we had to be careful. The next day, the Quebec government adopted an order of council declaring a health emergency throughout the province due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, like millions of people across the globe, we’ve been in a substantial lockdown, at home, ever since. Major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we hear. Among the many disruptions, much of my and everyone else’s daily communication has moved online. Our 40-plus weight training instructor, Lisa Marie, adapted quickly, started a YouTube channel, and has been posting daily workouts every day.\n00:05:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, from Lisa Marie’s workout video] Hello again. So this is going to be day one of the home workout.\n00:05:26\tJason Camlot:\tConcordia University where I work mobilized pretty quickly with efforts to support all faculty members so that we can complete the teaching of our courses online using Moodle chat rooms and Zoom teleconferencing software. It was during the week of March 16th, the first week that the university shut down as I was preparing to move my literature and sound studies graduate seminar online with a class on the poet David Antin, that I began to talk through FaceTime and Zoom with my colleague Katherine McLeod–\n00:05:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi, it’s Katherine here.\n00:05:58\tJason Camlot:\t–on what we were experiencing and what it meant for how we are listening now.\n00:06:09\tMusic:\t[Dreamy Instrumental]\n00:06:10\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy own thinking about questions of how we are listening now came from noticing that some of the poetry reading events that had been scheduled for the spring were starting to move online in different ways. Since 2016, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing of mostly Montreal literary events and readings called Where Poets Read. The last event listed in Where Poets Read that took place in person was on March 9th. It was Épiques Voices, a bilingual poetry reading, an event that I actually co-hosted myself with Catherine Cormier-Larose and little did we know that it would be the last one for a while. After that, readings that had been planned as book launches, at local bookstores like Drawn & Quarterly, VERSeFest in Ottawa, the Montreal Review of Books spring launch, and an Atwater library poetry reading were all cancelled. Meanwhile, reading series organizers were quickly thinking of ways to move readings online. Individual writers started posting themselves reading in YouTube videos or on Instagram Live posts, but within the first days of everything changing, rob mcLennan in Ottawa, Isabella Wang in Vancouver, and Ian Ferrier in Montreal were experimenting with moving entire reading series events online. Instead of the usual posts on Where Poets Read, I started posting links to live streams of readings and I started to wonder how are we listening to poetry readings now, now that we can’t go out to listen to them in person, together?\n00:07:56\tJason Camlot:\tRight, so we’re both thinking about how we’re listening now under the present circumstances of social distancing and self-isolation, and thinking about our new experiences and practices of listening, especially within a range of literary contexts, including reading literature silently at home, teaching and discussing literature in the classroom, and performing literature on a stage at a poetry reading. So let’s turn to our first real conversation about these questions that we held on Zoom on March 26th, 2020, a little more than a week after the government-mandated lockdown and soon after I taught my first virtual class on the work of talk poet David Antin.\n00:08:40\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] Hello?\n00:08:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tHello, can you hear me?\n00:08:44\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, hi Katherine.\n00:08:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tHi.\n00:08:47\tJason Camlot:\tWait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tNo, actually I’m in my office room.\n00:09:02\tJason Camlot:\tHow’re you doing?\n00:09:04\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m good, given the situation. But yeah, today felt definitely more like a challenge to get started. Yeah, just… It took more energy to get going.\n00:09:23\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, me too. I had a terrible sleep last night, I kept waking up like almost every hour. So…\n00:09:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tI just made coffee now and I sent myself a text last night to give myself instructions for the morning and they said, “Make coffee, dance, be.” I’ve done the first two and now I am in a state of being.\n00:09:43\tJason Camlot:\tYeah, you seem like you’re being–\n00:09:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:44\tJason Camlot:\t–so that’s good. You could check all three off. I like the idea of not only self-isolating, but self-texting.\n00:09:52\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah!\n00:09:52\tJason Camlot:\tSort of like, wow, we’re in some crazy individual loops here, you know?\n00:09:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah, I only send them as reminders to myself, but who knows, maybe by the end of this I’ll be having a full conversation with me over text.\n00:10:05\tJason Camlot:\tOh, man…\n00:10:10\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n00:10:10\tJason Camlot:\tYou can really hear the low-level anxiety and fatigue in our voices.\n00:10:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. So many Zoom conversations seem to have to begin this way now, with these kinds of emotional check-ins. And these are so important because we’re all feeling overwhelmed. But that’s also hard stuff to dive into at the start of a conversation. And I know I find myself saying that “I’m good. Oh, given the situation,” like I do in that recording. And then, when you listen between the lines, you can hear that the real answer to that question is more complicated than ever.\n00:10:45\tJason Camlot:\tIt’s one example of how we’re listening to each other a bit differently these days. Listening maybe with slightly more sensitivity to the other person’s mood. Listening to hear just how anxious or depressed someone is before you embark on an actual conversation about something else.\n00:11:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe did have a real conversation, though, after this affective, close-listening warm-up. I asked you how your class went.\n00:11:10\tJason Camlot:\tWe had to go back to teach online this week, so I held my seminar again and it went really well. I was surprised, like, and it was really great to see everyone. Everyone joined, everyone participated, and I think everyone was actually quite grateful because we’ve been reading all semester different theories of sort of how sound is mediated, different sort of audile techniques, you know, ways of listening, listening to voice, listening to other sounds. You know, the idea of soundscapes and the idea of voice and concepts of presence and things like that. I felt it was going to be unavoidable that we talk about what our listening situations are right now. And so since they were kind of equipped with a whole bunch of readings on that, on thinking about listening and sound, I did sort of tell them before class, I sent them all an email saying that the top of the class would be spent… Each of them would sort of give us a little bit of an account of how they’re listening now, sort of what their listening situation is and how their interactions with sounds may have changed as a result of them having to self-isolate.\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot:\tIt seems like we are re-negotiating our relationship to signals, noise, and silence. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] These different categories of sound are all related to each other. One can’t really mean much without the other. Noise is defined in relation to the signal, the thing we’re actually trying to hear. We speak of the signal-to-noise ratio. With a weak reception or a low signal-to-noise ratio, the signal will be lost in surrounding interference or noise, so that we can hardly hear the message or not hear it at all. With a strong reception, a high signal-to-noise ratio, [Sound Effect: Pulsing Tone] the signal will come through clearly and we hardly hear or notice the noise at all. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental]\n00:13:05\tJason Camlot:\tListen to this extended cross-fade of two clips, one of brown noise and another of a sharp emergency signal. It dramatizes the movement from a low to high–\n00:13:17\tAudio Recording:\t[Robotic Voice] –signal-to-noise ratio.\n00:13:18\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, begins with “brown noise”, a soft static-y sound, and fades into the pulsing tone played earlier, the “emergency signal”]\n00:13:34\tJason Camlot:\tAs human listeners, we’re usually pretty good at hearing the signal at the expense of the noise. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] Murray Schafer says in his book The Soundscape that “noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.” He was thinking about noise within environmental soundscapes, which he thought about as a composer would in terms of acoustic design. One thing that has come to our ears’ attention as a result of living the circumstances of a global pandemic and experiencing locally by staying at home, sticking to our neighborhoods and our own living spaces is the absence of the noises we were so good at ignoring under normal, noisy circumstances. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] The absence of the noises around us effects our mood, our sense of our place in the world, and leads us to compensate with different forms of listening. So we can speak of noise and silence in our sound environments and their effects on how we feel.\n00:14:35\tAli Barillaro:\tI live next to a bar, so normally there’s a lot of noise outside of my apartment on a regular basis even if it’s not like the weekend\n00:14:43\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Ali Barillaro.\n00:14:45\tAli Barillaro:\tSo not hearing people drunkenly shouting at 3:00 AM has been kind of strange. I don’t necessarily mind it not being there because I’m definitely sleeping a lot easier, but it’s definitely weird because that’s kind of been a constant and I’ve lived here for almost two years now. So that’s weird and different.\n00:15:06\tJason Camlot:\tThe absence of either noise or signal becomes present to us in the form of noticeable silence. Biochemist and doctoral candidate in English Marlene Oeffinger.\n00:15:16\tMarlene Oeffinger:\tIt’s almost like I feel with all the news and everything that we’re listening to there’s this constant barrage of noise. And then we were sitting on Saturday evening on the couch in our living room next to the window and usually Saturday evening is… You hear people walking outside talking, you hear cars, you hear planes. And so we were sitting and reading and not listening to the news and I suddenly had to stop because I realized how silent it was. It was dead silent and that’s just something I kind of associate not with the city and definitely not with the area here on a Saturday night. And it was just really completely silent. There was no noise from any neighbour, nothing. And it was almost distracting, the silence. ‘Cause I couldn’t stop listening to the silence. And yeah, I couldn’t even focus on what I was reading anymore because it was so unusual, I felt. It was just such a novel sound for the surrounding. Yeah, and that’s why I guess I just kept listening to it and it kept distracting me really from what I was doing.\n00:16:20\tJason Camlot:\tThe soundscapes outside have changed, but our relationship to the soundscapes within our domestic spaces have also changed. They become more complicated. We’re sensing how strange it can feel when spaces that one depends on for certain kinds of noise don’t sound the same, get quieter, or go silent altogether. But we’re also becoming more aware of our need for spaces that allow us periods of silence. My students told me how they had to work hard to find those spaces and how they’re now having to schedule slots of time for silent work. Thinking, writing, at home. PhD student Lindsay Presswell.\n00:17:01\tLindsay Presswell:\tSo my personal situation in my house is that my partner is a musician [Begin Music: Instrumental Guitar] and so normally he’s kind of here and he has a studio set up just over in the corner. And normally I’m like, I need to be out of the house. Like I have to be in the library or like in an atmosphere which very much feels like I’m working. But we actually have had to carefully negotiate the use of this space. We just started a Google Calendar this morning where I’m like inputting my lectures and like when I need to be sort of reading in silence ’cause I’m a very needy reader, I guess. We’ve discovered, like, putting in these soundproof headphones that he has, so I couldn’t hear the music as he’s working on things on the computer. But what that does is it… He like breathes loudly? [End Music: Instrumental Guitar] [Sound Effect: Heavy Breathing] Like, when those are in his ears, which I’ve never heard him breathe in my entire life. But that’s like a fun new thing.\n00:18:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tBreathing is definitely one of those sounds we don’t usually notice. But Lindsay’s situation spells out just how sensitive we’re becoming to sounds that are usually invisible to our ears.\n00:18:14\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar]\n00:18:14\tJason Camlot:\tMany of my students are engaged in similar kinds of sound-space negotiations, as I am at home with my family. But we also seem to need to fill ourselves with particular kinds of sounds to compensate for the lack of sounds and noise that define our states of normalcy. My sense is people are maybe talking to each other more than they had been even if they’re doing so at a distance. My students were telling me that they’re getting off of social media and picking up the phone in ways that they normally wouldn’t do.\n00:18:42\tPriscilla Joly:\tYeah, I think people want to talk more at this time, particularly my parents. They call, like, very frequently now.\n00:18:50\tJason Camlot:\tThat was Priscilla Joly, a PhD student in English.\n00:18:53\tLindsay Presswell:\tAnd then just in terms of, like, the sort of broader situation, I noticed that my tolerance for noise that also feels fast or jarring has slowed, too. I’m like needing direct, verbal communication more than sending texts. Rather than like reading the news and doing my emails on the commute, I’m like finding time listening to traditional media or calling people as well, which normally I don’t do because I associate speaking like it’s a slow way of communicating. I deactivated my Twitter account very quickly last week because [Begin Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental] I was just like, this is not the kind of… These aren’t the sounds… This isn’t the news that I want to be listening to.\n00:19:42\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Lindsay Presswell. John Durham Peters and his description of the uncanniness that surrounded early telephonic communication—talking into telephones—noted the existential anxiety that came from relying on the voice to do it all. That is, to do all the work of communicating one’s thoughts, feelings, and presence to another person. He talks about the disquiet of a medium defined by strange voices entering the home, the disappearance of one’s words into an empty black hole in the absence of the listener’s face. And he suggests that the telephone contributed to the modern derangement of dialogue by splitting conversation into two halves that meet only in the cyberspace of the wires. And that’s when telecommunications media relied on wires from start to finish. I cancelled my landline five years ago and threw myself at the mercy of wireless communication. Course, there’s still fiber optic cables at work, but wireless communication, the forms of interpersonal exchange we’re now forced to have instead of most and sometimes any form of interpersonal exchange, represent a further kind of derangement. The condensed and proximate signal [Sound Effect: Dial Tone] that came through the carbon microphone of the old-timey telephone in my teenage experience, at least, came to feel intimate in its own powerfully reduced way. The banal, unexpected kinds of disruptions we experience when we try to Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime [Sound Effect: Voices Breaking Up In Call] are too annoying and thinning to live up to Durham Peter’s sort of romantic idea of telephonic derangement. Grandiose concepts of sympathy, relationality, intimate connection are reduced to the irritatingly tinny sounding idea of connectivity. [End Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental]\n00:21:38\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Katherine McLeod’s voice breaking up during a call, sounding tinny and distorted]\n00:21:44\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhy was that happening to my voice there?\n00:21:46\tJason Camlot:\tI was wondering about that myself and so I started googling for answers. [Sound Effect: Electronic Interference] Part of it has to do with the way digital information is sent. We’re not getting interference with a continuous signal along the wire here. Our voices are transduced and converted into frequency data and then sent via a wifi signal as data packets, like assemblages of bits of data that add up to the sound of your voice. [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference] The computer waits for packets that represent a good signal-to-noise ratio of your voice. If something interferes with the analog signal that’s sending the data, then the computer, let’s say it’s listening for the right formula of your voice, will have trouble understanding, let’s say hearing the packets of data, will reject them as noise, and then wait for them to be sent again. When this keeps happening, you either get partial delivery of the packets, which sounds weird or complete drop-outs. Sort of like if a Star Trek teleportation goes horribly wrong because all the disassembled molecules of the person didn’t come back together again or like when Ron Weasley gets seriously splinched in that bad apparating accident in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Ron left part of his upper arm behind; we leave packets of our voice signal behind. Still, even if old-style landline telephones sometimes sounded better than cell phones and Zoom, these newer media in the present context of social isolation are making us feel what’s at stake in a scenario that suggests the loss of real old-time hanging out in person. My students were clear in expressing the frustration they felt from bad connections. [End Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference]\n00:23:24\tAli Barillaro:\tMy internet connection’s not the best–\n00:23:28\tJason Camlot:\tAli Barillaro.\n00:23:28\tAli Barillaro:\t–so listening to people through quite a bit of distortion has been a weird thing to kind of manage and just sort of… I’ve had to kind of let it happen and not let it get frustrating. Dealing with the weird kind of distortions and sometimes when the sound cuts off completely it’ll take a couple of seconds and then restart, but almost as if someone’s pressed fast forward. So trying to keep track of everything is kind of interesting.\n00:23:58\tJason Camlot:\tAnd in talking to my students, I let myself get carried away and waxed philosophical about the existential implications of a weak wifi signal.\n00:24:06\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] Your point about the frustration of communicating with people, especially through wifi-based telecommunication system, which is what we’re doing so much and what the university is having us do right now, I think is super important as well. It’s frustrating when you feel like you can’t have the confidence in the voice continuing. That’s a huge difference between in-person communication. You’re not worried about them breaking up in front of you and it makes you just incredibly aware of the fact that when we’re communicating we’re dealing with signal transduction, which is more than just annoying, actually. It’s kind of existentially traumatic and troubling. It’s like that we don’t know that we can count on the continuity of the person and the communication that we’re engaging in.\n00:24:49\tJason Camlot:\tStill, we are relying on Zoom and Zoom-like platforms as best we can for the social encounters that we crave. Here, I’d say we’re feeling the absence of a different kind of noise that we’re also very good at ignoring and not hearing under normal conditions, but the absence of which we notice in a strong way in these dangerous times. We are noticing the absence of social sounds and that absence becomes a distracting kind of silence. MA student in English Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.\n00:25:20\tKian Vaziri-Tehrani:\tThere’s kind of been sort of an avoidance of silence, if that makes sense. I live in a pretty, like, quiet neighborhood. It’s  Côte-Saint Luc. But yeah, it’s generally like a really, really quiet neighbourhood and I go out my balcony a lot and it’s pitch quiet. So I guess like I just kind of… The TV’s always on or I’m always listening to something and I feel like if it’s too quiet then I’m… Something’s wrong or something’s off about it. Like I’ve just been filling my senses up, I guess.\n00:25:49\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Voices Echoing and Overlaid] I’m thinking in particular of the experience of sounds reverberating within a space that makes us feel we are present in a real, material, and social environment alongside others. Something along the lines of what Brandon LaBelle was talking about when he says that “the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves.” We are increasingly interested in those interstitial noises that suggest life and movement and social activity. PhD student Sadie Barker.\n00:26:22\tSadie Barker:\tI find I’m much more aware of my neighbours’ sounds in the apartment building and I think interested in them and like inclined to speculate into them or like imagine into them just because… Yeah, I find when I hear like the doorbell ringing, I’m like, “Are people having people over? Are they socializing?” You know, you’re just kind of, yeah, more intrigued.\n00:26:44\tJason Camlot:\tWe might become intensive, causal listeners like Sadie, trying to decipher the causes, the things, actions, activities that go with the sounds we’re suddenly noticing. Or we might just be craving those little otherwise meaningless sounds because they suggest a real person in an actual space.\n00:27:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt’s like the difference between listening to an archival documentary recording of a poetry reading–\n00:27:06\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, muffled recording of people laughing and chatting]\n00:27:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t–you can hear all kinds of vibrations in the room other than those of the poet’s voice. Clinking, shuffling, breathing, laughter, applause. Compared to a studio recording, like something Caedmon Records would have made in the 1950s–\n00:27:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Sylvia Plath reciting her poem “Daddy”] The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through.\n00:27:31\tKatherine McLeod:\t–where the strong signal of the poet’s voice seems to exist in a sort of vacuum outside of any recognizable sonic space in the universe.\n00:27:42\tJason Camlot:\t[Sound Effect: Various Childrens’ Voices Echoing and Overlaid] In this present moment of social distancing, I think we’re craving the noise around the signal rather than the signal itself. We’re being bombarded with all kinds of messages, [Begin Music: Sparkly Instrumental] but really we want the comforting sounds of an actual person in a real environment. Philosopher Mladen Dolar might say we’re craving voice itself rather than the messages that voice carries. [End Music: Sparkly Instrumental]\n00:28:04\tJason Camlot:\tPhD student Klara du Plessis.\n00:28:08\tKlara du Plessis:\tI have definitely been phoning a lot more like every day I have two or three telephone conversations with friends who I’m close with, but would usually just text with or something. So there’s definitely this move towards trying to communicate more or to de-distance ourselves, I guess.\n00:28:25\tJason Camlot:\tVoice is that medium made up of accent, intonation, and timbre that carries the message but disappears in the process. Usually we don’t notice it because we’re so focused on the message. In this instance, voice is the noise and the meaning is the signal. It’s like what Dolar says about voice and a heavy accent. A heavy accent suddenly makes us aware of the material support of the voice, which we tend, immediately, to discard. Well, now we seem to be craving the accent. I’m speaking metaphorically here using Dolar’s account of voice as an ever-disappearing, yet undeniably present entity to help describe what we feel when we try to be together on Zoom or Skype or something like that, and sort of are together, but at the same time really aren’t together.\n00:29:19\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe sounds around the signal, the sounds that add the vibrancy to the social, the sense of a real unique person speaking are what we’re listening for, but even when we hear these sounds, we’re kind of aware that they’re evoking a scenario of actual presence that isn’t happening right now.\n00:29:37\tJason Camlot:\tBecause I’ve been on Twitter a lot more than usual, I read a tweet—this was early April—posted by Gianpiero Petriglieri that suggested we’re so exhausted after video calls because we’re experiencing “the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds are tricked into the idea of actually being together. While our bodies know that we’re not” actually together. He’s suggesting it’s the dissonance of being relentlessly in the presence of each other’s absence that makes us so tired.\n00:30:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis may be especially true during graduate seminars and poetry readings and probably even more so in relaxed meetings like the video conference parties and cocktail hours that have been happening more often.\n00:30:22\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, same various voices      speaking from earlier] [Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin. We’re gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight! Okay. Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Duh. Oh, Mickey’s outside, shit! Hang on. I gotta go get the dog. You hear him barking? Jason, you lost, your whole family went away. Where’d they go? Jason’s frozen. No, no he doesn’t move! I know, I know! He does it on purpose! I know! You told me your trick! Yeah, you knew I was faking it. You just couldn’t help it!   Welcome back. [Door Shutting]\n00:31:04\tJason Camlot:\tThat clip we just heard was from the middle of the video conference cocktail hour—or two—I held with some friends just after I taught my first online seminar that I’ve been talking about.\n00:31:14\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing the clinks of glasses at the beginning, the laughter, the spontaneous references to things happening within the individual spaces of the teleconference participants along with the things happening across those spaces, through the screen, really did evoke the sound of an intimate social gathering for me. At times it sounded like you were all there together. Other times, not so much. It was actually really hard for me to tell who was where.\n00:31:41\tJason Camlot:\tIt was a lot of fun. But hearing each other and seeing each other and ourselves through the flat screens of our laptops made me want to crawl through and be there. Wherever “there” is.\n00:31:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat reminds me of the title of the poem in David Antin’s book Talking At The Boundaries, the one called “what am i doing here?” The one where he asks himself, stepping into a space to create a poem by talking rather than reading the poems from a book, what am I doing here in this ambiance? What’s going to happen? Am I doing poetry here? How are we here together? Am I making art here? Just what exactly am I doing here? But that kind of question, the way he asks it in that poem, maybe it can’t be asked in the same way of the here, now.\n00:32:36\tJason Camlot:\tFollowing that opening conversation with the students in my class, which lasted about 40 minutes and functioned as part sonic listening analysis and part group therapy session, and just before the Zoom cocktail gathering I had with my friends, which was also like a therapy listening session, I did, eventually, segway into a two-hour class about the talk poetry of David Antin.\n00:32:57\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] But let’s start at the beginning, I guess, and let’s start with Antin and ask how do we begin to actually define what an Antin talk poem is and how do we define it as an entity? So let’s begin by thinking about what it is, what’s the artifact, what’s the thing that we’re organizing a conversation around? What could you glean from what you’ve read and listened to as to sort of what the production process of a talk poem is? And maybe that’s one way into beginning to define it. And we can think of it generically, we can think of it other ways, but sort of if we think of what is a talk poem, you know, how does he make them?\n00:33:34\tJason Camlot:\tDavid Antin seemed like a deeply relevant artist to be thinking about just now because his poetry originates in live, in-person talking before an audience. He called himself a talk poet. He would come to a venue with some idea of what he was gonna talk about, perhaps a title or a theme, and a few stories in mind. But then he would just stand there and create a poem before a live audience. By talking.\n00:34:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, David Antin saying his talk poem “The Principle of Fit, II”] I came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’d been thinking about and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces. On the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one      comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit, the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness, the calmness, in certain social, socially structured events as between patients and their doctors or between patients and their diseases. It’s a very close social relation and one that takes a certain education.\n00:34:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you listen really closely, you can hear the tape noises on that recording of Antin doing a talk poem. [Static From The Recording]\n00:34:59\tJason Camlot:\tHe would go into a room with an audience, press record on his tape recorder, and start talking. Not reading, not reciting a written text. Just thinking a poem into existence by talking it out loud in front of other people. That’s the first iteration of the talk poem: actual ephemeral talk in a room filled with real people. He would also record his talks on a tape recorder, hence the tape hiss you noticed in that audible trace of the event. He’d take that tape recorder home, transcribe the talk that was on it, and then shape that typed transcript into a unique-looking printed work without punctuation, with special spacing, designed to make the reader have to reinvoice the original talk back to life by finding the speech and intonation patterns that are not obvious to find in the printed treatment of the original, ephemeral live event.\n00:35:51\tJason Camlot:\t[Audio, from a video call with his class] So, if we continue to ask this question, what is a talk poem, okay, and we’ve just rehearsed in a brief way what the production process of a talk poem is, where is the talk poem? I guess that’s my second question, right? Is it in that event, right? Is it in the tape recorder, on the cassette that recorded it? Is it in the initial transcription of it? Is it in the book Talking At The Boundaries after that event happens? Where is the talk poem? Or is it in, or is it that combination of things? Yeah, Brian, you want to..?\n00:36:22\tBrian Vass:\tI guess thinking about this question also just sort of dovetails to the question that I asked on group chat.\n00:36:28\tJason Camlot:\tMaster’s student Brian Vass.\n00:36:31\tBrian Vass:\tIt seems to me that if the talk poem as a piece of art or as a event, if it hinges to some degree on the reciprocity between Antin as a performer and a speaker and the specific context that he’s in, as he seems to sort of describe that it does, like he says he’s got something in mind, but even the spontaneity and some degree of the improvisation is influenced or inflected by the context, specifically the people in the room, to the extent that that’s true. It seems like the real site of the talk poem is the occasion and everything else, the recording and the transcription are sort of derivations of that, but somehow aren’t fully it because you’re part of it if you’re there. Do you know what I mean? Like the audience is also a part of it. If it’s true, what he’s saying about vibing off of the group.\n00:37:21\tJason Camlot:\tI like that, vibing off of the group. So it’s talking, but as you say, it’s sort of talking with an audience present that seems to be important because of this reciprocity as you put it. But it’s more about him vibing off of them than about actual conversation. It’s not talking for conversation. It’s talking for the sense that he’s not talking in a vacuum. There’s a kind of priority that’s given to that original ephemeral event due to this scenario of talking in person before an actual listening audience.\n00:37:58\tJason Camlot:\tThe discussion we had of Antin seemed so appropriate and relevant to us at this moment, I think, because his art was premised on, depended on the act of talking in the presence of other people. If we think about the new scientific evidence coming in that suggests even asymptomatic people can possibly spread the coronavirus, it makes talking to someone in person a truly perilous scenario. We’re not allowed to talk before large groups of people right now. It’s literally against the law. Literary performance, poetry readings, literary gatherings are not possible in that way. But it sort of got us thinking, you know, some of the students were sort of asked what would David Antin do during COVID-19 crisis? Because he’s not, he wouldn’t be allowed to actually stand in a room before an assembled audience, right? And that was, you know, in many of their opinions and in my opinion, too, crucial to the actual creation of a talk poem. That talk poem requires the presence of others within one space, right, in order to actually to be made in the first place. So like, you know, imagining David Antin on Zoom or Skype doing a talk poem, it’s not quite the same thing.\n00:39:07\tMusic:\t[Gentle Instrumental]\n00:39:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo we can’t do talk poems. We can’t read poems before an actual audience. We can’t talk to strangers or speak moistly. Without talking to people in person how can we share art? How can we share literature? How can we share our work under the present conditions? How can we reach listeners? Today, not only are we listening differently in general, but we’re sharing and listening to literature differently. Think about when you listen to literature in your day-to-day life and has that changed? Just as before, you might listen to an audio book or to a podcast and you might listen to that more than before, but the method of listening probably remains the same. What has changed is that you can’t listen to a live reading or at least not in the same space as the reader and other listeners. Literary events have been cancelled or as we prefer to think of it postponed. But we can still listen to writers reading their works and even participate in a live online reading as an event.\n00:40:15\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] Good evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music. We’re very lucky to have two visitors from the great state of Toronto tonight. So all of this should be really fun. And to lead off the show tonight, I asked this person how she would like to be introduced      and she wanted to be introduced by me telling you that she lives beside a lake.\n00:40:46\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] That was a recording of Ian Ferrier performing his usual role as live host and curator of The Words & Music Show, a monthly cabaret of poetry, music, dance, and spoken word performances that’s been happening in Montreal for the past 20 years. At the end of March, the show went online with performers sending in pre-recorded audio to be played in the live event broadcast via Zoom. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Some of the artists, like storyteller Nisha Coleman, integrated into their performances the circumstances and impact of COVID-19 upon artists who depend upon live events. Nisha’s story was about the time she spent hanging out in a community art collective called The Church of Harvey Christ. And this is how she chose to end her story this time.\n00:41:36\tNisha Coleman:\t[Audio, from a past recording] Now, I’ve told this story a lot of times. It’s one I’ve told at parties and campfires and on stage. And every time I tell it, it’s sort of, I sort of tell it in a different way and it has a different meaning, it has a different sort of takeaway. But I think in this particular telling for me what stands out about this story is the strength of community, right? And, and what The Church of Harvey Christ meant to artists and what it provided for them at that time and how important that community is now. I mean, especially now. Because being an artist, you know, it’s precarious, of course. It’s precarious in the best of times and now we’re entering a new time where it’s sort of precarious for everybody. So, I think it’s more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle, or, you know, maintaining this connection over the internet. Because we need each other, we need to lift each other up. We need to help each other out. We need to promote each other’s work. I think that’s gonna be really important in the next however long. Who knows, right?\n00:42:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tOther performances really emphasized the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private spaces that come with a video conference, reading from home. That was the case with poet Alexei Perry Cox.\n00:43:08\tIan Ferrier:\t[Audio, from a past Zoom call] …extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18-month-old child on her bed and it’s by the poet Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen.\n00:43:21\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind.\n00:43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tNow, I have to admit that for this particular recording, my screen didn’t display the video, so even though others watched the reading, I was just listening. As a listener, I felt that Alexei’s poem conveyed such presence through its recording. Yes, I was listening to the poem, too, but I was also listening and deeply moved by the sounds of her daughter’s presence in the room with her and the interaction between them.\n00:44:01\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] A book with a room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. But present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time bringing of life.\n00:44:25\tKatherine McLeod:\tEven more than the words of the poem, I was listening to the sounds around the poem, the sounds of the social and of life. When you’re at a live reading, you’re there to listen to the poetry or prose, but so often the experience of the reading is the atmosphere, the ambiance, as Antin put it, and the conversations around the poems. And that’s much harder to describe, harder to document, and harder to replicate in a digital environment.\n00:44:55\tIsabella Wang:\tIn any other circumstance, when we are, there is this live community happening in the backdrop. I would be more hesitant to just go online and hear the works of a poet reading on the internet because there is that community out there. And I’m like, “Why would I want to like, you know, see this somewhat flat screen of you when I can interact with you in person and engage?”\n00:45:24\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Isabella Wang, who had the idea to go online with the reading series she helps organize in Vancouver, BC: Dead Poets Reading Series.\n00:45:33\tIsabella Wang:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly series at the Vancouver Public Library. We invite like four or five local poets to come and share the work of a dead poet. And so this happened around the time where everything around Vancouver—I mean everything, like not just in Vancouver, but everything—was getting cancelled. And so of course our reading series was also canceled, too, and we had four readers who no longer could come and share their work. I actually… It’s funny you mentioned rob because I actually got the idea from him. And so when I started hearing that “Oh no, we might not actually be able to put on this reading series at the Vancouver Public Library,” I was like, “Hey, rob is doing this thing. How can we maybe try to, you know, move this online?” And initially we were just planning to feature the four readers who couldn’t read anymore. But then it was kind of intuitive and it made sense. I was like, now that we featured Kathy Mak and Natalie Lim, who were supposed to be on the series, let’s start reaching out to more folks and it just started there.\n00:46:47\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe Dead Poets Reading Series is a bit of a ghostly series to begin with. [Begin Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental] So how did it work transferring this series into an online environment?\n00:46:58\tIsabella Wang:\tThe reading series has definitely transformed a lot. Some poets were saying how, you know, it’s hard for them to film themselves reading at home just because there isn’t that reciprocal audience thing going on anymore and it’s kind of like numbing. But at the same time, what the digital-like realm is so good at bringing out is a different sense of community where like before we were so limited to audiences just in Vancouver. And so that limited a lot of not only who our readers were, but also what kind of dead poets were being shared and spread. And so for the first time I think we were able to bring in a lot of      our friends from different places that normally we would only get to see on social media anyway. And it was when the series started that I realized, “Oh my gosh, I’ve known you and you and you like for so long. And this is actually the first time I’ve seen you, you know, move and be alive. And this is the first time I’ve ever heard you read.”\n00:48:05\tJason Camlot:\tI asked Isabella about her experience of listening to readings online versus in person.[End Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental]\n00:48:10\tIsabella Wang:\tWhat’s really changed is the interactive environment, that lively, bustling atmosphere that is somewhat changed now with, you know, this going online. ‘Cause I think part of the literary experience is that interaction, that engagement with poets like before and after they read. You know, ’cause it’s nice to hear Fred Wah read, but it’s also nice to just talk to him and make jokes with him, like, you know, by his side in the audience. And that’s not really there anymore. And that’s what’s been transformed mostly into the, into social media now. And so there’s still that, I think, you know, the liking and sharing and commenting. But it’s more invisible, it’s something that is more of an… Like you see it after they post something but it’s not that immediate anymore.\n00:49:09\tJason Camlot:\tThat’s really interesting. Yeah, I love the idea of response happening in a different temporal sort of timeframe than the actual event, is really interesting. And also in a different media format, so that instead of leaning over to someone and whispering or nudging them with your elbow and exchanging a kind of feeling about what you just heard, it’s being experienced later in a tweet or something like that.\n00:49:33\tIsabella Wang:\tAnd I think it’s also like the function is kind of different because, you know, when you’ve always had that community that you go to like day in and day out, you know, you love seeing the people you see, but kind of take it for granted. It’s like, “Oh yeah, next week I’ll see them again.” And, you know, there will always be literary events. And I think, I think this period just shows us how      important that community and those like events really are to us. And so part of that, social media like that, commenting and interaction is part of just supporting each other and making sure that we’re still going and there is still a sense of community somewhere.\n00:50:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn a poetry reading, you are listening to the poetry, but you’re also listening to community. So the challenge then becomes how to create and make audible that community online. I was so interested in how Isabella’s idea for taking Dead Poets online came from an invitation to read in an online series that went online on that very same weekend of March 14th–15th, 2020. That reading series is hosted on the online journal Periodicities and the poet behind it is Ottawa-based poet, reviewer, and publisher rob  . Jason and I spoke with rob in a video conference call and we asked him about what prompted him to start this online reading series.\n00:51:08\trob mclennan:\tThere are kind of a few factors in play. I’m one of the organizing reading series, founding reading series, of VERSefest, our annual poetry festival. This year would have been tenth, so… We realized, like, we were ten days out of our opening night and we realized like, yeah, this is not going to happen. We have to shut this down.\n00:51:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tWith the cancellation of Ottawa’s VERSfest, rob felt the absence of readings that would have happened. He was also starting up the online journal Periodicities and had the web space ready to curate a reading series. He reached out to poets and was met with an enthusiastic response of poets sending him videos of themselves reading poems. We asked him about his sense of how listeners are responding to all of this new content. Are they listening? But first one of Jason’s students, poet reading series curator and PhD candidate Klara du Plessis, was asking the same questions when some of these reading events started going online. She mentioned it in Jason’s class, so we thought we’d include her perspective before hearing from r     ob on this question.\n00:52:19\tKlara du Plessis:\tWell, yeah, I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about all these virtual poetry reading series, like multiple different people have started. So they kind of invite poets to read between like five and 15 minutes or so to record themselves reading either their own poetry or poetry by someone who’s already passed away and then these videos are posted online. And so I kind of got into a bit of a Twitter thing where I kind of questioned whether people were actually listening to these recordings or whether it was like something for poets to just be busy, so they’re doing something. And my poll discovered that half of the people said that they were super comforted by listening to these virtual poetry readings and felt a sense of connection and community as a result. And half of the other people said that it was like too overwhelming for them at this time to deal with, you know, listening to strange, like sometimes not very well produced audio recordings. I should also mention that I think I offended a few people with my question so I kind of regretted it after the fact.\n00:53:23\trob mclennan:\tI know early on I saw some social media posts of people saying like, “I appreciate that these things happen, but I just can’t deal with it right now.” You know, one or two other people saying like, “I don’t even know why this is happening.” Which is fine, I don’t expect every human on the planet to say, “This is awesome, I’m in.” That is not the point of any endeavor. But for those who might want it or require it, it is there. And for those who don’t want it, there are other things.\n00:53:52\tJason Camlot:\tI asked rob as he was watching these videos come in, if he noticed a blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private,\n00:53:59\trob mclennan:\tI have noticed that; it becomes slightly more intimate, right? Like as opposed to being public. I like watching people do stuff from inside their houses [Sound Effect: Clattering And Moving] or apartments or their, yeah, like you say, bedroom or from their living room table or their makeshift home office because not everyone has a home office. I find that more interesting than someone sending me a more produced video. I’m open to that. I’ve posted some of those. But I just find them just less interesting than something made just for this, with the limitations of that. So like the artifice is gone and one would hope that maybe that intimacy, like we require it now if we’re not able to get it in other ways. So it’s actually maybe helpful as someone… Whether watching or being the one making the video that is actually making this distance less difficult.\n00:54:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah. No, I think that’s such a good point. And it’s, and also realizing that we’re kind of maybe even enjoying those readings a little bit more ’cause we’re not just hearing the person, we’re hearing sort of the space around them and they’re interacting with–\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah!\n00:55:07\tKatherine McLeod:\tYeah.\n00:55:07\trob mclennan:\tYeah, they’re not, they’re not at the same microphone, the same backdrop. It’s actually a little more interesting just watching the limitations of the space. Like, “Oh okay, someone has a smaller space than another person.” And just watching their personal effects behind them and none of those spaces really surprised me. Like, okay, yeah, this person is a little more formal than another person and this person feels a little bit more domestic, say. Yeah, I like it. And yeah, it does feel like a little bit more of a connection, but then maybe we’re just making that, we’re seeking that connection, so we’re finding that connection. That’s fine, too.\n00:55:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince the first set of videos [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] were uploaded to r     ob’s YouTube on March 15th, there are now over 70 videos and the collection seems to be growing each day. The videos are becoming an ecology of recordings in that they’re networked sounds and representative of the poetry community that they’re growing from. Listening to literature now and specifically poetry in a digital environment becomes a kind of ecological listening. We’re listening to interconnectedness and relationality and we’re also listening to an evolving digital soundscape. Just as the soundscapes around us are changing, public places that would be bustling are empty and the sound of a plane overhead [Sound Effect: Plane Flying By] suddenly stands out when otherwise it would fade into the background noise. Yes, our Murray Schafer was right. Noises are the sounds that we have learned to ignore. Meanwhile, projects like Cities and Memory are documenting the changing soundscapes. #StayHomeSounds invites you to listen to the sounds from the global coronavirus lockdown. And as we walk through our own neighbourhoods, we may notice streets sounding quieter and the chirping of birds sounding louder. Our sensory experiences of our inner and outer worlds have changed. As we listen inwards to ourselves, we still find ways to connect that try to replicate the social. Outside of our homes, there have been invitations—multiple times now—to the entire city of Montreal to join in balcony singalongs to Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne.” [End Music: Gentle Instrumental]\n00:57:22\tMusic:\t[Alvaro Echánove singing along to a livestream of Martha Wainwright singing “So Long, Marianne” by Leonard Cohen]\n00:57:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs the summer arrives, balconies will become even noisier as neighbours converse. We have conversations with neighbours we may never have spoken to before and simultaneously we’re even more connected globally. Our phones and computer screens become the new stages. [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] Live-streamed readings are happening like Poetry in the Time of Quarantine here in Montreal and Sound On InstaReadings Series that’s happening in Vancouver or really over Instagram. And large scale initiatives like Canada Performs have launched for musicians and other performing artists including now, thanks to Margaret Atwood, writers whose shows or book tours have been cancelled in the spring or summer. Unlike the streaming that so often is done without compensation to the artist, artists selected for Canada Performs will be paid $1,000 for their at-home performance to be broadcast on the National Arts Centre’s Facebook page. And yes, they do perform from their own home for us, the collective we, to tune in from our homes and listen together.\n00:58:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tBut as collective acts of singing and of listening draw us to our balconies and our computer screens, we can also find ourselves not feeling like joining in. With all of the possibilities for tuning into live streams, we can feel overwhelmed amid searching for something meaningful to listen to. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Back in the first week when everything was changing, I remembered feeling relieved that people like Isabella and r     ob were creating online readings, but I also remember feeling that I didn’t have the concentration to sit down and listen. And I remember thinking that when I feel more focused, or really when I feel a bit better, then I look forward to listening. When you don’t feel like listening that says something about how you’re feeling. When you ask someone how they are listening and if that’s changed, you’re really asking them how they’re doing.\n00:59:33\tJason Camlot:\tHey, let’s try that out. Hey Katherine, how are you listening?\n00:59:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tI’m listening…fine, thanks. How are you listening, Jason?\n00:59:42\tJason Camlot:\tI’m listening pretty well. Thanks for asking. But let me ask you this. How are you really listening, Katherine?\n00:59:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, Jason, how am I really listening? [Sighs] As much as we try to replicate the social, what we manage to produce within these digital environments is a version of the social that is both entirely real and entirely unreachable. We hear in it both closeness and distance and that is affecting. As much as we might try to listen to something that brings back the feeling of the social and the togetherness of before, we are beginning to face the reality of this change and what this change feels like and sounds like. We are listening differently now. Here. Here. Here.\n01:00:34\tMusic:\t[Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental]\n01:01:00\tNatalie Lim:\tHello from my kitchen! Thank you to Isabella and the whole Dead Poets Reading team for putting together this virtual reading. I’m really excited to be a part of it even though I’m bummed that we can’t see people in person this weekend, but we’re gonna hang out for like ten minutes, I’m gonna read some poetry, I got some water, it’s gonna be a good time.\n01:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod of Concordia University and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Oana Avasilichioaei, Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier     , Priscilla Joly, rob mclennan, Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell, Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, and Isabella Wang for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9588","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E9, Producing Queer Media, 1 June 2020, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/producing-queer-media/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/f5b242ab-5995-4284-8650-19a92cd3d654/sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:42:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"41,006,437 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/producing-queer-media/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/49.282403/-123.108550\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.108550\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Constellations Audio. https://www.constellationsaudio.com/ \\n\\nGlass, Ira. “Freedom Fries.” This American Life 23 January 2015. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps/act-two \\n\\n“The Lesbian Show.” Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony. https://alotarchives.org/collection/lesbian-show . **Stacey also wished to issue the correction that The Lesbian Show episode discussed not baseball but track and field.\\n\\nMermaid Palace. https://mermaidpalace.org/ \\n\\nNoor, Poppy. “What is ‘sexy baby voice’? We spoke to a sociologist to find out more.” The Guardian 26 Feb 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/26/what-is-sexy-baby-voice-sociologist \\n\\nThe Queer Public Podcast. https://www.queerpublic.org/ \\n\\nEpisode banner image courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives / BC Lesbian and Gay Archives. Item : 2018-020.4643 – International Women’s Day [The Lesbian Show ‘Dykes on Mykes’ banner]. https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/international-womens-day-the-lesbian-show-dykes-on-mykes-banner\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549772828672,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, there’s a name you might be familiar with — it’s mentioned every episode — that has so far been almost entirely off-mic. We’re talking about Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb’s podcast project manager and supervising producer. Stacey helps to make this podcast possible, collaborating with SpokenWeb contributors from across the network to help conceptualize, produce, edit, publish, and promote each episode. But she’s also a scholar of sound in her own right, working on a PhD at Simon Fraser University. This month, SpokenWeb host Hannah McGregor sits down with Stacey to talk about what queer media sounds like, the feminist history of radio and podcast production, and how archival audio can help to build intergenerational intimacies.\n\nThis episode was a special cross-over between the SpokenWeb Podcast and\nSecret Feminist Agenda.\n\n00:00\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, there’s a name you might be familiar with—I mention it every episode—that has so far been almost entirely off-mic. I’m talking about Stacey Copeland, our podcast project manager and supervising producer. Stacey is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver. During her Master’s work in Communication and Culture, she co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto-based feminist community radio collective. And of course she helps us make this podcast every month. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, I sat down with Stacey—well, we Zoomed—to talk about what queer media sounds, the feminist history of radio and podcast production, and how archival audio can help to build intergenerational intimacies. Here’s me and Stacey with episode 9 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Producing Queer Media.” [Theme Music]\n \n\n01:55\tHannah McGregor:\tWhy don’t we start at the beginning with how you ended up being a person who researches radio and podcasts and sound?\n \n\n02:06\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. Well, I was born. No, I’m kidding.\n \n\n02:09\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n02:10\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, the way that I kind of look back on the start of everything was just the amount of media consumption I did as a teenager was a big start of it.\n \n\n02:21\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n02:22\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I was actually a YouTuber for awhile when I was a teenager, [Laughs] which got me into doing covers, like posting covers of me playing guitar online. And then eventually joining a couple of LGBTQ queer teen collaboration groups. So we’d have like, you know, I was Wednesday, and my friend Daniel was on Tuesdays, and we’d have like Micah on Fridays, and those kind of classic YouTube community forums. So–\n \n\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tSo as you say classic–\n \n\n02:58\tStacey Copeland:\tClassic. [Laughs]\n \n\n02:58\tHannah McGregor:\tI am, I am too, too old to know any of these things.\n \n\n03:01\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n03:02\tHannah McGregor:\t“Oh, is that how it works? Great.”\n \n\n03:04\tStacey Copeland:\tSo yeah, back when YouTube was more community-based and less lots of very high production videos, there was a lot of these like collab channels that people were part of and so that’s what really got me into being more creative with sound and with video. And then I actually wanted to go to university to make music videos, originally. I was way more a visual person than I was a sound person.\n \n\n03:29\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay.\n \n\n03:30\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd so I applied to the RTA School of Media, which is a four-year undergraduate program at Ryerson University in Toronto. And it kind of gives you a great background… Used to be called Radio and Television Arts now is Media Production because who would wanna only learn about radio and television these days.\n \n\n03:49\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n03:51\tHannah McGregor:\tThis is old-timey media for hipsters.\n \n\n03:53\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! [Laughs]\n \n\n03:53\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s what they teach you.\n \n\n03:55\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I joined that program and in the first year you actually take audio production courses as your first courses, rather than video. And so that kind of gave me a taste for radio production in particular, and I definitely caught the bug. And so from that point, I started taking all of the audio production courses, got an internship at Indie88, which is a radio station in Toronto in my fourth year, and started doing contract production with them for a couple of years ’cause they’re great. And then… It also brought in like my music interests and my–\n \n\n04:32\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n04:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–hipster identity at the time.\n \n\n04:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Do you have, do you have a sense of why it is the audio production ended up appealing to you so much when you had been so focused on the visual to start?\n \n\n04:45\tStacey Copeland:\tI think at that point it was just because it brought in my interest in music in ways that I found more intimate and more relatable and I got to work much more closely with bands and with artists than you get to as part of a much larger video production team. You really get to be one-on-one and close up in person with the people that you’re working with in a different way. And it’s kind of like this family when you’re working in a group of people on a, on an audio production, a very tight knit family. And so from that, I ended up working as a lab assistant and production staff at Ryerson for, for awhile, for about a year after my undergrad and that gave me the teaching bug. And so I applied for grad school ’cause I said, “Well, how can I do this forever?”\n \n\n05:33\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n05:34\tHannah McGregor:\tThat is how so many of us get here.\n \n\n05:36\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! So that’s what really brought me into doing my Master’s at Ryerson York in ComCult–\n \n\n05:42\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n05:43\tStacey Copeland:\t–which brought in the teaching–\n \n\n05:45\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat’s ComCult?\n \n\n05:46\tStacey Copeland:\tComCult, right. Communication and culture.\n \n\n05:49\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay. [Laughs]\n \n\n05:50\tStacey Copeland:\tThat program was great. It really introduced me more to theory and awoke my inner feminist a lot more–\n \n\n05:57\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n05:58\tStacey Copeland:\t–in thinking about my audio production and my approach to it. And so that’s why I ended up deep diving into feminist theory and sound and how they relate and how we can think about it. And–\n \n\n06:10\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:11\tStacey Copeland:\t–what does… What is the experience that women are having with their voices in audio production? So that’s what I ended up doing for my MA and then of course, PhD work now is just the next–\n \n\n06:21\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:21\tStacey Copeland:\t–chapter.\n \n\n06:22\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Ahaha…literally and figuratively.\n \n\n06:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:25\tHannah McGregor:\tI… It’s so interesting to me the ways that people stumble across feminist theory for the first time, including those of us who, who might have sort of, looking back, been like, “Ah, I was a latent feminist that whole time, but didn’t have the language to articulate myself as such” or didn’t have any particular sense of what feminism meant beyond, like, “I am a woman and think I should be allowed to do things.”\n \n\n06:47\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n06:48\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is, you know, a legitimate standpoint for feminism. My first encounter with feminist theory came through a theology course–\n \n\n06:56\tStacey Copeland:\tInteresting.\n \n\n06:57\tHannah McGregor:\t–I took at the University of Edinburgh and I read Judith Butler for the first time, like, against the Gospel of Mark. So it was just this real, like, like it was this weird way that I sort of entered into this theory, but then it’s like, it gets ahold of you and you’re like… I don’t know. I remember after reading Gender Trouble for the first time that it was the first theory book that I had been desperate to tell everybody about.\n \n\n07:21\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n07:22\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, that it broken open my brain so entirely that I just wanted to grab everybody and be like, “Did you hear?! Gender’s a performance!”\n \n\n07:29\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:30\tHannah McGregor:\t“I had no idea! But I’m so excited by that!” So, let’s talk a little bit more about gender and voice.\n \n\n07:36\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah.\n \n\n07:37\tHannah McGregor:\tLike what, what does… I mean, I know, but I’m going to go ahead and ask–\n \n\n07:40\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:40\tHannah McGregor:\t–the naive question: what did the gender and voice have to do with each other?\n \n\n07:44\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. So… [Nervous Laugh]\n \n\n07:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:48\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s a casual question.\n \n\n07:50\tHannah McGregor:\tAren’t we all just people? Maybe?\n \n\n07:52\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:53\tHannah McGregor:\tAt the end of the day?\n \n\n07:53\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I mean, Judith Butler is a great, a great place to start. That was definitely one of my foundational texts, too. And one that got me real riled up… Because Butler doesn’t talk a ton about the voice or–\n \n\n08:06\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n08:07\tStacey Copeland:\t–about sound as part of our construction of gender. Which is fair, that was not very in fashion at the time, you might say.\n \n\n08:15\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n08:15\tStacey Copeland:\tI know my supervisor Milena Droumeva says this often that we’ve really hit this sonic turn–\n \n\n08:20\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n08:21\tStacey Copeland:\t–in the academy and in humanities–\n \n\n08:23\tHannah McGregor:\tMmm.\n \n\n08:23\tStacey Copeland:\t–and social sciences. And what that means is we’re really getting awoken to this idea of how our voices carry so much of our identity and our experience. And it’s often… If people aren’t seeing us in person for the first time, it’s the first thing they notice about us. And if they’re meeting us in person for the first time, it’s the second thing they notice about us. So it’s something that really changes people’s perceptions. And when you start to think about what your voice says about you, it also kind of opens up these questions of the different voices that we have in different contexts as well, and how gendered–\n \n\n09:08\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n09:08\tStacey Copeland:\t–that can often be. So part of my MA work was looking at particularly women’s experiences with their own voices in radio, in Toronto, and how they felt about it. Did they think it was high-pitched? Did they think it was low-pitched? Did they feel like they had a radio voice? What is a radio voice anyways? And what I found was for the most part, women working in the radio industry do have lower or what would be considered almost androgynous registers and pitches in their voices.\n \n\n09:43\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n09:44\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd they may not necessarily present their voice that way in person, but they do when they’re on the microphone. And I mean, even as scholars or as speakers, we often do that, too. We have a different vocal presentation that often–\n \n\n09:57\tHannah McGregor:\t100 percent.\n \n\n09:58\tStacey Copeland:\t–skews lower, which also translates to skewing as more masculine presenting, at least in Western culture.\n \n\n10:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n10:06\tStacey Copeland:\tSo even just there–\n \n\n10:07\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n10:07\tStacey Copeland:\t–we can think about some of the gendered aspects of voice.\n \n\n10:10\tHannah McGregor:\tOne of the many terrible jobs that I had as an undergraduate was working for a Rogers call centre.\n \n\n10:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMm!\n \n\n10:18\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I was maybe six months into that job before I noticed that when I was on calls with men, I pitched my voice a full half octave higher. [Pitches Voice Higher] Like, it just went right up here, like, “Hi, my name is Hannah and I’m calling from Rogers Wireless.”\n \n\n10:32\tStacey Copeland:\tYep.\n \n\n10:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I just like… I, it was, it was deeply unconscious and my voice has pitched lower, I think both naturally and through training as I’ve aged.\n \n\n10:42\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n10:43\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s fairly common. In singing, we learn this, that our voices don’t sort of fully settle into their lifelong register until our thirties. And I started off singing much… Like I was a soprano when I was a kid and I sing bass now. But I will never forget a feminist mentor of mine telling me that I would have less difficulty in the classroom than other women my age because I had a naturally lower voice.\n \n\n11:06\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n11:06\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that it’s like both as simple and as complicated as that, that when your voice is lower, it registers as more masculine, which is synonymous with more authoritative. And so it will be easier to make people listen to you and take you seriously because your voice is lower.\n \n\n11:19\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! And this is a common experience. Like–\n \n\n11:22\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n11:22\tStacey Copeland:\t–when you have these conversations with women, it’s often something that they have experienced in one way or another or have talked to another friend about having this experience.\n \n\n11:32\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n11:32\tStacey Copeland:\tSo we can think of… I know a lot of people probably watched Love Is Blind recently [Laughs] on Netflix. [Laughs]\n \n\n11:39\tHannah McGregor:\tI did not, but continue your point.\n \n\n11:40\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh.\n \n\n11:42\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n11:42\tStacey Copeland:\tAs a, as a nerdy, like, gender and voice scholar, I was like, “Whoa!”\n \n\n11:46\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, oh…\n \n\n11:47\tStacey Copeland:\t“A show where they meet and they don’t see each other in person? They just have to fall in love with their voice??”\n \n\n11:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Okay, yep. I see why this would have interested you.\n \n\n11:56\tStacey Copeland:\tBut there’s this one character and there’s a great article online when the show first came out by Anne Karpf who’s also a feminist voice and radio scholar and critic [sic: the article was by Poppy Noor, in which she interviewed Anne Karpf]. And it was talking about how this one particular character on the show actually has this sort of baby voice that she puts on whenever she’s–\n \n\n12:16\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n12:16\tStacey Copeland:\t–speaking to the person that she’s dating. And it actually pitches more baby and higher when they’re in person, rather than when she’s behind the screen. So…\n \n\n12:29\tHannah McGregor:\tHuh!\n \n\n12:30\tStacey Copeland:\tRight there’s like this very fascinating demonstration for everyone watching Love Is Blind in the way that we change our vocal performance and interaction depending on who we’re talking to because she wasn’t doing this to her voice when she was just talking to the other women in the social off time that they had, it was only in these particular situations. And so it brought up these really great conversations online around baby voice–\n \n\n12:58\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n12:59\tStacey Copeland:\t–and the long history of that voice. We think of characters like Marilyn Monroe.\n \n\n13:03\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:04\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd why do we think that’s sexy? Why does anyone think baby voice is sexy, right?\n \n\n13:08\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n13:10\tStacey Copeland:\tSo it brings up these really interesting conversations around how we identify what’s sexy, what’s masculine, what’s feminine.\n \n\n13:18\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:19\tStacey Copeland:\tIs it a way to be more submissive in having this kind of youthful sounding voice? And, and it comes–\n \n\n13:26\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:26\tStacey Copeland:\t–into biology, like you said. As we age, we tend to have lower voice. And that also translates to–\n \n\n13:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–our understanding of what voices have authority, as well, both men–\n \n\n13:39\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:39\tStacey Copeland:\t–and people who are older. And so we then hit this like youth demo using baby voice to be sexy because it’s a little submissive. And then also having vocal fry, which I know I have a ton of–\n \n\n13:51\tHannah McGregor:\t[Exasperated Sigh in Agreement]\n \n\n13:51\tStacey Copeland:\t–because we’re, our voices–\n \n\n13:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Exasperated Sigh]\n \n\n13:53\tStacey Copeland:\t–are trying to hit those lower registers to seem authoritative.\n \n\n13:57\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm!\n \n\n13:58\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n13:58\tHannah McGregor:\tI…could scream about vocal fry until the cats come home.\n \n\n14:01\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n14:01\tHannah McGregor:\tOne of my early sort of personal encounters with how much I was gonna fixate on gendered voices in podcasting was Marcelle my co-, the co-host of Witch, Please and I were invited onto CBC Edmonton AM–\n \n\n14:18\tStacey Copeland:\tOkay.\n \n\n14:19\tHannah McGregor:\t–to talk about gender and podcasting. In particular, to talk about why there are so many fewer women in podcasting than men. Though, that has change–… I mean, this was like a good five or six years ago.\n \n\n14:29\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n14:29\tHannah McGregor:\tThat demographic is shifting decisively.\n \n\n14:32\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, hot conversation in like 2014.\n \n\n14:34\tHannah McGregor:\tYes.\n \n\n14:35\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n14:35\tHannah McGregor:\tSo it was a hot conversation at the time. It was like, podcasting is 75% men, what’s going on, what are the barriers to access? And so we came on this radio show to talk about this. And we were talking about how one of the barriers to access for women is the policing of women’s voices.\n \n\n14:49\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n14:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThe way that women talk is always wrong. And that… We were talking about that iconic This American Life story, “If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say, SAY IT ALL IN CAPS,” [sic: should read “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS”] where they talk about how the top form of hate mail they get is about the voices of their young women producers.\n \n\n15:04\tStacey Copeland:\t[Sadly] Yeah.\n \n\n15:04\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, nothing makes their listeners as mad as the sound of a young woman with vocal fry.\n \n\n15:08\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:08\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, just makes them lose their fucking minds. And we were talking about how there’s sort of this pseudoscientific concern-trolling attached to it.\n \n\n15:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n15:17\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, “Oh, well, it’s bad for your voice. And that’s why you need to stop. Vocal fry wrecks your voice. We’re really just worried about you.” Which every woman has experienced somebody using this kind of like pseudomedical concern-trolling to–\n \n\n15:31\tStacey Copeland:\tGaslighting. [Laughs]\n \n\n15:32\tHannah McGregor:\t–to control us. Ga- precisely. It is absolutely gaslighting with a thin veneer of the medical on top of it.\n \n\n15:37\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:39\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd the host was like, “Oh, well actually vocal fry is extremely bad for your voice, though.” And then just launched into like, mansplaining vocal fry to us. We like lost our goddamn minds. [Laughs] What is happening here?? Anyway, all of our listeners listened to the segment and then were really mean to him on Twitter all day.\n \n\n15:57\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:58\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd it was very satisfying.\n \n\n16:00\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, vocal fry is really fascinating that way. And you have to ask the question well, who is being, you know, bothered by vocal fry? What’s the demographic behind that? Because it’s very unlikely that it’s younger women who also have vocal fry. There is–\n \n\n16:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, we’re not mad. [Laughs]\n \n\n16:19\tStacey Copeland:\t–the argument that it is a millennial and Gen Y, just, vocalization the same way that we had Valley Girl as a kind of slang and vocalization in generations before us. So, there’s… Part of what I found in my MA work was that a lot of younger women actually really enjoy the sound of vocal fry–\n \n\n16:40\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n16:40\tStacey Copeland:\t–because to them, it sounds like them. It’s, it’s more–\n \n\n16:43\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n16:43\tStacey Copeland:\t–like having a conversation with a friend, rather than a, a formal radio broadcast presenter, you know?\n \n\n16:50\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. And I wonder if the embrace of things like vocal fry is one of the sonic differences between radio and podcasting, that podcasting has sort of emerged as a space where in fact, because there’s a younger demographic who are hosting sometimes, and because there’s a sort of casualness behind a lot of the recording settings, that you are more likely to hear vocal fry on a podcast than on the radio and that becomes part of what makes it feel like a cozier medium.\n \n\n17:14\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm. Yeah, and it’s easier for vocal fry to come across, too, because there’s not as much high compression on the voice. You’re maybe listening or most likely listening on headphones versus on a blasting car stereo.\n \n\n17:28\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n17:29\tStacey Copeland:\tSo even when you maybe have a vocal fry voice—I’ve had this experience—and are doing a radio broadcast, it doesn’t necessarily come through because it’s smoothed out and compressed, versus on a podcast where we kind of let things breathe a little bit more because it is more conversational.\n \n\n17:46\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:47\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I think podcasting, yeah, it’s definitely more conversational, but it’s also produced differently. There’s a different–\n \n\n17:54\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:54\tStacey Copeland:\t–logic behind it often.\n \n\n17:56\tHannah McGregor:\tUgh, I love that. Okay, let’s fast forward now to that, to that next chapter. Tell me about what your research is about now.\n \n\n18:04\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. So I just presented my, and defended my, proposal a couple weeks ago. So…it’s fairly fresh in my mind.\n \n\n18:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n18:13\tStacey Copeland:\tBut– [Laughs]\n \n\n18:13\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd still in, in that pure form before you’ve actually started trying to write it.\n \n\n18:17\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n18:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhen it’s just a, just a perfect idea.\n \n\n18:19\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I’m in the ethics stage now and quickly realizing how much work I have ahead of me in the next year.\n \n\n18:27\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n18:27\tStacey Copeland:\tBut it’s exciting. So, basically, the, the one-liner or the elevator pitch version is–\n \n\n18:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n18:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–I’m, I’m looking to ask the question, how is gender and sexuality communicated through audio media?\n \n\n18:41\tHannah McGregor:\tMm!\n \n\n18:41\tStacey Copeland:\tSpecifically asking that question in relation to audio produced by queer women in different decades. So the two kind of foundational shows that I’m looking at are The Lesbian Show, which was on Vancouver’s co-op radio in the 1970s, 1979, all the way into the early 2000s. So quite a few decades on air.\n \n\n19:07\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n19:08\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd then Dykes on Mykes, which is a community radio show out of Montreal, CKUT. And these are kind of my foundational shows of thinking about the production of audio and radio by queer women for queer women talking about queer identity. And from these shows, the goal is to create an intergenerational analysis where I interview these, these particular producers and then make linkages to contemporary podcasts that are making content either connected to or influenced by or reflecting back to these, these foundational shows. So for instance, I’m sure a lot of people, if they’re into queer podcasting or just like more intimate feminist podcasting, have listened to The Heart.\n \n\n20:00\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n20:01\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s a great podcast. But what a lot of people don’t know unless they dig deeper is that podcast, The Heart, was actually a community radio show audio smut on CKUT at the same–\n \n\n20:13\tHannah McGregor:\tHuh!\n \n\n20:14\tStacey Copeland:\t–community radio station as Dykes on Mykes. So making these kind of linkages to where are we finding these groups of feminist and queer community who are making audio either in the same spaces or together or are influencing each other and how does that transition from historical understandings of community radio, and how that was produced,–\n \n\n20:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n20:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–into podcasting today? So with shows like The Heart… There’s another great one, Asking For It, by the same collective, which is Mermaid Palace. And… There’s quite a few out there there’s, there’s Queer Public, which is another great podcast out there, also someone from Montreal CKUT-background who’s producing that. So making these kind of connections early on made me wonder what the intergenerational overlap is in–\n \n\n21:04\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–the experience and underlying desires in producing queer media as queer women.\n \n\n21:11\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:11\tStacey Copeland:\tWho is it for? What’s the intention behind it? What does it sound like?\n \n\n21:16\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n21:17\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat’s queer media anyways? And what, what is that when you’re doing it on the radio, when both queer politics and feminist movements have this very long history of visual metaphors, of visibility, of coming out, right? What does it mean when that’s being done only through sound?\n \n\n21:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:36\tStacey Copeland:\tSo that’s what I’m really interested in exploring over the next year, anyways.\n \n\n21:40\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n21:40\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. I love this focus on the intergenerational, which is such a necessary and often fraught conversation when we are talking about, I think, both feminist and queer, intergenerational solidarity and divisions.\n \n\n21:54\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm!\n \n\n21:55\tHannah McGregor:\tI’ve been talking a lot with other queer and feminist friends about this feeling sometimes that, I think because we are so invested in a constant movement towards greater liberation, that there is a tendency to, as I usually put it, eat our mothers.\n \n\n22:17\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. That’s, that’s a great way to say it.\n \n\n22:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is to say that in order to articulate our greater liberation, it often involves a kind of disavowal of those who came before us. And we’re seeing that playing out in Vancouver in all kinds of complex ways, especially around the surprisingly [Laughs] vocal TERF movement in this city and the way that a trans inclusive queerness and a trans inclusive feminism feels this need to break with what is not necessarily, but it’s often seen as, a generational divide. I think that’s important to, to distinguish: that it isn’t necessarily a generational divide, but that’s often how we understand it as a like, “Oh, those are like… Lesbians from the ’70s hated trans women. And so we distinguish ourselves from that generation.” And the figuring out ways to find forms of continuity and to build dialogue, like, intergenerational dialogue feels like really vital work…right now to try to sort of, I don’t know, figure out how we can find different ways to relate to the generations who came before us that are not a sort of burn it down, build something new out of the ashes. [Laughs]\n \n\n23:27\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm! I mean, that’s a big part of the issue with the waves metaphor in feminism, that–\n \n\n23:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMm!\n \n\n23:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–everything comes in waves, but we have this first, second, and third, and fourth, and arguably fifth, [Laughs] at this point in the way that we’re micro-breaking it down into almost standpoints or initiatives. So…\n \n\n23:46\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n23:47\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, part of what I’m really fascinating in, in doing is taking a step back and asking, “Well, we can’t just simply dismiss all of the work that lesbian feminists in particular did in the ’70s.” Yes, there are awful stories, there are dark histories, but we need to open those up and see what else was going on. Well, why was this happening at that time? What are the other stories? What were some of the wins that were coming out of that? And how, how was that politics influencing everyone who came in the decade or wave after, and then now, as well, when we start to see this rising of queer feminist work and people taking up even lesbian feminist and lesbian separatist identities—which I found very fascinating—or using the term “sapphist” for instance.\n \n\n24:39\tHannah McGregor:\tHaha!\n \n\n24:40\tStacey Copeland:\tRight?\n \n\n24:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThat I’ve never come across.\n \n\n24:41\tStacey Copeland:\tOh.\n \n\n24:41\tHannah McGregor:\tBut…\n \n\n24:41\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s new. If you go on Tumblr…\n \n\n24:42\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Ah, Tumblr. Fucking Tumblr. Everything I know about gender and sexuality, I definitely learned from Tumblr use.\n \n\n24:50\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] Yeah, so the term sapphist, it’s there. And it’s making a comeback, which is fascinating to me. So there is this kind of desire I think people have of looking back, of trying to understand where these movements came from and reconnecting to feminists who maybe are from older demographics. And this… You know, it’s not unheard of. When we think of the way that we interact with our grandparents or elders in our lives, this should also be happening within queer and feminist communities–\n \n\n25:24\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n25:24\tStacey Copeland:\t–so that we can understand what people went through and what people experienced before we got to the point we’re at now.\n \n\n25:32\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n25:32\tStacey Copeland:\tHow did we come to a moment where we have, you know, queer same sex marriage in Canada when we have something like the Me Too movement that didn’t just spring up overnight?\n \n\n25:43\tHannah McGregor:\tNo. Okay, I want to talk more about what queer production sounds like, but just a brief aside about intergenerational and queer ancestors: have you watched A Secret Love yet?\n \n\n25:55\tStacey Copeland:\tNoo, it’s on my, it’s on my, my list on Netflix.\n \n\n25:58\tHannah McGregor:\t[Emotional Exhalations] Hoo, whoa. I mean, I strongly recommend it and I also cried so much.\n \n\n26:06\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah!\n \n\n26:07\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s…\n \n\n26:08\tStacey Copeland:\tMy social media feed is full of people talking about how emotional it is. And I’m like, I need to be in a space where I’m prepared to watch this.\n \n\n26:13\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, you gotta be ready. I was not ready. I thought it was just going to be like fun, like, “Ooh, A League of Their Own.”\n \n\n26:20\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n26:20\tHannah McGregor:\t“Like, look at this, old-timey lesbians!” But it was a full on like five Kleenex situation.\n \n\n26:24\tStacey Copeland:\tMm.\n \n\n26:25\tHannah McGregor:\tIt was, it was intense. But also really exciting to get even this micro history told through a queer lens. I was chatting with a friend—a friend of the show—Cynara Geissler about it afterwards. And she was like, “Isn’t it interesting that the two women being described met in Moose Jaw and moved to Chicago in the ’40s because it was safer.” And she was like, “What narratives do we hear about Chicago in the ’40s? It’s never that it is a safe place to be.” It’s always articulated as this like, den of iniquity, this wildly dangerous city. But all of our definitions of like what makes a city safe are really, really different when you’re like…a couple of lesbians in the ’40s–\n \n\n27:10\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n27:10\tHannah McGregor:\t–doing something that is literally illegal. You know, all of a sudden the big city becomes safe for you in a different way. And it was just like, even in that small register, the way that we understand reality, historically, becomes so, so different when we’re offered different lenses on it. Anyway.\n \n\n27:27\tStacey Copeland:\tNo, completely. So I–\n \n\n27:28\tHannah McGregor:\tRec-, recommend.\n \n\n27:29\tStacey Copeland:\t–I’ve listened to quite a bit of The Lesbian Show so far. There’s a big collection of it as part of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, which is an initiative by Elise Chenier here at Simon Fraser. And then there’s a new big collection at the Vancouver Archives, which I’m very excited about. But listening back to these shows, there is so much fascinating history and interesting, very queer sound moments like sexual innuendo commentary over a lesbian baseball game [sic: should read “track and field”] at the Gay Games, you know?\n \n\n28:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n28:06\tStacey Copeland:\tOr a tap dancing competition on air. [Laughs] And then like…\n \n\n28:12\tHannah McGregor:\tSo many of the lesbians I know love tap dancing. [Jokingly] Can you explain that to me?\n \n\n28:16\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I don’t know.\n \n\n28:17\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n28:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMaybe it’s connected to this ’70s and ’80s fad.\n \n\n28:21\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay, great.\n \n\n28:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI don’t know, right? And then other moments like Valentine’s call-in shows where women could call in anonymously and the host would read out a love letter to the person that they were having a crush on if they wanted to stay anonymous. And so we get all of these kinds of historical points and we also get a lot of discussions around like working class lesbians and Black feminist lesbianism. And they also do discussions on global issues and transgender issues and solidarities, as well, throughout the LGBTQ community and the poor community, because they were also rooted in community radio stations.\n \n\n29:03\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n29:04\tStacey Copeland:\tSo making those kind of connections and hearing those stories really does question and rewrite the histories that we understand.\n \n\n29:11\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s so exciting. History’s great, right? What a fun discipline.\n \n\n29:15\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n29:15\tHannah McGregor:\tMedia history is the best. So, you mentioned that you’re interested in, like, what does queer media sound like?\n \n\n29:21\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n29:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does queer production sound like? And that was like… It really struck me even when you were describing like how podcasting and radio sound differently because they’re produced differently.\n \n\n29:31\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n29:32\tHannah McGregor:\tSo have you started to hypothesize what queer production sounds like?\n \n\n29:37\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, it’s tough, but there’s already some examples that have come out of my kind of initial research into the subject. And some of them are when you’re looking back at community radio, those moments where you can imagine someone flipping through the dial and then all of a sudden they’re hearing two lesbians talk very sexually about another woman playing baseball [sic: should read “track and field”]. That kind of a moment is really, very queer, very queer–\n \n\n30:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n30:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that–\n \n\n30:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n30:05\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that isn’t the same as podcasting because podcasting, in contrast, someone’s going to be choosing to listen to that show.\n \n\n30:12\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n30:13\tStacey Copeland:\tSo then how are those produced in a more… To create a more queer audio experience? And I think shows like Asking For It that Kaitlin Prest and the collective at Mermaid Palace are, are making–\n \n\n30:25\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n30:26\tStacey Copeland:\t–are great example of some of the queer feminist work that we’re going to see moving forward where we have lesbian, queer, and feminist protagonists–\n \n\n30:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n30:36\tStacey Copeland:\t–and taking on more difficult subjects, like same-sex relationship abuse and domestic abuse, but in ways that really bring us into the spaces in new ways. So it’s not just voice-over conversation or a journalistic style of production. It’s actually taking us into those rooms with the couple…\n \n\n30:58\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n30:59\tStacey Copeland:\tHearing both sounds of violence but also sounds of intimacy and sex in a podcast between two women, right?\n \n\n31:10\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n31:10\tStacey Copeland:\tCreates these very queer audio experiences that we aren’t used to hearing. And really, podcasting is perfect for creating that kind of experience in contrast to radio, because little coos from a woman, for instance, or soft crying is something that’s much harder to communicate because of the compression and way that radio is broadcasted in contrast to a podcast.\n \n\n31:36\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, that’s, that’s super interesting. I just finished listening to the second season of Within the Wires.\n \n\n31:42\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm, yeah!\n \n\n31:43\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is also–\n \n\n31:43\tStacey Copeland:\tI’ve started listening to that. It’s so good!\n \n\n31:45\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s, it’s really good. And the second season has all of these examples of both crying and also intentional silences where the narrator is supposed to be recording these audio guides to art that was created by her former lover. And she begins to cry and then just stops talking for lengths of time. And as I was, was walking around and listening and I was like, “Oh, this is impossible in any other medium.” Because you can’t… There’s an intentionality to listening and a kind of duration to listening with podcasting where like, I will sit here and listen to a solid minute of silence because I understand you have put it here intentionally.\n \n\n32:27\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n32:27\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that will register to me. Whereas if you’re flipping… [Laughs] I mean, I imagine if you’re flipping through the radio, ’cause when have I flipped through the radio in my adult life? The answer is zero times.\n \n\n32:36\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n32:37\tHannah McGregor:\tBut I imagine if you’re flipping through the radio and come across a station where there is a minute of silence, you will assume it’s just not a station and keep going.\n \n\n32:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, exactly. You’ll assume something’s going wrong and go somewhere else.\n \n\n32:47\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, Yeah.\n \n\n32:49\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Yeah, moments like that. And there’s also work with groups like Constellations. I don’t know if you’ve heard of, of Constellations, but it was originally an installation—sound art installation—in Toronto and then it was put online as a series of podcasts. And it’s really sound artists and podcasts and audio producers making these pieces that kind of push the boundaries in the way that we understand radio and podcast production and asking–\n \n\n33:20\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n33:20\tStacey Copeland:\t–really intimate questions. So one of the episodes, for instance, takes us into a session where the audio producer is learning how to sing and voc-…and vocalize. But it takes us into these very intimate spaces in a way that sounds quite different because we’re hearing the room, we’re hearing overlap of time, so I think that’s another way that we can think about it: a queering of audio and queering of media is playing with our sense of time and space–\n \n\n33:50\tHannah McGregor:\tMm, mhm.\n \n\n33:51\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that we don’t necessarily hear in traditional, linear, radio formats, right? It’s ’cause–\n \n\n33:57\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n33:57\tStacey Copeland:\t–radio is traditionally produced as very linear: you tune in at six o’clock, it’s going to be the six o’clock news. You tune in at five, we’ve got the traffic, right?\n \n\n34:08\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n34:09\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd it’s cyclical as well. So it’s always pre-produced and cyclical every day. Versus podcasting can really play with those senses of time and space in a new way.\n \n\n34:18\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. So this… Listening to you talk about production in this way… I mean, you are a great example of a scholar who comes into their work with a kind of experiential knowledge because of your background in audio production.\n \n\n34:33\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n34:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I imagine your knowledge of audio production heightens your ability to understand what you’re hearing and the kinds of deliberate choices that people are making when they are producing radio or podcasts. But I wonder if sort of before SpokenWeb and the other work we’re doing together, if you had been thinking about, you know, sharing some of your research as a podcast, like, is that an impulse that you have given that you both work on and think about sound and are also a producer yourself?\n \n\n35:05\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, and it’s hard. [Laughs] So…\n \n\n35:07\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n35:09\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s very, very… It’s a very different experience ’cause when you’re writing academic work, you’re writing with an academic audience in mind versus when–\n \n\n35:17\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:17\tStacey Copeland:\t–you’re creating something like a podcast or a radio documentary, you really want to make it as accessible as possible. And that can often be difficult to do–\n \n\n35:26\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:27\tStacey Copeland:\t–as you know, from making this–\n \n\n35:28\tHannah McGregor:\tUh-huh\n \n\n35:28\tStacey Copeland:\t–show and working with SpokenWeb. So I actually… I attempted to do that for a first time during my MA. So I made a three-piece radio documentary that went with my MA work. I think the first part is really good and I think then I got too heady and it’s really still–\n \n\n35:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n35:46\tStacey Copeland:\t–for an academic audience in the second–\n \n\n35:48\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n35:48\tStacey Copeland:\t–and third part. But my, my goal is to try and do that again with my PhD work.\n \n\n35:53\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:53\tStacey Copeland:\tSo radio documentary, audio documentary is part of the process that I’m going through. So I’ll be keeping an audio diary as a feminist reflexive method–\n \n\n36:04\tHannah McGregor:\tYes.\n \n\n36:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–throughout my research process. So after each interview, I’ll sit down with my microphone and kind of detox and have a bit of a–\n \n\n36:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n36:12\tStacey Copeland:\t–confessional moment and work through my material that way. And so I am trying to think through, and I think working with SpokenWeb and thinking about the way that we can translate academic work into something that’s more publicly accessible and just more enjoyable, to be honest. Sometimes reading–\n \n\n36:30\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm!\n \n\n36:31\tStacey Copeland:\t–a lot of large manuscripts and articles can, can be a lot if you want to grasp a subject. I know I’m more of an oral learner. So thinking about the ways that we can use some of these production techniques, and especially when you’re thinking about sound and in something intimate, like queer experience and queer identity, how can I marry these two things together in a way that really makes it useful and enjoyable and also informative, right?\n \n\n36:59\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n36:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAt the end of the day, getting those ideas across is a big part of it.\n \n\n37:02\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n37:02\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd so I do think SpokenWeb is doing some interesting work that way.\n \n\n37:06\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd it’s also interesting, as part of working on this project, to see the places that are challenges and the places that come more easily and maybe whose work lends itself to that kind of translation or mobilization more readily, right? Because there are, there are different kinds and levels of translation that are required for different kinds of fields. And there is… I, I’ve been finding myself… I’m trying to relearn how to write right now–\n \n\n37:37\tStacey Copeland:\tMm.\n \n\n37:38\tHannah McGregor:\t–because I was rigorously trained how to write over a decade of education in a very particular way with a very narrow audience in mind and have come to the conclusion that I personally don’t particularly want to write to that audience. I mean, I don’t want to exclude that audience either, but I don’t want that to be my primary audience. But the ease with which I produce scholarly prose at this point is such that it is like physically difficult [Laughs] to produce anything else. But I have to stop myself and be like, “Nope, okay, nobody understands any of these words and also that sentence was 14 lines long. Why are you doing this?”\n \n\n38:18\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n38:19\tHannah McGregor:\tA friend of mine once said, “I write as though I’m challenging myself to fit every preposition into every sentence.”\n \n\n38:25\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n38:26\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich was rude, but true. And podcasting for me, especially sort of over these different projects, has been a way to try to find a different voice as a scholar. That rather than starting with the work and then trying to translate it, by actually doing the thinking through this medium I’m finding the ability to, to articulate a different kind of scholarly voice with a different audience and a different conversation in mind. So I love that idea of like keeping the audio journal as you go, of, of building sound into the process itself so that it’s not a sort of “once all the research is done and I’ve written all of the papers and I know everything and exactly how I want it to sound, then I will translate it.” It’s like, how do I actually think when I think out loud?\n \n\n39:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n39:17\tHannah McGregor:\tBecause we think differently, don’t we, when we think out loud?\n \n\n39:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, I know I do. Yeah. And sound does bring this entirely new element into it. Part of the other sound element that I’m bringing into my process is actually playing archival clips for my interviewees to kind of evoke–\n \n\n39:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n39:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–some of those memories and experiences back. And I think that’s part of what excited me about the SpokenWeb project, too, is thinking about how can we use sound archives in new ways? How can we take all of these fascinating stories and voices out of places that are usually exclusively for researchers and librarians and archivists and bring them to the public, take them out of the dusty box and into–\n \n\n40:02\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n40:02\tStacey Copeland:\t–the digital space, right, and create this kind of time overlap. So there is some, some relationship between maybe me listening to a lesbian’s experience in 1982 when I’m listening in 2020. And I think–\n \n\n40:18\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n40:19\tStacey Copeland:\t–we have, you know, this very long history of sound recordings, not being archived properly, not being given the same value, but we’re seeing a huge change in the last couple years and it’s definitely exciting times for sound scholars.\n \n\n40:33\tHannah McGregor:\tDo you think that there’s anything behind this, this sonic turn in the humanities? Why are we suddenly taking sound seriously?\n \n\n40:39\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I mean, this is a great question. There’s a couple theories behind it, one of them being that we’re finally really used to the visual, we’re bombarded with it every day, the novelty’s kind of wearing off. And so we’re actually finding ourselves retreating into sound in new ways that we never had before. We’re wearing headphones as we commute to curate our own spaces, to listen–\n \n\n41:04\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n41:05\tStacey Copeland:\t–and create these experiences for ourselves in ways that we never had before. Listening used to be very communal, now it’s very personal. So it’s creating new connections and new relationships to sound that we didn’t necessarily have before, which I think, I think gives more value or at least perceptive value to some of these recordings from the past. [Theme Music]\n \n\n42:44\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. This episode was a special cross-over with Secret Feminist Agenda. To learn more about that podcast, check out secretfeministagenda.com. Our producers this month were me, Hannah McGregor, and of course our podcast project manager Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Stacey for taking the time to talk with me. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9592","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E1, Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley Presents “Challenging, beautiful bioregion”, 3 October 2022, Burr"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-to-fire-knowledges-in-and-around-the-okanagan-valley-presents-challenging-beautiful-bioregion/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Judith Burr"],"creator_names_search":["Judith Burr"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Judith Burr\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/31248cf9-be05-49e8-9e8a-b28ed3022a72/audio/c94c3c7a-5e2d-423d-b2b2-3a77183099eb/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e1-crossover-fire-knowledges.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:00:33\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"58,128,971 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e1-crossover-fire-knowledges\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-to-fire-knowledges-in-and-around-the-okanagan-valley-presents-challenging-beautiful-bioregion/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In this episode, we hear clips from a cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” from the Lent Fraser Wall Trio’s album “Shadow Moon.” Used throughout this episode with permission from John Lent. The rest of the music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, and you can find specific tracks cited in the transcript: https://app.sessions.blue.\\n\\nCatherine Owens, Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (Hamilton: Wolsack & Wynn, 2020).\\n\\n“It is clear that a successful record of fire suppression has led to a fuel buildup in the forests of British Columbia. The fuel buildup means that there will be more significant and severe wildfires, and there will be more interface fires, unless action is taken.” Filmon, G. (2004). Firestorm 2003: Provincial Review. Government of British Columbia, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/public-safety-and-emergency-services/wildfire-status/governance/bcws_firestormreport_2003.pdf.\\n\\n“Master Plan for Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park.” 1990. Kamloops, B.C.: B.C. Parks, Southern Interior Region.\\n\\nMy analysis of B.C. Wildfire Service data using QGIS. Okanagan watershed defined by watershed atlas polygons and compiled by fellow Living with Wildfire researcher Renée Larsen. Area burned data from: “Fire Perimeters – Historical.” Statistics and Geospatial Data. BC Wildfire Service. Available at https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/about-bcws/wildfire-statistics.\\n\\nXwisten et al., “Xwisten Report Executive Summary,” Revitalizing traditional burning: Integrating Indigenous cultural values into wildfire management and climate change adaptation planning (Department of Indigenous Services Canada (DISC) First Nations Adapt Program, 2019), Accessed April 2022 at https://www.fness.bc.ca/core-programs/forest-fuel-management/first-nations-adapt-program.; Eli Hirtle, Xwisten (Bridge River Indian Band) (Masinipayiwin Films, 2019), Accessed April 2022 at https://vimeo.com/383104228.; Shackan Indian Band et al., “Shackan Indian Band Report Executive Summary,” Revitalizing traditional burning: Integrating Indigenous cultural values into wildfire management and climate change adaptation planning (Department of Indigenous Services Canada (DISC) First Nations Adapt Program, 2019), https://www.fness.bc.ca/core-programs/forest-fuel-management/first-nations-adapt-program.; Eli Hirtle, Shackan Indian Band (Masinipayiwin Films, 2019), https://vimeo.com/383108850.\\n\\nForest Enhancement Society of BC, “Projects,” Accessed May 2022, https://www.fesbc.ca/projects.\\n\\nAmy Thiessen, “Sharon Thesen’s ‘The Fire’,” English Undergraduate Honours Thesis, 2020, https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/about.\\n\\n\\nMore Resources: \\nFireSmart Canada, https://firesmartcanada.ca/; Blazing the Trail, https://firesmartcanada.ca/product/blazing-the-trail-celebrating-indigenous-fire-stewardship.; Nature Conservancy, Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX), http://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/FireLandscapes/HabitatProtectionandRestoration/Training/TrainingExchanges/Pages/fire-training-exchanges.aspx; Karuk Climate Change Projects, “Fire Works!,” https://karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.com/fire-works; NC State University, “Prescribed Burn Associations,” https://sites.cnr.ncsu.edu/southeast-fire-update/prescribed-burn-associations; Firesticks Alliance, https://www.firesticks.org.au.\\n\\nMore Fire Podcasts: Amy Cardinal Christianson and Matthew Kristoff (Hosts), Good Fire Podcast, https://yourforestpodcast.com/good-fire-podcast; Amanda Monthei (host), Life with Fire Podcast, https://lifewithfirepodcast.com; Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski (hosts), “On Fire: Camas, Cores, and Spores (Part 1),” Future Ecologies Podcast, August 29, 2018, https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-5-on-fire-pt-1.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549774925824,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast features an episode created by our former supervising producer and project manager Judith Burr. This audio is part of Judith’s podcast, “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley,” which she produced as her master’s thesis at UBC-Okanagan. While Judith was working on The SpokenWeb Podcast, she was also working on the research methodology of making a podcast as thesis and on the compiling of interviews and tape that would become the sound of this representation and intervention in ecological thinking. The episode features a number of Judith’s interviews about living with wildfires in the Okanagan, including the story and poetry of Canadian poet Sharon Thesen. Listeners of the SpokenWeb Podcast might remember Thesen from past episodes, including Episode 7 of last season about the Women and Words Collection, or from episodes of our sister podcast SoundBox Signals produced by the Audio-Media-Poetry Lab at UBCO. In Judee’s conversations with Sharon and other interviewees, we hear first-hand perspectives of those who have witnessed and lived through the dangers of these wildfires. We hear about challenges of resource management and land-use planning in fire-prone geographies. And we hear about the role that storytelling may have to play in helping us reckon with these challenges.\n\n\n00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:36\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. For our first episode of this season, we’re bringing you sound work by someone who has been instrumental to The SpokenWeb Podcast as a team member: Judith Burr. Judith Burr is our former supervising producer and project manager, and she’s now off to embark on a PhD in geography at UBC. During her work on our podcast, she was also hard at work on a podcast that she called, “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley.” That podcast was her master’s thesis project in the Digital Arts & Humanities theme of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. You heard Judith Burr’s voice on the episode “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity” that I co-produced with Kelly Cubbon.\n\nWe interviewed Judith back in February 2022, when she was in the early stages of conducting oral histories for her podcast. At that point, she had so many sounds – clips from news reports of the Okanagan wildfires – long conversations with wildfire experts – and was planning to speak with poet Sharon Thesen about how the environment finds its way into the sound of her writing. Sharon Thesen is a poet who the UBCO Amp Lab, as part of SpokenWeb, has previously featured in a collective reading of her work. Hearing Thesen on this podcast feels like a bringing together of Judith’s work her master’s thesis and on The SpokenWeb Podcast. Along with Thesen, you’ll hear from foresters Daryl Spencer, Dave Gill, and Gord Pratt; UBCO Living with Wildfire project lead Mathieu Bourbonnais; forest technologist Jeff Eustache; and FireSmart program lead Kelsey Winter. The SpokenWeb Podcast starts season with Judith’s podcast because it is a timely call to reflect on how we listen and live within our complex and challenging ecosystems. [Music Interlude]\n\n03:05\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tHi, it’s Judee. This is the second episode of my thesis podcast, Listening to Fire Knowledges. This episode includes a number of conversations about surviving wildfire events and living in their aftermath. My heart and thoughts go out to those who have lost something in a disastrous wildfire event, including to my aunt and uncle who lost their home in the California Camp Fire in 2018. I know conversations about wildfire disasters can be challenging to hear, so I hope you can take care of yourself, and listen when you are ready. Thanks for being here.\n \n\n03:45\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tWell, I love the dry heat [Music Starts] I love the smell of the earth. I love the blue and gold, the blue sky and the gold grass. I love the orchards. They always seemed so beautiful in an almost biblical way: these orchards with all this fruit hanging, the gift of that. And the gift of its warmth, its welcoming warmth. Maybe it’s the smell of the pines too, that resinous perfume. I mean, you come from a different place and so you would have your experience of this place too.\nMy name is Sharon Thesen. I’m Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus. I’ve been a writer, a poet, a critic, and an editor for many decades in the Canadian, BC, and Cascadian worlds – Cascadia being the bioregion that encompasses most of BC, including the Okanagan and the coast and Washington State and Oregon and part of Northern California. It’s an extremely unstable region – geologically – prone to fire, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, flood, avalanche. It’s a landscape that’s very vibrant, very beautiful, but also dangerous. It creates challenges for sure. And in this challenging beautiful bioregion, I’ve been living for most of my life.\n\nLiving in Vancouver, I was always aware, as a writer, of being in a different zone from the rest of Canada. It seemed that we writers – a lot of us poets in Vancouver – had deeper aesthetic and poetic connections with our counterparts in the States. But the quote-unquote “rest of Canada” was not involved in these poetics. There was always an east-west stretch. There was a sense of not belonging, really, to either of them. Okay, so then what do you belong to? So here is this very prominent geography and landscape. [Music Ends]\n\nBut I always had a soft spot for the Interior. I spent probably about 10 years of my young life, living in the Kamloops and Vernon areas, and always wanted to come back. I appreciated the spectacular landscape on the coast, but my body, my heart, was here. So, when we started coming back here, I would feel at home. Because I could smell it. I could recognize the weeds –when you’re a little kid, you’re closer to the ground and you’re seeing the weeds and all that small stuff. It’s all about those weeds, right? And it still is. [Start Music] It still is the place of my heart, and my deepest being is this landscape.\n\n07:39\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tYou sat down with another student Amy Thiessen almost two years ago, who was another student in the AMP Lab, like I am, to record a digital edition of your poem “The Fire,” which was really wonderful to listen to. You talked about your experience of living through the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fire, and I’m really grateful that you’re willing to revisit these experiences again. It sounds like that was the year that you move to Kelowna was the year of this fire. I wonder, if you, if you’re comfortable talking about it again, talk about what you remember of that fire happening and the experience of having to be evacuated at that time. [Music Shifts]\n08:24\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tWe had moved into this new subdivision. We were thrilled to be able to live in a beautiful house that was new, and certainly didn’t cost nearly as much money as a house like that would on the coast at the time, especially then. I did have doubts about it, but, anyway, we moved there. On every side of the house, was forest. And it was beautiful. We had these two dogs, I’d take them to walk every morning. There was trees, forest, coyotes. There was a little lake. It was really, really hot for a couple of weeks prior to the fire starting, but we didn’t mind. We liked it.\nCan I read this little paragraph?\n\n09:10\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tPlease do.\n09:10\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\t[Reading from Locations of Grief] Hundreds. The subdivision was called South Ridge and there were about 40 houses off a t-shaped roadway. “A park” was made somewhere in the middle and a new road was already being built just above ours. Hundreds of acres of woods, streams, and meadows flourished just beyond where the roads ended, having not yet succumbed to the inferno that would engulf the landscape a couple of months later. – That’s when we first moved. – June and her husband David lived a little farther up the hill, while we were closer to cherry orchards and large, old properties that until then had been somewhat out of town. Deer hunters still stalked the woods not far from our houses back in 2003 when I first met June. Late one night after a lengthy heat wave, we were awakened by a thunderclap and, in the morning, a plume of smoke could be seen rising into the sky to the south. This plume, by the time June and I got to the beach that afternoon for our regular swim, was starting to develop an ominous anvil shape on its eastern edge. Two days later, you could hardly see or breathe for the smoke. And there were reports of houses burning in a residential area far to the south. But, for some reason, we weren’t quite sure about that, even though evacuation alerts were being handed out in neighborhoods farther down from us. We tried to stay calm as falling embers burned holes in our lawn chairs. Paul – that’s my husband – Paul and I had made a casual arrangement just in case, with friends who lived in Penticton should the worst come to the worst which we didn’t think was possible. Surely the fire wouldn’t jump the blocks-wide clearing where the big power lines were. [Stops reading]\n11:02\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tBy the time they started trying to put it out, it was out of control. [Music changes] And the wind was blowing. And the wind is the worst thing that can happen with a fire. When a fire gets really bad, as this one did, it became the worst level of fire you could have, a Rank 6 firestorm. People even farther north than us were getting evacuation alerts. So we’re just thinking “oh, well, they must think we’re going to be okay then,” right? Because we didn’t get one. But it got to a point where I was starting to get really nervous. I was starting to think maybe we should pack some things up. To go through that process is horrible. We phoned our friends in Penticton, and Paul said, “you go and I’ll stay here and hold the fort.” And – it was that afternoon – it was pitch dark from smoke, and driving down to Penticton you saw the whole east side of Okanagan Mountain Park, from Kelowna to Naramata, on fire. That side of Okanagan Lake used to be green and forested. There was that little railway near the top. [Music ends] Paul went down to June and David’s for dinner\n12:34\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tWho lived in that same subdivision, nearby?\n12:36\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, nearby. So they were eating dinner inside, and June went out to see how things were. And there was the fire coming right down the hill. So, Paul jumped in the car, drove back to our place. I had packed some stuff and he was throwing it in. The police were going up and down and saying get out right now, right now, right now… So…\n13:01\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tAnd you hadn’t received an evacuation alert prior to that?\n13:04\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tNo.\n13:05\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tWow. It was moving that fast.\n13:07\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tIt was moving that fast, and, also, I think that the authorities didn’t really even know we were still there, because it was such a new development. We probably weren’t even on the map. So he had to drive down through what was an old quarry, and is now called “The Quarry.” June and David decided to go back to White Rock, and they stayed overnight at our friends in Penticton in their car. [Start Music]\n13:39\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tThere was a period of time when they thought the whole town was going to go up in flames. The whole town. And there was still so much chaos, and the fire still wasn’t really out for quite a long time. It was the Winfield fire department that saved our place. I still see the tracks of their boots in our little flower beds around the house where they were working, but they had given up. The fire was coming. It was too hot. It was terrifying. They could have died. But the wind changed. The wind changed and took the fire north to an area called Crawford and burned up most of the houses there. Ours were left standing. But we didn’t know that for a long time.\n14:29\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tSo, when did you find out that – when were you able to return back to your house?\n14:35\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tThe fire department held a meeting in the big Trinity Baptist Church downtown, because they were not saying what areas had burned. There were roadblocks keeping people out from the badly affected neighbourhoods. All those people were to sit in Trinity Baptist Church while whoever it was pointed out all the lots on a map, which houses burned and which were still standing and which were damaged. And so, can you imagine that meeting? [End Music]\n15:30\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tNo.\nDo you remember anyone talking about fire danger before the, um, fire?\n\n15:38\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tNo.\n15:46\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tAnyone who was living in the Okanagan in 2003 remembers the firestorm. It was a season stoked by drought. This fire started in a park where people had been warning of the accumulating fuels and fire danger for years, but little had been done. The Okanagan Mountain Park Fire burned more than 25,000 hectares, caused 33,000 residents to be evacuated, damaged or destroyed 238 homes, and caused $200 million in damages. It was one fire of many in “Firestorm 2003,” a summer that set a record high number of forest fires burning in British Columbia. [Music Ends] A Provincial Review team was established after this fire season was over to evaluate the response to these fires and make recommendations for the future. The resulting Filmon Report explicitly linked the severe wildfires of 2003 to the build-up of fuels caused by decades of fire suppression. Between then and the time I write this in early 2022, the Okanagan Valley has experienced even larger fire seasons. Here is Matthieu Bourbonnais again.\n17:12\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tDo you have any specific fires that have happened in the Okanagan that you point to, to explain what our wildfire situation is here in the Valley? Or examples you use to think through how we live with wildfire and what the challenges are?\n17:12\tMathieu Bourbon, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, the Okanagan, the communities here, have a lot of like experience with fire. The 2003 Okanagan Mountain Fire was – if we look back over the last 20 years – it was one of those fires that put fire as a big threat to communities back in people’s minds. We lost few hundred homes, there was thousands of people evacuated for over a month, and it’s something that it’s ingrained in the mentality here in the Okanagan. You hear people who lived through it still talk about the 2003 fire. And if you go up into that area where it burned, there’s infographics and signs talking about the fire and what happened. So that’s one that people that have been here for a long time, they remember it.\n18:13\tDaryl Spencer, Interview, January 2022:\tIt was unpleasant to understate it. Yeah, it was quite smoky and fiery and scary. Houses were being burned, and it was really kind of apocalyptic. And I remember seeing the fire, the smoke start. When the fire first started and I heard about the lightning strike and the fire started burning, and people were out looking at and it just kept burning northward and northward and started destroying homes. [Music begins] So yeah, it was quite a scary occurrence to happen. And at the same time there are some health risks too – I was into different athletic events back then, that was when I was into marathons and running and so forth, and it really interrupted my training schedule which wasn’t good. [Both Laugh] Either that, or I was going to just be smoking all day while I run through this smoke. I remember the smoke being so thick at times you couldn’t see more than 20 feet through it.\nSo, my name is Daryl Spencer. I’ve been a registered professional forester since 1985, so it’s been a few years. I’ve done fire management and planning amongst other things in the Okanagan Valley for the past 20 years. My current role – I work for the government. I work with the Forest Practices Board, which is an environmental watchdog for the Province. We look at various things that fall under the Forest and Range Practices Act and the Wildfire Act.\n\nCertainly there was fires, but not as predominant as say, 2003 was like a fulcrum kind of point where fire seemed to take off for me anyway. I think that fire, like I said earlier, was a launching point or staging point for more awareness with municipalities, the parks, and the government and served as a bit of a wake-up call for, say the city of Kelowna, BC Parks, and the Ministry of Forests. And it raised awareness of the importance of managing interface fuels and so forth. So that was a key thing there. And I mentioned all those homes were burned down. It was a situation where Okanagan Mountain Park which was back then a Class A park – I think it still is – and Class A parks are left unto themselves to evolve ecologically. So there’s huge mats of pine needles on the forest floor up to two or three feet thick and gathers in areas. So a lightning strike in that fuel – which is readily burnable and burns quite rapidly – started that fire and all these homes were being developed adjacent to this park without the thought of fuel management. So that resulted in a lot of these homes burning up. So that was kind of a wake-up call for city planners and parks and so forth to start setting up interface and buffer areas and so forth to protect homes. [Music ends]\n\n20:57\tDave Gill, Interview, February 2022:\tThe night the fire started, our oldest who’s 20 now…it was a thunderstorm on a Saturday night, I think it was, or a Friday night. And it woke her up. I remember walking around, holding her and tried to console her and get her to go back to sleep. We saw these flashes of lightning, and I was thinking to myself exactly about this guy that was on his horseback in that area just a few weeks before that. And thinking, wow, you know, it’s been so dry all summer, this is going to start something. And the next morning, yes, for sure, [Music Begins] it had cleared off and there was this wisp of smoke going right over our house. It was this odd yellowy color, and it was just a thin strip of smoke. And it was fairly hot, and I thought, ‘Oh, man. It did, it started.’ My name is Dave Gill. I am a registered professional forester, and I work for Westbank First Nation, a company called Ntityix Resources, which is Westbank’s forest management company.\nWe heard them on it, we could hear the helicopters on the fire. We thought that they’d bring it under control, but within a couple days, we realized it was much more than that. It wasn’t long before people were starting to crowd on the streets around us, and higher up on the hill behind us, just looking at this thing. A few days later we were told to leave.\n\nThat was the way I was initiated to fire in the Okanagan, and that in itself changed the way I thought about fire [Music Ends] – from what I learned to, you know, on the ground what I’ve been hearing from people that that live here, rather than what I had learned in school. From there, we had the Filmon Report, and we had a lot of other, I guess for the most part, high-level reports that came out about fire. And that maybe we’ve been taking the wrong approach with fire for about 100 years. [Music Begins]\n\n23:28\tMathieu Bourbonnais, Interview, January 2022:\tMore recently, just even the last few years – Mount Christie fire, White Rock Lake Fire – again fires that really, really quickly came right to our doorstep. These aren’t fires that – oh, there’s an evacuation alert, or you need to be kind of prepared. It was just, pretty quickly, it was right there. That’s the situation that we have in the Okanagan where oftentimes there are really dry conditions that are really conducive to fire spreading quite quickly. And what we should be expecting moving forward is really more of that. It’s unfortunate, again people lost homes. It disrupted a lot of people’s lives. You always try to take that into context, but those are examples you can point to – like this is what we should be expecting, and we need to kind of prepare better for that. From 2003 to now, we look at this last year: the heat dome, these extreme kind of weather conditions that regardless of where you are, if there are those kind of conditions, there is a good chance that if a fire happens, you’re going to have a lot of problems. [Music ends] Yeah, definitely landscape management is a part of it, but also just our legacy and our history of how we’ve managed this Valley combined with how our climate is changing. You can see the progression now as you look back over the last kind of 20 years. [Music Begins]\n25:11\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tJust hearing about that experience of really not having a lot of conversations about fire and then having this massive fire happen, I wonder how fire seasons since then have been for you. Do you hear more conversations happening about fire preparedness and FireSmart? Also, what’s it been like for you for these past fire seasons that have been bad, again, to have to live through those kind of smoky summers again?\n25:45\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tSmokey summers. It’s true, I’m extremely anxious every summer. We moved to Lake Country. I guess it felt like a new start or a fresh start. Or to go somewhere where there hadn’t been that kind of destruction and damage. Yes, Smokey summers, the heat, the wind, extreme anxiety. Then it gets cooler in the fall and you kind of forget about it. Then everybody says, “oh, it’s not going to happen here.” Or “oh, they know enough about it now that they will make sure that there’s protection.” But anyway, last May, half of the fire departments from around the Okanagan, were in our very neighborhood practicing putting out forest-interface zone fires. [Music Begins] And I’m sort of like “ha ha, just practice! not rehearsal I hope!” This last summer, because we live in a place where we can see northward up the lake toward Vernon, there was that Monte Lake fire that was burning for about a month and a half.\n27:16\tJeff Eustache, Interview, February 2022:\tYeah, there’s a lot of work needed. Just speaking to the Okanagan Band lands here and the fire that they experienced last summer was quite devastating for the community and the loss could have been a lot worse. But if you look at the landscape, from about a kilometer from here, I’m on the north end of the Reserve, to the south end, which is probably at least 10 kilometers in length – once you get off the lake you get into interface forest and it’s quite thick. Very dead, decayed, pine and fir. I know they do fuel reduction projects, but you’re talking 10, 20 hectares at a time. [Music changes]] And you probably need 50,000 hectares to be done along the whole interface to make a difference.\nMy name’s Jeff Eustache, I’m a registered Forest technologist. I’m from the Simpcw First Nation just north of Kamloops, but I live and reside on the Okanagan Indian Band lands. And I work as the emergency program manager for IPO West, Natural Resources Canada.\n\n28:29\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tBefore moving over to Natural Resources Canada recently, Jeff had worked for the First Nations Emergency Services Society of British Columbia since the mid-2000s. That’s how I found his work. As head of the Fuel Management Department, Jeff supported First Nations communities in taking care of wildfire hazards on their land. This also included working on the “Revitalizing Cultural Burning” project in 2019 with the BC Wildfire Service, the Bridge River Indian Band, and the Shackan Indian Band. This project provided funding for these First Nations communities to conduct cultural burns and document their Indigenous fire stewardship knowledge in videos, reports, and infographics. I’ll put the link to those projects in the show notes. In all of my interviews including this one with Jeff, we talked about much more than you’ll hear in this podcast. But it was significant for me to hear Jeff – someone with extensive wildfire hazard management experience – reflect on living through the White Rock Lake fire last summer on Okanagan Indian Band land.\n29:30\tJeff Eustache, Interview, February 2022:\tThat fire that came through here last year, it started at Monte Lake, which is about, I don’t know, 30 kilometers from here. When they kept on talking about it, I said well it’s never going to get here. They’ll knock it down over there somewhere. The next thing you know, we’re getting evacuated. I was pretty surprised at even how it came into the community, because I know there’s some what I thought would have been pretty good fire breaks. I was pretty surprised that it made it that far. [Music Changes] We got kind of lucky; we’re a little bit further away from where the fire actually was. We got displaced maybe three times over the summer, but some were displaced for probably most of the summer. Unfortunately, some haven’t been able to go home because they lost their homes, right.\nSo, you can see the need for higher-level, landscape-level treatments. You can do the fuel reduction outside at the doorstep there, but once it starts rolling like it did, it takes a lot more than a 50, 100 metre fuel treatment to stop that. I think it’s going to require a lot more aggressive fuel reduction treatments. I know my wife’s family members, they actively go out – and it’s really about, I would say, not even five kilometers from here – they would actually go out every spring and do some burning outside of their property. I’m fairly sure that resulted in a few of their structures being saved, because it didn’t have that understory that could have ignited and swept through there. I was pretty surprised there was not a lot more losses along the Valley here where it came down. It hit pretty hard, but I’m fairly sure that the burning practices of that family really helped. Because they would go in the forest, it wasn’t just grass burning, and they’d go up the hillside and that really, I think, resulted in some protective measures for them. You need to try to increase that more and more. Otherwise, like I said, once it starts rolling that quickly, it’s pretty hard to stop. [Music Changes] You actually can’t stop it.\n\n32:09\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tI’m Gord Pratt. A professional forester who works as an operations manager with the Forest Enhancement Society of BC. [Music Ends] And yeah, just happy to be able to join you here today, Judee.\nI was actually on the Peachland fire, back in 2012, I believe. I remember being in Kamloops that day, and it was one of those hot, early September days where, you know what, you’re starting to think you’re past the fire season in many ways. But, it was windy, super windy. I actually remember having a conversation with a friend of mine who was pretty active with BC Wildfire, who said, ‘this isn’t a good day. If we get a start, it’s going to be a problem somewhere.’ Right? And, sure enough, later that weekend, Peachland was on evacuation. It started up, I believe, in the top end on the Coq [Coquihalla Highway] and it ripped down through the community. [Music Begins]\n\nIt’s hard to predict where it will happen. My philosophy is reduce the fuels where there’s likelihood of starts. Where’s that fire behavior going, and what’s the typical weather going to move it towards – and that’s where we need to do it.\n\n33:40\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tI wonder if you could just introduce the FESBC for folks who might not know what that is, and talk about your role in this work now. And maybe we could talk about some of the projects in the Okanagan too.\n33:50\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tFor sure. The Forest Enhancement Society was formed by government back in 2016. It’s really about a good opportunity to invest back in the province good stewardship projects going forward. Those stewardship projects are governed by our five primary purposes…\n34:12\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tThe Forest Enhancement Society of BC has been a major funder of fuel management projects. I spoke with the foresters I interviewed extensively about fuel management practices. This refers to work to remove combustible layers of woody debris and brush and other material that is accumulating in forested areas where fire has been suppressed and excluded. Sometimes these projects involve removing material from the forest floor, sometimes they involve cutting down some trees to open up a forested canopy to reduce the likelihood of a wildfire spreading from tree to tree, and sometimes they include prescribed burns. We’ll hear a lot more about fuel treatments in the next episode. I asked Gord about some of these projects in the Okanagan.\n34:54\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tI think hats off to the Okanagan-Shuswap District, who applied for funding through us to do a lot of work, primarily in the Southeast Kelowna area. And it’s fit into the Ministry’s Wildfire Risk Reduction Program, which is their own internal program that started after FESBC initiated these projects to continue that good work. Because there’s a lot of work that needs to happen throughout the Okanagan.\n35:26\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tHave you noticed a change in the way people perceive these projects? [Music ends] Are people able to see a thinning project as ‘this is actually making my home a lot safer’ – from your time in Kelowna, even, through now?\n35:44\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tWe have. I think people are pretty sensitive and, I hate to say it, but sometimes an event like 2003 makes it easier. The events of ‘17, ‘18, and ‘21 makes it easier for people to believe us. But, that being said that, there’s definitely a need for that balance. We fund a project in the Joe Rich area. That’s an area, I guess it would be southeast of Kelowna on the highway towards Rock Creek. Gee, what year was that? 2017, 2018 – Joe Rich had a significant fire of note. I think it was four to six hundred hectares. That scared everybody there. The need for a treatment in there probably changed the perception of the people. That project came as an application to us in ’17, ’18, somewhere in there. But I was involved with the high-risk concern of the Joe Rich area when I was in wildfire from 2009 to 2014. Difficult, you know – what do you do there? There’s so much work to do that you kind of need the partnership of industry to do it. And then, you know, maybe that’s too much. [Music Begins]\n37:07\tGord Pratt, Interview, January 2022:\tNone of these things can happen overnight, Judee. And, I guess that’s the other thing, is it takes time to get these things done, to plan it right, get it all done. I always encourage our industry partners to be part of our project because you and me and everybody in BC – we can’t afford to do all this. Well, it’s expensive for us all to do. We can’t afford not to do it, but it’s expensive for us to do, I guess is probably a better way to put it. We need the assistance of our forest industry.\nOne of the balancing acts of some of the projects that we have funded is the importance of the irrigation districts and the watershed groups in and around the Okanagan. We’ve funded some planning and some treatments that either we have done or have been picked up by the wildfire risk reduction program by the Province, to recognize how important the watersheds are – not only for the public but your agricultural industry in the Okanagan.\n\nI am so excited and happy to see that the importance of wildfire risk reduction is getting out in the public eye. Because it can be forgotten so quickly. I saw that in my career as a fuels management specialist – if we didn’t have a fire last year, nobody cared. All I care about is I’m going to go canoeing and camping have a campfire. And, all of a sudden, we get smoked out. It’s a really lousy summer. You know, in Kamloops, I think in Kelowna it was the same there: we got robbed of a summer. In so many different ways. Either we knew somebody who was impacted from an evacuation, or, in my household, people had trouble breathing. It was just one of those things. So, you know what, I think this is critical that we’re getting this out to the public eye, and I think it’s important to all of us who live near, in, around the wildfire-urban interface, those who recreate in BC’s forests: we all have a role in reducing the starts and supporting the activities that our leaders actually want to get done to reduce the likelihood of fire in your neighborhood. That’s the key thing for me. [Music Changes]\n\n39:28\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tDid you ever work on any fires in the Okanagan?\n39:31\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tYes. [Laughs] Of course. As a firefighter in British Columbia, that’s like a rite of passage. There’s fires in the Okanagan season, right, it’s just an eventuality, right?\nMy name is Kelsey Winter. I work for the BC Wildfire Service in the Province of British Columbia in Canada. And I’m also the chair of the BC FireSmart Committee.\n39:57\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tDo you have any stories from some of the first fires that you worked on?\n40:02\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, I have quite a few stories. I’m trying to think of a good one. We got a report of a fire way, way up a Forest Service Road. No helicopters. It’s the middle of the fire season. There’s more important targets elsewhere. We’re probably on day 12 of working, so people are pretty tired. We drove up there regardless. It took us quite a while. This was not a very well-maintained FS, Forest Service, road. So there’s potholes that could sink your entire vehicle if you weren’t careful. Got up to where it was, thankfully not a big hike from the forest service road – no water anywhere. And we’re talking anywhere. A helicopter that was bucketing on another fire was able to come by and say, yeah, the best place to get water is way back down the road you just drove up on. And so we went all the way back down, filled up our tank and then on the way up, got a flat tire. Got a flat tire. So we’re perched on a super steep section of the road, obviously can’t change the tire without emptying the tank. So all of the water we just went and got, we dumped all over the road so that we could change the tire. Drove all the way back down. Thank goodness the fire was like in some pretty gnarly slash and some bigger growth. So it hadn’t taken off – because it we were not very quick on our initial attack. But yeah, we did it, went back down, got more water, drove all the way back. It was challenging. But that was one of my very first ones too – I was like, are they all going to be like this? Holy…\nThe one I think of the most, Smith Creek, fire in the Okanagan, I was there with an incident management team. We were pretty sure we’re going to lose neighborhoods. It’s scary. It’s a scary place to fight fire because it’s so populated, right, and the fuel type there is not an easy one to stop when it’s hot and dry and windy, right?\n\n42:09\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tIs there anything that stands out to you from working in this Valley?\n42:13\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tI think for me, in my job now too as the FireSmart Program Lead, the Okanagan for me is always like – if we’re succeeding in the Okanagan, that’s a really good indicator that we’re succeeding. [Music Changes] Because it’s somewhere that’s always going to be impacted by fire. Somewhere that historically has had some of the worst fires that have really heavily impacted the populations. It’s a tourist center. It’s economically a super important area of British Columbia. I think it’s kind of where all of those things converge. One of the things with FireSmart that I say all the time – that everybody that lives and breathes FireSmart does – is that it’s not a disaster unless homes are involved. And in the Okanagan homes are involved. You know, it’s populated, there’s people, everybody lives in the wildland-urban interface..\n43:06\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah. Can you think of any particular stories or projects that are happening in the Okanagan with FireSmart? I don’t know if there’s any like specific, place-based stories that you have of doing this work in this area.\n43:25\tKelsey Winter, Interview, January 2022:\tYeah, so in BC our primary funding program for FireSmart is the Community Resiliency Investment Program, and it’s run through UBCM, which is the Union of BC Municipalities. But basically it provides up to 150 thousand dollars per community to do FireSmart work or fuel management work, which is amazing. And the eligible activities within that program, you know, you can do assessments, you can replace the cedar shake on your roof, you can make those small changes that – you can change bylaws, you know. Create a position that’s dedicated to FireSmart. Cross-train, so you get your fire department staff out with your wildfire staff and make sure that they know how to handle each other’s equipment, that kind of thing. And the Okanagan has quite a few areas that have been involved in that that grant funding for a long time. Penticton has probably one of the best FireSmart programs in British Columbia. They have a van that’s a FireSmart van, they have community events, they have year-round positions. They have by-laws that are in place that enforce FireSmart principles if you live in Penticton. So they’ve really gone above and beyond.\nKelowna is really involved in the program. They have the Home Partners program there, which is detailed mitigation assessment of individual homes. The homeowners are provided a report, and then they are able to go do those mitigation recommendations on their property, and then they get a certificate at the end that says you’re a FireSmart property that they can then use for their insurance. So Kelowna is really involved. I can’t list all of them. But there’s a ton of great areas in the Okanagan that have really adopted the program, and I think that’s, like you were saying earlier, that’s because of living in the Okanagan. They understand it’s something that’s always going to be there, right? [Music ends]\n\nThere’s a project that we started last year through the BC FireSmart committee and it’s doing research in the wildland-urban interface on structure ignition. So, basically, getting more data on why some structures ignite and why some don’t. So when a wildfire moves through a community, why are there those – you see the pictures, especially more out of the US, but even in Lytton – of that one house on that row that’s still standing, and the others that are gone. And I went to a couple fires this summer in the Okanagan with the research team, and it was crazy to see the little things. Like – maintained green grass. So, someone who just mowed their grass, you know, might make a huge difference, might be the reason why that house was still there and the one beside it was gone. Or things like, all their lawn furniture was pulled away off their deck, or their deck was sheathed in. And so, to me, being there and actually seeing those structures – the one that’s just ash and all you can see is bricks that were there on the chimney stack and everything else is gone – next to the one that is still there. That’s some pretty powerful stuff. I was saying to the researchers, you’re coming home and you’re walking down your driveway, and you have this idea of what’s going to be at the end of your driveway. It would be so I think reassuring to a member of the public – and we talked to a few of them – that were like, ‘I did everything I could like. When I left that house, when I was told to evacuate, it was FireSmart to the best of my abilities.’ Like, ‘I was confident leaving that house that I had given it the best chance I had of coming back to it.’ Versus someone who is thinking ‘Oh man, the propane tank was right up against the house’ or, you know, those little changes. Or ‘the windows were open’. I think that was pretty powerful for me this summer, just seeing what people were going to end up coming home to right. [Music Begins] And what we can do as a program to encourage them to make those changes ahead of time, right? When they still have time to do it.\n\n47:52\tRecording, Sharon Thesen:\t[Thesen reading the final sections of her poem “The Fire,” from Amy Thiessen’s digital edition of the poem.] … And now once more the wind is blowing [Music ends] and the fire surges upon the town and the countryside the dear historic what was lovely the firs and the pines, etc. the brown rabbit hopping the canyon road to the railway trestles where we took our brother and our mother on a Sunday or a Wednesday with its tall ears standing up I would comfort if I could but would have to wrestle it down and feel its sacred heart pounding A stubble of blackened shards where magpies fly, try to settle—in autumn light pine sap looks blue against bark’s carbonic crust and a spray of brown needles on the forest floor we pretend are a carpet of grass and not a scorch of tears upon the miles of roots that smolder still in molten maze where a bluish haze appears to mark [Music begins] the transit of ghosts and giants who left an arsonist’s hoard heaped extinct to matchsticks leaning tip to tip\n49:34\tMusic Interlude:\tJohn Lent singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” from the Lent Fraser Wall Trio’s album “Shadow MoonThere\n50:12\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\t[Music Ends] I’m curious to hear more about this homemaking in a fire-prone place. Can you say more about actually writing “The Fire,” and about how home and making a home in the Okanagan came through in the poem?\n50:30\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tI think my sense of being at home in the Okanagan at the time that I wrote that poem was still really new and fresh, because we had more or less just moved there. We didn’t know that many people, except for June and David. And there’s another little section of my little piece that I call “My Friend June” that I can read – because for me, home is people too. It isn’t just my house. My memory of that time is as much about June as it is about the fire, and the two events coincide so deeply in my memory of the time.\n51:22\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tSharon read from her essay “My Friend June”, which is published in a collection called Locations of Grief. June got sick with cancer and passed away two and a half years after she and Sharon lived through the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire together. Sharon and I talked about the importance of her friendship with June, and Sharon told me about an event that she and June organized to bring people together after the fire.\n51:48\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tSo after the fire, June and I decided we should get some people together. Because everybody, this entire city, had been traumatized and then we’re just all kind of sitting there. So why don’t we get some people together to talk about their experiences, share their experiences of the fire? I don’t know why. So, we organized this and made posters and sold tickets. I got on the phone to the local helicopter company and asked if somebody be willing to speak about being a helicopter pilot, putting out fires. Indeed, this one fellow did come, and it was fascinating. We got Patrick Lane, who used to live in the Okanagan. Wonderful poet who was living on Vancouver Island, but he came up and read. John Lent’s quartet came and played afterwards – and the place was packed. It was just a relief. It was a relief, to be with other people and talk about this. Cry, and everything.\n52:56\tJudee Burr, Interview, January 2022:\tI keep thinking about what is powerful about poetry and art and literary work that has to do with fire, and why it’s important to have a space for these kind of fire humanities reflections. This gathering that you organized seems to embody a lot of what feels powerful about it. Like, this ability to use language to notice together, and also the way that poetry can bring people together, and literature and music. Do you have other reflections on what the humanities have to offer and what poetry has to offer in communities that are fire-adapted and live with fire?\n53:41\tSharon Thesen, Interview, January 2022:\tI think what writing does and maybe poetry even more so is [Music begins] it brings to life the particulars of an experience. Not just the generalities about it or some aspect of it, but actual, real particular things. From particular feelings, to particular objects, to particular relationships. Where there isn’t this sense that okay, if it’s a poem about the fire, it has to be about “the fire.” When the fire is just part of what’s happening. So, I think what poetry does is restore us to the real. Restore us to who we are as feeling, perceiving, spiritual beings – and reminds us of the value of that. And that’s not a trivial thing. Like I was saying earlier, what we care about is tremendously significant. And we have to keep remembering what we care about. Because we’re often misled by things that are impossible to care about. Who can care about an abstraction? Who can care about some general office language about this, that, and the other? Maybe the people working there need it to do whatever they have to do. But it’s just an aspect. It isn’t the fullness of the real. What we share are these particularities in our experience. And that’s what holds us together. I don’t know. It just seems that sometimes these terrible things happen. When we were together at the Rotary Centre afterwards, we were together again, as human beings who’d experienced a calamity. But I think what is at risk now is precisely that separation of home and people. And I think when that happens it’s very hard to restore. [Music Changes]\n56:52\tJudee Burr, Narration:\tThe Okanagan based Lent Fraser Wall Trio played music at the gathering that Sharon and June organized in 2003. You’ve been hearing parts of their cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” in this episode, used here with permission of John Lent. The rest of the music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions. You also heard a selection from Sharon Thesen’s poem The Fire in this episode, recorded for the digital edition of the poem created by UBC Honours English graduate, Amy Thiessen. You can view the digital edition of the poem and hear Amy’s interview with Sharon at sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net. In this episode, you been listening to my conversations with Sharon Thesen, Mathieu Bourbonnais, Daryl Spencer, Dave Gill, Jeff Eustache, Gord Pratt, and Kelsey Winter. We spoke about living through severe wildfire events and about how to protect communities from wildfire danger. You can get going today to prepare yourself and your home for wildfire events, and there is great information on the FireSmart Canada website about this, at firesmartcanada.ca. You can listen to many of my full interviews on my thesis project website, listeningtofirepodcast.ca. You can also find the transcripts of those interviews there, and transcripts of each of these episodes. The episode transcripts include citations for my research. This research was supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund through UBC Okanagan’s “Living with Wildfire” Project. I’m Judee Burr, and thanks for listening. [Music continues and fades]\n58:56\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] The Spoken Web podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Judith Burr, PhD student in geography at the University of British Columbia. You can listen to her full podcast by searching “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” in your favorite podcast app. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt, our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood, and our production manager and transcriptionist is Kelly Cubbon. Judee would like to extend a special thanks to the SpokenWeb project team for teaching her so much about podcasting, and to her thesis co-supervisors Karis Shearer and Greg Garrard, who encouraged her and supported her as she created a thesis in the form of a podcast. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod—mini stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9593","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E2, The Night of the Living Archive, 7 November 2022, Makarova"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Liza Makarova"],"creator_names_search":["Liza Makarova"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Liza Makarova\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/fb141e0b-924d-4e1f-8ea4-d1b28a057963/audio/c5a844a6-1623-443d-ba91-bb326cefe213/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:16\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"47,303,828 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"},{\"date\":\"2022-11-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In For Instance Radio Show: Literary Arts Program Interviewing Fred Wah, https://fredwah.ca/node/431\\n\\nPoetry Reading – March 8, 1979, https://new.fredwah.ca/node/438\\n\\nFred Wah: Classroom Conversation on March 9, 1979\\n\\nWah, Fred. Mountain. Buffalo, NY: Audit/East-West, 1967. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/mountain\\n\\nWah, Fred. Limestone Lakes Utaniki. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1989. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/limestone-lakes-utaniki\\n\\nWah, Fred.”Limestone Lakes Utaniki.” Karabiner: the Journal of the Kootenay Mountaineering Club 30 (1987): 9-12. Print. https://fredwah.ca/content/karabiner-journal-kootenay-mountaineering-club-30\\n\\nWah, Fred. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” So Far. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/so-far\\n\\nWah, Fred. “Don’t Cut Me Down” Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community, 1972. Print.\\n\\nhttps://fredwah.ca/content/tree\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549780168704,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["What better way to understand the archival state of a poem than to ask it? \n\n“The Night of the Living Archive” is an audio drama/mock interview between research assistant Liza Makarova and Fred Wah’s poems Mountain (1967), Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1987, 1989, and 1991),  and Don’t Cut Me Down (1972), which currently live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca). \n\nPoems within the archive are independent documents that live incredibly interesting lives that are celebrated within this episode. Over a series of three interviews, Liza invites these poems, drifting in “the Great Universal Archive,” to speak about their existence in the digital realm. These poems are given the opportunity to speak their minds  on topics such as how digital archives are treated, the poems’ complex histories, and their relationships with each other on a literal and literary level.\n\nThis episode will also present excerpts of Fred Wah’s archive of audio recordings, ranging from his 1979 Poetry Reading Series to an interview which aired at a literary arts radio show in Calgary. As an artist, educator, and writer, Wah has built an incredible social network throughout generations through his poetry, which has the capacity to tell its own story.\n\n\n(00:04):\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n(00:19):\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\nMy name is Katherine McLeod and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Do you ever wonder what a piece of literature is thinking? What better way to find out research assistant Liza Makarova realized, than to ask?\n\nAnd in this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, Liza does exactly that. Three of Fred Wah’s works that live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive are given voice as Liza interviews them about their lives. Mountain from 1967, Limestones Lakes Utaniki from 1987, 1989 in 1991, and “Don’t Cut Me Down” from Tree in 1972. What is a typical day in a digital literary archive? In this episode, Liza imagines how the preservation of a digital archive can impact the works that it holds and what the relationship between multiple versions of a work in an archive could look like and sound like.\n\nThe episode cleverly and creatively examines the shape of print and digital archives and their preservation and engages in questions of textuality and performance. It dives into the lives of these literary works and how they have shifted and changed over time, and how they feel about this new age they live in. Our producer, Liza Makarova is an undergraduate student at Concordia University in the honors English and Creative Writing Program, and a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliated project, “Mapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive.”\n\nThe Fred Wah Digital Archive is a bibliography and repository for the works of Canadian writer Fred Wah. This episode features archival audio of Wah and the voices of the students, researchers, and scholars on the “Aapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive” Project. Here is episode two of season four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “The Night of the Living Archive.”\n\n \n\n(03:25):\tArchival Recording Fred Wah In Class Conservations – March 9,1979\t[Sound Effect: Sound of a tape clicking shut]\nSteve McCaffery, a Toronto sound poet, and I have been having discussions about the mutations or mutability of a poem. He is now writing poems which, at a certain point, the poem reaches the pages and he admits that: “Okay, at one stage in a poem’s life it belongs in a book or on a page in type, but there are further stages to that poem’s life.”\n\n[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking Shut]\n\n(04:07):\tLiza Makarova\t[Start Music: Upbeat Percussion]\nHello, SpokenWeb Podcast listeners! My name is Liza and I am an RA for a Spoken Web-Affiliated Project called “Mapping Social Bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive” led by the brilliant literary editor, researcher, Concordia doctoral candidate, and archivist, Deanna Fong. Fred Wah is an extraordinary experimental poet, professor, literary critic, editor, and community literary legend currently based in British Columbia but he has connections all throughout Western Canada.\n\nHis poetry, prose, and scholarly work has been in circulation since the 1960s. Various researchers, developers, and academics have been involved with his digital archive, building off the work of Susan Rudy, who initially started the Fred Wah Digital Archive around 2006 after starting the paper archive in the late 80s/early 90s. Working on the archive of a writer who is still active is a curious and special thing. If we have a question about something or need more context, we can directly contact Fred for support.\n\nPlus, the archive is still growing as we add his recent collections. I used to think of an archive as something purely historical, out of date, a storage room. But ever since I started working on the Fred Wah Digital Archive I realized that archives are incredibly dynamic and ongoing spaces. I would even go as far as to say that most digital archives… [End Music:Upbeat Percussion] are living. //\n\nI first noticed it when I was organizing a dataset in the backend of the site. I was having some trouble with finding older entries so I could update them, nothing was coming up when I was searching for a couple of his poems. I decided to refresh the page when all of a sudden I heard a voice. I thought I was hallucinating from too many all nighters but then I heard it again. “Hey! Don’t do that! We’re trying to bring our brother over from our old place. He’s stuck in the search box,” I looked and the site URL was replaced by the text for one of Fred’s poems called “Artknot 14”.\n\nI quickly copied and pasted him into a new entry and heard cries of joy from the reunion. They asked how they could repay me and I said by letting me interview a couple of them…for research. They said okay, if Fred said okay and Fred said okay as long as the poems get back before 8am the next day because they have a lecture to attend together. Today, I have the deepest honor and pleasure of speaking to three of Fred Wah’s collections and poems from the Digital Archive. First off, I would like to introduce Mountain, a collection of Wah’s poems from 1967.\n\n(06:44):\tComputerized Voice:\t[Music Interlude: Synthesizer] Hello and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive. Please sit closer to your device to proceed onto the liminal speaking platform.\n(06:53):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, like this?\n(06:55):\tComputerized Voice:\tExactly. Who can I connect you with today, past, present, or future?\n(07:00):\tLiza Makarova\tI would like to speak to Mountain, please. From 1967.\n(07:04):\tComputerized Voice:\tUnderstood. Mountain is now loading. [Sound Effect: Computer whirring]\n(07:14):\tMountain\tUh, hello?\n(07:16):\tLiza Makarova\tHello, and welcome to the podcast.\n(07:18):\tMountain\tHello. Hello.\n(07:20):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, what’s up? How’s it going?\n(07:22):\tMountain\tI’ve been good. Coasting. What about you?\n(07:26):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. Mm-hmm. Not much, but, but good. Okay. I’m just gonna jump right in. How long have you been in the archive?\n(07:34):\tMountain\tThat’s a difficult question.\n(07:36):\tLiza Makarova\tHow so?\n(07:37):\tMountain\tWhat archive are you talking about?\n(07:39):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, well, the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(07:42):\tMountain\tAh, okay. You see, saying the archive without specifying which one usually signifies the whole universe.\n(07:49):\tLiza Makarova\tThe archive is the whole universe?\n(07:52):\tMountain\tPrecisely. As soon as something is made, even if it was just a second ago, it becomes part of the archive.\n(07:59):\tLiza Makarova\tThe great universal archive. It seems vast and overwhelming.\n(08:05):\tMountain\tIt is, but that’s why you exist, right? To keep it all organized?\n(08:10):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah, and I guess it is.\n(08:12):\tMountain\tAnyway, to answer your question, I’ve been around since the beginning of Fred’s archive, but not the archive. Moving from platform to platform since 2008. Then in 2015, and now again in 2022.\n(08:23):\tLiza Makarova\tBy platform you mean website, right?\n(08:26):\tMountain\tMm-hmm.\n(08:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat’s it like in Drupal 9 in general, but also compared to previous platforms?\n(08:33):\tMountain\tSo far it’s not too much different from other places we’ve lived. Think of moving from a duplex to a townhouse.\n(08:39):\tLiza Makarova\tInteresting. What about the jump from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7?\n(08:43):\tMountain\tWe call that period… [Ominous music starts and then ends] the dark times. The age of Link Rot.\n(08:55):\tLiza Makarova\tLink Rot? Can I ask what happened?\n(09:00):\tMountain\tNovember 6th, 2013. It was a Wednesday and we were getting quite a lot of visitors because of “Diamond Grill”, Fred’s 1996, semi-fictional biography. Since everyone was trying to figure out that Lorde song by looking up the lyrics, “I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh.” It was at the top of the charts, you know? That was our last normal day for a while.\nWe noticed something was wrong right away after that, Susan Rudy, Darren Weshler, derek beaulieu, Bill Kennedy and a group of researchers like you were always active on the site. In fact, from 2009 to 2013, even the public could submit pitches and bibliographic material to the site. We became accustomed to this very caring community. We knew something was wrong when sections of the archives started to get dark. We literally could not see them. Poems, which were friends of ours, literally started to disappear.\n\nNothing seemed to work properly and the quality of our space gradually decreased as no human was working on the archive at the time. By working, I mean what you humans call maintaining the site by updating it to the right versions of Drupal, editing data sets and uploading new ones. As our website link died, so did our connection to the digital ecosystem. We were lost in space and time. For a human it would be like if you were stranded and then your phone dies.\n\n(10:16):\tLiza Makarova\tAnd that’s Link Rot? It almost sounds like a  loss of identity or not being able to properly take care of yourself.\n(10:24):\tMountain\tIt’s exactly that. But one day it all changed. We don’t celebrate a lot of holidays over here at the Fred Wah Digital Archive, but we do celebrate the summer of 2014. [Calming, ethereal music begins]\nSuddenly two new users logged into the site and then a huge group of student researchers, archivists, and designers followed. After a month or so, we were launched onto a whole new platform.\n\n(10:46):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, yeah. Hearing  the project start up again in 2015 from your perspective is so special. I’m really touched. Thank you.\n(10:54):\tMountain\tOf course. We’re very, very lucky to have been supported and taken care of for so long, and that there were people like Deanna Fong and Ryan Fitzpatrick who were able to get more funding and get us back on our URL. [Music ends]\nIt’s hard to imagine the number of archives, especially ones about tracking social relationships in the literary world that go under. All of those fellow poems suddenly go dark and disappear.\n\n(11:16):\tLiza Makarova\tAnd why do you think that Fred Wah’s Digital Archive has lasted so long?\n(11:21):\tMountain\tOur versatility, our literary community, the longest breath of all.\n(11:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat was the best part about being rebooted?\n(11:30):\tMountain\tI would say the most special part was being reunited with collections who were still in the process of being digitized in 2013. Seeing them in the digital realm was miraculous.\n(11:40):\tLiza Makarova\tAw, one big family reunion.\n(11:43):\tMountain\tYes. It was such a happy but interesting day.\n(11:47):\tLiza Makarova\tOh?\n(11:48):\tMountain\tWell, Fred wrote, recorded and performed new work while the archive was down. There were a lot of first time introductions to be made as this new work, which was very well received and known in the public, was unknown to us in the archive. Making space for them in Drupal 9 was easy though.\n(12:04):\tLiza Makarova\tYou know, that’s actually something the current team is working on right now.\n(12:07):\tMountain\tOh, are you digitizing more archival material?\n(12:11):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. Over the summer, the humans working on the archive went to Vancouver to work in the SFU Special Collections. We went over the digital archive and found what didn’t have a cover or a textual scan, pulled it from the collections and scanned it. While we were there, we formally met the SFU Fred Wahl Archival human team and hosted a public talk about what it was like to work on a “so-called” living archive. We called the conversation “Mountain Many Voices: The Archival Sounds of Fred Wah.”\n(12:39):\tMountain\tHow original [Mountain and Liza laugh] That’s super sweet.\n(12:44):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah, we mostly talked about Fred Wah’s audio fonds, which are a collection of his audio tapes and recordings. At the end of the trip, we brought home a lot of good memories, new scholarly knowledge, and a USB full of archival material.\n(12:57):\tMountain\tI’m looking forward to the reunion as well as a new design of the site. We’ve all been chatting about this a lot. I’m most excited for the audio recordings to get their own page. They do not respect after hours noise regulations. [Mountain and Liza laugh]\n(13:12):\tLiza Makarova\tSpeaking about having a page of one’s own, how does the way we organize the archive affect the relationships between the various poems on the site? Do you feel like being represented on separate pages/links isolates you from specific contexts?\n(13:26):\tMountain\tI mean, not really. We already represent different places and time periods depending on when we were created.\n(13:32):\tLiza Makarova\tCould you clarify what you mean by created? Do you mean when/where you were published or when/where you were written?\n(13:40):\tMountain\tDo you really think there’s a difference? Where do you think we came from?\n(13:45):\tLiza Makarova\tI guess from Fred Wah, but the thing about his work, about you, I guess, is that his writing is really inspired and contextualized by the environments he grew up in. His Chinese Canadian heritage, the politics of the time and the social groups, he was, and still is a part of.\nI’m a writer myself, so I really like to compare it to the textual art of embroidery. You have this base, which is like a book website or even a single poem, and you’re using all these threads that you’ve collected by living life to weave together these art forms. Oh, sorry. That was really long winded.\n\n(14:22):\tMountain\tNot at all. I quite miss the wind actually.\n(14:30):\tLiza Makarova\t[Liza blows into the mic to simulate the sound of wind blowing] Is this helping?\n(14:32):\tMountain\tIt’s the thought that counts. You’re really making me think about my home and my fellow poems. We’re all so different from each other, in conversation with each other, but also in comparison or reference to other pieces of art, music and writing. These influences can be hard to highlight in print, but the vastness of a digital archive creates a lot of space for these intimate connections to receive the attention they deserve.\n(14:55):\tLiza Makarova\tI would love to know more about what it’s like in the actual digital space.\n(14:58):\tMountain\tWell, we live in a five story house. Each floor is labeled by sections A through E.\n(15:04):\tLiza Makarova\tRight. We call that the bibliography. For those who might want more clarification, a bibliography is essentially a list of everything a writer ever wrote. What are your thoughts on how you’re currently organized?\n(15:15):\tMountain\tI really like it. It’s what I’m used to, you know? Archival work has always kind of been a thing, but digital archival work is super new. Susan, as in Susan Rudy, started this digital archive with a team of researchers in 2006. Fred has always had an organizational system, so we got used to who we were surrounded with, who’s in the neighborhood. Thankfully, Susan made sure that when we got digitized, the same system was put in place, hence our bibliography. [Soft warm music begins to play]\nI’ll never forget the feeling of being scanned for the first time. I think you can imagine it as an x-ray. I’m pretty old, so I’m not used to any of those things. I thought that laser scanning would be the end of me, but instead it was the beginning.\n\n(15:59):\tLiza Makarova\tI can only imagine how that might have felt. [music ends]\nWhat about migrating? What is it like to migrate onto version 2.0? How did it feel?\n\n(16:07):\tMountain\tKind of feels like a huge family road trip.\n(16:10):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, that’s really sweet.\n(16:12):\tMountain\tYeah. Yeah. I’m pulling your leg. Assuming that it is pullable. It was quite a long process since we can’t all just move at once. There are a lot of steps involved to make sure everything goes smoothly. Think of migrating from site to site like this. You’re moving boxes from one shelf to another, but the other shelf has slightly different dimensions, so you have to make certain adjustments to make sure everything fits again. Then again, these spaces can be filled with new software updates that improve the overall functionality of the site. It’s like moving into a bigger house, so now you have space for that vintage standing lamp you’ve always wanted.\n(16:47):\tLiza Makarova\tWow. I just love hearing your thoughts on all this. As we discussed, digital archives are a really incredible tool to showcase and disseminate the oeuvre of writers who use multimedia such as audio, visual arts, and small press publishing. You mentioned earlier that due to the age of Link Rot, newer material didn’t get on the site until a couple years after they were published, so I’m not quite sure who makes the calls inside the archive, if someone or something like that exists for you, but out here we have something called for-profit publishing companies.\n(17:21):\tMountain\tHmm, Yes, the InPrint books or the LabuorLeaflets, if you’re trying to be a part of the open source movement.\n(17:28):\tLiza Makarova\tThe movement… [Liza hesitates before going on] [whispering]  Can we talk about this near a recording device?\n(17:33):\tMountain\tOf course. I think more people should know about this. Here in the archive, no one is in charge, no anthology name or chatbook is more important than the community that we make up. But it’s true that outside of the archive, some work is still in print and therefore under institutional control.\n(17:50):\tLiza Makarova\tRight. We can’t scan or upload anything still circulating for the public to purchase. Does that make you sad or feel anything in particular?\n(18:00):\tMountain\tIt’s simply a phase of our lives and the archive is hopefully the next.\n(18:04):\tLiza Makarova\tWould you consider the archive as your home at the moment?\n(18:08):\tMountain\tIt’s definitely not a permanent home. I don’t think something like that exists for anything. Like for you, where would you consider home? Where you were born, where you grew up, where you are now, or where you’ll end up? Like a retirement home. Nothing and no one stays somewhere forever, or at least a part of them is always somewhere else.\n(18:28):\tLiza Makarova\tCould you expand on what you mean by a part of them is always somewhere else? [Mountain sighs deeply]\nOh, are you? Are you talking about, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this…\n\n(18:42):\tMountain\tOh, just say it.\n(18:43):\tLiza Makarova\tAre you talking about your body?\n(18:46):\tMountain\t[Soft piano music begins to play] Yes. I miss it a little.\n(18:50):\tLiza Makarova\tHardcover or paperback?\n(18:53):\tMountain\tWell, that’s a little personal. [Music ends]\n(18:54):\tLiza Makarova\tI’m, I’m sorry. So your body, your physical presence on earth. Would you consider that your home? Okay. Maybe a better question would be what about the present digital archive feels like home compared to the physical one?\n(19:07):\tMountain\tThe relationship is a little tense. I mean, my physical body is kept in a temperature controlled room in the Simon Fraser Special Collections. While my contents and consciousness have been bloated to a nebulous space. I really can’t tell which is more permanent, the internet or the real world. What I like about being in a digital archive, that I hope you humans listening can also appreciate, is how open it is. There are no clear boundaries about where I start and where I end.\nPlus maintaining a literary archive in the real world can be a lot of work. I mean, I can only imagine how hard it is to keep 50 books open at the same time, or even worse, to never be opened again. In the digital space, we keep ourselves alive, always ready. There is no rest for the digital archival poem. The internet is a busy place. Sometimes it’s nice to dissociate for a little and reconnect with my physical form. [Soft piano music begins to play] To feel the chill of my spine, to stretch out my pages when someone brushes by. Sadly, in a physical archive, I’m not relevant until someone needs something from me. [Music ends]\n\n(20:15):\tLiza Makarova\tThat’s not true. You’re an artifact. You’ve survived so much. We don’t need to be needed in order to be important. The fact that you still exist and people who didn’t even exist in the sixties can interact with you is really special.\n(20:30):\tMountain\tThank you for that.\n(20:31):\tLiza Makarova\tOf course, I don’t do this just because I like to keep the great universal archive organized. I’m also passionate about the preservation of literature.\n(20:41):\tMountain\tI actually have a question for you now.\n(20:43):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Go ahead.\n(20:44):\tMountain\tWhy do you have to put our dimensions and everything up on the digital archive? Do people really need to know how much I weigh, and how truthful is it to say that I’m 22 pages long when the PDF actually compresses me down to 20?\n(20:57):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, that’s metadata.\n(20:58):\tMountain\tData can be existential.\n(21:00):\tLiza Makarova\tNo, it’s data about data.\n(21:02):\tMountain\tThat’s kind of existential.\n(21:04):\tLiza Makarova\tI guess so. The reason why archivists and researchers need to collect and display metadata is so that it’s easier for users to find the information they’re looking for. The process of creating metadata from large and various sets of data is kind of like creating a dating profile.\nA person, just like a data set, is complex and often holds a lot of information at once. Metadata is specific details about information rich material that is formatted and categorized so it’s accessible, easy to find and descriptive.\n\n(21:36):\tMountain\tWell, when you put it that way, I can see how it reduces the amount of smalltalk I have to do when someone new comes to the site.\n(21:42):\tLiza Makarova\tExactly. By using the search bar, any user can just type in what they’re looking for in terms of genre, length, or collaborator, or all the information can be found just by looking at you.\n(21:53):\tMountain\tI gather slightly similar information about our users.\n(21:56):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, like what?\n(21:58):\tMountain\tWell, I know that you all have good taste. [Mountain and Liza laugh]\n(22:03):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, it has been an absolute pleasure to speak with you, Mountain 1967. Before I let you go, I have one last question to ask you. Can you describe existing in a digital archive in one or two words, even?  If you can, of course?\n(22:22):\tMountain\t[Mountain takes a deep breath] Freedom. [Soft piano music plays briefly and then fades out]\n(22:36):\tFred Wah, In Class Conversations – March 9, 1979\t[Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player]\nAnd maybe you, maybe, maybe people have some opinions on, you know, paying for literature or poetry. Uh, I mean there, you know, there’s a pretty good argument for saying that poetry belongs, because it’s language, it belongs to everyone. It belongs to all of us. [Sound effect of a tape ending]\n\n(22:54):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, hello? um, com-computer voice?\n(22:58):\tComputerized Voice:\tHi.\n(22:59):\tLiza Makarova\tMay um, may I please speak to “Limestone Lakes Utaniki?”?\n(23:03):\tComputerized Voice:\tWell, does it wanna speak to you?\n(23:06):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, yes? It agreed to meet with me, so I think…\n(23:11):\tComputerized Voice:\tOkay, I see you on the list. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” is loading.\n(23:15):\tLiza Makarova\tThank you.\n(23:18):\tComputerized Voice:\t[Whirring noise begins] They have now been loaded. [Whirring noise ends]\n(23:20):\tLiza Makarova\tThey? [Music begins]\n(23:25):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Hello?\n(23:26):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, am I speaking to “Limestone Lakes Utaniki?”\n(23:29):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Yes.\n(23:30):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, hello. There are so many of you.\n(23:34):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Yes, but…\n(23:37):\tLLU 1\tUh, yes, but we are not all the same.\n(23:41):\tLLU 2\tWe’re like identical twins with slightly different features.\n(23:45):\tLLU 3\tI like to think of myself as an individual, a lone wolf even, distant from the pack.\n(23:50):\tLLU 2\tOh, so you went from first to second person in 1987, and now you think you’re so different from us.\n(23:56):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] That’s not true!\n(23:58):\tLLU 3\tWow.\n(24:00):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, I’m still so excited to speak with all of you today. It completely slipped my mind that there are so many versions of this collection. My first question for all of you, I guess, is this: The Fred Wah Digital Archive is more than an archive, right? It also explores mapping a social bibliography. So from your perspectives, how does this mapping appear for you?\n(24:25):\tLLU 1\tSo the social bibliography is, well, like a list of everyone who has worked on a project with Fred. Each person is housed under us as either an editor, contributor artist, or as, uh,  someone who was published alongside Fred. However, archival materials are, uh, also housed under the contributor.\n(24:51):\tLLU 2\tOkay. Okay. You’re getting a little wordy. To summarize there’s—\n(24:55):\tLLU 1\tWordy! Aren’t you the one with three extra passages?\n(25:00):\tLLU 2\tTo summarize, you can’t search for information about a specific contributor without also learning about different archival material and vice versa.\n(25:08):\tLiza Makarova\tSo for you, being an independently published poem, as well as appearing in a few different publications means you’ve come across a lot of people.\n(25:16):\tLLU 2\tI’m not sure if “come across” is the right word to describe the relationship the social bibliography has with the literary bibliography.\n(25:25):\tLLU 1\tOh! Oh, I agree. Oh, we’re, we’re not just passing through. The poem is part of the community, just as much as the poets.\n(25:33):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm, I see. So perhaps you could say that you’re not only personally connected to each contributor, but you also make up the bonds that connect people in the Wah-verse.\n(25:42):\tLLU 3\tInside and outside of the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(25:46):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh? What do you mean?\n(25:47):\tLLU 2\tWell, think about yourself, for example.\n(25:49):\tLLU 3\tOr the cooler, [clears throat] I mean, cool people that worked on the Fred Wah Digital Archive before you.\n(25:55):\tLLU 1\tOh, we’re always meeting new and familiar researchers as the project gets new team members or when it moves to a different province.\n(26:05):\tLiza Makarova\tWait. So, like you, you know our location?\n(26:08):\tLLU 3\tUm, we weren’t created in a vacuum.\n(26:10):\tLLU 2\tOf course we have a sense of spatiality.\n(26:13):\tLLU 1\tYou could even say that, that spatiality is our specialty.\n(26:21):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] [All three laugh] Good one.\n(26:21):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. So I know that one of the main features of the archive is to plot and display geographical metadata based on the framework of Fong and Fitzpatrick who revived the Fred Wah Digital Archive in the 2010s. We know how the text, you all, circulated throughout Canada in various time periods. In their words, this sort of research adds another layer of relational information that illuminates literary sociality in a spatial sense.\n(26:48):\tLLU 2\tRight.\n(26:49):\tLLU 1\tI think I know what you’re getting at.\n(26:52):\tLiza Makarova\tBut you’ve also developed a sense of present sociality.\n(26:56):\tLLU 3\tIn order to be in the Fred Wah Digital Archive, you have to have been outside of it at some point.\n(27:01):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh. So since your positionality is currently inside of the archive, how or in what ways are you connected to the um, I guess non-archival space?\n(27:13):\tLLU 2\tCapturing the present is also a way of capturing the past.\n(27:16):\tLLU 1\tI mean, couldn’t every space be considered an archival space?\n(27:21):\tLiza Makarova\tOh yeah, yeah. Right. Sorry. The great universal archive. Oh, okay. So let’s break it down a little bit. You’re all in the Fred Wah Digital Archive, like within the code that’s projected as a legible image in text. But you also exist in various library archives that are in British Columbia and Montreal, because Fred Wah donated his reel to reel tape collections and books to SFU, UBCO and Concordia. But you also absorb information in the homes of everyone who has ever bought, bartered or stole a copy of you- your material.\n(27:57):\tLLU 2\tThere’s a movie like that, right?\n(27:59):\tLLU 1\tLike, um… Everywhere…\n(28:01):\tLLU 3\tAt once.\n(28:02):\tLLU 2\tAt once everything is…\n(28:04):\tLiza Makarova\tEverything Everywhere All At Once-, anyway, what I’m trying to understand is how you feel about your positionality as digitized archival material. In the many places where you are at the moment you are simultaneously in the digital archive, which is a very dynamic place in terms of temporality. How does this huge angle inform your sense of self and how you feel about all the places and people you are connected to?\n(28:29):\tLLU 3\tThe Fred Wah Digital Archive is just like any other place that’s been passed down over time. You always know what kind of person lived prior to you based on how they left the space, and you’re going to be aware of the contributions you personally make in the space.\nSame thing goes for an archive. The research group in Vancouver at SFU are very different from you all in Montreal. They have access to material you don’t, and vice versa. We take note of these distinctions quite literally since it affects how we are presented, but also how people interpret us\n\n(28:57):\tLLU 2\tBy working on the Fred Wah Digital Archive with someone in the same position as you from Vancouver in 2016, automatically makes you affiliated to them in some way, even if you’ve never met before. Internally, we see that by comparing your organization of metadata, use of punctuation, and what information you think should and shouldn’t appear in the archive.\n(29:18):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. There is definitely a connection between how you track the variation of archival interaction and how we track the development of Fred Wah’s work and community as he moved within different literary milieu’s.\n(29:29):\tLLU 1\tYes, exactly! So to go back to the question about the social bibliography, it is a list of people, but it also represents a network, one that spans across generations and miles, genres and styles, friendships and camaraderie.\n(29:51):\tLiza Makarova\tSo there is an archive of contemporary interconnections within so-called Canada inside of the archive of Fred Wah’s collected works.\n(29:58):\tLLU 3\tIt’s super layered. It’s not exactly clear where the archival text ends and where the social bibliography begins.\n(30:05):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat are your thoughts on being in conversation with so many different people, texts, and environments?\n(30:10):\tLLU 2\tIt’s exciting.\n(30:11):\tLiza Makarova\tI’m so glad. Personally, I think I would feel a little overwhelmed. It’s a lot of information that overlaps. I would be scared of getting lost.\n(30:19):\tLLU 2\tI would say that’s why it’s important to be precise, specific and to display a variety of labels in the way you organize things. An editor of Fred’s work could also show up as an artist. As part of the collected work taxonomy, we became accustomed to being called “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” without any note about us being different versions.\n(30:39):\tLLU 3\tFor the longest time we were just listed as the same poem.\n(30:42):\tLLU 2\tAnd in some ways we are, different variations of it.\n(30:47):\tLLU 1\tBut it’s important to track these changes over time.\n(30:51):\tLiza Makarova\tWe actually found out through an audio recording from March 9th, 1979 that the reason why there are so many versions of the same poem is because Fred Wah edited them before sending them off for publications.\n(31:03):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Oh, we know!\n(31:05):\tLiza Makarova\t[Liza laughs]  I wonder if there are any other versions that we don’t know about that were specifically edited for readings.\n(31:10):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Oh, we wouldn’t know.\n(31:12):\tLiza Makarova\tWait, you have never heard yourself be read aloud?\n(31:16):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once] Nope.\n(31:16):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, would you like to?\n(31:18):\tLLU x3\t[Three voices speaking at once, talking amongst themselves]\nI, I’m not sure. Like… I think it’d be, I think we could…\n\n(31:22):\tLLU 2\tLet’s do it.\n(31:25):\tLLU 1\tThe thing is… I don’t think there is a recording of us being read.\n(31:28):\tLLU 2\tWe actually haven’t ever heard an audio recording of Fred read before. Like at all.\n(31:36):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. Okay, let me see. [Sound effect of someone typing on a computer]\nOh, here. Let’s listen to this clip of Fred reading “What does Qu’ Apelle mean?” for the 1985 TISH celebration. A bunch of poets like George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, Gladys Hindmarch, Lionel Kearns, Peter Auxier and Warren Tallman were there reading as well.\n\n(32:02):\tFred Wah reading in “TISH: A Celebration (1985)”\tI was in, uh, I was in, uh, Fort Sand this summer, Fort Qu’ Apelle and, uh, a few poems out of that. This was a letter, a letter back home.\nWhat does Qu Apelle mean?/ Did you know I watered the Japanese cherry out front?/ The manchurian plum too./ How late did Jennifer sleep on Sunday?/ I talked to my mum about using the wormy cherries for wine./ Tell her about the worm in the tequila./ What did Erica do at Gray Creek?/ I picked two cocoon-like burs off the apricot tree./ What do you think they are?/ I think we should plant more flatter sugar peas from now on./ I cook that halibut with some veggies in the leftover burnt brown rice./ I’m trying to remember a particular and specific rotten two by four on the deck or a blemished shingle/. So I can take us there by mentioning to you like that piece that’s soft to the touch of my foot when I turn to the left on Slant Trans Canada./\n\nYou can’t swim in the lake here because of the algae./ I don’t have a printer for my computer, so I’m using a typewriter./ There’s a girl here who was an old Smith Corona portable of her mother’s, which is just like yours only in better shape./ This place is full of noise because it’s a band camp and there’s a black lab right outside my window howling all night, every night./ When I flew over Invermere, the fires were really chugging out. Huge smoke stacks./ So you could tell the mountains were in control./ They have mosquitoes here./ Is life work?/ Where’s my olive green tank top?/ I don’t know if my grandmother’s ever talked to one another./ Do you know that idea about if you image something, it will be true?/ There are probably images in our lives which will never be actualized, particularly ones above the north./ Information is definitely not narrative or maybe narrative isn’t narrative./ Could someone, and I don’t mean in the Japanese sense at all, clean out the culverts on the road in case it’s a real deluge./ The food’s mediocre./ I’m too academic./ This worries me, but I, but maybe it’s okay./ Like I don’t think it’s a serious problem./ But if it becomes part of a life force blow, I’ll really wonder./ Don’t forget to check the water in the batteries in this hot weather/ What does Qu’apelle mean?\n\n(34:22):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat did you think?\n(34:25):\tLLU 2\tI could feel the air flowing through the spaces between each letter, the warmth of breath propelling us towards the microphone and seeping into the tape.\n(34:34):\tLLU 1\tI felt like I was there. As soon as you played it, I was transported to 1985. Being inhaled [LLU 1 inhales] and exhaled,[LLU 1 exhales]  riding each sound wave to the present.\n(34:51):\tLiza Makarova\tRecording poetry readings was really important for Fred Wah’s generation in the sixties all the way into the eighties. It wasn’t just for the sake of preserving or capturing the work of prolific poets on tape, but it’s also a way for work to be shared or even gifted.\n(35:05):\tLLU 2\tThat isn’t to imply that we were some commodity either. A huge part of sharing tapes was keeping the contemporary writing ecosystem alive. Poets from the west could hear poets from the east read and vice versa. After this exposure, writers from one side of the country could respond to the work of their distant peers, and it would also circulate throughout their local literary communities.\n(35:27):\tLLU 3\tThe Digital Archive is similar in that way. Instead of being transferred from the hands of one artist to the next, we’re easy to access for the entire world. Obviously, we don’t wanna compete with people buying books, but for some people it’s hard to find copies of older material, especially if a bookstore doesn’t carry our publisher.\n(35:44):\tLiza Makarova\tHmm. I hope there’s a time when literature on the public domain and independent publishers can work together. Literary artists and editors deserve to be paid for their work, but Digital Archives shouldn’t be neglected in the process.\n(35:57):\tLLU 1\tEspecially one like the Fred Wah Digital Archive. It’s a homage to all the care that goes into creating a generative literary community with a lot of significance placed on the people who made it possible.\n(36:14):\tLLU 2\tHaving one’s memory and work be celebrated and sustained is an important non-monetary contribution to a writer’s career.\n(36:22):\tLiza Makarova\tI feel like that’s the reason why the legacy of this specific archive is so vital to the Canadian literary scene. It isn’t just about the bibliography and access to Fred’s work, but it’s also about the possibility of interacting with people in literature you otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to. Do you think that this sort of openness or convenience affects the personal connections between writers and their work?\n(36:44):\tLLU 3\tMm, I can speak on that, I guess. I would argue that putting these relationships into context is a way to preserve their intimate nature. Fred Wah widely wrote for his community and vice versa. Making sure the users of the archive know who these people are, where they’re from, and how often they’re connected is a great way to situate them in a closed network.\n(37:02):\tLiza Makarova\tTo clarify, are you saying that us as users of the archive and researchers are situated as outsiders? From this position we can view this network but not really consider ourselves as part of it.\n(37:14):\tLLU 1\tMm, no. That would be a little harsh. I guess it has more to do with ensuring that the network of writers and artists and editors and others are represented in the temporal and spatial realm when and where they had strong ties. The beauty of mapping a social bibliography is that these connections are only framed by our knowledge of them. Rather than thinking of them as a box, someone who is not, well, let’s say a part of the network, someone who grew up in a different setting or time period has a different perspective and sociality.\n(38:05):\tLLU 2\tSo you’re not outsiders. Actually quite the opposite. You’re insiders! By using the archive and inspecting the relationship network, you’re getting an in on the details, which develops your understanding of the archival material you are trying to analyze. It brings you closer to us.\n(38:22):\tLiza Makarova\tI definitely feel closer to all of you after this interview. Thank you so much for inviting me into your space.\n(38:29):\tLLU 1\tThank you for having us.\n(38:31):\tLLU 2\tIt was a pleasure.\n(38:32):\tLLU 3\tIt was nice to have someone different to talk to— Someone like me—\n(38:34):\tLLU 1 and LLU 2\t[LLU 1 and LLU 2 speak over each other.] Oh. Oh, Come, come on, on you. This is the last time we’re oh, oh, this. Why are you making such a scene? Jeez! [Music begins to play and then quickly ends]\n(39:00):\tFred Wah reads “Don’t Cut Me Down”\t[Sound effect of a tape player starting plays ] So I’ll read a few poems from the book, Tree.\nDon’t Cut me down/ I don’t want any of this tree poetry shit from you/ You don’t know what a fucking tree is/ If you think it’s only in your head, you’re full of shit/ Trees is trees and, and the only thing they’re good for is lumber, so don’t give me any crap about them being something else/ For Christ’s sake, you think the rest of us don’t know sweet fuck all all compared to you/ But you don’t know nothing until you go out there and bust your back on a set and chokers break your so fast, you wouldn’t even wanna look at a tree, let alone and write about it/ Then you’d know what a tree was ‘stead of yapping about it.\n\nThat’s essentially what was said to me in a bar, obviously, when I said I’m a writer and I write, I’m writing poems about trees.\n\n(39:37):\tClip of Fred Wah speaking  “In For Instances – Literary Arts Program on CJSW” \tLanguages, I see language as quite an organic, uh, moving thing. We really don’t have, uh, you know, individually, uh, a lot of control over what language does. Um, and I, I’m, I’m a believer in the notion that really the poem writes itself or the poem writes me. [Sound effect of tape player stopping]\n(40:01):\tLiza Makarova\tHello? May I please speak to, “Don’t Cut Me Down” from Tree?\n(40:06):\tComputerized Voice\tAre you sure?\n(40:08):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, yes? It will be my last interview, I promise.\n(40:14):\tComputerized Voice\tAll right. If you’re sure. [Sound effect of whirring begins] “Don’t Cut Me Down” has now been loaded. [Whirring ends] [music begins and ends]\n(40:27):\tLiza Makarova\tHi, my name is Liza and welcome to the podcast.\n(40:30):\tDCMD\tHuh? What the hell is a podcast?\n(40:32):\tLiza Makarova\tOh, it’s like a radio show.\n(40:34):\tDCMD\tAll, right. Then why don’t you just call it a radio show?\n(40:36):\tLiza Makarova\tI mean, it’s not technically a radio show since we’re not on air.\n(40:40):\tDCMD\tWell then what the hell are we breathing?\n(40:43):\tLiza Makarova\tUh, no. To be on air means-\n(40:45):\tDCMD\tDon’t explain to me what a radio show is. I know what a radio show is. So in 2022, you have no radio shows and no sense of humor. Typical. What do you wanna talk about?\n(40:56):\tLiza Makarova\tI would love to know what a day in a life of a digital literary archive looks like. What do you usually get up to?\n(41:02):\tDCMD\tSit around. Mind my business. Load once in a while, if I feel like it.\n(41:07):\tLiza Makarova\tWould you say you sit around more in a digital archive or in a material archive?\n(41:11):\tDCMD\tMaybe we’d be sitting around more if you’d bother to code some damn chairs.\n(41:15):\tLiza Makarova\tOh… I’m not the web developer.\n(41:18):\tDCMD\tWho do I talk to to get a chair around here?\n(41:21):\tLiza Makarova\tI’ll let our web developer know as soon as possible. Okay. Here’s a question I think you’ll like. What are some things digital archive poems don’t appreciate? I’m talking, boundaries.\n(41:33):\tDCMD\tJust don’t talk to me about feeling complete.\n(41:35):\tLiza Makarova\tYou don’t feel complete? Do you feel like a draft?\n(41:38):\tDCMD\tDidn’t you hear me? Do you feel complete? Aren’t you sort of a draft? See? Don’t go asking things if they feel complete, you’re gonna get in a lot of trouble.\n(41:49):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Fair. Noted. I’m sorry.\n(41:51):\tDCMD\tIn terms of boundaries, I’ll narrow it down to two. Number one is close your damn tabs. I know you’re reading, researching, rambling, but be mindful of those tabs. You have me open in three different browsers and you don’t even realize, and then you complain that I’m slow. Then you refresh, refresh, refresh. It’s hard to keep up.\nNumber two, don’t forget about that Fred blog, new updates thing, on the site. You people are digging deep into the archives, but forget what’s happening in the present. If you do, then you’re really not grounding yourself. It really grinds my metaphysical gears, tightens my syntax. I don’t like it.\n\n(42:27):\tLiza Makarova\tWell, thank you for bringing that up. [Music begins] Another aspect of the Fred Wah Digital Archive that’s very unique is that it informs users on what Fred Wah is doing in the now, as well as the creative contemporary writing that is inspired by him, his older works, and even the archive itself.\n(42:43):\tDCMD\tAnd that’s what I like to see people exploring. I know what Fred has done, but I wanna know what he’s doing right now. Hopefully not writing any more tree poems.\n(42:52):\tLiza Makarova\tI can assure you he’s doing a lot of interesting writing and revisions since your publication. Bringing up tree poems and the theme of experimenting with the temporal clash of digital archives and material archives, I’m wondering about your thoughts on immortality. You were written and published in 1972, but you’ve honestly not aged a bit.\n(43:09):\tDCMD\tI want everyone to know that I’ve gotten zero work done, by the way, and I say that because you can’t say the same for some of these revised poems.\n(43:18):\tLiza Makarova\tGetting some touch ups isn’t a bad thing.\n(43:20):\tDCMD\tYou know what I don’t like?\n(43:21):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat’s that?\n(43:22):\tDCMD\tInstall updates. I hate moving, migrating, whatever you call it. We’re not birds, we’re poems. We belong somewhere. We need to be treated with more respect Now, everything’s a mess. We have duplicated poems, couplets, if you’re trying to be all fancy, all these new functions. But, oh, don’t you dare marvel at new technology because once you blink, there’s something out there that’s newer. And that’s what I’m talking about. Who is paying for all of these moves? Are we really getting that popular? That’s what I wanna know.\n(43:51):\tLiza Makarova\tYes, actually! You are. I can completely understand how migrating can be tough, especially after experiencing two big overhauls. Maintaining and updating a digital archive is both a very slow, yet simultaneously overwhelming process.\n(44:05):\tDCMD\tMhm, I hate being hurried and I also hate feeling stuck.\n(44:08):\tLiza Makarova\tStuck? Do you feel stuck in the Digital Archive?\n(44:11):\tDCMD\tDon’t put words into my mouth.\n(44:12):\tLiza Makarova\tI just wanna know your thoughts on what it means for a piece of literature to end up in a literary archive.\n(44:18):\tDCMD\tEnd up?\n(44:20):\tLiza Makarova\tYeah. There’s a general misconception, I feel, in the public opinion that an archive, digital or not, is a place where old books are left to collect dust or take up space.\n(44:31):\tDCMD\tAnd who are you? Some hero? Why do you feel the need to prove them wrong?\n(44:34):\tLiza Makarova\tBecause I think there’s a lot of value to preserving the work of our predecessors. It’s a way to be a part of the conversation and interact with media we wouldn’t have been able to interact with otherwise.\n(44:45):\tDCMD\tSo you think you can just waltz into any old archive and listen to a couple of tapes and you’re just like the greats?\n(44:51):\tLiza Makarova\tNo, it isn’t a hierarchy. Without getting too stoic, I, I think it’s a duty of contemporary writers, artists and academics to be critical of, listen to, and take care of archival material, their future is our future. Plus we as researchers wouldn’t have this deep connection to prolific writers from the past if  archives like this one weren’t maintained.\n(45:12):\tDCMD\tYou don’t know what an archive is.\n(45:14):\tLiza Makarova\tHuh?\n(45:15):\tDCMD\tYou’re pulling all this nonsense out of the website’s backend. I’ll do you a favor by telling you some difficult truths by asking you some questions now. How do you decide what makes it onto the digital archive and what doesn’t?\n(45:25):\tLiza Makarova\tSelection criteria is subjective.\n(45:27):\tDCMD\tWell, that’s what I’m asking you, subject!\n(45:30):\tLiza Makarova\tOkay. Well, personally, I don’t think I’m the one to say. This isn’t my body of work, but in general, I think that everything deserves to be preserved one way or another. Either through a library, a special collections room, in art, a digital archive, or even in memory.\n(45:47):\tDCMD\tYou know, not everything is up on that archive.\n(45:50):\tLiza Makarova\tI know that. We can’t track down everything Fred Wah has ever written.\n(45:54):\tDCMD\tAnd you’re okay with that?\n(45:56):\tLiza Makarova\tI mean, no. Call me a perfectionist, but I love the satisfaction of knowing there are no gaps when I’m looking at a bibliography, especially in the sense of mapping out a social sphere. No interaction, inspiration or contribution is too small.\n(46:11):\tDCMD\tMm, interesting.\n(46:13):\tLiza Makarova\tWhat, what is it?\n(46:19):\tDCMD\t[Music begins] Did you really think that you could preserve everything? [Music ends]\n(46:49):\tClip from “Fred Wah In Class Conservations – March 9,1979”\t[Sound effect of a person’s footsteps and a tape player being started]\nFred: It’s a line printer, so it only prints out how many copies are requested. They don’t have to print a whole edition.\n\nAudience Member: Well, all this stays in the computer, in other words.  Say, I’d like a copy, it would run one off whatever edition it is now. Second, second draft, or whatever.\n\nFred: To a certain extent, I agree with you except that, that I also like, uh, I like books. I like the feeling of something, uh, of a statement, um, of a, I like monuments too, but I like the possibility that monuments can be, uh, destroyed. [Sound effect of tape player stopping]\n\n(47:42):\tKatherine McLeod\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collective from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Liza Makarova, undergraduate student at Concordia University and research assistant on the mapping social bibliography in the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt and our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. Kelly Cubbon is our production manager and transcriber. And I’m your host, Katherine McLeod.\nSpecial thanks to Deanna Fong, the principal investigator of the Fred Wah Digital Archive and the entire Fred Wah Digital Archive RA team. And an extra special thanks to Fred Wah for giving us permission to use his recordings, text, and the overall support he has provided us through the creation of this podcast episode.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music begins] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod: Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9658","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.6, Living Together, 15 March 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-together/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7da3e459-6a0f-453f-89b9-abab0f2e6c07/audio/8d91254e-ec0f-4b5e-b988-11cda316e954/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e6-shortcuts-listening-together.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:16:54\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"16,283,734 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e6-shortcuts-listening-together\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-together/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-15\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nArchival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Margaret Avison’s reading in Montreal on January 27, 1967.\\n\\nAudio clips of Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel are from SpokenWeb’s Listening Practice, led by Katherine McLeod and held on January 27, 2021.\\n\\nAudio clips of Katherine McLeod in conversation with Mathieu Aubin were recorded over Zoom on March 9, 2021.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nAubin, Mathieu, “Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen.” ShortCuts 1.6, 15 June 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/.\\n\\n@mathieujpaubin. “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work… eh boy. But, as a bad ass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.” Twitter, 23 February, 2021, https://twitter.com/mathieujpaubin/status/1364328694341246980.\\n\\nAvison, Margaret. Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding, Poems 1940-66. McClelland & Stewart, 1982.\\n\\n“Listening to Winter Sun: A Virtual Ghost Reading (Margaret Avison, January 27, 1967) [led by Katherine McLeod.” SpokenWeb, https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-listening-practice-guided-by-katherine-mcleod/.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Margaret Avison reading ‘Thaw’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 30 March, 2020, spokenweb.ca/margaret-avison-reading-thaw/. Accessed 12 March, 2021.\\n\\nSarah, Robyn. “How poems work: Thaw by Margaret Avison.” Globe and Mail, 2 September 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article25470778/.\\n\\nNickel, Barbara and Elise Partridge. “The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison.” Books in Canada 33. 6 (September 2004), 34-36.\\n\\nQuebec, Ike. It Might as Well Be Spring. Blue Note Records, 2006.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549782265856,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["March is a time of year when you can hum along to “It Might as Well be Spring,” but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. Can we hear spring in the archives? And what does it feel like to listen to sonic representations of change – at a distance – together? Listen to Margaret Avison read “Thaw” (on 27 January 1967) as our ‘short cut’ this month. Then, get ready for the first ShortCuts audio challenge when a special guest joins us to talk about a perplexing moment in archival listening.\n\n\n00:00\n \n\nMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n01:10\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. It’s March 2021. Our deep dive into the SpokenWeb audio collections continues to ask the question of how to hear time. We’ll be listening to a poem that describes the moment between winter and spring. I’m recording this minisode in a city where the month of March feels a lot like winter. Here, March is a time of year when it might as well be spring, but, on other days, it can feel like winter might never end. It is a time of year when you can hear snow melting – a sound [Sound Effect: Snow Melting] that tells of the coming spring, and a sound that conveys the lasting presence of the past season, a frozen archive of winter… What does it feel like to listen in and to this season of change? Can we hear the spring thaw in archival recordings of poetry?\n02:21\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tThis is one of the very cold days, I guess, about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass – separating inside from outside comes into it, a certain kind of sky that goes with that which is like glass again…\n02:46\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tThe sun has not absorbed this icy day and this day’s industry in behind glass hasn’t the blue and gold cold outside. Though not absorbing this sought that…\n03:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Canadian poet Margaret Avison introducing her very wintery poems on January 27, 1967. She read that night at Sir George Williams University, at what is now Concordia, in Montreal. That is the first event you’ll hear audio from in this ShortCuts. The second event was also held on January 27, but in a different year, not in 1967 but in 2021. On that January 27, I played some clips from Avison’s reading as part of a SpokenWeb Listening Practice.\n03:40\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn choosing to listen to the recording on the same day, it was like organizing a Ghost Reading, a listening activity in which the reading is listened to on the same day as it would have taken place and, while listening, listeners make things out of the listening (such as notes, doodles, booklets, paintings and more). I thought I’d try out how the Ghost Reading translates into a virtual environment in which we are listening together, but not in the same place. How would we listen and what would we make?\n04:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tPoet Barbara Nickel joined us for the Listening Practice and I asked her what it was like to hear that opening that we just heard of Avison introducing the wintery poem “The Absorbed” from Winter Sun…\n04:30\tAudio Recording, Barbara Nickel, Listening Practice:\tI spent the whole morning just reading Winter Sun. I have, from years of reading her, I have a certain voice in my mind: the voice of the page. And then to hear her voice for the first time … I can’t put words to it – it’s so mundane to me, her voice, it feels mundane in one sense it’s almost disappointing; but then, on the other hand, I find that the articulation of the consonants, something I love so much about Avison’s work, comes through so clearly, and articulates those sounds to me in a way that I’ve never noticed before.\n05:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tAlso listening was poet Stephanie Bolster and she had a very similar reaction to Barbara, in that this poet who she had spent so much time listening to on the page was now audible. I asked Stephanie if she had ever heard an Avison recording before…\n05:29\tAudio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:\tNo, I never have, that’s what was sort of magical about it is her authentic voice, having had the voices of poems in my head, but never attributed any particular voice. And I guess I’m getting a sense of expectation of formality based on the work itself, but never really having thought about what she would sound like.\n05:46\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Listening Practice:\tYeah, I think, that’s such a great point, even to introduce her voice to us – to start with – because she’s somebody who —we’ve seen titles of her work — she has a book called Listening. So you think: what is this voice going to sound like? Or all of her work — say the poem “Snow,” maybe encountering that as an undergrad, and her words about “the sad listener” or “optic heart” that get so often quoted from that poem, but thinking: what does her voice sound like reading it?\n06:15\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs I started riffing upon Stephanie’s point, she added a comment into the Zoom chat that it was important to remember that Avison’s voice is mediated through recording technologies. So that really raises the question of where the authentic voice is, and whether there are other ways of understanding it’s embodied and material source – where the voice is coming from. Let’s hear more of Avison’s voice from this archival recording, as she reads the poem…\n06:45\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967\t“The Thaw”. Sticky inside their winter suits / The Sunday children stare at pools/ In pavement and black ice where roots/ Of sky in moodier sky dissolve. / An empty coach train runs along / The thin and sooty river flats / And stick and straw and random stones / Stream faintly when its steam departs. / Lime-water and liquorice light / Wander the tumbled streets. A few/ Sparrows gather. A dog barks out / Under the dogless pale pale blue. Move your tongue along a slat / Of raspberry box from last year’s crate. / Smell a saucepantilt of water / On the coal-ash in your grate. / Think how the Black Death made men dance, / And from the silt of centuries/ The proof is now scraped bare that once/ Troy fell and Pompei scorched and froze. / A boy alone out in the court/ Whacks with his hockey-stick, and whacks / In the wet, and the pigeons flutter, and rise, / And settle back.\n08:15\tKatherine McLeod:\t“Thaw” is a poem that I wrote about last year in March 2020 – when ShortCuts used to be Audio of the Week – I chose the poem as a way of coping with the uncertainty of the pandemic. By chance, the poem ends up having a reference to the plague in it. There I was, trying to find a poem to guide us from winter to spring, through a transition, and I was forced to confront the pandemic again. I could have pressed stop, but I chose to re-play the poem and to re-listen to it again, as I have done again here and in the listening practice. The poem depicts a solitary image – “a boy alone,” making a sound with the hockey stick, causing the pigeons to “flutter and rise and settle back” – a scene and a sound of winter solitude and of repetition. What was it like to listen to this poem together?\n09:22\tAudio Recording, Stephanie Bolster, Listening Practice:\tI guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything, and slow it down and take in the details, just the density and abundance of details. I was scribbling things down, and couldn’t keep up. And, in that sense, it really felt the same sense I would have had in a live reading. Even though it was recorded, because we were listening to it together, I couldn’t just stop it and go back. And so I think it really did replicate that sense of having a communal experience. Sharing something, and gaining all that I gained and also losing what one does lose in a live reading.\n09:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we were on January 27, 2021, listening to a recording of Avison from January 27, 1967, and we were struck by the immediacy of her voice. I couldn’t help but think that maybe all of these online readings were making us even more attuned to the recorded voice. With nearly all literary events as virtual over this past year, we are practising our skills of hearing an archival recording as a performance, one that is mediated and live. Let’s liven up the end of this miniside – get ready for our first ShortCuts audio challenge, [Sound Effect: Fanfare] solving mysteries in the audio archives, together! There’s a very curious moment in the recording of the Avison reading. I had wanted to talk about this curious moment in the recording but we didn’t have time in the listening practice… Then a couple weeks later I saw that SpokenWeb researcher Mathieu Aubin – a friend of ShortCuts as you may recall he guest-produced a minisode last season – he had posted a tweet about this very same moment. He agreed to revisit this moment in the archives together.\n11:02\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tSo, thank you for joining me for this conversation, and welcome back to ShortCuts.\n11:09\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tHi, happy to be here.\n11:11\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tWhat was the tweet that you wrote after listening to the Avison reading? Would you mind reading that out for us?\n11:16\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah, of course. So “In today’s listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work… eh boy. But, as a badass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.”\n11:35\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tI think it is just beautiful, but nobody gets it unless I explain, so I’ll explain, it’s like you take a piece of 8 by 11 typing paper….\n11:44\tAudio Recording, Audience Member  at Avison at SGWU, 1967:\n \n\nDon’t explain, just say it.\n11:46\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison:\tAlright, you can tell me then, eh? “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka.” Now, come on… [Audience Laughs] Hmm? Does anybody want the explanation? Well I’ve read it. It’s just a crumpled-up letter, you know, you get it and you read it and you cry and you crumple it up and you throw it down and the mic goes up…now I’ll read it again. “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter: Eureka.”\n12:45\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tWhen I was listening to it the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately – it’s different with you, obviously, because we’re actually responding and we’re both in on this is about to happen – but it’s, first, the audacity of that anonymous man just interrupting her and then telling her to do something, on the one hand. On the other hand is her being like, come on, do you want to do it? Do you, do you really want to – just calling him out and you could feel it generations later of that awkwardness and everyone is like ‘eee’….\n13:24\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tI’ll read it again: “Said the mite on the single page of a sad letter. Eureka!”\n13:35\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tThat point that we’re almost, we’re listening, almost anticipating knowing what she’s going to do —.\n13:39\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah.\n13:39\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\t— I love thinking of all the sounds in there. Even I’m wondering what this is: it almost sounds like she stamps the desk with her hand or something. So, I’ll just play this here…\n13:52\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\tAll right. You can tell me then. [Muffled Bang] Eh?\n13:58\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\tYeah, you’re right! I didn’t notice that — I was paying attention more to the sorts of the words that I could understand. But you’re right. You hear the book hitting the — I don’t know the podium or whatever it was.\n14:07\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tYeah, just that sound. It really sounds like either hitting something down onto the desk or a book hitting… but it punctuates it. [Sigh] It’s also interesting that the whole joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then, this, if she does like slam the book down, the presence of the weight of the page is right there.\n14:34\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\t[Recording overlaps with Katherine] It’s just a crumpled up letter – you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down…\n14:36\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\t[Katherine overlaps with Avison recording] You cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down – and there are so many emotions happening in this moment.\n14:41\tAudio Recording, Margaret Avison at SGWU, 1967:\n \n\nNow I’ll read it again…\n14:41\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tDo you feel like, do you feel like you get it?\n14:46\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview\tYeah. I think –I mean I’m trying to picture it in my head and obviously when I’m listening to it and I can kind of see it. Do I immediately get this symbolic significance? Not necessarily. At the same time, I think it gains more significance with what’s happening in that moment, and in the performance, like with the “Eureka!” – the here we are! Like what you were saying earlier, almost like drawing a parallel between what’s happening with the paper and her using the paper and speaking up. If I were to read it on the page, I would probably sit with it a bit longer, but that’s the thing about audio, right? You can pause it, but you’re trying to listen along and trying to be in that moment.\n15:27\tAudio Recording, Katherine McLeod, Zoom interview:\tWe talked about it even more than I could have imagined from the clip itself. So thanks so much for listening back to this moment in the archives and for joining me once again on ShortCuts.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin, Zoom interview:\n \n\nAnd it’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\n15:40\tMusic:\tPiano Interlude\n15:45\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s leave this mystery unsolved. And, more than solving the mystery, I hope that this audio challenge will unite us as an audience – in 1967 and in 2021 – as having to figure something out, together, as having to share our confusion and our curiosity. My name is Katherine McLeod, [Piano With Distorted Beat] and ShortCuts [Sound Effect: Chime] is produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Stacey Copeland. This minisode was recorded in the city of Montreal, on the unceded lands known as Tiohtià:ke by the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. A special thanks to Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, and to all of the listeners in the Listening Practice. And, of course, to our guest Matthew Aubin for taking on the first ShortCuts Audio Challenge. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives, and next month… it might be spring."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9664","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.1, Archival Listening, 17 October 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-4-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:10:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,059,067 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-4-1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/archival-listening/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Interim Transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1 “Sounds”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/\\n\\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9 “Re-Situating Sound”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/\\n\\nArchival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 reading, from ShortCuts 3.3 “Communal Memories”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/\\n\\nArchival audio: Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980; Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981 — all from ShortCuts 3.6 “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Doug Barbour” (guest produced by Michael O’Driscoll): https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/\\n\\nArchival audio, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4 “Sonic Passages”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\\n\\nDaphne Marlatt interview with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive” an episode of SoundBox Signals that was aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast (co-produced by Karis Shearer, Megan Butchart, and Nour Sallam), clipped on ShortCuts 3.4: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\\n\\nInterview with Kelly Cubbon, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity,” (co-produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod), S3E9 The SpokenWeb Podcast, June 2022: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/\\n\\nInterview with Kaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5 “The Voice that is the Poem”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/\\n\\nArchival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/\\n\\nArchival audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: “What the Archive Remembers”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/\\n\\nArchival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7 “Moving, Still”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549784363008,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this first episode of Season 4, SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts continues the tradition of starting a new season by diving into its own archives. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through short archival clips? Join host and producer Katherine McLeod to listen to clips from Season 3 of ShortCuts as a way of asking what literary criticism sounds like through cutting and splicing sound. It is a short exercise in archival listening, and archival making.\n\n[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] ]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to ShortCuts. My name is Katherine McLeod. Join me, each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\nOn ShortCuts, we explore what you can make by cutting up [scissor cut] and splicing sound digitally. What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, do think about joining me on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work, especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening. Get in touch! Write to SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com\n\nNow, as I’ve always done to start each season, let’s dive into the archives of ShortCuts. We’ll listen to clips from the previous season, Season 3, in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like… We’ll do this as is an exercise in listening – an exercise in archival listening. From now on…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1: All of the sounds will be clips from Season Three of ShortCuts, and that includes my voiceover. [Overlapping] My Voiceover, my voiceover.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.\n\n[Tape rewinding]\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: I am holding the sound carefully, knowing how difficult it can be to take a recorded voice, with all of its situated affect attached to it, out of the archives. To unarchive carefully.\n\n[Tape rewinding ends]\n\nArchival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 Reading, from ShortCuts 3.3: Lee read the epigram back to me in Montreal. And I was very honoured too, that she had written it back to me and I’ve been trying to write her back an epigram. We might make a book [Audience Laughter]. So I haven’t got very far with the epigram except to say: “Write me out of this epigram, Lee, you are so much water. You are too much water, too much rock, so much eagle. Write me out of this epigram, Lee. I am so much bush, so much ocean, so much rage…” And that’s just the beginning. [Laughter] It’s not finished. [Clapping] It’s supposed to go and like “write us out of this goddamn epigram.” [Audience Laughter]. I want to read a couple poems about South Africa.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.3: Brand starts her reading after Maracle with a poem for South Africa. And that is exactly how Maracle had started hers. I am taking all of these audio clips out of their contexts, out of their linear order in which they would’ve been heard in the reading, but, in doing so, I’m trying to bring to the forefront, the connections that are embedded within it and the conversation happening between poets in the reading itself.\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977, from ShortCuts 3.6: They’ll be right up to your feet but that won’t be too bad.\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977, from ShortCuts 3.6: …Penny is the author of Most Recently Transformed, which is a marvelous looking book, as well as a very, very fine book…\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980, from ShortCuts 3.6: [Audience Chatter] …still a bit of… Not much [Audience Laughter]. We’re happy to welcome Leona Gom. [Audience Applause]\n\nArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981, from ShortCuts 3.6: [Audience Chatter] …there’s your friend. There’s a little bit of room if you wanna sit on the floor here!\n\nAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4: This is a poem that I wrote when I was about… oh I don’t know, seven or eight months pregnant… [Pause] …Bird of Passage. I wrote it in Vancouver… spring time again…. Bird of Passage.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.4: Here, was Marlatt in 1970 saying that she had written this poem ‘Bird of Passage’ while she was pregnant. That is significant in and of itself when thinking of the body but now I was hearing it with the full resonance of her recent conversation with Shearer and Buchart from the podcast and what Marlatt says when the date of the recording, July 1969, is mentioned…\n\nArchival audio played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”, 2019, from ShortCuts 3.4: Interesting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I’d had when I wrote those poems. What was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading – there was so much – my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being…\n\nKelly Cubbon, S3E9, SpokenWeb Podcast: […] I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of slightly different context to indicate.\n\nZoom interview with Kaie Kellough, from ShortCuts 3.5: : You asked me [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it and it’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself and to – I didn’t realize it was as far back as 2016, because it feels a lot sooner. I remember what I was thinking about. I remember what my poetry, my poetic preoccupations were at the time. I remember how far that poem came because it was young and sentimental when I wrote it, and then it was not like that by the time it was published. It took on a different sort of personality by the time it was published. But yeah, I remember everything that I was thinking about. I remember how excited I was about it. Yeah. It’s just a — so thank you.\n\nZoom interview, Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.5: Thank you so much.\n\nArchival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: [Performing “Chambersonic”] Let form be oral / a foundation / sonority / an impossible lone sound / recording / the ghost of sound [whispered] the ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation of phonemes. Distorted – [overlapping voice] fragments. Re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.8: This. This is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider: what is this this-ness of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound?\n\nArchival Audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: [Reading poem] Wanting you, I forgot you. You erased my name. Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: The emotional weight of archives.\n\nArchival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7: [Reading from “Naked Poems”] In the gold darkening light / you dressed / I hid my face in my hair. / The room that held you is still here. / You brought me clarity / gift after gift I wear / poems / naked, in the sunlight / on the floor [sound of pages turning]…\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: To what extent are we trying, trying to remember or trying to erase a memory that may not be ours in the first place –\n\nArchival Audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: [Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name.\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.2: — and yet having heard it, that memory can never be forgotten. The feeling of having heard it is still there.\n\n[Ambient music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. ShortCuts is transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n[End of music]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9665","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.2, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing, 21 November 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-sarah-cipes-about-feminist-audio-editing/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"The wrong file is linked on the podcast site, so this episode cannot be listened to/downloaded and some information is missing.\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cipes, Sarah. “It’s more of a feeling… Digitizing Reel-to-Reel for the SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection.” AmpLab, online.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Shearer, Karis. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 21 April, 2022.\\n\\nHeld, Virginia. The Ethics of Care. Oxford University Press, 2005.\\n\\nHobbs, Catherine. “Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers.” Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives. Eds. Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012, pp. 181–92.\\n\\nWanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch. Eds. Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer.  Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549786460160,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out of the archives and into the world. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University. It is a conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes. \n\nAt the time of recording this conversation, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” In fact, this paper was already in conversation – that is, part of a collaborative article in development with Dr. Deanna Fong and Dr. Karis Shearer who have developed feminist listening methodologies in their introduction to Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch and to their article, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” Listen to ShortCuts Live! to hear Sarah talk with Katherine about feminist redaction when working with sensitive materials in audio archives, and where this collaborative research will take her next.\n\nShortCuts, Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing\n\n[Theme music]\n\nKatherine McLeod [host intro]: Welcome to ShortCuts. This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out into the world and records them as conversations, live. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University in Montreal.\n\n[Theme music ends]\n\nAmid the bustle of a packed week of talks and workshops, it was such a treat to sit down with some of the presenters and have a conversation about their archival audio. It was especially meaningful considering how ShortCuts started in 2020 and so nearly all of its episodes have been recorded during the pandemic, and mostly in my closet. It felt great to be sitting down with folks at our microphones in the same space, and to embrace the background noise around us – after all, it was all happening live! In this ShortCuts Live, you’ll hear my conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes. At the time of the recording, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” We sat down together at microphones set up in Concordia’s 4th Space, and you can hear the buzz of the symposium behind us – reminding us that this is being recorded live…\n\nKatherine: Welcome to ShortCuts. We’re recording this ShortCuts, live, in 4th Space at Concordia University during the SpokenWeb Sound Institute. I’m here with Sarah Cipes. Thanks so much for joining me, Sarah!\n\nSarah: Thanks so much for having me. This is very exciting.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Well, the reason that I asked Sarah to join me is that, during the SpokenWeb Symposium she delivered a paper that was really based on an audio clip. It was really all about one audio clip, which seemed perfect for ShortCuts because we love diving into the complexity of a single audio clip. So I thought that one way of starting would be for Sarah and I to listen to the clip together…\n\n \n\nArchival audio,Warren Tallman: \n\nNow one thing I’m curious about [inaudible – distortion]….\n\n \n\nArchival audio, Gladys Hindmarch:\nThat the young recognize, the elders two years older.\n\n \n\nArchival audio, Warren Tallman:\nAnd they’re both, they’re both and, but now…\n\n \n\nKatherine: So rather than starting with a question of “What are we listening to?” I’m going to ask you, Sarah, what it’s like to listen to that clip – here and now in this moment…\n\n \n\nSarah: That was a really lovely refresher and a nice moment – and, I don’t know if you noticed I was smiling while I was listening to it. I am really pleased with what we were able to sort of tease out of the sound that was left when the voices are gone. And I – I actually said something in my talk on Tuesday that I hadn’t planned to say – and that I hadn’t thought of previously – but I was being sparked by all of these amazing questions and thoughtful comments from the audience – and that is that I wanted people to feel, when they’re listening to it, uncomfortable, as if they’re trying to listen in onto a conversation that they shouldn’t be listening to, like trying to listen through a door. I think that even though this is a preliminary version of the idea of the feminist edit, I think that I was able to bring home that feeling of discomfort and of tonal variance… And, yeah, tonal discomfort for the listener that you should feel when you’re trying to hear other people’s gossip <laugh>.\n\n \n\nKatherine: You refer to this as a feminist edit, and what do you mean by that, generally?\n\n \n\nSarah: So when I initially started working with the idea of feminist edits, it was really, it’s really a large idea. It can, it can really incorporate anything that comes within the idea of feminist ethics of care. So, I looked at Virginia Held’s Ethics of Care, as a big proponent of my understanding of what to do with feminist edits. And I also looked at Catherine Hobbs’s discussions and scholarship about literary archives and what it means to be respectful when you’re archiving.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>\n\n \n\nSarah: And so bringing that into audio was a really interesting idea for me because redaction restriction and censorship and all of these things that have a lot of negative feelings around them for researchers can actually be turned into positive things, I think, particularly within audio that actually allow users to listen to tapes that they might otherwise be totally barred from.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And so my desire was to create sound edits that allow the listener to hear the vast majority of the tape while also protecting the privacy of those on the tape, or even in this case, someone who’s mentioned who’s not there. But really a feminist edit could also be about amplifying voices that are not usually central to the microphone.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yeah, I can imagine – it makes me think of in the 1963 Poetry Conference that was recorded by Fred Wah’s tape recorder. That now is at UBCO <laugh> I think you have that recorder. When listening to those recordings it’s so interesting to hear a question asked, and you can tell that it’s a voice from very far back in the room, and often those voices are women because – you know, you really hear it – the men are up front, closest to the mic. And, you know, hearing say a question asked by a voice that is, say, quite soft in terms of the recording and the placement in the room, and just like literally amplifying that voice, let alone all of the other ways that voices could be amplified. That just just makes me think of the, the potential there for centering voices through audio edits – making them clearer, making them louder – on a very technical level.\n\n \n\nSarah: There really is so much that that could be done. And that’s why I love the idea of the feminist edit within archives because archiving itself is such an intuitive practice and sound editing. These kinds of sound edits have all been very intuitive and very personal. And I think that every single person who encountered and tried to edit this tape would’ve ended up with a different edit, which is really, it’s really cool. It allows you to think about how people’s brains work in terms of what: Do you want the listener to feel when they can’t hear specific kinds of audio?\n\n \n\nKatherine Yes, and you’ve been working with Dr. Karis Shearer and, I believe, [Dr.] Deanna Fong as well, and could you speak to a little bit about that collaboration?\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s been really wonderful. I am lucky enough to have Dr. Karis Shearer as my supervisor. She has just been such an amazing, inspiring person leading me through this. I tend to focus more on the practical, and in those ways I sometimes leave the theoretical behind and I forget to ground my work in theory. And so working with Karis and Deanna has been really amazing and really important for me because it has pushed me to step back and say: Okay, I’m trying to create this practical edit, but what am I grounding my work in? Where is this coming from? Instead of just assuming that everyone understands my desire to do a feminist edit. You have to express, you know, why that’s necessary. Where does this work already exist? Where did it begin? Where am I? Where am I pulling from?\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: So in terms of understanding how to ground my work within feminist ethics of care, Deanna and Karis have been there sort of showing me the light <laugh> – and giving me readings!\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yes <laugh> I can imagine that augmenting and building upon your training in library sciences and just really bringing that theoretical richness to the technical skills that you have already. It makes me think too that the way that like redaction works in the archives and say in the print archives or maybe something is redacted. Here you are redacting through audio editing, but the important thing is that you’re keeping that audio somewhere else. Could you explain how that works? How does the audio remain while also being redacted?\n\n \n\nSarah: Yes. This is something that’s really important to me based on my work in archives, I think I may have overly expressed this actually in my talk because it’s so necessary, but transparency is key in every archive. And I now realize it’s not just necessary for the practical reasons that you would – that I generally – think of, but also for ethical reasons.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And so I have been working with digitizing audio digitizing the sound box collection, specifically the reel-to-reels at UBCO at the AMP Lab. And that has been – that is my joy. I love, love working with reel-to-reel. It’s actually been really interesting because a lot of people at this conference have been talking about sound as ephemeral. And to me it’s, it’s very physical.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s attached to this whole, to working with this machine to being so careful with these amazing tapes. And so the way that we are maintaining them is obviously we are keeping the original magnetic tape recordings, very carefully. And they’ve been archived and gently babied because they are – I call them my babies <laugh> – and then also, upon digitizing them, you have to work to a specific. There’s audio specifications – within, that’s just understood – that’s necessary within archival maintenance of digitized recordings. And so you digitize the tape, which means that you play the tape on its original on a playback machine that’s able to do that; put it through a secondary, a mix-preamp or some other secondary source, and then directly into your computer; and you digitize it at a high enough rate and specificity that it sounds almost exactly the same. And in fact, if it’s done to the highest standards, sounds exactly the same. So you can’t differentiate. And then you maintain that. That’s your master access copy, and you do not edit that copy. You save that, and it’s for no one, it <laugh> it exists solely in case of emergency. Really, and then you can make copies of that, and edit them. So what I’m playing with is not the original.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right, okay.\n\n \n\nSarah: For its own safety. <Laughter> And then you can also save those. Your copied files as lower quality so that you can make them more accessible. Because not everyone has the ability to play wav files.\n\n \n\nKatherine: That makes sense. You have original or the preservation copy and then you’re making the edits on the digital files. I also love what you said about sound as being very, very physical, tangible and just, you know, the way that you described working with these recordings. I think as a last question or reflection. We’ve talked… We’ve moved closer and closer to the sound through our conversation, and I’m wondering if you could speak to the difference between for you, for the difference between editing and leaving silence versus editing and leaving some suggestion of sound, whether that’s visual – looking at the sound waves – or audible in what we’re listening to.\n\n \n\nSarah: I love having both available. I love being able to look at the wave forms and listen to the audio at the same time. They’re visually beautiful and that’s a big part of it, but also it’s sort of, it’s sort of lets you know what to expect, like what’s coming up when you’re looking at the waveform and playing the sound. At the same time. I personally prefer to have ambient sound occurring during the silences, during the redactions, if you want to call them that. I think that it is more implicative of like, the world is still continuing, we’re holding space for this to happen, and just because you can’t hear the words doesn’t mean that the conversation has stopped.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: So I think that’s really important. I also showed a clip in which I just had the, I had the sound removed, all of the vocals removed. And because the tape that I used didn’t have a lot of ambient noise, it was actually really beautifully recorded. It ended up being essentially silent, in the, in the background of that. But for a lot of archives, if you are listening to tapes that were recorded in loud areas or there’s a lot of background noise, if you do remove the vocals, you’re still going to have all of this delicious background sound. So it’s really as with everything each, each object is, is so unique.\n\n \n\nKatherine: So how do you remove the vocals? What tool do you use?\n\n \n\nSarah: It’s so easy. It’s actually, it’s so – Audacity’s most recent version, which is 3.1.3, and I use Audacity because it’s free and it’s open source software, so it’s always improving. And it’s also available to archives even that have a lot of financial constraints and staffing constraints. There’s literally a tool called Vocal Isolation and Removal, and you just high highlight, that’s it. You just highlights the part that you want. So that’s how it leaves, it leaves the background noise. That’s, Yeah. That, So what, what, what we were listening to in that that middle portion that was background or was that, That was distortion. <Laugh>. That was distortion. So in the, in the final edit that I liked the most, the way that I was able to maintain the sound of the conversation because there was so little background noise was to use a distortion element called the VO coder. And so while I still had the vocals in there, I added the VO coder, which added distortion around the vocals, kind of fuzzed them up a little, and then you remove the vocals, and so the, the sound is still there. It didn’t, I think I expressed this. I need to, I would like to do further work because what I really wanted was sort of a smoother conversation tone where you can hear it you can hear it sounds more like speech. I think I did this in my, in my discussion, but sort of like the Charlie Brown teacher.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Right.\n\n \n\nSarah: That’s what I was going for…\n\n \n\nKatherine: Hearing that intonation of speech up the, the fluctuations up and down it, well, we could hear it a bit there, but it, it’s, Yeah, I can imagine then you’re even more, you’re aware that you’re not hearing something, but you’re also hearing something and you can, you’re – you’re hearing the fluctuations in the conversation, but not the conversation itself, not the content. It’s so important to know that there’s audio there – there are things to listen to – but also that you know, it’s we don’t have to have access to everything. And in fact, ethically it, it’s not right to have access to everything. And so how to be able to make audio accessible, while still respecting that, respecting the communities that the recordings are from, respecting the individuals and the voices on them, on those recordings because it, it so easily the recordings could just get shelved away and they’re then never listened to. So trying to balance that it’s really exciting that you’re, you’re doing this work. When we know that something’s there, it’s also, it’s tempting to want to hear it. And so it, I think what you talked about about uncomfortableness too, it’s also this sense of even catching oneself, being like: Oh, I want to hear it! And then thinking: Well, wait – am I, am I the listener for this? And realizing that actually you’re, you’re maybe not the person. You’re not in that room, you’re not listening, you’re not privy to that conversation. But that, that sort of checking our impulse of wanting to know everything as researchers and recognizing that that is actually that can actually be problematic too.\n\n \n\nSarah: What you’re speaking to is actually a larger archival issue in terms of wanting to have everything.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nSarah: And the idea of leaving space was actually something that came out of archival theory surrounding the archive, the capital ‘A’ – Archive – you know, the institution as not necessarily being a place that should have everything. And that, as opposed to maintaining collections that really belong elsewhere, what they should do is hold space and tell researchers: we don’t have that because it doesn’t belong to us. That’s not ours. And so I’ve tried to take that idea of sort of thoughtfulness and space and bring that down to the level of the personal – to the individual – and, and now to audio.\n\n \n\nKatherine: Yes, I think what you’ve, what you’re working on, it is holding space in sound. And thank you for sharing this with me today here live and shortcuts live and with our listeners. So thank you so much, Sarah.\n\n \n\nSarah: Thank you, Katherine. This has been great.\n\n \n\n[Music begins]\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod [Outro]: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. A special thanks to this month’s guest, Sarah Cipes. Thanks to supervising producer Kate Moffatt, sound designer Miranda Eastwood, and transcriber Kelly Cubbon. ShortCuts is written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n \n\n[Music ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9666","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.3, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project Archives, 20 February 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/f7991804-23c4-4608-8996-9b9b7fdce603/audio/7eb476a2-d59e-403b-bb78-019d065205d9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-4-3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:26:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"25,802,336 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-4-3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-02-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The Atwater Poetry Project, https://www.atwaterlibrary.ca/events/atwater-poetry-project/\\n\\n“Performing the Atwater Poetry Project Archives, guest curated by Katherine McLeod and Klara du Plessis, featuring the sounds of poets from the APP archives,” 20 February 2023, https://spokenweb.ca/events/performing-the-atwater-poetry-project-archive/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549787508736,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["ShortCuts presents another episode of ShortCuts Live! This month’s episode was recorded as a live conversation on Zoom with the current curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, Faith Paré. As a former SpokenWeb undergraduate RA, Faith’s SpokenWeb contributions have included editorial and curatorial work on Desire Lines; an interview with Kaie Kellough on SPOKENWEBLOG; performing as a spoken word poet in Black Writers Out Loud; leading a virtual listening practice on Black noise; and reading her poetry at SpokenWeb’s “Sounding Undernames” at Blue Metropolis. This is all to say that Faith had a wealth of experience to draw upon when, as a curator, she was handed a folder of poetry recordings.\n\nHow to reactivate the archival past of the Atwater Poetry Project? What is it like to curate the past and future of a reading series? Find out by listening to ShortCuts Live! A conversation with Katherine McLeod and Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project archives.\n\n[Music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to ShortCuts. This month on ShortCuts, we’re here – live – on Zoom with the Atwater Poetry Project curator Faith Paré. Faith joins me for this conversation to talk about the Atwater Poetry Project archives. These archives are community archives that are being integrated into SpokenWeb in order to preserve them and to make them more discoverable. As part of the Atwater Poetry Project’s programming, Faith reached out to me and Klara du Plessis to see if we’d be interested in curating an event for the Atwater Poetry Project that would activate play and remix the archives in ways that would be both performative and also exploratory. What could we make with these archives? What would it be like to re-listen to clips from this reading series in the very same place in which it has always taken place? Klara and I will be undertaking this performance of the Atwater Poetry Project Archives on the same night that this shortcuts is released. And with all of our conversations about this event with faith, it felt like a shortcuts conversation every time we talked about it. And so I had to get some of those conversations on tape. Hi, Faith, thanks for joining me here today on ShortCuts Live!\n\nFaith Paré: Thanks for having me again, Katherine. It’s really a pleasure.\n\n[Music ends]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Thank you so much. And it really is a ShortCuts Live! By the fact that my three month old daughter is also here with me, and she has already been making a few noises, and she’ll be making some noises throughout. And, for long time ShortCuts listeners, you’ll remember that back in season two, the voice of a poet’s young daughter has already been heard on ShortCuts, so we welcome sounds like that here.\n\nSo, just to give listeners a little bit of background, the Atwater Poetry Project was started by poet Oana Avasilichioaei in 2004. Since then, the series has hosted over 300 poetry readings by established and emerging Canadian poets. The curators of the series have been Avasilichioaei, then it was Katia Grubisic, followed by Darren Bifford, then Simon Jory Steven-Gillie, and Charlotte Harrison, followed by Deanna Radford, then Rachel McCrum. And now you, Faith Paré. What was it like to take on this role as curator of the Atwater Poetry Project? What was most exciting at the start?\n\nFaith Paré: That’s a great question of kind of trying to boil down what the role specifically is because I think by nature and also by the fact that arts administration is so all encompassing and often such a juggle of what you need to do, it changes so often. I think fundamentally it is about trying to listen to your surroundings, I think, and be perceptive to what’s happening,and the different strains of literary existence that are going on around you. And keeping in mind that I am not trying to make it sound too much like following trends but rather trying to kind of put together a larger story of what a poetry scene essentially is – and the different networks and interconnections and entanglements that make that and conflicts. So fundamentally, I think it is about listening, but it’s also about wanting to listen to not only to the kind of literary city around me but also to what people are, might be looking for in the audience as well. But I do have to say it’s a big act to follow coming after, particularly Rachel and the amazing way that she was able to engage, transition, first of all audiences online and then engage them so well. And really try and think about the expansiveness of the online reading form as its own phenomenon, not just as like just something to fill in until we’re back in-person.\n\nKatherine McLeod: You took on the role when it was still online on Crowdcast, which Rachel had started during her time as curator in the Pandemic. And that really was an opportunity to think about the way that the Atwater Poetry Project does always program two readers. So there is this conversation between the two readers, but it seemed that at least to me, that when during Rachel’s curation and then into your curation, there’s really this emphasis on the relationships between those two poets.\n\nFaith Paré: Yeah, totally. And I think it goes back again to the heart of poets are just people, often it’s two poets. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. It depends on the kind of event. Particularly I’m thinking about a great reading back in January, 2022. One of my first ones with Gillian Sze who, this was a very important reading for me because she, even though this gig was booked before my time, she’s been a long time mentor of mine in poetry as well as Rebecca Păpacaru. And both of them have wanted to read alongside each other for a long time, but hadn’t had the chance. And during that reading, they would actually they started to read work from their books based on what the previous person had done, because there was a line or an image or a theme that reminded them of something that made them go, oh, I’m actually going to change things up a bit, but I think this might actually fit together really well.\n\nAnd I love that quality of being able to kind of echo each other or answer to each other in this very particular environment for the one, one-night-only quality. Another early reading that I organized was with Tolu Oloruntoba, who’s based on the west coast and with Montreal spoken word artist Jason Blackbird, Salman. Both of them work in very different fields, but I thought about their particular kind of tender, quiet thundering, essentially of their voices together for a really long time. And even though they hadn’t met each other before, they checked out each other’s work and were even saying to each other that they felt like there was a really strong resonance there. So that’s, that’s the really exciting thing for me to also bring together strangers and be able to introduce them and be like, it’s kind of like a dinner party or something, <laugh> being able to be like, I know a lot about you two and I think you guys would actually get along. And it’s a really awesome opportunity when you’re right! <Laugh>.\n\nKatherine McLeod: So this takes us to the archives and I’m interested in, you know, what it’s been like as the, you know, the curator of this series to also be handed these archives. What are these archives?\n\nFaith Paré: The APP archives are interesting, I think, for me as a former or SpokenWeb RA, in that they’re all digital. <Laugh>, Which, you know, sounds kind of silly and mundane to say perhaps, but because so much of our work at the research network has been thinking through questions around, you know, how do we take analog materials, sometimes very fragile analog materials, and then transfer them into the digital, the ways that things can be gained, but also lost in that transformation that allows for for more distribution and disperse all those materials discoverability. But what does like the, the materiality of the object also do? Well? These these archives and recording from the beginning were digital. They were done on Zoom recorders. And they were, I think another thing that became a kind of inherited foundational part of the series by accident that somebody else was, when curators started, I’m not even sure exactly who from the timeline that I do have.\n\nI believe Katia Grubisic was the one who was starting to do it more regularly. Though I believe Oana may have also had some recordings as well. This is also part of the journey with this as I’m trying to fill in missing pieces. But basically from what I have, it seems like the series started to be regularly recorded in 2010. This was also really firmly embraced by the library too, in thinking about the Atwater Library and Computer Center’s mandate – their mission is widespread education on digital literacy particularly for working class and elderly communities who are often left behind when it comes to digital literacy education. And also in just the mandate of being a library for the public, making those materials available. And I think it was kind of forward thinking of them, particularly because so much of event culture and the inc excitement of event culture is the one-night-only quality.\n\nYes. But also  the availability of these archival recordings uploaded onto the website after the fact means greater accessibility. It means an archive for the poets or attendees to return to and revisit a means discoverability. It means bolstering a CV, potentially, because you have a recording. It means being able to find a piece that, you know, you were trying to track down. I’m a poet, but you can’t remember the name, and then you stumble across it again in an audio piece. It’s and it’s also being able to capture and preserve the, the interesting experiments of the one night only and be able to reverberate that through time. This collaboration with spoken w will finally allow its these MP3s to get a little bit out of the Montreal bubble and more into a, a national context, especially as we really pride ourselves from about bringing poets from all across the country\n\nKatherine McLeod: That makes me think of times when being at the Atwater readings and hearing, say, Deanna Radford say that, you know, the evening’s being recorded. And it made me think about the extent to which the audience and the poets are aware of the night being recorded, and whether that makes a difference or not. Often when they would say that you know, I’d sort of think to myself, oh, right, it’s being recorded, but I wasn’t very necessarily aware of the recording taking place. And so it’s still, it just felt like that information was there, but I soon forgot <laugh>. And I guess I wondered whether you have any sense, actually maybe the transition online and then back to in person whether there’s a… to what extent does the fact that it’s being recorded influence the event?\n\nFaith Paré: I really love that question. And it, it expands on some of my own thinking that I’ve done with Jason Camlot and Carlos Pittella about some of the new collections at Spoken Web like the Enough Said series which I was working on for a while, alongside Carlos, which is a video collection – one of the first video collections I believe, in the network. We were thinking particularly about the fact that, you know, what, what does this do to the poet’s performance and the way that people carry themselves in the space and also what does it do for I guess the, the person who’s perceiving the event afterward. So we were thinking along, along the lines of the wave Enough Said, for example, was a performance poetry series mostly was really embracing an ethos of spoken word and like a kind of first big wave of, you know, acknowledging different kinds of performed traditions of poetry under a kind of umbrella of spoken word in Montreal.\n\nAnd the fact that was video recorded allowed for people to not only to capture the dynamic choreography that can occur in different performances. You can also see how people are reacting to a work, which is huge. You can perceive what the environment was like in a way that it’s clearly laid out in front of you visually, or sometimes audio-wise, it could be more difficult to perceive, you know, what is that moving? Is that share, is that a desk? Is it getting in the way of something? Is it part of the, the main goings on of, or the stage goings on of the evening? Or is that to the side? It is a different level of information that is being communicated, and it means that people can sometimes be more complicated in what they’re portraying.\n\n: But what I really have loved about audio recording and I think spoken web is really ingrained this in me is the kind of fly on the wall quality that an audio recording has, that I think there is an element just somehow, maybe it’s because in some ways sound isn’t perceived as with the same kind of surveillance quality as the visual in our contemporary period. Sometimes it can, sometimes it’s not perceived in that way. There’s, there’s something about the audio recorder being its own listener too, or maybe the a signal of future listeners to come, it fades comfortably into the background. A of course, you know, there are poets where they may hate the sound of their voice, or maybe they wanna read something that particular night that feels like a risk for them. And they don’t wanna release it for, to the, to the public afterward because they, they wanna keep that private to the, the space that they were in.\n\nOr maybe they are sound practitioners and because sound is their main way of working, they might want to develop a piece and they’re actually like, well, I don’t want to release this audio yet because I might be releasing this piece on a, on a record soon. So those are also ways that audio can have stakes that makes it incompatible with some poet’s practice, and wanting to acknowledge that. But there’s, there’s something about the series where people seem kind of genuinely excited or just maybe just perfectly fine and relieved with having another ear in the room. I think this is also a testament to the way that previous curators have been really gentle and caring and genuine with poets of checking in with what they want to share, what they don’t want to share, like having that ability to go back and forth make that dynamic relationship between curator and poet. Something that doesn’t have to exist as like this permanent archival object forever, you know?\n\nAnd I think there is an interesting switch when the pandemic happened and Crowdcast became the main platform for the APP, which now was involved, you know a level of intimacy for a lot of people of you are not on the same kind of level of engagement, I guess, in that you can’t see the audience staring back at you, at least on the Crowdcast platform. You are kind of alone with your screen and the other poets and the curator who may also be on screen, and depending on person you are who might hate that, it cuts off, you know, your body from like, you know, your chest to your head. So if you are, or you’re someone who does a lot of choreography in your work, you might reasonably be frustrated.\n\nIf you play instrumentation enjoying your work, you might recently be frustrated, but you also might feel more confident in if you’re a quieter person, you worried about, if you worry about being perceived, if, like the idea of a, a full house freaks you out, being able to have your work listened to and appreciated, but without the pressure of having pairs of eyes look at you might also be a relief and a welcome kind of gesture. I think what I’ve been learning more and more about this down this curation journey is like, there is really no perfect way of being able to host an event, but also to document an event even in a live event because of the kinds of people you could be leaving out that there are so many people who want to be, be able to enjoy poetry, but we’re unable for different ways and different ways and means.\n\n: So there’s no perfect way of documenting these, but how do you contend with the particular stakes, challenges and materials that you have? But I do have to say, being able to be back in the auditorium, and particularly with the sound recorder is something that I’ve personally really enjoyed just because of the way that the, the sound recorder can be a little less intimidating than like, perhaps a big DSLR lens in your face that a videographer and big camera recording equipment in the space might do.\n\nKatherine McLeod: I think a video can sometimes almost give this illusion as if, as if this is what it looked like if you were there. And in fact, no, it only looked like that to that one field of vision going through that camera lens. And I love how audio we’re so, we’re just so aware that we’re getting, we’re getting sound, we’re getting a sense of the room, the voices, but there’s so much that we also are not hearing and we’re not seen, and we’re not sensing, we’re not feeling, and that because we’re so aware of those, the lack of that we also don’t trick ourselves into thinking that we have everything. And I think that’s something when listening to the recordings that I was certainly, I was drawn to recordings that really you could almost hear the room and you could almost hear the, whether it’s like kind of the, the, the voice echoing through the room or else moments of, of applause or laughter or the poets directly speaking to the audience. And even still in those moments when listening, we have to do a lot of work in order to really imagine what it would be like to be there listening. And here I’m thinking about, there’s a moment when Tawhida Tanya Evanson speaks directly to the audience from her reading in 2016…\n\nArchival audio of Tawhida Tanya Evanson, from the Atwater Poetry Project, 2016:\n\nApplause is this crazy habit we have, and it’s a beautiful thing, but maybe just a moment of silence with the eyes closed can also be beautiful. If you’ll indulge, if you’ll indulge me, please close your eyes for a moment and just take a deep breath on your own. [Deep breath.]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Suddenly we’re then imagining that room and we’re imagining that space and what it would’ve looked like and felt like to be there. A last question here is, what’s next? What’s next for the Atwater Poetry Project archives? What are some of the next steps?\n\nFaith Paré: So I think at this point, I’ve collated the best I can in a version one, essentially of the files that we have. And part of my personal next steps is to be able to knock on the doors digital doors, but also possibly literal doors of previous curators looking for missing digital files or things that were linked on the website, but broken. So I have currently <laugh>, you know, I, I have about all just around 200 readings just so far recordings from from 2010 to the present. And there are still a lot more that are to be, you know, found or collated or at least declared, never recorded or pote like lost and, you know, we’ll see if it ever comes up again. But I think, you know, next steps are really to allow the, the Montreal team to, to give the, the files more of a listen, you know, you and Clara have been the people to really take a most of a listen to ’em so far.\n\nBut to be able to have more fresh ears on it and think about our approaches of how do we want to make this discoverable and how do we want to continue animating these recordings? What is important to transcribe and document and these recordings? And even just thinking about like, the fact that previously these were there, there was a kind of mixture of how, like these recordings were categorized by both, by both pe like the people who are reigning, but also kind of by event. I think also one thing that is important to me as I, you know, I think about where we go next is the ways, or the ways that, how do we bring in poets who have animated our space and acknowledge the kind of work that they, they have done, and and the way that they have made the series into what it is today.\n\nThat’s why I feel really excited about this project, particularly and your performative performed curation digging back into the archives, I think one thing I said really early on is that I don’t want this to feel like just some kind of like, narrow celebration of the E p p, you know it’s really important to me that this is a kind of laboratory for, you know, ex exploring the ways that poetry can sound different presences, but also the ways that others are silenced or muted. And the ways that, you know, I think as a reading series, I, I wanna believe that my job is perhaps complimentary, but also different from the role of like the publishing industry, for example. The publishing industry particularly is interested in having a new kind of cohort of people who are brought to the table with new work every year.\n\nAnd that’s all great and fantastic. We all love new work, but also wanting to think about who has been at the table with us for a while. I think, you know, one of the most genuinely moving emails that we’ve, we’ve gone so far was a message from Gerry Shikatani, who is an amazing Japanese Canadian writer, sound performer, experimentalist – also food writer and critic – and that we’ve had different scholars at Spoken Web right on his work, and it was brought to my attention by you and Klara that you wanted to weave his work into this piece and writing him for permissions and seeing how genuinely touched he was to be involved in this work that he said, paraphrasing, that he was really honoured, that people were still thinking about the kind of work that he was doing, you know, over a decade ago was something that felt important to me, really struck at the heart of what I want a reading series to do, that it’s not just a, a space for people to pass through, but really a place of return, of being able to come back and think about work, think about community, think about previous writers who have impacted us.\n\nKatherine McLeod: What a generative approach to the archive and to the series. Thank you so much for, for talking about it in this short, short conversation – ShortCuts Live!\n\n[Music begins]\n\nFaith Paré: Thank you. And I’m, I’m really hoping that folks may be able, if they are in Montreal, to come out to your event debuting this engagement with the archive on Monday, February 20th 7:00 PM the Adair Auditorium at the Atwater Library and Computer Center. It will be in the show notes, I’m sure I will, I will send all the appropriate deeds. Hopefully we will also have it recorded in some kind of way for that preservation as well, and to also add this into its own kind of archival place too. So I really appreciate being here and I really appreciate your work so far on this. Thank you so much.\n\nKatherine McLeod: Thank you so much. Faith.\n\n[Music ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9667","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.4, ShortCuts Live! Talking with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya, 20 March 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/f8ce0167-1805-4a05-8efd-481726b7058c/audio/c98427aa-fbf2-4d5e-aa26-9ccef9fd9cb9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sc-4-4.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:17:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"17,031,044 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sc-4-4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-03-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["Draft transcript"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Academics on Air.” Produced by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 2 May 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/.\\n\\n“‘A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio.” Presentation by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, a Graduate Symposium. Concordia University, 16 May 2022.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549788557312,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! It is a conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya about their collaboration in producing “Academics on Air” (May 2022) for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode became a paper that Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea co-presented at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. After that presentation, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod sat down with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea around a microphone in the SpokenWeb Amp Lab at Concordia University. They talked about processes of collaboration and archival listening that shaped their work. Starting with one audio clip as the short ‘cut’ that caught their attention in the archives, they talk about about context of that clip in the Voiceprint archives, the potential for podcasting to be a radical act of unarchiving, and what makes recordings of a radio show a unique task for cataloguers working with literary sounds recordings, and much more.\n\n[Music]\n\nKatherine McLeod: This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! It is a conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya about their collaboration in producing the episode “Academics on Air” for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode was released in May 2022. And that episode became a paper that they co-presented at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute also in May 2022. After that presentation, I sat down with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea around a microphone in the SpokenWeb Amp Lab at Concordia University. We talked about the collaboration and archival listening that shaped their work. Starting with one audio clip as the short ‘cut’ that caught their attention in the archives, they talk about about context of that clip in the Voiceprint archives, the potential for podcasting to be a radical act of unarchiving, and what makes recordings of a radio show a unique task for cataloguers working with literary sounds recordings, and much more. Plus we hear three collaborators finally talking, and laughing, in the same room together. You can hear a bit of the room’s hum but hey that’s all part of ShortCuts Live!…\n\n \n\n[Music ends]\n\nKatherine McLeod: Just as you’re talking, I was like, oh this sounds great. I’m –.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne, Ariel Kroon, Chelsea Miya: <laugh> <laugh>.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Oh good!\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Check the –\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Just pull a Jars and just turn it on and just start interviewing before we know it\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Yeah, exactly….\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Right.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:I’m going do the same thing that I have done for the other ones that I’ve done this week, which is actually go into “podcast voice” to do the opening <laugh>. I feel like somehow you need headphones to go into podcast voice…\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Yeah.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: You gotta put it on… as part of the suit.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Exactly. <laugh> <laugh> I’m going stay present with you, with the three of you here… So, we’ll start…\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Welcome to Shortcuts. On this ShortCuts, we’re recording live at the SpokenWeb Sound Institute. I’d like to thank Chelsea and Ariel and Nick for joining me on this Shortcuts Live! We’re recording this one in the AMP Lab on the sixth floor of the Library Building at Concordia University. We’re surrounded by audio equipment and silence… So thank you for joining me. Would you like to just say hello and introduce yourself on the mic? Go ahead, Nick.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Hello, I’m Nick Beauchesne. I teach at TRU in Kamloops and the University of Alberta in Edmonton.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Hi, I’m Ariel Kroon. I am an RA on the SpokenWeb U Alberta team.\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: I’m Chelsea Miya, and I’m a postdoc at U Alberta with SpokenWeb.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Thank you. So the three of you just presented a paper this week at the SpokenWeb Symposium and the audio clip that we’ll be listening to today and we’ll be using to inform and guide our conversation is a clip that you played in that presentation. So, to start our conversation, I’d like to play that clip and to listen to it together.\n\n \n\nArchival Audio: [Sound quality makes it audible that archival audio is playing.] A main issue that I’m concerned with, especially as it relates to language, is what kinds of assumptions do people have about sex rules that they don’t recognize? And language is a tremendous carrier of those assumptions, but we don’t know how to self-examine them. Yes, people are beginning to realize that there is a male culture, there’s a female culture, and culture and language are terribly intertwined. But the question is, where have we not even learned how to look and where is it that people are resisting looking? I mean, if you say to somebody, the pronouns you use say tremendous amounts about your beliefs and your culture, people will laugh at you.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Alright, so could you tell me and listeners what we’re listening to?\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: So, that was a clip from the Voiceprint episode, “A Room and a Voice of One’s Own.” Voice Print was a campus radio show that was produced between, I think, 1979 to 83, 84, so about four or five years. It was hosted and produced by a student, Jars Balan, who was in the English Department at that time and was really embedded in poetry culture and all the really cool scholarship and creative works that were happening at University of Alberta. There’s also a bit of background about the history of campus radio at that time, which is really cool, and which we talk about a lot in our podcast episode. But what we actually came to present on was this specific episode on women’s voices and on gendered language, which really stood out to us, all of us when we were listening to the archive and to that episode in particular.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Yeah, well, I was just going to add to that we are recording this in an English department – we’re recording a podcast in an English department – and that radio show was made through an English department. Yes, but, you were saying in the presentation, it wasn’t recorded in an English department?\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: No, it was actually Jars’s studio was in the basement of the biology building on the University of Alberta campus. And it was not just the basement – it was the basement below the basement. So they were down quite a ways and he talked about how guests found it very odd, and a little bit intimidating, to go visit him there, and so they would try to put them at ease, and that was just very, very cool for all of us to hear.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: That was a clip from Jo-Ann Kolmes, and she came on as a guest. She was working as an editor for academic papers. I think maybe an academic journal. And so she was really talking about her practice of feminist editing at the time, and we were so fascinated by what she had to say because it struck us as very resonant and relevant to discussions that are all around us today. And though, back in 1981, they were definitely still talking about gender firmly within the binary of he/she, and, and now we have recognized and there is a linguistic recognition of – that there’s much more out there than the binary, and so language is adapting to that. So we found that extremely fascinating, the way that it speaks to issues today.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:Yeah. And especially how it came out of feminist editing, as you said. That seems to resonate. [as] even in this conference, we heard a paper by Sarah Cipes talking about feminist editing in audio. And so it’s really interesting that Joanne’s thinking about this was coming from the perspective of editing. You’ve now done a presentation on this audio clip and the Voiceprint recordings that it’s from – the Voiceprint Radio show, that it’s from – you have made a podcast episode for The SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ve attended a listening party for that episode. I’m wondering, for the three of you, what has really stood out in those experiences?\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: I think for me, like what really stood out was… the pleasures and joys and frustrations of working collaboratively with Nick and Ariel and how great it was to do something other than an academic paper, especially after two years of being in isolation, sequestered in my room doing, finishing my dissertation. I’m sure like a lot of people in various professions, but in academia especially it’s isolating being a grad student at any time but during COVID it was especially so. Being able to like have the three of us be brought together for this project was so much fun. And I got so much like energy and like inspiration from, from their different ideas and from learning how to work with people who have different ideas about audio and, and we, all of us brought different, I think, strengths and and perspectives to the experience.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: I think –\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Go ahead.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Yeah, no, I, I think it was very interesting because, as you mentioned, for grad students, especially of English literature, we’re not used to working with other people. And so it was very eye-opening to work on what is traditionally a solitary endeavour along with other people. But then have the added complicated factor of we were all in different provinces–\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: – while we were putting this together. And so we couldn’t, well, we could, we could meet on Zoom simultaneously, but we couldn’t be in the same space editing audio together. And we couldn’t just – I couldn’t just look over and say: Hey Nick, do you mind if I do this and this and this to this clip? Or Hey Chelsea, what do you think about my research into such and such? You know, it was very collaborative and yet at the same time not collaborative because it was so difficult to work with that space between us. And so I was really glad that we were all here together finally at the SpokenWeb conference.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Yeah, I’ve never presented a paper with like other co-authors before – and we split our paper so to read different sections, but also our different roles. Ariel did a lot of like the research and tracking down of documents and tracking down audio clips and that sort of stuff. Chelsea did a lot of like the main kind of composition for our script for like the podcast, and I did a lot of the technical stuff for the editing. I’ve never really been responsible for this. I’m just a useless singer. I’m used to – so for me to step back from, from the limelight and do more technical behind the scenes work as part of the podcast was fun, but also reading the paper, sharing that with other people. And then we all wrote the paper together. So that felt a little more kind of balanced in the sense that our roles maybe weren’t as specialized as they were for the podcast.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: So that was a really great experience.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Yeah, I was interested in that too. The way that often collaboration, um, might take the form of, um, of an article that you write together, but in this case, the first thing that you made together was a podcast episode… And then maybe the paper was closer to maybe a print based –\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: – publication. That’s interesting to hear sort of the roles shifting or how that work pans out and it’s shared.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Well, you know, Klara, Jason, if you’re making a book, call me, call us!\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Yes, it’s possible that you might be collaboratively writing an article <laugh> as the next step of this, which is exciting because it shows how these ideas started in a podcast episode of scholarly research and it will eventually take the form of a print article. Often the print article gets put on a hierarchy above the other, but if you hadn’t made one, you couldn’t get to that other stage. I think starting with the podcast too allowed you to really dive into the sound and think about multiple sound clips and also really reflect on what the podcast is doing as academic scholarship. Which I think you all did so brilliantly in the episode and also in the Listening Party too, really reflecting on what you are doing as academics in making this podcast alongside reflecting on what those who made Voiceprint were doing within an academic institution, which is really a fascinating parallel.\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Yeah. It’s interesting too, like podcasting as this sort of radical act of de-archiving, in that we talk a lot about close listening at SpokenWeb, but I mean – and you do that when you’re doing like time codes and timestamps – but to create something from that, you really listen to it and it becomes like part of you, you ingest it and create something out of it in a way that you don’t necessarily do when you’re doing the sort of laborious, tedious work of digitizing something and creating metadata for it. So, and which is good and valuable work, but it can sometimes be like monkey work in that the focus is more on like doing the sort of repetitive tedious tasks that are removed from actual thoughtful intellectual engagement with your materials. And doing this podcast was a way, I think, at least for me, it felt like so great to be engaging with the material in a different way.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Yeah. Those repetitive, tedious tasks definitely prepared us for doing all that we needed to do for this podcast in terms of close listening and honestly just in terms of discovering that it was there at all. When I first joined SpokenWeb, I started digitizing these radio shows, and at that time we didn’t really have any sort of schema for digitizing them because all of the sort of like accepted practices were for poetry readings. And so I was there as this new RA looking at what had been done before and saying: None of this fits, none of these categories work for this. Oh no, what, what do I do with it? And so it started as this problem. And only later was I, or were we, sort of able to get a little bit more deep into the sound of it and the content of that sound.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: Mm-hmm <affirmative>\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: It’s surprising and incredible in how generative the material is. So you start off, yeah. So I mean, I did a lot of time-stamping before I did anything intellectual and fun, like what we just did. And it’s like, you know, you listen to all, like, first of all, going to the archive to discover this stuff at the University of Albert Alberta archives, which is where we found this, not from the English department closet, like most of our other stuff, so it’s a different archive. We have to track it down. I have to make an acquisition list. Mike approves it. We get the material, it goes to digitization, we get it, we split it in three. So we all time-stamp different episodes of Voiceprint, and that’s when we all kind of fell in love with the show <laugh> and became fans.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: And then from there, yeah, then you go to making a podcast episode, doing ShortCuts, making, writing a paper, presenting that paper. And it just keeps growing and growing, growing. I mean, we interviewed Jars, we interviewed Terri Wynnyk – his production assistant and a female sound tech, which is very rare for radio shows in the eighties – we interviewed all Brian Fateaux, Stacey Copeland –\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Jennifer Waits\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Yeah. We interviewed all these people. We got hours of the interview footage and, and most of it wasn’t used, but it just expands and expands.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: And the conversations with all those people that all came from the archival listening that you were doing. Also, I love the fact that Voiceprint brought you together, <laugh>. I think that’s – I was wondering how you had it first encountered these archival recordings. And so that’s really beautiful hearing that. And also, um, the way that Voiceprint as a radio show was also so embedded within literary communities and just really a show that had so many writers on – and that was something I was really struck by, in listening to the podcast episode, and I can only imagine how many more conversations could come out of the Voiceprint archive –.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod: – around the recordings of writers and conversations. It also sounded very much like interdisciplinary work too, like talking to people, you know, across disciplines and inviting them into that studio and having those conversations. So I’m excited to hear what else comes out of the Voiceprint archives. So I think that’s a good note to conclude our conversation for today. And also I’m so thrilled that, here, around this microphone, these three collaborators are finally together in person after all your work across distances. So, Chelsea, Ariel, Nick, thank you so much for joining me here on Shortcuts. Thank you all.\n\n \n\nAriel Kroon: Thank you.\n\n \n\nNick Beauchesne: Thank you.\n\n \n\nChelsea Miya: Thanks.\n\n \n\n[Music]\n\nKatherine McLeod: You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. This ShortCuts was a ShortCuts Live! A conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya recorded on May 19 2022 on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. Fun fact: we were wearing our SpokenWeb t-shirts that we had been given that day at the institute while recording. Check the Show Notes for photos to prove it! Also check the show notes for a link to their episode, “Academics on Air.” Plus, since talking with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea, they have interviewed Jo-Anne Kolmes, and a few clips from that interview could be the start of another ShortCuts Live conversation recorded at this year’s symposium and institute. \n\nSpeaking of which, are you listening to this episode and getting excited about this year’s SpokenWeb Symposium? It is coming up in May at the University of Alberta. Check SpokenWeb’s upcoming events to find the link to the full program. And, who knows, there just may be ShortCuts Live recordings happening again this year, and so if you’re attending and interested in talking with the podcast team, let us know! Write to us at spokenwebpodcast at gmail dot com.\n\nShortCuts is a monthly deep dive into archival audio distributed monthly on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. It is mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, transcribed by Zoe Mix, and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n\n[Music ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9668","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.5, ShortCuts Live! 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Producer Katherine McLeod talks with Annie Murray about the EMI Music Canada Archives at the University of Calgary, and their way into these archives begins with a cassette tape. And not just any cassette tape. Listen to find out which tape and how this tape tells stories of recording not only in relation to what’s on the tape but also to archival collections of Canadian music. Audio objects are sonic objects in the sounds they hold and the stories they tell – both on their own as materials and in our affective attachments to them – and this episode of ShortCuts dives into all of this, and more. Annie and Katherine’s conversation about archives is full of whimsy, suspense, and even the sounds of a power ballad – yes, archival research can sound like this.\n\n\n(00:03)\tAnnie Murray \tSo what do you wanna talk about? [Laughs] \n(00:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, first I’ll say: Welcome to ShortCuts.\n(00:11)\tShortCuts Theme Music \t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:12)\tKatherine McLeod \tWelcome to Shortcuts. This month, it’s another ShortCuts Live. In fact, it’s a final ShortCuts Live conversation that was recorded at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. That’s because this year’s symposium and institute is coming up, starting May 1st. Check the full program by heading to the events link on the SpokenWeb website. And if you’re attending, do get in touch if you’d like to chat with us on ShortCuts Live in-person this year. \nBack to this episode, it’s a conversation that I had with Annie Murray from the University of Calgary. It was recorded after a packed day of sessions at the 2022 SpokenWeb Sound Institute. The sounds will take us into 4th SPACE at Concordia University. I quite love the background noise because it reminds me of being there with the May sunshine outside the window next to where we were recording and the vibrant conversations that we were having all week. \nSo there I was sitting at a microphone with Annie Murray and I pulled out a cassette tape to start things off. Usually on ShortCuts, it’s an audio clip that starts the conversation. This time it was not an audio clip, but rather an audio object, and not just any audio object. It was my first cassette tape, and this cassette tape that I’m holding right now, well, it’s not only the start of me loving music that’s just so full of emotion, music that is moving, moves you and makes you want to move, but it was also the start of my conversation with Annie Murray about EMI Music Canada Archives. Which tape is it? Well, listen to find out. Here is ShortCuts Live…\n[ShortCuts theme music fades and ends]\n[Transitions into interview recording]\nThank you so much, Annie, for joining me on Shortcuts Live.\n(02:04)\tAnnie Murray\tThank you. This is a great setup.\n(02:07)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I’m about to take a tape out of my bag, and Annie’s gonna see this for the first time, but she’s heard that this is the object that will inspire our conversation.\n(02:19)\tAnnie Murray\tWhoa, shall I describe what we’re seeing?\n(02:22)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes. Take a look. What is this tape?\n(02:25)\tAnnie Murray \tKatherine has just handed me a tape called “Over 60 Minutes with Luba”. Luba is on the front. It was issued by Capital Records and EMI Canada in 1987. We had an earlier conversation where I learned this was a seminal tape for young Dr. Katherine McLeod. And the reason I’m interested in her relationship with this tape is because I’ve been working on a project that will bring some Luba content out in the world.\n(03:03)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes, I told Annie that this Luba tape was in fact the first cassette tape that I ever owned. I think I was about seven or eight years old living in Queensboro, which is a neighborhood in New Westminster, British Columbia. And I don’t even know how I had heard of Luba, I think, because I never really watched TV very often when I was young. So somehow much music must have been on. And I was really drawn to the song, “Every time I see your picture, I cry”. And this tape does have it on there.  I think that says a lot about me as a seven year old, that I was really drawn to this very dramatic song, that continues. I feel like it just, I love very dramatic music and dance. So, you know, this was just an early sign of that.\nI could still probably recite the entire song. And I recently found this tape at my parents’ house, and it made me think about the way that this recording, with it being issued by EMI, would be part of the EMI collection. And when Annie was speaking about the EMI collection in a SpokenWeb meeting, she mentioned, you know, it even has Luba. And I was like, oh, Luba! Yes, someone’s talking about Luba! \nSo I thought this would be a perfect  audio object for us to chat about because it brings us into the EMI collection. It makes us think about audio objects and how just a tape that we’re not even playing right now can generate so much conversation. And it can also make us think about rights too. So maybe towards the end, I’ll ask you about, you know, can we even play this tape on the podcast? But, we’ll hold onto that question. \nFirst of all, you know, I see Annie looking at the tape cover, she’s got it out of the, out of the case. And I’m wondering, you know, you’ve been immersed in the EMI collection at the University of Calgary.  What do you, what are you noticing? How does this speak to you as an archival object?\n(05:11)\tAnnie Murray \tWell, what’s interesting about this tape is it’s not one of Luba’s studio albums. It’s a compilation album. So, Luba had already released some albums, and this is a compilation. The other thing I’m noticing is in what great physical condition it’s in. I know you loved it a lot, but you also took really good care of it. A lot of my old tapes from this era,  the writing is rubbed off the cassette, but the tape looks in good shape and the liner notes don’t have the lyrics, which a lot of studio albums did. And I don’t know about you, but did you used to open them up and follow along?\n(05:53)\tKatherine McLeod\tI sure did. [Laughs] Yeah.\n(05:54)\tAnnie Murray\tYes. That, I mean, especially when you first got tapes of your own and you bought them with your own money, you were so proud of them, and you would open up the liner notes and follow the lyrics. So what I’m seeing here, there’s some interesting things about this album. First of all, Daniel Lenoi plays as a percussionist on this album. There’s some really interesting musicians brought in on some of these. And guess who’s the sax player? Kenny G! [Both laugh]  And then there’s a list of tracks or songs, and there’s little symbols next to them that talk about the original recording, where it came from. \nSo this is like an anthology. And then some were mixed by Daniel Lenoi, then it shows how many songs Luba wrote and how many she didn’t. So this is, this is fascinating.\n(06:56)\tKatherine McLeod\tI love thinking about it as an anthology of Luba. Luba is a Canadian singer who was very popular in the eighties. And we really haven’t heard much from since. So, actually, it’s interesting how things, you know, like YouTube. I think like, partly just to go back to your point about how the tape is in such good condition, I think it’s because then when CDs came out, I didn’t listen to my tapes as much, and Luba sort of had faded into the background. \nSo, I’d almost forgotten about this amazing song. And then, recently, you know, searching it on YouTube and thinking, yeah, like, I can listen to this in a digital version without having to, you know, dig out my tape from so long ago. And just listening to it again, I thought, wow, this  almost like, power ballad song, really resonates with today’s moment too.\nSo I thought, yes, Lupa to come back, but then thinking, you know, this is like this anthology and this collection, a collection within a collection thinking of this tape itself is almost like a collection. And how it also speaks to, you know, this moment in Canadian music. And, you know, as you’re noticing all these artists that were part of this tape, that in many ways many people probably would know those names and not necessarily know Luba’s name too. So that’s really interesting thinking of what we can learn from the tape itself. I know you told me that you asked some of your colleagues in the archives about what you have in terms of Luba’s work in the collection.\n(08:26)\tAnnie Murray\tThat’s right. So, maybe just as I recorded my live reactions to the liner notes, I’ll read you some information that my colleagues David Jones and Rob Gilbert provided.  I explained what I was going to be up to and that you were a Luba fan from childhood and that we’d be looking at the tape and they immediately knew, oh, well that’s a compilation, you know, and I, cuz I didn’t know. \nAnd then David said, that’s awesome. So is Luba. And then Rob came along and said a few things that I’ll just read. So Luba was a direct signing. So the capital releases, the EP and the three big albums in the eighties are all extensively documented. So in the EMI Music Canada archive that’s at the University of Calgary, if that artist was signed to Capital or EMI, the archive will contain all of the original studio recordings and will have all the documentation about how that album was produced, how it was recorded, produced, disseminated, marketed and received.\nSo it’s like the whole story, but if the EMI artist was someone like Kate Bush or The Beatles or Pink Floyd, and they weren’t actually recorded in the, for Canadian, like on the Canadian label there would be less recordings and material associated with it. All of those originals would’ve been in England or in the United States. But for Luba, Rob says, I think Luba is one of the more significant artists in the collection. All of the audio is migrated or out with a vendor and/or Nathan. So Nathan Chandler is our audio audiovisual conservator who, in Calgary, we built these studios. So sometimes some types of formats, we’ve migrated them right there in Calgary. Other ones have been sent out in different places in North America, depending on like, would it be too expensive to buy the equipment or too difficult or maybe there aren’t enough recordings in that format because the EMI archive has 94 different media formats.\nSo some of them wouldn’t make sense. But guess how many individual Luba recordings will be available eventually? There will be 400 audio recordings [Katherine laughs] available to users eventually in an online system. So the system we’re using is called Cortex. It’s a digital asset management system. Rob goes on to say all of the quarter inch tapes are done. The half inch tapes were sent out to a vendor last summer and should be done soon. And many of the two inch tapes are on a cart with Nathan waiting to get to them. So even in the time Luba was recording, she first recorded on quarter inch, then half inch, and then on two inch multi-tracks. So even in her eighties, early nineties career, she recorded on these different formats. So. \n(11:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s incredible! [Laughs]\n(11:59)\tAnnie Murray \tThen all told there are 400 of them because like, say a two inch recording, it’s massive. You might have one to three songs on one reel. And so if you think of how many times you would record something to make an album, that’s why there are so many. So then, let’s see, also, any videos associated with Luba will also become available. So it’s audio, but it’s also video. And then, this won’t be put online or you won’t be able to access this, but there was also all the original artwork that they used to make all the album covers. So that has also been preserved for the Canadian artists such as Luba. \nSo, let’s see. There are whole sets of studio sessions, 24 track tapes and mixes on half inch tapes. The 60 Minutes with compilation is like a “best of” album with a couple extras on it. It was a branded series from Capital, maybe tapping into CD technology, having the ability to play over 60 minutes without switching sides of a tape or a record [laughs]. \nSo there’s gonna be a lot of Luba content that researchers can access. So you could explore the documentation around wow was that album produced there in your hand? How were the other studio albums? Her EP? I don’t know if they would’ve had a demo, but we would be able to find out if there was a demo. So it kind of goes to show the extensive documentation, both audio, video, and then there’s all the textual archives that would’ve been, so perhaps you’ll come to Calgary to do a deep Luba research trip? \n(13:50)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes. Yes. A deep listening in the Luba archives. I also love how it feels like Luba, you know, I was speaking to like maybe she could have a resurgence and maybe she could have a resurgence through the archives.\n(14:03)\tAnnie Murray \tThat would be great. Like, it will be interesting to see how people respond to an archive of this type being made available. Like, first of all, the fact that it’s being preserved, that it is in a public institution, and that we have created some secure and elaborate, but easily available ways to use audiovisual archives, which really isn’t always the case. \nThe traditional model is if there’s a recording in an archive, you travel to the archive and you listen to it in there. We knew that with the way systems have developed and the way digital asset management systems have developed, that you can still have users authenticate and use a recording and access it remotely. And in the time that we’ve been finishing up this project during Covid, there is actually more expectation of remote access now of archives and libraries. So these sort of systems coming online is just perfect timing for these kinds of researcher expectations.\n\n(15:17)\tKatherine McLeod \tMaybe one last question then, leading along those lines around access. On a podcast like this, if I were to play a clip of one of Luba’s songs,  am I allowed to do that?\n(15:34)\tAnnie Murray\tI think so. I think it’s a kind of quotation. We could ask a copyright person about how much is appropriate. But say for example, like broadcasters and news organizations, they generally work with clips of a certain length for reporting, and then scholars can use certain lengths of clips for their academic reporting, so to speak. I don’t know where a podcast is on the spectrum. Is it broadcasting? Is it news? Is it scholarship? Seems to be a blend of those things?\n(16:10)\tKatherine McLeod \tAnd often defined by the producer or the maker of the podcast, rather than the podcast itself being a medium that is defined in those ways. I feel like because we did, you know, we’ve been commenting on the tape and especially offering a bit of commentary around one particular song, that that song perhaps could, you know, appear at some point, audibly in this or- \n(16:37)\tAnnie Murray\tA clip.\n(16:37)\tKatherine McLeod \tA clip. Exactly. It would just a, just a-\n(16:39)\tAnnie Murray\tMaybe the most dramatic part.\n(16:40)\tKatherine McLeod \tExactly. [A clip from “Every time I see your picture, I cry” by Luba plays and ends] \nSo I think that’s, you know, a perfect note to end on. And I want to thank Annie Murray for joining me here on ShortCuts Live in 4th SPACE at Concordia University. Thank you so much, Annie.\n\n(17:12)\tAnnie Murray \t[ShortCuts theme music begins to play] \nThank you. And I just wanna extend an invitation. As a Luba fan, you could create, when you have an account in the University of Calgary’s digital collections, you could create something called a light box where you could keep track of your favorite Luba recordings, and then you could say, Hey, these are my favorite Luba tracks curated by Dr. Katherine McLeod.\nSo, then even if you return later and you’re like, oh, I’m going to think about Luba again. You could keep track of what you’re interested in. You could send it to another user, then they could sign it and say, oh, these are the three songs that most shaped your 1987 life. \n(17:57)\tKatherine McLeod \tYes! A curated listening and yeah. To be able to share that. Oh, yeah. That’s fantastic.\n(18:01)\tAnnie Murray\tSo, when it’s available, I’ll contact you and you can be our guest digital curator of the Luba Collection. [laughs]\n(18:11)\tKatherine McLeod\tThank you so much, Annie. I look forward to that. Thank you. Thank you.\n[ShortCuts theme music ends] \n[A clip from “Every time I see your picture, I cry” by Luba plays] \nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. A special thanks to Annie Murray for joining me for this ShortCuts Live recorded on May 19th, 2022. \n[The Luba clip ends and ShortCuts theme music begins again] \nAnd for the invitation to head to Calgary for a curated listening in the archives. Do check the show notes for links to more about that archive, and for a few fun photos to accompany this episode. Yes, you’ll see Annie holding the tape itself, and what you won’t see is me listening to Luba on repeat in the weeks surrounding this conversation. But indeed that happened too. \nMy thanks to the SpokenWeb podcast team. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcription is done by Zoe Mix. ShortCuts is written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Stay tuned next month for a full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. And as always, thanks for listening.\n[ShortCuts theme music ends]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9669","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 4.6, What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival Archives, 19 June 2023, Jando-Saul"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Ella Jando-Saul"],"creator_names_search":["Ella Jando-Saul"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ella Jando-Saul\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c4891c8a-e6b8-4a15-b0b4-7ba2b7d4e22a/audio/4d8d4112-c9a7-490e-a3e5-4b973c419512/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sc4-6.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:20:50\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"20,008,168 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sc4-6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-06-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-2-2. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nbissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-BNW-T5. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nThose interested can find more information about these recordings in the following documents:\\n\\nbissett, bill. Participant acceptance form. AL-Folder2-img003-04, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nbissett, bill. Letter to Alan Lord. AL-Folder2-img195, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nKonyves, Tom. Sketch of stage setup. AL-Folder2-img186-187, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\nLescaut, Roxa. “Le Premier Festival de Poésie urbaine de Montréal.” interModule 2. AL-U85-img029-32 and 035-38, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549793800192,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Have you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if it was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival (Montreal, 1985). This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant. They’ve been working with a series of recordings of the Ultimatum Festival, which are part of the Alan Lord audio collection, a collection currently being digitized and catalogued by SpokenWeb (Concordia). The Listening Queerly research team – Mathieu Aubin, Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow – first attempted to confirm who they are listening to in their selected audio file for this ShortCuts by cross-referencing with other recordings of Christopher Dewdney, Tom Konyves, and bill bissett, but then, as the team re-listened to this recording, they focused more and more on the rhythmic thumping sound throughout this clip. What is the cause of this sound and its effect on us as listeners?\n\nListen to this episode of ShortCuts to hear how, even if a sound is an unintentional sound caused by the recording equipment, it still affects our interpretation of the recording.\n\nThis special episode of ShortCuts is produced by Ella Jando-Saul, with contributions from Mathieu Aubin, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and James Healey. \n\n\n(00:00)\tShortCuts Theme Music \t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n  (00:07)\tKatherine McLeod \tWelcome to Shortcuts.\nHave you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if the sound was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival in the Alan Lord Audio Collection. First of all, Listening Queerly is a team of student researchers based at Concordia University: Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow. This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC funded Insight Development grant. \nThey’ve been working with a series of recordings in the Alan Lord Audio Collection, a collection that’s part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections. In 1985, Alan Lord helped to organize the Ultimatum Festival in Montreal. And recordings from that festival are what the Listening Queerly team were listening to when they heard a sound. A sound that sounded almost like a heartbeat, or was it a technical glitch in the recording? Could they be sure? What were they hearing? What’s that noise? \nWhatever it was, the reality was that the sound, the noise, had an impact. They couldn’t stop thinking about it, and they talked about it together. What results from those conversations is this episode of ShortCuts. Here is a very special episode of ShortCuts produced by Ella Jando-Saul, taking you on a deep dive into the sound of one memorable recording. [ShortCuts music swells and then ends]\n(02:02)\tElla Jando-Saul \t[Sound effect of a heart beating begins] \nIn 1985, Alan Lord with help from a team of close friends organized Ultimatum, a literary festival that took place from May 1st to 5th at Les Foufounes Électriques, a punk bar that exists to this day in downtown Montreal. Ultimatum was advertised as an event presenting both a new generation of urban poets who utilize video, computers, electro pop music and performance art as an integral part of their mode of expression, and also traditional poets whose work reflects the urgency and electricity of living in a modern urban environment. \nLord invited both Anglophone and Francophone poets from Montreal, as well as poets from Vancouver, Toronto, Quebec City, and New York. The event was recorded on tapes, which have since been digitized at Concordia University. The tape we are listening to today is from the 2nd of May. \n[Heartbeat sound effect speeds up and then ends]\n(03:05)\tMathieu Aubin\tHi, my name is Mathieu Aubin and I’m the primary investigator for the Listening Queerly Cross-Generational Divides Project, and I’m also a research affiliate in the English department at Concordia University.\n(03:17)\tElla Jando-Saul\tMy name is Ella Jando-Saul and I am the project manager for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I am also finishing my first year in the masters program at Concordia University in English Literature.\n(03:31)\tSophia Magliocca\tHi, my name is Sophia Magliocca. I’m a research assistant on the SpokenWeb affiliate project called Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides. I’m also finishing my second year in the masters program here at Concordia University in English Literature.\n(03:45)\tMisha Solomon\tHi, my name is Misha Solomon. I’m a queer listener on the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project. I’m also finishing my first year as a master student in the English literature program here at Concordia, with a creative poetry thesis.\n(03:59)\tElla Jando-Saul \tAs part of our research, we listened to the Ultimatum recordings and encountered a tape that included a mysterious heartbeat sound on some of the tracks. The poet speaking on those tracks was unannounced, so we were not sure who it might be. At the time, our team included Rowan Nancarrow, who has since left, but who did much of the listening and contributed to our initial discussions about these tapes.\n(04:29)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive- [Unknown Speaker] 1\t[Sound effect of a heartbeat begins to play] With real trees around us, why do we want painted trees? What does art give us that life does not?\n[Sound effect of heartbeat ends]\n(04:43)\tElla Jando-Saul \t…many months ago, Misha, you’re actually part of the team already, even though it’s the 8th of December, 2022. And we’re having a conversation as we do on a Monday morning about this tape. Yeah, the weird heartbeat noise is really interesting to me because I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, and it’s doing really interesting things with the poet’s voice.\nIt’s sort of, I feel like sometimes rhythmically it’s aligning with the rhythm of the poem, and sometimes it’s not, and I find that super interesting, but then we get this like four minutes of just heartbeat, and I find it hard to imagine that that was intentionally just sort of recorded, and there’s the fact that the sound is different. So I’m thinking maybe there’s something that happened to the tape itself, that when we play the tape to digitize it is making this noise.\n(05:41)\tSophia Magliocca \tWhen I found it, when I came across it, I was almost not going to present it at all. The only reason why I decided to present it was because I thought it was a broken tape, and I thought it would be interesting to talk about what a broken tape might look like in this collection. \nSo my initial impression of it was either it got damaged, you know, the tape itself was damaged and they recorded on something that was already damaged and that’s what happened. Or it was like you said, kind of some way affected when they were digitizing it. And then other ideas I have is that because the heartbeat sound was happening on other tapes too, whether it was related to someone tapping on a microphone or some kind of like something happening in the room, unrelated to the technology, but close enough that it was getting caught. And then, you know, because of that shift to the static background noise, it kind of made that whole committing to one version of this what the heartbeat was really difficult.\n(06:38)\tElla Jando-Saul \tMhmm.\n(06:39)\tMisha Solomon \tYou know, based on the pattern and the inconsistency of the noise, I think we can be relatively sure that the heartbeat sound isn’t actually a heartbeat, but it is difficult for me to separate the sound from being a heartbeat. That’s what it feels like somehow. If I try to think about it logically while listening, I suppose it could be a metronome, but it does lack the regular rhythm. Or as others have said, something accidental, microphone feedback or a mechanical issue with the recording device. \nBut I keep going back to the idea that there is something so corporeal about the sound. Something like akin to listening to a whale from inside of a whale’s belly.\n(07:24)\tMathieu Aubin\tHmm. I like that irregularity that you’re pointing to. I hear this, and to me also, I don’t know what it is that we’re thinking, like is it a stethoscope? There we go. You know, listening for someone’s heartbeat is, it’s what it sounds like to me. \nAnd it’s interesting that we have a similar experience of listening to that and identifying that as that kind of sound, but like Misha just said, it’s irregular. So if somebody’s heartbeat is indeed that, I don’t know that that’s probably the best thing for them. So for me, you know, I’m thinking about this and listening to this and it seems like it could be intentional, it could be not intentional. Sometimes because of the rhythm of like, I’m thinking of like tape moving around and maybe bumping that sort of irregularity also could be a technological sound that’s being emitted.\n(08:26)\tElla Jando-Saul \tI mean, Imeasure the intervals of the heartbeats and I do have to say like, I hope this is a whale and not a human, because if it’s a whale, I mean, I’d have to find out what a regular whale heart rhythm is, but for a human like this, this human’s in a coma or something, I don’t know, it’s way too slow for a human and it is a little bit irregular. There will be moments where it sort of slowly gets a bit faster and then it starts getting a lot faster right before it sort of cuts and then you have applause. \nSort of having done that, I’m rethinking my thought about it being just like the tape sort of spinning and that sort of circularity doesn’t really make sense with the way that it’s shifting around. Like, if it was just slight shifts, it would be like, okay, well tape can’t be at the perfectly same speed all the time. But I think especially that bit where it really speeds up, I’m thinking, okay, maybe it’s intentional if it’s doing this, but in that case, why are there all of these silent moments with just a heartbeat?\n[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play]\nNone of us know much about how sound recording works. So in an attempt to find some answers, we consulted James Healy, the AMP lab coordinator at Concordia University.\n(09:42)\tJames Healy \tThe next one was like the metronome, or what I would describe as a metronome. It could have been like in one of those old school drum machines that were made to accompany an organ in church, because it was just like a simple “pum-pum pum-pum-”\n(09:59)\tElla Jando-Saul \t[Interjecting] -Yeah-\n(10:00)\tJames Healy \t-pattern, but like the timbre reminded me of like a Roland 808 a lot, which made me think that it’s maybe the same chip as the Roland 808, but a little earlier, because I don’t think that they’re using sort of like this staple hip hop drum machine in the background. I think they’d just be using a fairly rudimentary one, because they just need it for a fairly simple task.\n(10:27)\tElla Jando-Saul \tJames answered the question we had been laboring over pretty quickly, but he had more to say about these recordings.\n(10:34)\tJames Healy\tThere was a really high noise floor in one of them. And then the voice was also saturating sooner than it was in the others, which made me think that it was a different time altogether because they had basically set up a whole bunch of new equipment.\n(10:51)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2\tBecause it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. \nThank you. [Audience claps]\n(11:24)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive  [Unknown Speaker] 3\t[Sound effect of heartbeat plays] What’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively by proponents of the arms race than the advocates of the peace movement? [Sound effect of heartbeat ends] \n(11:39)\tJames Healy\tAnd what I mean by new noise floors, there’s like a “chhhhhh” and it was closer to the level of the voice than it was in the other pieces of audio. Yeah, I think the next thing that interested me, like in audio to audio and knowing that maybe it was a different room was just literally like the reflection times of the room that I was hearing. Like, I can’t be like that’s a five millisecond reflection, but it’s just like, it sounds different. The room, the reverb, right? Like  you can tell when you’re just mostly getting a direct source.\n(12:21)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 3\t[Sound effect of heartbeat plays]\nWhat’s wrong with this?… governments have been lobbied more effectively…[Sound effect of heartbeat ends]\n(12:25)\tJames Healy \tOr if you’re getting some room reflections bled into the direct source as well.\n(12:32)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 2\tBecause it cruises hovering, long snouted crocodilian because it is primitive. \n(12:36)\tJames Healy \tAll living things with ears are really good at that. They listen for reflection times to know what type of space they’re in.\n(12:43)\tElla Jando-Saul\tThe digitized tape labeled U22  is split into multiple files labeled from T01 to T02. The recordings cut suddenly from one performance to the next, often starting and stopping in the middle of the performance. \nDuring our conversation, James and I started to piece these together chronologically thanks to recordings done by CBC’s Brave New Waves team, also held in Concordia’s ultimatum collection, which recorded the whole evening from start to finish with no cuts. This helped us figure out that the poet using the heartbeat sound was Tom Kenyvesh, an experimental performance and video poet who had recently moved from Montreal to Vancouver. \nOkay. So your guess would be that like what we have with the U22 recordings that sound really close up is that he’s recording these sort of offsite and then bringing them in to play them. \nIn that case, like, does it make sense that there are parts of the same event from that day before this? So it’s like Christopher Dudney live and then it cuts and then it’s Tom Kenyvesh sounding very not live. And then on T06 it’s just heartbeat sounds which are playing in the background, um, of T07, which is back to Tom Kenyvesh speaking, but now we hear like the audience, it sounds very live and then it cuts and it’s Bill Bisit, same event.\n(14:22)\tJames Healy \tYeah. Well that did confuse me, but then Jason mentioned in an email that they actually had like eight tracks on that tape, so that made me think that they possibly used two of the tracks just to record stuff for playback.\nAnd then they just use the other two tracks to record what was going on live in the room, you know? So, and then essentially what you could do is you could take the two tracks that are already recorded, so you want to go out to the PA with them and you could play them via like their own output to the PA while you record on another two tracks what they’re saying. \nSo it could have been a simultaneous thing and they could have just prepped the two recorded tracks, like beforehand.\n(15:48)\tMisha Solomon\t[Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] \nWhat I find really interesting about the mystery of the sound is that it’s a reminder of the missing information on these tapes. That these tapes are representative of performances that involved some visual aspect and that that aspect is missing entirely. \nAnd so even when the sound changes or disappears, one could imagine someone in an outrageous outfit playing a percussion instrument in the corner and producing that sound. And we’d never know of that person’s existence unless we found photographic or video evidence. But it would significantly change the tenor of the performance were we to be able to see this producer of the sound if the sound is in fact being produced by someone on stage accompanying the performer, let’s say. \nAnd so it’s just interesting to think about the fact that Ultimatum was this full sense live event, one that even seemed to prioritize the visual in terms of screens being available for performers and all that. But here we’re experiencing it only as audio, which is a kind of mutation of the event into something that is only available to us using one sense. So the sound is an invitation to theorize and that invitation can either be fruitful or, you know, can lead the listener astray down paths to which answers might not be found.\n(17:17)\tSophia Magliocca\tYeah. I love when we think about our project in that way, like that distance that we have in a way retains the privacy of the event, but also invites us in and gives us that intimacy in a really different sensory experience or in a limited one. And when I think about the heartbeat in that way, and whether it’s intentional or not, it does force the listener to really turn or return interior, accept the sound for what it is. \nAnd for a moment it was really nice that we just got to sit and really think about what it could be without having any definitive answers. And think about how it was complimenting the poem and how it was complimenting our experience, you know, so many years down the line of taking that with the limited resources that we have. \nAnd it’s always interesting to have, you know, the real technical terms for what’s going on. But sitting in that mystery, I find, brought us closer and really gave us an opportunity to distinguish the voices and distinguish the settings in a way that, and in a depth that we didn’t always apply to all the other recordings. And this gave us a way into that.\n(18:20)\tElla Jando-Saul \tMm-hmm. And sitting with the mystery, but also just sitting with the sound, however fragmentary it is that we have left to us, is sort of itself an art piece so that whether the heartbeat is intentional or not, it creates this really great experience. Like it is wonderful to hear with the poem regardless of where it comes from.\n(18:44)\tMathieu Aubin\tAnd I love the way that it’s formatted and structured as an art piece, as a poem where these powerful, impactful lines are read and then they’re interspersed with [Sound effect of heartbeat begins to play] these like “bum bums” in the effect of that. And how we’re sitting with that sort of message while trying to figure out that mystery the whole time.\n(19:11)\tArchival Audio from Alan Lord Archive [Unknown Speaker] 4\tForgive everything, walk, don’t run, post no bills, leave no fingerprints. In case of emergency stand still, press return. Please don’t touch. [Long pause] Push. \n[Heartbeat fades slowly] \n(20:14)\tKatherine McLeod \t[ShortCuts Theme Music plays] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. This episode of ShortCuts was produced by Ella Jando-Saul. You also heard the voices of Mathieu Aubin, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon, and input from Rowan Nancarrow. Also a special thanks to James Healy. ShortCuts is a deep dive into archival audio distributed monthly on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. It is mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, transcribed by Zoe Mix and written and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n[ShortCuts Theme music ends] "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9670","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2 Trailer, Season 2 Trailer. We’re Back!, 21 September 2020, McGregor and Copeland"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/season-2-trailer-were-back/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah McGregor","Stacey Copeland"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah McGregor","Stacey Copeland"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/cfd03a52-ba91-41a2-a177-e69003d4427e/audio/a85328c9-9743-4a2d-9c46-079bec3cd2d5/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2-teaser-trailer-2020-v2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:30\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,512,638 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2-teaser-trailer-2020-v2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/season-2-trailer-were-back/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-09-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"contents":["Get ready for Season 2 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. We have a brand-new line up of original episodes for you from archives, universities and in these physically distant times, the many spaces and places we call home, all across Canada and beyond.  Whether it’s a deep dive into deep curation poetry, never before heard interviews with Canadian Literature legends or fresh takes on the role of sound in listening in our lives, this season has something for every canlit curiouso, sonic explorer, poetry connoisseur, and lifelong learner at heart. Season premiere in your rss feed October 5th, 2020.\n\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Upbeat String Music] Last season on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we brought you stories of early spoken word recordings, etched and wax —\n00:10\tJason Camlot:\t[Instrumental Music] [Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 Ep2 plays: Old sound recordings are weird.] [Inaudible Voice] [Crackling Recording].\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\t— And the hidden labor behind archiving and caring for literary collections.\n00:23\tKaris Shearer:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 Ep3 plays: I think often we don’t understand or see the labor that is behind that presentation.]\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe listened together to the arresting words of Dorothy Livesay and Elizabeth Smart —\n00:34\tElizabeth Smart:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 E4 plays: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept] —\n00:36\tHannah McGregor:\t— and to the sounds of the changing world around us as the pandemic changed how we work and how we listen.\n00:43\tJason Camlot & Katherine McLeod:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 E8 plays: How are you really listening, Catherine? Well, Jason, how am I really listening? Sigh.].\n00:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThis season on the SpokenWeb Podcast we have a brand new lineup of original episodes from archives, universities, and, in these physically distanced times, the many spaces and places we call home all across Canada and beyond. Whether it’s a deep dive into the deep curation of poetry, never before heard interviews with CanLit legends, or explorations of the ethics of listening, season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast has something for every sonic explorer, poetry connoisseur, or lifelong learner at heart. I hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca [Musical Tone] or wherever you get your podcasts."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897344,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9671","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4 Trailer, Welcome to Season 4!, 19 September 2022, Moffatt, Eastwood, McGregor, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-4/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Kate Moffatt","Hannah McGregor","Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Kate Moffatt","Hannah McGregor","Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/aa749423-c429-48b9-8aaf-c150b5c0a869/audio/a0e73918-a5b1-4e35-aa6e-320e73a87208/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:03:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"3,484,987 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-4/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-09-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897345,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hello and welcome to another season of The SpokenWeb Podcast! We’re back with a new line-up of exciting episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network. The SpokenWeb Podcast asks, “What does literature sound like? What stories do we hear when we listen to the archive?” In this season, we have episodes that dive into the lives of archival objects—university poetry events—what it means to read an audiobook—and so much more. This season has something for everyone from lovers of literature and history to sound studies scholars, so come and join us as we continue listening to literature and the archives.\n\nWe would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does The SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? [Start Music: Acoustic Strings] In our third season, we revisited Myra Bloom’s episode about Elizabeth Smart from Season 1—\n \n\n00:11\tMyra Bloom, S3E1 “Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’”\tIt suddenly occurred to me that I actually never heard her voice. (Underlaid Archival Audio of Elizabeth Smart: “I thought, if it was agreeable to you, that I’d read a chapter from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.”\n \n\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\t— heard the voices of poets and writers across Canada —\n \n\n00:21\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, in S3E10 “‘starry and full of glory’: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam”:\n \n\n…stars, stars, stars! [Repeats, fading out]\n \n\n00:23\tInterview Excerpt, S3E2 “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”:\tIs it the glimpse of mortality that makes you feel a bit differently about it?\nWell, it’s quite literally seeing your friends die.\n\n \n\n00:29\tFaith Paré, S3E5 “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”:\tThis is not the poem I wanted / It is the poem I could.\n \n\n00:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd thought about how we listen.\n \n\n00:36\tStéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do we discuss the sounds of human beings\n \n\n00:38\tHannah McGregor:\tWe asked, what does scholarship sound like? and revisited last year’s virtual SpokenWeb Symposium—\n \n\n00:46\tStéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do we listen virtually?\n \n\n00:48\tMathieu Aubin, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do you listen virtually to a conference about listening?\n00:52\tHannah McGregor:\t—and the 1983 Women and Words conference held in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:56\tArchival Audio from S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:\t“[…]our subject this morning is women facing traditional criticism, criticizing criticism.” (Clip continues under Hannah and resurfaces, underlaid with the next clips)\n \n\n01:01\tHannah McGregor:\tWe explored how collaboration and conversation are central to the research and work that we do.\n \n\n01:07\tKelly Cubbon, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:\tKelly: Well, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation\n \n\n01:12\tKatherine McLeod, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:\n \n\nIt is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses.\n01:18\tKate Moffatt, S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:\t[Warped Archival Clip Plays With Some Words Audible] And it’s funny, cuz you can almost hear it. Like you can almost hear something being said.\n \n\n01:26\tHannah McGregor:\tThis past season took us to new places and spaces, from the plains of Northern Alberta–\n \n\n01:32\tMichelle, S3E3 “Forced Migration”:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.\n \n\n01:37\tHannah McGregor:\t–back to the 80s, to the student-run campus radio shows of the CKUA network.\n \n\n01:44\tTerri Wynnyk, S3E8 “Academics on Air”:\n \n\nWe once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches […]\n01:52\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and I’ve been the host of the SpokenWeb Podcast since its inception. But I’m stepping out of this role for the next year, and I have the pleasure of passing the mic to this season’s host: Katherine Mcleod.\n \n\n02:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThank you Hannah! [Music Swells to Atmospheric Chords] My name is Katherine McLeod, and I am so excited to host this new season of the SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll recognize my voice from ShortCuts – our deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives that you can find right here on the same podcast feed.\n \n\nThis season on the podcast, we have a line-up of episodes that we can’t wait to share: we’re going to hear more about the “Drum Codes” we listened to in Season 2; we’ll be thinking about audiobooks as a literary medium: what is it like to read an audiobook? What is it like to teach with an audiobook in the classroom?\n\n \n\nWe’ll be re-listening to university poetry events, diving into the archives to converse with the archival objects themselves. We’re going to experience environmental sound with an episode on fire and ecopoetics; and we’ll be thinking about literary environmental sound, and even exploring the soundscapes of libraries. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. Subscribe and join us for Season Four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, coming to your podcast feeds on October 3rd."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9672","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6 Trailer, Welcome to Season 6!, 16 September 2024, Harris, McLeod, McGregor, Healy, and Ajeeb"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Yara Ajeeb\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3849923d-330b-4a2b-8e36-2347aca1e839/audio/1fac0b3b-c40e-4950-8e0f-966db64790a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,544,931 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-09-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897346,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!\n\nThis season, we’ll continue to bring you contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.\n\nCheers to Season 6 ~\n\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:14)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does the SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? Or should I say — when?\n[Theme music fades]\n(00:21)\tMusic\t[Futuristic, electronic music starts playing]\n(00:26)\tHannah McGregor\tBecause in season 5 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we travelled through time–\n(00:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tFirst, we paid a visit to the medieval period [choral music starts playing] where we attempted to textually and orally translate the old English poem “The Ruin.”\n(00:42)\tAudio clip from episode 1 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Ghislaine Comeau reciting “The Ruin”\t[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]\nnum geheapen felon/\ngrimly ground/\nIt shone/\n(00:52)\tMusic\t[Upbeat pop music starts playing]\n(00:54)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen we jumped to the 1950s, where we revisited the fascinating early history of Caedmon records.\n(01:02)\tAudio clip from episode 4 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Barbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth.\n(01:13)\tMusic\t[Grunge guitar music starts playing]\n(01:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe travelled to the 1980s and listened to recovered recordings from the boundary-breaking Ultimatum Festival.\n(01:24)\tAudio clip from episode 6 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Frances Grace Fyfe\tThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n(01:32)\tMusic\t[Pop-esque, upbeat music starts playing]\n(01:35)\tHannah McGregor\tWe “crossed over” to 2021 and checked in with Linda Morra to hear about Kaie Kellough’s “Magnetic Equator.”\n(01:43)\tAudio clip from episode 3 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Linda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it.\n(01:53)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Pop-esque upbeat music continues] And we revisited the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium to ask academics and artists big questions.\n(02:02)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Kate Moffat\tWhat are you listening to?\n(02:03)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Rémy Bocquillon\t“What are you listening to?” Ho, that’s a hard question.\n(02:07)\tMusic\t[Eerie echo music starts playing]\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWe also explored how our bodies experience time, by asking how “not-knowing” feels and how it sounds.\n(02:20)\tAudio clip from episode 2 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Nadège Paquette\tDoes the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps]\n(02:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd then, [Sci-fi music starts] we looked to the [echo] “future.”\n(02:36)\tHannah McGregor\tWe heard from the artists harnessing algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance in a live episode.\n(02:45)\tAudio clip from episode 8 of SpokenWeb Podcast\n– Audio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\t[Overlapping voices] nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat.\n(02:52)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe also asked computers to help us decide which oral performers are the best at “doing” the voices in the Waste Land.\n(03:01)\tAudio clip from episode 5 of SpokenWeb Podcast, MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading The Wasteland\tTwit twit twit\nJug jug jug jug jug jug\nSo rudely forc’d.\n(03:07)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd we looked ahead to a future without our mini-series Shortcuts, bidding it a fond farewell.\n(03:13)\tAudio clip from SpokenWeb Shortcuts Season 5, Episode 6, Katherine McLeod\tAs always, thank you for listening.\n(03:18)\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast that showcases audio from archival literary recordings across Canada.\n[Theme music starts playing] But while we’re fascinated with how audio archives can help us understand the history of literature in Canada, we’re not just a history podcast.\n(03:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast covers the “then,” the “when,” and the “now” – contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds.\n(03:49)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season, we’ll continue to look back at the past and explore the future with new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n(03:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tSeason 6 will be our last season, at least in this current form. The podcast will evolve into a new series, on this very same podcast feed, so don’t go anywhere!\n(04:10)\tHannah McGregor\tIn the meantime, as always–\n(04:13)\tKatherine McLeod\t–My name is Katherine McLeod–\n(04:14)\tHannah McGregor\t–And I’m Hannah McGregor. And we are back as your co-hosts.\n(04:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe podcast production team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, and transcriber Yara Ajeeb.\n(04:27)\tHannah McGregor\tSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.\nAnd welcome to season 6!\n(04:37)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Electronic music fades away]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9675","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E7, Listening on the Radio, 16 June 2025, Camlot and McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-on-the-radio/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2025],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0ce6d2de-52b4-4599-9c37-54198c620fc4/audio/c33fb792-620d-47f8-afb7-6bfe99eb739d/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6ep7-mixdown.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:43\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"61,173,943 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6ep7-mixdown\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-on-the-radio/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2025-06-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. “Toward a History of Literary Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 271.2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 263-271. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17421\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.”\\n\\nESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 1-18. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17412\\n\\n“Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show.” CJLO 1690 AM, http://www.cjlo.com/shows/sonic-lit-spokenweb-radio-show\\n\\nThe audio of “Listening on the Radio” is currently presented as part of the digital gallery of Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (University of Vienna) in June 2025.\\n\\nListen to the radio show Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal on Mondays at 2pm EST, or check out past episodes online at cjlo.com.\\n\\nRecordings played during “Listening on the Radio” include the voices of poets Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Cyano Sun Suite), Maxine Gadd (from SGW Poetry Series), David Antin (The Principle of Fit, II”), FYEAR (FYEAR), A.M Klein (Five Montreal Poets), bpNichol (Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1970 – 1980), Allen Ginsberg (from SGW Poetry Series), and P.K. Page (The Filled Pen).\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549796945920,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show is a bi-weekly radio show on CJLO, the campus radio station of Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada). On air since September 2024, the show features “sound recordings from 1888 to the present that document times when people have whispered, spoken, howled and screamed literature out loud” (“Sonic Lit”). Co-hosted by us – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod – the radio show is an extension of our collaborative and creative research about “new sonic approaches in literary studies” (McLeod and Camlot). Prior to stepping into the booth, we had imagined the show as a curation of audio recordings as catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers working with various community and institutional holdings of literary audio across the network. However, as the show began, we had to sort out how the definition of “spoken word” as understood by regulatory bodies in Canadian radio intersects with “spoken word” as understood by poets and scholars of poetry recordings. Making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience than making audio for podcasts such as this podcast, The SpokenWeb Podcast. We soon realized that our radio show was a performative exploration of a set of research questions relating to the affordances of radio for “literary listening” (Camlot). For example, what are the affordances of radio as compared to a podcast when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio? How does spoken word poetry register in relation to other discursive forms on the radio? How do we as hosts perform “talk radio” in talking about poetry? And what is our sense of audience when on air? What does listening sound like on the radio? We produced this audio, “Listening on the Radio,” as a radio-show-as-podcast-episode to answer these questions and others – out loud.\n\n\n00:00:05\t[SpokenWeb Intro Song]\t[Instrumental music begins]\n[Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here.]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast — stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor —\n\n00:00:36\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod.\nAnd each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history — created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n[Vocal instrumental music plays]\n\n00:00:54\tHannah McGregor\tThe lines between radio and podcasting have been blurry for as long as podcasting as a medium has existed. With radio shows now regularly streaming online, that distinction has only gotten blurrier.\nSo it makes sense that when today’s episode producers, SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, first started making their radio show Sonic Lit, they anticipated an experience similar to that of making an episode of this very podcast.\n\nInstead, making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience—one that led them to begin asking about how making radio differs from making a podcast, especially when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio.\n\n00:01:45\tHannah McGregor\tIn this episode, you’ll hear Jason and Katherine modeling their creative and collaborative approach to exploring these questions through a process of conversation, curation, and careful listening.\nThis is Season 6, Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Listening on the Radio.\n\n00:02:10\tJason Camlot\t[Upbeat instrumental music begins] Rolling.\n00:02:13\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast — or should I say, welcome to Sonic Lit, a SpokenWeb radio show–\n00:02:21\tJason Camlot\tPodcast. [Laughter]\n00:02:24\tKatherine McLeod\tIs it a podcast or a radio show? We’re recording this live in the AMP Lab at Concordia University. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with —\n00:02:37\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot. [Katherine laughs]\nI hate the way I say that on the radio show, I have to say.\n00:02:43\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s okay. I always take a deep breath before saying “Sonic Lit: a SpokenWeb radio show.” I’m tempted to almost say—I have to really think and not say “Spoken Lit,” so—\n00:02:56\tJason Camlot\tSpoken Lit: A SonicWeb radio show. [Laughter]\n00:03:00\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we’re recording this live and kind of pretending that this podcast episode is a radio show — well, we’re more than pretending. We’re recording it as if it’s a radio show, and that’s making us think differently about how we’re talking.\n00:03:16\tJason Camlot\tYeah. Well, wait a second — this is a podcast, right? So welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast. [SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\nBut the conceit of this podcast— and we’ve made many podcasts together —\n00:03:25\tArchival Recording – Unidentified Speaker\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\nJoin episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. Here are Katherine and Jason—\n00:03:34\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\n–But the conceit of this one is that we’re going to make a podcast in the spirit, or maybe even the form, of a radio show—so that we can reflect on the differences between our—at least our experience of—podcasting and radio.\n\n00:03:52\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s right.\n[Soft vocalizing music starts playing]\n\nWe’ve been hosting a radio show on Concordia Campus Radio, CJLO 1690 on the AM dial, or streamed online at cjlo.com, and we’ve been hosting it since September. We’ve been playing recordings of poetry and talking about what we hear as we play those recordings. And we’ve created a bit of a body of work over these past months, and we’re starting to sort of get a sense of what kinds of themes are emerging through the show—but also some experience in making radio.\n\nNeither of us had made radio before when we started this show, so it was not only a question of figuring out what were we going to play on the show and how were we going to talk about poetry, but also quite literally: how are we going to make the show?\n\nBecause when we sit in the booth at CJLO, we also work the board and sort of figure out how to come in and out of commercial breaks—what are we going to do to end the show, how are we going to begin the show, and how are we going to keep track of time while doing all of that?\n\nRadio is really a very timed medium, as we found out.\n\n00:05:06\tJason Camlot\tI mean, really, one of the least podcasting things I could say right now is: “It’s 4:30, and we’re in the AMP Lab podcast studio. It’s partially sunny outside.” Right? You know? [Laughter]\nKatherine opened by saying, “We’re live.” Right? And we are live and we’re speaking live—but you will not be hearing this live, in the same way that when we do our radio shows live.\nPeople who happen to be tuned in to CJLO 1690 [brief hip hop beat] are hearing our shows. So we want to reflect on, you know, some of the differences—that would just be an example. And we’ll talk more about “liveness,” but we’re going to talk about—and just to give some of the themes that we sort of thought of in advance that might be interesting—to play examples of and reflect on:\n\nHow we listen on radio\nWho we’re talking to\nWhat’s our imagined audience for radio\nThis sense of liveness that we’ve been talking about already\nWhat to do with mistakes when they happen on the radio\nBecause, you know, what we do with the mistakes usually when we make podcasts is—we hide them. We cut them out. [Laughs]\nWe erase them. There are no mistakes in our podcasts. But on radio, there are mistakes. And in that sense, it’s a more spontaneous and possibly surprising medium.\n\nSo we want to talk about spontaneity and surprise. We want to talk about: what are some of the things we can do on radio that maybe we wouldn’t do in a podcast? And then I suppose also reflect on some of the larger frames of our show—like Katherine mentioned—one show being part of a larger body of work, but also that our own show plays or is heard among many other shows that are happening, that sound quite different from our show.\n\n00:06:49\tKatherine McLeod\tWe thought that we would follow the format that we usually follow for the radio show, which will involve listening to a series of clips related to those topics that Jason just outlined, and talking about what we hear as we listen to them—and listening to them together.\nThis is Jason and I listening to them together, but also imagining that we’re listening to them with you, our audience.\n\n00:07:15\tJason Camlot\tYeah, that’s great.\nI mean, just to get things straight—usually on a radio show, we don’t play clips of ourselves talking. [Laughter]\n\n00:07:21\tKatherine McLeod\tRight, good point.\n00:07:23\tJason Camlot\tWe play records, we play poetry—\n00:07:26\tKatherine McLeod\tPoetry recordings. Yeah, that’s a good point. We should make that clear.\n00:07:30\tJason Camlot\tBut we’re going to be treating clips from our past radio shows as though we’re DJ-ing them. You know, I was very proud after our first show to come home and tell everyone that I was a DJ now.\n00:07:43\tKatherine McLeod\tAs someone who’s been listening to a lot of recordings of poets on the radio in the CBC archives, I was pretty excited to know what it’s like to be on the other side—making radio.\nAnd then it does make you think about all the different considerations—how the show gets put together and also just how that has changed over time as well.\n\nSo yeah, we’re making radio here—and also making this podcast episode.\n\n00:08:08\tJason Camlot\t[Upbeat instrumental music begins]\nYeah, I was never so proud to claim that I was a podcaster as I was to claim I was a DJ.\nAnyway, let’s move on into the show itself.\n\n[Instrumental music continues for a while]\n\n00:08:48\tJason Camlot\tMaybe we should start by playing a clip or two of what our radio show sounds like, so people have an idea of what we’re talking about.\n00:08:54\tKatherine McLeod\tSounds good. Let’s listen.\n00:08:58\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Transcriber’s note: Audio excerpt from a previous episode of the Sonic Lit show]\n[Soft instrumental music begins]\n\nWelcome to Sonic Lit, a spoken word radio show. I’m Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with —\n\n00:09:09\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tJason Camlot.\n00:09:11\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tAnd every second week, we’ll be bringing you literary audio to the airwaves of CJLO. We decided to call this show Sonic Lit because we’ll be playing many different examples of literary audio.\nAnd today, we’re going to offer you a bit of a sampler of what you can expect to hear on this radio show.\n00:09:33\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tYeah — the theme, if we want to think of the theme, is: what is literary audio?\n00:09:37\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts into another recording from another episode of Sonic Lit]\nWe’re back with Sonic Lit. Before the break, we heard “America” by Allen Ginsberg. And while listening to that, we were — well, we were sitting here in the booth just laughing to ourselves, because we couldn’t believe that after almost every line there was a roar of laughter from the audience. [Audience laughter and cheering]\nIt almost sounded like we were listening to comedy. [Grand piano music fades in and out]\n\n00:10:01\tAudio Clip, Unknown Speaker\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is an excerpt from William Wordsworth’s poem “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” recited here by an unidentified speaker.]\n…the untrodden ways / Beside the springs of Dove…\n00:10:05\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tThat track was called Part 1: Trajectory, from a new album by the group “Fire.”\n[Transcriber’s note: Unable to locate a definitive release under this title or artist.]\n[Distorted instrumental music with overlapping heaving sounds]\n\n00:10:20\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tSo…do we know what a poem is now, Jason?\n00:10:25\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\t[Pages flipping] I think that I understand. I think I understand exactly what a poem is now after having heard that. How about you?\n00:10:33\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI think I do. I also feel like that poem is in my body. [Voice fades]\n00:10:38\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nSo that was a collage of a variety of clips from our radio show. What are we listening to there, Katherine?\n\n00:10:45\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, Jason, the question of what we’re listening to is really part of the question: how did this radio show begin?\nWe wanted to extend a practice we’ve been calling “listening practices” — something we’ve been developing here at Concordia as part of the SpokenWeb team since 2019.\nWe’d gather in a room and a “listening guide” would bring a sound or sonic concept for us to listen to. As that evolved — and continued online during the pandemic — the focus was still on bringing a sound and then talking about it, listening together.\n\nAnd I think this radio show has really continued that. When we play something on the show, we usually don’t prepare how we’re going to respond to it. We just respond to what we’ve heard and ask ourselves what it was we were really listening to.\nI think you can hear that in the clips — that moment where we’re still figuring it out, thinking on our feet. You can hear us listening live and responding in real time. It’s rooted in that idea.\n\n00:12:14\tJason Camlot\tYeah, that’s a major difference between how we do the podcast and how we do the radio show. We don’t prepare. [Laughter]\nFor the radio, we barely prepare. Katherine and I will meet like 20 minutes before and say, “Which CD are we going to listen to today?” Sometimes we haven’t even pre-listened — which can cause problems, but usually creates some very exciting moments. It also allows our audience to hear us listening — to experience listening modeled by listening with us.\n\n00:12:48\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly. And the fact that we’ve been doing this show twice a week during a really busy term —\n00:12:56\tJason Camlot\tOnce every two weeks. We’ll get to errors later. [Laughter]\n00:13:01\tKatherine McLeod\tDidn’t I just say every two—?\n00:13:02\tJason Camlot\tYou said twice a week. [Laughter]\n00:13:07\tKatherine McLeod\tNo, no — that would be a bit much. Maybe one day?\n00:13:10\tJason Camlot\tWe’re aiming for twice a week.\n00:13:11\tKatherine McLeod\tRight — the morning poetry show.\nBut seriously, doing the show every two weeks — it’s amazing we’ve kept that up, given everything else going on: teaching, research, life. If we were making a podcast, there would be so much planning involved. But for this, you have to improvise. It’s almost like training for… I don’t know, not a marathon, but something long-term. It’s about sustaining it. You don’t have to make one polished, research-heavy podcast episode — you’re making something every two weeks. So we can try new things, experiment, and not overthink it.\n\n00:14:13\tJason Camlot\tThat’s a great point.\nIf I were to sum up what you just said: radio, as a medium to explore literary listening, is sprawling. We can go deep, we can take our time. We can just talk — no scripts.\nWith podcasts, we at least draft a script, sometimes fully write it out, and then read it. But here, it’s talk-thinking. Thinking aloud in response to sound. It’s all part of the same continuum of listening practices — like those group listening sessions we’ve done. We’ve even listened to full-length readings and modeled that on the show. But again, radio feels different from sitting in a room with people.\n\n00:15:16\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd to extend the podcast comparison a little further, it actually reminded me of the ShortCuts series I did for the SpokenWeb Podcast — where each episode took a deep dive into the archives, really listening to one or two clips and asking: What are we really listening to here?\nWe gave the space and time to reflect. And honestly, there have been moments on the radio show that feel just like that — which has been a really wonderful thing. But unlike the podcast, we can’t assume the audience is ready for a deep dive. Radio has a wider, more general audience — and truthfully, we don’t know who’s listening at all.\n\n00:16:10\tJason Camlot\tRight. As we were talking about listening, you started talking about audience — and of course, you can’t think about listening without thinking about who’s listening.\nFor me, audience is one of the biggest differences between podcasting and radio. With a podcast, it’s a bit like writing a poem or an academic essay — I imagine a reader or listener in mind, and that’s enough for me to move forward. But when I’m live on air — when I’m actually on the air — someone might be listening to me right then. That changes everything. It summons a completely different sense of audience.\n\nSo… who are we talking to on our radio show?\n\n00:17:05\tKatherine McLeod\tIt’s fascinating to imagine — we could be talking to anyone, anywhere. It could be a broad audience… or a very small one.\nSome might be in their cars, others at home, or listening while doing something else. And if they tune in to 1690 AM or stream it online, they may not hear the show from the beginning. They might drop in mid-show and wonder, “What are these sounds I’m hearing?”\nThat’s why we do things like station IDs or say: Welcome to Sonic Lit, a SpokenWeb radio show. I’m Katherine McLeod and I’m here in the booth with…\n00:17:58\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\n00:18:00\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly — and reminding people of where they are, what they’re listening to, and who we are. That’s not something we’d typically do in a podcast. It felt strange at first, but I think we’ve gotten used to it.\nAnd then of course, the show streams online too — and we can archive episodes. That version of the show maybe feels closer to a podcast, but the radio experience still feels a lot more unknown.\n\n00:18:42\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I have to say, I completely block out the idea of a streaming audience—you know, the idea that people might be listening to it streaming afterwards. And probably it’s possible that more people will listen to it because we’ll tell three or four people to listen to it streaming, whereas probably there are zero people listening to our show when it’s playing live.\nBut that’s not the point. The point is: when we’re on the air, it creates a sense of urgency, because if there’s dead air then we’re not being responsible.\nSome of the things you mentioned, like playing the station ID—I like to say, “It’s 1690 on your AM dial”—you know, playing the station ID, playing the advertisements that we’re required to play during the course of the hour that we have on the air, is all part of a kind of responsibility to the station and to the audience.\n\nBut I have to say, the fact that we don’t know who’s listening to us creates a kind of potential—in my mind, anyways—for an actual listening audience. And it allows me to summon them, you know?\n\nAnd I want to give you an example. So we’re on a college radio station, so it’s probably fewer listeners than, say, larger radio stations—either commercial or the CBC. But, you know, I was on the CBC just yesterday morning to promote a show that’s happening at the Blue Metropolis Festival this Friday–\n\n00:20:21\tCBC Host – Archival Recording\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is an excerpt from Jason Camlot’s appearance on CBC Radio.]\nMontreal-based literary group The SpokenWeb is back at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. They work out of Concordia University to save the audio history of poetry across Canada. They preserve recordings that date back as far as the 1950s. Their event on Friday: Not Your Mother’s Poetry Reading…\n\n00:20:25\tJason Camlot\t[End of CBC clip – podcast resumes]\nAnd I won’t go into the details of promoting it because this is a podcast, so there’s no point. But yesterday I was on CBC at 7:30 in the morning–\n\n00:20:33\tAudio Clip of CBC Episode\t[Audio cuts back to the CBC clip]\n–Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb podcast. He’s also a professor of English Literature at Concordia University and joins us on the line.\n\nCBC Host: Good morning.\nJason: Good morning.\nCBC Host: What kind of audio archives is your group trying to preserve?\nJason: These are like–\n00:20:48\tJason Camlot\tI got up to be on the air and I was like, “Oh, why am I getting up? No one’s going to be listening to this.” And I had my eight minutes to talk about the event we’re doing at Blue Metropolis.\nThen, as soon as I got off the air, my phone [phone notification ding sound] was off the hook with texts. I don’t know if that metaphor makes sense anymore, but I was getting a lot of messages from friends.\n\nI was literally thinking to myself, as I got off the air, “Oh no, I’m going to be so tired today. Why did I even do this?” And then all these friends were texting me saying, “I just heard you on the radio!”\n\nIt took me aback. First of all, I was like, what are you doing up listening? I mean—it’s not even that early… Sorry, this is making me sound like a real slacker. [Laughs]\nBut it was a surprise. I got about five texts—that’s five people within my inner circle who had heard me.\n\nSo that made me think, “Wow, there were probably a lot of listeners out there.” And then if we think of college radio in relation to the CBC—maybe it’s only 5% of the CBC audience, but still, that means there are actually people tuned in to that station, listening. So, oh my God—it’s a huge difference.\n\n00:21:53\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, I haven’t told you this story yet, but I have to add it to what you just said—thinking of stories from these past couple of days.\nOver the weekend, I was at a party, talking about our radio show. And in fact, I think I’ve attracted three new audience members from that.\n\nIt was a party full of poets—so, you know, maybe this came from that. But when I was telling them about the radio show, one person replied, like, they responded, they were like:\n\n“Oh, you know, even if your audience is reaching, like, that 17-year-old listening to the radio in that moment…”\n\n[cryptic sound plays and fades]\n\n“…it’s going to change his life.”\n\nAnd I was like—yes! You know, that’s our imagined audience. If we want to have one of many possible versions out there. But really, if someone’s tuning in, there’s a real potential to change their life. And it’s—it’s—yeah. The possibility is there.\n\n00:22:42\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I wanted to run something by you in relation to audience.\nWe’re running out of time for audience. So that’s the other thing. [Laughter]\n\nYou know, we’re working with a time limit—both with the podcast and the radio show—but the urgency of time is much more dramatic in a radio show, because you literally are the clock–\n\n00:23:00\tKatherine McLeod\t–is ticking, coming up at the hour and we have to be done by then, yeah.\n00:23:03\tJason Camlot\tBut I wanted to tell you this story about David Antin, who was a talk poet.\nHe was an avant-garde poet, and he used to sort of create poems by going before an audience and just starting to talk.\n\n00:23:38\tDavid Antin, Archival Recording\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is a recording of poet David Antin before a live audience.]\nI came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I’ve been thinking about, and because I don’t come unprepared to do pieces.\n\nOn the other hand, I don’t come prepared the way one comes to a lesson. I haven’t studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit—the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness that comes in certain socially structured events.\n\n00:23:39\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nHe would talk for 45 minutes to an hour, and then he would record them, and then he would turn them into print poems as well. And the poem existed across all these different media—live performance, tape, in a book.\n\nI was doing a sort of email interview with him and preparing an article about him. He had done some radio, you know, so I asked him a little bit about what’s the difference between performing a talk poem on the radio versus performing a talk poem in a classroom before a bunch of people who showed up to hear you?\n\nAnd his response was that when you’re on the radio, you’re just speaking into a black hole. It’s as though your words are just evaporating as soon as you speak them. And there’s no sense of reception.\n\nBut that’s not been my experience at all of speaking on the radio. I—somehow, even though I can’t see anyone listening—have a very tangible sense that there are people listening. I mean, big myth perhaps, but you know, that’s how I feel.\n\n00:24:50\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I feel like the idea of it traveling across the airwaves—and like, you know, again, there’s something about the radio dial or tuning in—that anyone could be tuning in.\nAnd also, that responsibility to put on the show and not have silence, not have that dead air happen. You feel like not only are the listeners depending on you, the station’s depending on you. There’s—again—a sense of responsibility for the sound.\n\n00:25:16\tJason Camlot\tWhat I have, going back to these texts I received from friends, is that I learned things about them — that they have rituals of listening to the radio.\n00:25:24\tKatherine McLeod\tBut yeah, there’s a ritual. Also, really, radio has connection.\nI think of so many times I’ve texted my mom across three hours’ difference out to her in Vancouver. And I did this a lot when I first moved to Toronto and we had moved away from home. But I’d be like, “Oh, turn on the radio at 3:40,” or whatever, to hear this specific piece of music.\nAnd because we were both big CBC Radio 2 listeners, if we could be connected by both having heard that piece of music at that point in the day, there was something very special about both having listened to the same thing at, you know, the same time in our day. [Instrumental music starts playing]\n\nSo radio — connecting across really vast distances — is something that’s really quite, again, special about the medium–\n\nArchival Recording\t[Audio cuts into a prior radio broadcast. Fast-paced instrumental music plays in the background. Voices are slightly distorted.]\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nAnd we’re here on September 30th, which is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. And here on Sonic Lit, we’re bringing you all Indigenous sounds. You just heard—\n\n[Audio glitch/cut]\n\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nSo what happened today, Katherine, in the USA?\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nNot sure. Weirdness is about to happen in the USA. Trump’s inauguration?\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nWe don’t know what’s going to happen in the USA, do we?\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nIt feels very, very uncertain — and a bit weird.\n[Audio glitch/cut]\n\nJason Camlot [distorted archival recording]\nIt feels a bit weird.\nKatherine McLeod [distorted archival recording]\nAnd so today’s Sonic Lit show is basically going to be American weirdness.\n[Fast instrumental music continues briefly, then fades]\n\nJason Camlot [live recording, clearer]\nWelcome back to Sonic Lit, the radio show.\nKatherine McLeod [live recording]\nToday we’re listening to poetry by memory — poems that people carry with them in their minds and in their hearts.\n00:27:09\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nIn some ways, what you’re saying makes me think that speaking on the radio is closer to doing a live performance — you know, a live poetry reading — than making a podcast is. You know, there’s a liveness, and it’s about the sort of simultaneity in time, as time is unfolding in the present, that really makes it special.\n\n00:27:32\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd a podcast may be more akin to a vinyl record that a poet has recorded some poems on. And you know, that’s also a very moving sonic experience, but something different — experiencing time together.\n00:27:50\tJason Camlot\tAnd yet, when we’ve been talking about — and even sort of theorizing and talking with experts about — podcasting, the sense of liveness, the sense of immediacy and dialogue and informality is always stressed. But the liveness is maybe just a little bit different. There’s a different kind of liveness in radio than in podcast.\n00:28:10\tKatherine McLeod\tPodcasting — there’s maybe a liveness in, say, the intimacy of the voice, and kind of having that voice with you in your headphones as you’re moving about the world. In those moments in time, you’re experiencing sound along the same time — you’re synced in time through sound, that’s what I’m getting at.\nBut, you know, the intimacy of the voice is maybe something different than the intimacy of time, or being connected through, again, through radio — traveling through the airwaves, connecting you across distances, and connecting through time.\n00:28:47\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\t[Audio cuts into another recording]\nZen Ship sounds from Tanya Evanson — that’s “Qutb,” or “Qutb (the search for the bull),” from her album Zen Ship.\n\nAnd I mentioned earlier that Katherine McLeod can’t be in the studio with me today. Unfortunately, she had to stay home because little Clara, her daughter, was having some…well, just not having the best day. And I think it was a teething thing. And you know, teeth are important — they’re all part of this oral performance art that we’re highlighting on the show.\nBut since she can’t be with us in studio, we’re gonna try to see if we can get her on the phone. So I’m interested to hear what Katherine thinks of the Tanya Evanson stuff we’ve been playing so far.\nKatherine, are you there? Can you hear us?\n\n00:29:35\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\t[Katherine on the phone]\nI can hear you.\n00:29:36\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tAlright, cool, I hear you too. This is ecstatic.\n00:29:40\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\tI’m so thrilled to be live on the show via the telephone.\n00:29:45\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tWell, I hope things are going OK. How’s Clara doing?\n00:29:48\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\tShe’s doing well. She’s actually having her nap, so this is perfect timing to be able to call in. I was thinking, well, I’ll get to listen to the show during her nap — but even better, I get to join you on the show today.\nWasn’t expected, but thanks for heading to the radio booth yourself, Jason — and for telling me.\n00:30:07\tJason Camlot, Audio Recording\tYeah, yeah. No, it’s great to have you with us one way or another. And it was really your idea to feature Tanya Evanson in today’s show. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about why you wanted to do that.\n00:30:25\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nSo one of the— we’ve been talking about some of the different qualities of liveness in radio, and one of the, in some ways most terrifying and yet also most— it’s become for us most enjoyable, funny, comical, I don’t know, humiliating yet pleasurable— elements of liveness and radio is that when you make mistakes, they just happen. And they’re there. And they’re not going to go away.\n\n00:30:50\tKatherine McLeod\tYes, and they range from things like maybe mispronouncing something–\n00:30:57\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\nWe’re going to be listening to, first of all, some tracks from her new albums. You know— Sun Suite. [Disappointed “womp womp” sound effect plays]\n\nAlright, we’re back—Sonic Lit.\n\nWhile we were off-air, Katherine sent me a text. And Katherine and I have a little bit of a running gag going, at least between ourselves, where we correct each other’s pronunciation or knowledge on the things that we’re playing on air.\nAnd I’ve had a good run. I’ve been—I’ve been able to correct her on a few things over the last few shows. But this time, Katherine texted that I’ve been saying the title of Tanya’s newest record, which I’ve been saying *CNO*, as though it’s *Cyrano*—like the Bergerac—*CNO Sun Sweet*, but it’s actually *Cyano Sun Sweet*.\n\nSo—chalk up a point for Katherine.\nAnd I did want to make that correction: cyanosis.\n\n00:31:50\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nStumbling over–\n\n00:31:53\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\n[Deep voice saying: Now, if you’ll open your book, I’ll begin.] *A Child’s Introduction to the Novel Oliver Twist*, as adopted by J.K. Ross, captures the true spirit of an old England in much of Dickinson’s—Dickens—sorry, in much of Dickens’s own words.\n\n00:31:10\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nOr the CD player not working—\n\n00:31:12\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording]\n–and I’m going to pause that. [Audio playback fails]\n\nI knew I couldn’t get it on the first try.\n\nHere, let’s try that one more time.\n\n[Audio playback resumes successfully: “Stories of snow…”]\n\nAlright, here we go.\n\n[Audio continues: “Those in the vegetable rain—”]\n\n00:32:25\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast]\nOr your microphone not working, and realizing that you have to just figure that out on the fly and try to, you know, make it work— and sometimes have the help of our very wonderful station manager, Cameron McIntyre, who sometimes will fly into the booth and, you know, turn the CD player on.\n\n00:32:47\tJason Camlot\tCameron’s like a helicopter parent, nearby in case something goes wrong. I mean, we had to be trained to be on the radio, right?\nYou know, you can’t just walk into a studio and start being a DJ. Like, you have to pay your dues for at least three training sessions.\n00:33:01\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I think too, though— from making so many podcasts, I think it actually surprised both of us, because we kind of thought, well, we’ve made a lot of podcast episodes, we’re very, very familiar with making audio about literature, and, you know, we can just— we can do this. And then realized— no, no, there’s so much to learn. And we’re still learning.\n00:33:20\tJason Camlot\tYeah, absolutely. I mean, so you mentioned some of the things that can go wrong— equipment failure of different kinds. And there definitely— it happened to us more than once where, you know, we planned a whole show based on a few CDs and— oh, the CD player’s not working. Or, you know, there are three mics in the studio and none of them seem to be picking up any sound. And we don’t know why. And it’s because the person who was in the booth just before us pressed some buttons that they weren’t supposed to. And so, you know, Cameron has to rescue us.\nOh yeah, one of our most common errors is we get too ambitious. We want to— there’s like five more songs before the show is over, but we only have time for one of them. So we actually list all the songs that we hope to play, but then we only play half of one of those songs or poems–\n\n00:34:05\tKatherine McLeod\t–we’re going to, you know, end this— end this show with playing, like, this poem and this poem, and then Jason and I both look at each other and realize that actually— there’s only two minutes. [Laughter]\n00:34:18\tJason Camlot\t[Fast paced instrumental begins] So yeah, managing time is a big cause of errors for us.\n00:34:22\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. [Fast paced instrumental continues and fades]\n00:34:42\tJason Camlot\tIt seems to me, actually, as we’re talking, that almost all of these different qualities of radio seem to come down to the effects of time on us as radio show hosts. One of the things we’ve been excited about in using time— or about the time— is how much time we actually could devote to listening to, say, a single artist or something like that.\n00:35:03\tKatherine McLeod\tBecause we’ve kind of adopted some of the practices of, say, the ghost reading or again, the listening practice or the podcast— in that we have done some really deep dives. And actually, some of the shows that I think have felt the most satisfying have been where we’ve just really listened closely to, say, a CD of a particular poet or an archival recording.\nAnd I should say that actually— radio, CDs—this is like the best forum for playing poetry. Because on a podcast, you can’t necessarily— you know, you can’t really play commercial recordings. Or if you do, you can just play a clip and talk about it, and all those things about rights.\n\nBut on the radio, playing a commercial recording of a poet is a terrific way of playing the work and then being able to, you know, have it count towards Canadian content on air and everything like that. So we’ve really done some good deep dives into Canadian poets who have made CDs. And I think some of the times that we’ve just really dwelled in one disc have been some of the most generative and enjoyable.\n\n00:36:06\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I love that. I mean— yeah, we literally have license under the legal rubric of radio to play whole records if we want.\n00:36:15\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Recording\t[Audio cuts to a recording]\nThe other thing they really have in common is they’re both off of albums, which I just think is so fascinating. So we really, when thinking about the Montreal sounds to feature on today’s show, we thought: well, why not? Why not feature two albums? But two albums from really different periods… [Voice fades]\n\n00:36:31\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd yeah, there is almost a kind of inclination to just talk less, comment less. So it’s less about our intervention, you know, in the pieces we’re playing as illustrations of something, and more of a kind of sharing and collaborative listening with whoever else might be listening at that moment.\n\n00:36:50\tKatherine McLeod\tYou know, in that way, it’s such an ideal format for a listening practice. Because, you know, we’re listening with our audience, and really the focus is on listening.\n00:36:59\tMaxine Gadd, Archival Audio\t[Transcriber’s note: The following is a clip from a previous episode of the podcast, in which Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod listen to and discuss a recording of Maxine Gadd.]\n[Audio cuts into a previous podcast episode]\n[Maxine Gadd archival recording]\n\nI remember the bell— Some of us are to be half-inch diameter crystal. If there is crystal—Leary—I should have mentioned—was Timothy Leary. I should—I should have explained that before, you know?\n\n00:37:23\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tWow. Maxine Gadd, reading at Sir George Williams University in 1972, on February the 18th. So— tomorrow, many, many years ago.\n00:37:37\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI love listening to this reading again.\nI was really noticing how it was really hard to tell when she moved in and out of a poem. But I really liked that— because I was like, then I felt like listening to her talk about the poem also kind of felt like her reading the poem.\nAnd then I would suddenly realize: oh wait, now we’re in a poem. And it felt like just her voice kind of carried us through both— again, from the commentary into the poem itself. And then even at the end there, when she says like, “Leary, I should have mentioned it was Timothy Leary,” it almost was like— oh right, now we’re out of this poem. And it again felt like kind of part of the poem.\n\nBut I was also just thinking— Jason, I don’t know if you’re noticing this too, but like— when she was talking about the poem, either before or after, it felt so improvised. And like, we kind of— I think when we were sitting here, we felt like, oh, we feel like we can just imagine her talking to us. And it felt very informal. But we really liked that element of it, because it just felt, again, like we were sitting down with her, hearing her talk about her poems in a very casual way— and then read them. And the improvisational quality of it was just— it felt very live.\n\n00:38:52\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tI mean, you really hear her— you hear this in many readings, not all readings— but you really hear Maxine Gadd sort of tuning herself or calibrating herself in relation to the room. So  the opening part of the reading that we just heard after Richard Sommer’s introduction, she was really feeling things out. She didn’t really know what she was going to do. You get a sense that she almost didn’t quite know who she was speaking to yet. And so she needed to explain herself. But at the same time, explain that she would be figuring out what she’d be doing as things unfolded. And I think she needed to start making sound in order to get a sense of some feedback that would help her decide where she would be going with this reading, and what pieces she would choose, and how she would read them— and what it would all mean to her as she did it.\n00:39:52\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tI think that we’re going to hear more. We might pause for a…well—\n00:39:57\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tLet’s— let’s, yeah— let Maxine have a little more time–\n00:39:59\tKatherine McLeod, Audio Clip\tYeah, because she’s about to actually talk about a really important movement in Vancouver called Intermedia. So let’s— let’s hear that before we do anything.\n00:40:07\tJason Camlot, Audio Clip\tSo let’s continue being the audience for Maxine Gadd, February 18th, 1972. And you’re listening to CJLO 1690.\n00:40:21\tMaxine Gadd, Archival Audio\tOh yeah, this—this is where I’m at now. I don’t like it. OK.\n00:40:27\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd it’s probably not a good point. It’s not necessarily about, you know, disseminating our ideas about these recordings as research. It’s about listening again with other listeners who are tuning in.\n\n00:40:36\tJason Camlot\tYeah, it’s about—it’s about sharing also, right? You know, so the Montreal spoken word performer Fortner Anderson has a show on our rival station, CKUT—not really rival station, but that’s McGill’s station.\nBut on his show, he doesn’t speak at all. He just plays records, right? So basically, he uses his hour purely to share work, to promote work, circulate work, expose work, you know. And there’s definitely a much greater sense of, you know, that being one of the major purposes of what we’re doing on the radio.\n00:41:10\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, and it’s so exciting to think—like to be like, OK, well, you know, this disc that, you know, we— I don’t just have to choose one clip from it. In fact, we can—we can really—we can listen to the whole thing. We can listen to tracks and also then talk about it a bit. But really, it’s about the listening. And then we have been able to share a lot of local artists and, you know, discs that we’re big fans of and want people to listen to as well.\n00:41:34\tJason Camlot\tYeah, so in the spirit of this topic, the next hour of our podcast will be devoted to listening to a single record. Here we go now. Just kidding.\n[Piano instrumental begins]\n\n00:41:59\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’re listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast— or Sonic Lit. [Laughter]\nYou’ll do it again? Yeah, because I was like, wait—how should I— You’re listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m here with—\n00:42:17\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\nKatherine, was that your radio voice that we were just hearing?\n00:42:21\tKatherine McLeod\tYes. I will say you also have a radio voice, Jason.\n00:42:24\tJason Camlot\tDo I ever. [Laughter]\nIt’s so embarrassing. I hear myself speaking that way and I just can’t help myself when I’m in the studio. I was like, “And Jason Camlot,” you know? Like, who am I? Who is that?\n\nBut I think it’s interesting to think about how we speak on the radio and what forms of talk are happening, you know, on our show. Like what forms of talk are happening to us on our show? What forms of talk are we performing on the show? What forms of talk are we listening to on the show? Because there are a lot of different forms of literary talk and performance, but then also our show happens within a much wider context of other forms of discourse and talk.\n\n00:43:03\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd I remember one time when we had arrived early before our show, we were listening to the show that airs just before us. And it’s a sports show–\n00:43:14\tJason Camlot\t–the Tommy John Show.\n00:43:17\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah. [Laughs]\nThat was your radio voice. [Laughs]\n00:43:18\tAudio Recording from Tommy John Show\t[Audio cuts to a recording from Tommy John Show]\nAgain, so this could be a disaster— an absolute disaster— for the Carolina Hurricanes. And so what do you do if you don’t think you can get a deal done? So you try and get something for him. And there’s going to be teams that would be interested— absolutely— it’s Rico Ratman— but not necessarily a team he wants to sign with. A team that’s going to try and win a cup. So I would not be surprised. A team like Winnipeg, Edmonton. Because you know what they’re gonna have to do— Carolina— they’re gonna have to retain some of the salary to make it—\n\n00:43:50\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd—\n\n00:43:51\tJason Camlot\tHe has a good radio voice—\n00:43:52\tKatherine McLeod\t—Because we were— when we were listening, we were amazed at the way that he just— he talks continuously [music plays] in such an animated way. And just the way that he pauses— there’s just such a style to it. It was just incredible to hear. So, you know— and also sounds really different from our show and the person that comes in after us–\n00:44:10\tAudio Recording from Tommy John Show\t[Audio cuts to a recording from Tommy John Show]\nThat was “Arizona” by Wunderhorse off their newest album “Midas,” which I’ve been a huge, huge fan of lately. It’s not doing anything necessarily reinventing the genre or doing anything particularly special, but it’s just like— I’ve— sometimes I’m in the mood for just some really, really well-made indie plays, you know?\n\n00:44:18\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nLocal Montreal artist talks about local events and also has a really distinct unique sound to that show as well. And across— again, look across the shows on the station— very diverse sounds of the show across the spectrum of radio. A lot of differences.\n\nAnd yet there’s something about, like, the radio voice that we kind of know when we do it. And you know what? What is that? And, I do it too. And I often, sometimes even on the radio— I’ll notice when I go from sort of a hesitant thinking or like, is the microphone working? Is this working? Is this working? And there’s lots going on in my head.\nAnd then suddenly, in a moment when we’re talking about something we’ve just heard, I’ll realize I’m really just like in the zone of thinking about what we heard and what I’m talking about. Even right now— I’m now gesturing with my hands, whereas I wasn’t before. And my voice changes then. And that’s another kind of, I guess, radio voice.\n\n00:45:32\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I actually like the setup better in here than in the studio— the radio studio— because we get to look at each other. We’re side-by-side in the radio studio, and I think that makes a difference.\nBut I want to say— when we first— or when I first heard the Tommy John Show, because we wait outside before we go in— so it’s playing in the larger studio— I was amazed at how he never says “umm,” you know?\nAnd when I listened back to the first few shows we did, I’m like “umming” every 3 seconds. And I was like— how does he do that? You know? How do I not?\nI think I’ve gotten better at it, actually. And not even thinking about it. It’s just sort of gradually becoming a little more fluid— without “ums.” There’s a good one. I’m definitely going to keep that one there.\n\nBut Matteo, who does the show after us—who does kind of a local music show and bands that are in town, who’s in town—his whole approach is more like, “I love this band,” you know? And basically, the entire approach to the show is, “This band I’ve been listening to like, you know, for 30 years.” He’s only like 20 years old. “And I love them, and they’re great, and they’re in town, and they’re playing here. I remember I last saw them last summer here,” or whatever. And it’s all very personal, you know?\n\nAnd so even just the bookends to our own show have very different— like, when Tommy John’s speaking, you have a sense of a hardcore sports audience who knows as many stats as he does, and he can just rattle them off like nonstop. And is a fan of every sport and can talk extensively about every player, every trade, every—everything. He has a very clear sense of who he’s talking to. And so does Matteo. And I think that’s— that we’re still coming into our own. Like we talked about audience before, but I think we do have that. And—and I suppose the way we talk is going to change as we gain a clearer sense of who we’re talking to.\n\n00:47:17\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, but it is about kind of getting comfortable with your sound, and also knowing that, like, your voice is a radio voice, even if it doesn’t sound like other radio voices. I think that was actually Cameron McIntyre, our station director, who said that when we were doing our training—that every voice is a radio voice. And I was like, yes, that’s right.\n00:47:50\tJason Camlot\tWe’re doing a literary radio show, right? Which is probably—I mean, and it’s a poetry radio show. And it’s like often obscure poetic works. We’re doing sound poetry—[Audio transitions to a distorted clip: “your voice, so what is the bone inside of your body… body.”]\nIt’s probably like the least commercial kind of show imaginable, right? You know, we’re not doing a sports show or one on, like, recent music that’s been through town like the shows before and after ours. And it’s been obvious to me that even at a college station, radio is functioning within a very commercial framework—commercially minded. There are ads we have to play.\n\n00:48:46\tAudio Clip, Unknown Speaker\t[Audio cuts to a recording – Unknown source]\nOne of the lions ladies left behind to scratch coloured gods on rocks.\nLate production. We’d have “Freak, in collaboration with TD Bank Group presents…\n\n00:48:54\tJason Camlot\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nFor the shows that are topical, maybe are supposed to draw in audiences. It’s as though our show is designed to drive audiences away. Almost. No—just kidding! It’s a great show and you should all listen to it. But yeah, I don’t know—what do you think about this element of radio—that it really is sort of functioning within a kind of commercially minded framework?\n\n00:49:21\tKatherine McLeod\tYeah, well, it’s interesting too, because the examples both you and I refer to when talking about the show have often been CBC Radio. And so it’s almost like our go-to comparison is public radio, not commercial radio.\nBut I think that what we’ve noticed is—then realizing, “Oh yes, radio is inevitably influenced by the commercial,” and trying to sort that out when thinking about poetry, which is often not thinking about the commercial. And even things like from the station, getting reminders—because we’re in Canada—to play Canadian content to a certain percentage, or a list of top songs for the week.\n\nI know we just got an email saying that our show was part of the days that will be audited next week, so that means that we’ll have to submit a very elaborate playlist where it really identifies which content is Canadian. And often on our show, most of our content is Canadian, but it’s recordings of poets—not necessarily recordings of the latest Canadian singers. So it’s a different kind—it feels like a different kind of Canadian content.\n\nIt’s also made us think a lot about poetry itself—like, say, playing the poetry, talking about the poetry. Is our show talk radio? That category doesn’t quite feel right for our show, but we are talking about the material. Or is our show more like experimental sound-folk something? You get leaning into more of the recordings, and even the record labels that some of the poets are on. Is it some mix? It feels like it doesn’t quite fit in any of those categories.\n\nBut it’s been interesting to try to apply one of those categories onto our show and sort of see: how does that work? In what ways do we kind of exceed those boundaries or just not quite fit? Which is, it’s funny—for, again, college radio, where everyone’s pushing boundaries—but just this show…it’s a mix.\n\n00:51:33\tJason Camlot\tI do feel that within the college radio environment, being as weird and experimental as you like— [Swooshing sound]\nThere have been a couple of times where Cam has come in from his desk into the studio and said like, “Are you still on air? Or is there something going wrong with the signal?” or whatever. But it’s just because we’re playing a sound poet, you know, or an experimental sound piece.\n\n00:51:55\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly at that moment. I’m glad you told that—told that story. Yeah. He’s like, “Just to check—is that…?”\n00:52:01\tJason Camlot\tAnd he wasn’t like, “Turn it off! Go to the regular programming!” He just pokes in and goes, “Is this what’s supposed to be playing?” But it’s like—oh, that’s cool. That’s great. [Trombone plays]\nThere have been more commercially minded moments of our shows—like when we play Tanya Evanson’s new record or Kaie Kellough’s new record, and we want to promote it.\n\n00:52:26\tAudio Recording, Unknown Speaker\t[Audio cuts to a recording – Unknown source]\nIn the future it’s ache. Strive. A natural continuity.\n\n00:52:46\tJason Camlot\tThe way anyone would be promoting a new band’s record, right?\nBut at the same time, I do feel like the stuff we play on our show is kind of in tension with all the other forms of talk that are expected to be heard on the radio. And I find that really exciting and fun, actually—that like, even though it’s all talk, like you were saying—or music, right? Music is the go-to, really—but of all the talk shows, the fact that we’re playing talk shows that doesn’t register as the correct kinds of radio talk seems to me very exciting.\n\nAnd I think that wouldn’t, again, be a feeling I would have if it wasn’t within the radio context. The fact that it’s actually open to anyone hearing it. The fact that people who probably don’t want to be hearing it are hearing it, because it’s on somewhere or whatever—for me, is very exciting. Because it feels like a discursive intervention of some kind.\n\nStill, when you think about it, for all that talk about how fringy our show is, it is still a radio show. And as Hannah McGregor, our co-producer of the SpokenWeb Podcast, pointed out, there are differences in access to being able to produce shows between podcasting and radio. And the bar—even on a college radio station—may be higher than starting your own podcast would be. So I think it’s important. It’s an important point that Hannah raised, and that we’ve been thinking about surrounding the question of access to the medium, and being able to use it to make interventions of the kind that we’ve just been talking about.\n\n00:54:35\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m really glad that Hannah made that point to us too, because I was thinking a lot about why were we so happy and proud of ourselves to be DJs? And I think it also had to do with the way in which we both just really loved radio as a medium. And that’s been the medium that we’ve grown up with, we’ve listened to throughout our lives.\nAnd so the idea that we were going to do something that others who we have admired have also done—at first, I didn’t think about it so much as about access. It was more like, “oh, we’re getting to do that thing that we’ve always wanted to do.” But then to realize, “oh, right, we’re getting to do that because there’s a degree of access that we have”—to be able to say, like, pitch our show to the station and be trained.\n\n00:55:19\tJason Camlot\tYeah, you’re totally right.\nI think one of the reasons I was so excited to be on the air is because I didn’t have access to that medium growing up. And I wanted to, we would maybe watch a show like “WKRP in Cincinnati” and see the inside of a booth.\nBut it was only when I went to CEGEP—which is like after high school—that I got to see inside a radio booth. And even then, as a first-year CEGEP student, I couldn’t get on the roster of DJs at CEGEP, which was only broadcasting within the building. It didn’t even have a band. So yeah, there was a kind of allure due to the barriers that were set up from using that medium.\n\n00:55:54\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd even for me too—especially the aura of the radio archives. I know when I first went to CBC Radio archives to listen to poets that I was researching there—and I got to go—at that time, CBC Radio Archives were in the basement. And like, going downstairs and seeing the sign for “Radio Archives,” I was just enthralled.\nAnd so then to think of bringing that to my experience of being on the radio—and, you know, not everyone’s going to do that. But I think there was something that then— I hadn’t even thought about access because it was just so exciting to enter into that space itself.\n00:56:31\tJason Camlot\tI mean, I think there’s a continuum of access between commercial radio, public radio, and college radio. College and community radio is certainly more accessible and really big. But we had to be somehow within the community—or within the institutional community in this case—to be able to apply to have a show. The application process wasn’t overly onerous, right? But still, not everyone’s in university, not everyone is in an institution that can provide that kind of access. What does all this add up to?\n00:57:10\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, it makes me think of how this show—it’s not just about one show. The show is a body—the show is a body of work. It’s continuing to grow.\n00:57:21\tAudio Clip\t[Audio cuts to another recording – a collage of audio clips from previous recordings]\n[Overlapping and distorted voices]\nWhich is cool. I don’t know what that was, but I was just listening and looking. Which is the lake of the island, and it’s freezing.\n\n00:57:41\tKatherine McLeod\t[Back to podcast discussion]\nAnd right now, we don’t even have a year’s worth, but we’re sort of reflecting on how this show was evolving. Also thinking about maybe things that, you know, we wouldn’t have known—like doing a deep dive into, say, a CD, or actually just kind of stepping back and listening with listeners would be the way to go.\n\nAnd I think that that was something that we only developed while doing the show. And so it makes me think of almost this show as a space to experiment—or almost kind of like a lab, to use a buzzword—but even more than a lab, almost like—like going back to listening practices—like an opportunity to practice, but also like, it is a performance. Listeners are listening, but it’s evolving. It’s like we’re continuing to practice listening with listeners. And there’s not a conclusion. It’s continuing.\n\n00:58:41\tJason Camlot\tYeah, I’ve found it’s served as a kind of public forum for working our way through content that we don’t have time to do otherwise, right? And which allows us to begin to make connections between some of the different recordings we’re making that we maybe would never have thought of as linking up or connecting to each other. So the fact that we have the time to just play these things, listen to them—it’s almost like doing the first readings, you know, of materials that will then allow you to do something maybe a little more specific, a little more expository with afterwards.\nBut this phase of listening, and then of thinking about connections live as they’re happening, is incredibly generative. And I think interesting in its own way to listen to, actually, because you’re sort of hearing those connections be heard as they’re perceived—and hearing the initial reflections on what those connections might mean right when they were perceived.\n\nSo it is—and I like the idea of—you know, so you have a bad show, right? You make a lot of mistakes or something goes wrong. I like falling back on that argument that—I think it was our colleague Elena Razlogova said to you—is that, well, it’s just, it’s a body of work. Right? So it’s sort of like, you know, OK, that was a bad show, but there’ll be another show.\n\n01:00:00\tKatherine McLeod\tExactly. Exactly. Yeah.\nAnd that idea too, of like listening—hearing the listening unfolding live on air. You know, listeners—they—we really—what we’re doing is listening on air, and listeners are hearing that. And I think that going back to that point about it being live on the radio—that I think that is what is most important about actually doing the show live, is then for listeners to be able to listen with us and hear that listening taking place.\n01:00:35\tJason Camlot\tWhat do we usually say at the end of our show? Like, how do we—how do we sign off, so to speak?\n01:00:40\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, sometimes you’re showing—we announce what’s going to play next and then do an outro. I’ll do it, yeah.\n01:00:50\tJason Camlot\tSorry—we list 10 songs and then play 30 seconds of one of them. Yeah. But apart from that, you know, what do we say? I mean, you’re so good at bringing us into the show. Like, can you do the opening again? Let’s just hear it.\n01:01:01\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, I can do what I did for one of the outros. But I have an idea of how to end this. So let’s see how this goes.\nYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast. This episode has been about Sonic Lit, a spoken word radio show. My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m here with—\n\n01:01:21\tJason Camlot\tJason Camlot.\n01:01:23\tKatherine McLeod\tThanks for listening. [Laughter]\nI couldn’t—I got distracted by your radio voice. [Laughter] Well, that’s good.\n\n01:01:33\tJason Camlot\tThis has been a podcast, not a radio show—even though it really sounded like a radio show.\n01:01:41\tKatherine McLeod\tThat’s right. So, we could say “Tune in next week,” but in fact, stay tuned on the podcast feed for future episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast.\nAnd if you’re interested in checking out Sonic Lit, the SpokenWeb radio show, head to cjsf.com. Or if you’re in Montreal, tune in Mondays at 2:00 on 1690 AM. Or as Jason likes to say—\n01:02:10\tJason Camlot\tYour AM dial, 2:00 PM Mondays.\n[Audio: Thanks for tuning in—and keep it locked to 1690 AM.]\n[Soft instrumental music plays and fades]\n\n01:02:31\tHannah McGregor\t[SpokenWeb theme song begins]\nYou’ve been listening to the SpokenWeb Podcast, a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\n01:02:47\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Jason Camlot and our very own Katherine McLeod.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n\n01:03:05\tHannah McGregor\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\nIf you love us, let us know—rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media.Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\n\nUntil next episode, thanks for listening."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9682","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.1, Audio of the Month – Daryl Hine’s Point Grey, 20 January 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-daryl-hines-point-grey/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/a736b976-2394-4326-8ba6-8250b6767046/minisode-ep1-edit-v2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"minisode-ep1-edit-v2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:06:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"6,387,296 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Minisode ep1_Edit V2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-daryl-hines-point-grey/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-01-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549802188800,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Welcome to our first SpokenWeb minisode. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) – join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of Month mini series. This month Katherine shares a recording of Canadian poet Daryl Hine reading “Point Grey” (1967).\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to our first SpokenWeb minisode. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s inaugural Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(00:57)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:03\n)\tKatherine McLeod\tAt the end of 2019, I was listening back through the December readings in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and I started exploring the reading by Daryl Hine. At first, I considered selecting his reading of the final poem “The Trout,” but then I noticed something else: a note for one timestamp indicating that Hine had introduced and read quote, “an unknown poem.” End quote. As I listened to his introduction to that poem, I realized that he was preparing the audience for the now-famous poem “Point Grey,” which at the time of this reading was not yet published. In fact, the introducer of Hine at the start of the reading had mentioned that Minutes, the collection that contained “Point Grey,” would be published in the new year, 1968. That voice of the introducer was listed as unknown, too, but it sounded a great deal like Margaret Atwood, possibly meaning that this was the first time that Atwood heard “Point Grey,” a point to expand upon elsewhere and perhaps even to confirm through an Audio of the Week in the new year.\n(02:15)\tKatherine McLeod\tReturning back to the audio clip of Hine’s poem, the unpublished state of “Point Grey” is audible through the sounds of the pages turning, suggesting that Hine read from sheets of paper, not from a book and especially in his decision to restart and read a different version. He introduced the poem by describing its view from the University of British Columbia or Point Grey clarifying that, quote, “I don’t mean the university by any of the architectural things I mention in this poem, but I’m talking about the beach, a very beautiful, barren Pacific beach that lies below Point Grey.” End quote. Many years ago, I heard this poem read in a classroom at UBC, overlooking the same view where, quote, “…rain makes spectres of the mountains.” End quote. Here was “Point Grey, on this recording, as I listened from Montreal where this poem was read in 1967, soon to be published in 1968 and anthologized in poetry collections for years to come.\n(03:27)\tAudio Recording\t[Coughs] [Audio, Daryl Hine] Well, I also—[Shuffling Papers] this year or was it last?—returned to my place of origin, British Columbia [Long Pause, Audio Cuts Slightly] –Grey, which will be familiar to some of you as the site of the University of British Columbia. I don’t mean the university by any of the architectural things I mention in this poem. But I’m talking about the beach, a very beautiful, barren Pacific beach that lies below Point Grey.\n(04:10)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daryl Hine Begins To Recite “Point Grey”] Brought up as I was to judge the weather / Whether it was fair or overcast… [Stops Reciting] Well [Crumples Paper] I’ll read another version, I think. Excuse me. [Begins To Recite A Different Version of “Point Grey”] Brought up as I was to ask of the weather / Whether it is fair or overcast, / Here, at least, it is a pretty morning, / The first fine day as I am told in months. / I took a path that led down to the beach, / Reflecting as I went on landscape, sex, and weather. / I met a welcome wonderful enough / To exorcise the educated ghost / Within me. No, this country is not haunted, / Only the rain makes spectres of the mountains. / There they are, and there somehow is the problem / Not exactly of freedom or of generation, / But just of living and the pain it causes. / Sometimes I think the air we breathe is mortal / And dies, trapped, in our unfeeling lungs. / Not too distant the mountains in the morning / Dropped their dim approval on the gesture / With which enthralled I greeted all this grandeur. / Beside the path, half buried in the bracken, / Stood a long-abandoned concrete bunker, / A little temple of lust, its rough walls covered / With religious frieze and votary inscription. / Personally I know no one who doesn’t suffer / Some sore of guilt, and mostly bedsores, too, / Those that come from scratching where it itches / And that dangerous sympathy called prurience. / But all about release and absolution / Lie in the waves that lap the dirty shingle / And the mountains that rise at hand above the rain. / Though I had forgotten that it could be so simple, / A beauty of sorts is nearly always within reach. [Shuffling Papers]\n(\n06:12)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(06:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to spokenweb.ca to find the entire recording where this selection is from. I’m Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into SpokenWeb’s audio collections."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9660","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.7, Moving, 19 April 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/191afc43-7900-41f2-b82e-38b41a4e5eba/audio/a4fd83fa-8a12-4186-b289-0d1e5be20e02/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2-shortcuts7-moving.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:13:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,786,339 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2-shortcuts7-moving\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018. \\n\\nMcGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/. \\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\n—. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965. \\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549802188801,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, it is April – the month of poetry. The audio we will be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. In fact, it is a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space and that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. How is a poem held in the space in which it is spoken, and what happens to desire in this speaking? How are they held in the archives?\n\n\n00:00      Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:10\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, a monthly minisode in which we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors Cutting] from the SpokenWeb archives. Our last minisode ended up being the most interactive so far. It was a collaborative listening that ended with a conversation, trying to figure out what was happening in a confusing moment in archival listening. It was one of those moments that you wish you could go back and talk about. That’s what we did, and we’ll be talking about more of those moments in future ShortCuts.\n \n\n01:46\tKatherine McLeod::\tWhat kinds of moments might we be revisiting? One of SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by Simon Fraser University is called the Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest collection. It’s a series of recordings of a radio program called radiofreerainforest that produced by Gilbert in the 1980s. Coming up in future minsodes we’ll dive into that audio collection, especially to talk about some of the spaces where the recordings take place. One reading happens on a bus, yes, it was recorded on a bus travelling through Vancouver’s downtown streets. Another recording has Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle reading and talking together on a panel, but where did the panel take place? And what was it like to hear this panel on the radio?\n \n\n02:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe’ll try to figure all of this out. Plus, we’ve been diving into audio collections from the past, but coming up we’ll be listening to recordings of literary events that took place much ore recently. That’s what we’ll be listening to next month. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast if you haven’t already to stay tuned for that, along with, of course, the full episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast on the first Monday of each month. This month, it is April, the month of poetry. The audio that we will be listening to in this ShortCuts is a poem by Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. It is in fact a series of poems from Naked Poems, poems that open up space, that leave room for the listener to listen – to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. The space is audible in her reading of the poems and it is visible on the page, as Webb comments on when she introduces Naked Poems to her Montreal audience in 1966…\n \n\n03:30\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tI want to move on now to my latest book, which is called Naked Poems, in which one of your local critics – or at least you vote for the Montreal Star at this particular point – exclaimed of the price – because there are so few words in the book [Audience Laughter]. It’s $2.25. [Audience Laughter]. These poems are very small and therefore very expensive [Audience Laughter] and and came at a bitter price. I may say, to me. They came quite as a surprise. I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them – the first 14 or so. I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here? And I couldn’t quite take them seriously. And then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic, in them. And realized that here was something – almost a new form for me to work on. And it’s very bare, naked, undecorated. And I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to write oh a couple of hundred of them. And I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem and finally reduced them to, I don’t know, 40 or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation let’s say. I’m going to read the first14, which comprise the total poem– in a sense, the whole book is a poem. And then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.\n \n\n05:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn that clip, we hear that Naked Poems has recently been published around the time of that reading. It’s an example of hearing time in the archives, coming back to a theme running through this season. As for how we can hear in this minisode and in the archive of podcasts it is creating, we can think this month of April and what this time brings to our listening to Webb’s poem and to Webb herself. April is the month of Webb’s birthday, and I hope that the sounds of this minisode travels through the airwaves to her on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. I was able to meet with her there a couple years ago while working on articles about her poetry and she graciously made time for a visit. I had hoped to meet again but the sound of this minisode may make it there first before I can travel from Montreal to BC. And so, it is with this spirit of sending the sound across from Montreal to Saltspring Island that I cut the audio of this ShortCuts and make it into a gift, crafted with deep respect and gratitude for your art, Phyllis Webb.\n \n\n06:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tLet’s now hear Webb read from Naked Poems. The reading was recorded in 1966 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia. At that reading, the second reader was Gwendolyn MacEwen. Imagine hearing Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn MacEwen reading in person on the same night. MacEwen would be sitting in the audience listening to Webb read. Here is Webb reading “Suite I” and “Suite II” from Naked Poems…\n \n\n07:26\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\t“Suite 1” Moving to establish distance between our houses. It seems I welcome you in. Your mouth blesses me all over. There is room. And here. And here. And here. And over. And over. Your. Mouth. Tonight, quietness in me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls. The bruise. Again, you have left your mark. All we have. Skin shuttered secretly. Flies. Tonight in this room, two flies on the ceiling are making love quietly or so it seems down here. [Audience Laughter]. Your blouse. I people this room with things, a chair, a lamp, a fly. Two books by Mary Ann Moore. I have thrown my gloves on the floor. Was it only last night? You took with so much gentleness, my dark. Sweet tooth. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude.\n \n\n09:36\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tThe sun comes through plum curtains. I said, the sun is gold in your eyes. It isn’t the sun. You said. On the floor, your blouse. The plum light falls more golden, going down. Tonight, quietness in the room. We knew. Then you must go. I sat cross-legged on the bed. There is no room for self pity, I said. I lied. In the gold darkening light you dressed. I hid my face in my hair. The room that held you is still here. You brought me clarity. Gift after gift I wear. Poems naked. In the sunlight. On the floor.\n \n\n10:59\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air, we see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room, we feel the air thick with eros, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire, to be contained within the archives of this reading series –\n \n\n11:32\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nWhile you were away. I held you like this in my mind.\n11:38\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe hear this holding. The quietness of each page …\n \n\n11:43\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\tQuietness. In the room. We knew…\n \n\n11:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe hear the turning of the page. The room–\n \n\n11:51\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nThe room that held you. Is still here…\n11:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tWe are listening to desire in the making, every time we press play on this recording, as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem, the room of the reading, the voice moving…\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n \n\nYou brought me clarity. Gift after gift, I wear. Poems naked, in the sunlight, on the floor.\n12:26\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe room that held you is still here.\n \n\n12:29\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n12:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tMy name is Katherine McLeod, and this ShortCuts minisode was produced by myself, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and mixed and mastered by Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland. It was recorded in the city of Montreal, or what is known as Tio’tia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about The SpokenWeb Podcast and tune in next month for another deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9661","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.8, Contrapuntal Poetics, 17 May 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/contrapuntal-poetics/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/478fa03a-47f5-46f5-84ee-548433c59706/audio/22aa5df2-7658-4204-997b-9a175efbae6e/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e8-shortcuts.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:12:50\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,380,831 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e8-shortcuts\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/contrapuntal-poetics/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-05-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nAudio clipped from “The Words and Music Show” (29 March 2020), https://www.facebook.com/1541307492796466/videos/891396077972589.\\n\\nAudio clipped from “ShortCuts 1.3 Where does the reading begin?” (Kaie Kellough reading at “The Words and Music Show,” 16 Nov 2016),  https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nGibson, Kenneth. “Jessica Moss ponders the mysteries of the universe.” The Concordian. 22 January 2019,  http://theconcordian.com/2019/01/jessica-moss-ponders-the-mysteries-of-the-universe/.\\n\\nMoss, Jessica. Entanglement. https://jessicamoss.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement.\\n\\nPerry Cox, Alexei. Finding Places to Make Places. Vallum, 2019. \\n\\n—– Revolution / Re: Evolution. Gap Riot, 2021.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549803237376,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this ShortCuts minisode, listen to the contrapuntal poetics of poet Alexei Perry Cox. In a recording made at home, Alexei reads and improvises in response to a second voice in the room – the voice of her daughter Isla. Their interaction itself could be heard as a poem. Meanwhile, sounds of place enter and exit the room of the recording, with what sounds like cars passing by outside and even the “Zoom room” becoming audible at times. The audio you hear in this ShortCuts was recorded, over Zoom, as part of the first online version of The Words and Music Show on March 29, 2020. What are you listening to when you listen to an online reading? From where do you listen? \n\n\n00:00\tMusic:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? A fresh take on our past minisode series, ShortCuts is an extension [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. The series brings Katherine’s favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more [End Music: Instrumental Electronic] Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod with episode one of SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n01:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Each month, we listened closely and carefully to a shortcut or cuts from SpokenWeb‘s audio collections. The recent ShortCuts have been from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, but last season we ventured into a more recent collection in episode three, when we heard a truly innovative way of starting a reading.\n \n\n01:42\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words and Music Show:\tI want to forget/ 1980s /high school fever / forget articles in the Herald/ in the moment of heavy evangelical / black-haired teens from reserves / who drank themselves to death in macho contests/activity and much extreme conservativism/ trying to prove to themselves that they exist/ as night drifts into next days headlines / some of the challenges that arise growing up and trying to live and become oneself in a climate like that / I want to forget my stupid conviction that a boy had to be distilled into a man/ that the Caribean bloodline had to be spiked with rum / which seems to be a climate that is re-emerging/ that amber alcohol…\n \n\n02:13\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal. And the audio collection for Words and Music is where we’re headed to you for this minisode. But we’re not going to be listening to audio that was recorded at Casa de Popolo where so much of the Words and Music show has been recorded live over these past 20 years. No, we’ll be listening to the Words and Music show recorded from home — the first one to be online and hosted on Zoom. On March 29th, 2020, the Words and Music Show took to the Zoom stage. Co-hosted by Ian Ferrier and Jason Camlot. That first online show was meant to test if it worked. And it did.\n \n\n02:58\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\tI wonder how many people can hold.\n \n\n03:01\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\t300 people.\n \n\n03:02\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nOh wow. Okay.\n \n\n03:04\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nI think we’ll be okay.\n \n\n03:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tSince then, the Words and Music Show has been online usually every third Sunday of the month. By now, most of us are used to attending Zoom events, or at least whereas used to it as we’ll get — or want to get. But back in March 2020, it was incredibly new. The reason why among the many recordings that are now part of the archive of pandemic poetry readings I’m selecting this one, is because it demonstrates the blurring of the public and the private through sound. In these archival recordings we listen on ShortCuts, we often ask: what are we listening to? And what are the sounds around the poem that tell us about the space, the sociality of the room, and how the sound was recorded? These sounds around the poem give context. They become part of the relationality of the listening. Sound doesn’t exist on its own, but in relation. What is our relation to this sound now? What does it feel like to listen to it? With that in mind, let’s listen to the ShortCut for this month: A reading by poet Alexei Perry Cox on March 29th, 2020.\n \n\n04:21\tAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words and Music, March 2020:\tAnd the next thing we have is a video which was created under extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18 month old child on her bed. And it’s by the poet, Alexei Perry Cox. So I’m going to bring that up now and we can take a listen. Yeah, here she comes.\n \n\n04:46\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \tThe unequivocal [french word], according to the [inaudible], comes in the chorus that has a lullaby. It makes use of emphasis on the incantatory present participle and is a consultation. Tropical, the island breathes, and this was where I long to be. Time is portrayed as malleable and is a journey. The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time. We are taken there to this Isla Bonita, and there is wherever we are. In a vice grip with my lover in exile. As time went by, my lover was gradually overtaken by an urgent desire whose futility exceeded all measures, but the circumference of the universe itself. I desire to grasp the secret of the present, to penetrate the eternal unity of life and see a system’s undulating veil. In the universe of our civil war, systems have the insubstantialabily of hummingbirds song and the iridescence of its plumage. While their manifestations were immutable. Told that my lover, my love for my lover, told that my love for my lover was a vice. That loving another woman wasn’t very womanly of me [Baby Speaking] that our civil war as being against ourselves. Wasn’t the same as their civil war as being against us. [Baby: Coos] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality perfect in congress would get through to human kind. In exile, in Paris, in Sausalito. I want you to touch me here and here. I want it to be worn for me, for you. I want to love systems that are women so that you can enter them by being untrue.\n \n\n07:10\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at the Words and Music show online on March 29th, 2020. She’s reading from “Finding places to make places” and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla her then 18 month old daughter –\n \n\n07:35\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\n[Baby: Coos] La revolution ….\n \n\n07:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tWhat are we listening to in this clip?\n \n\n07:41\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\n[Baby: Cries] \n \n\n07:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] The poem? The interaction between Alexei and her daughter that becomes a duet? The improvisation, or to the quality of the sound, the audibility of the Zoom room? –\n \n\n07:57\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \n \n\nThe entropy in an open system –\n \n\n07:57\tKatherine McLeod:\t– [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] When listening to a recording of Phyllis Web reading from Naked Poems on a previous ShortCuts, I suggested considering how desire is held by the archives and how the poem creates a space for the listener. Similarly, how does this recording hold the poem’s desire and how does the poem make space inhabit space? From where are we listening?\n \n\n08:25\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \tTo a certain logic for disappearing. You cannot live the same life as you imagine. [Aside: Alexei laughs at baby] You must live a smaller life. A more compact life. [Aside: Yeah? Laughs] [Baby: Coos] The life is too capacious. You will lose your balance. Driving home, I think this. [Baby: Coos with increasing volume] A door opens on an eye, an eye opens on a line. A line of eyes, looking into a coffin, carrying the body. Body to the river and into a vision. You know your conscience cannot forgive what left you long ago washed away by summer floods like a body loosened from a grip into something death made transformative.\n \n\n09:21\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] As I listened to this back in March, 2020, I was right in the middle of making an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast with Jason Camlot. We were making an episode called “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence”, which you can have a listen to if you feel like revisiting that time of March 2020 sonically. When I heard Alexei read at the Words and Music show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices, what improvisation at a poetry reading. Plus it felt like her reading was enacting exactly what the podcast was trying to say: that we are missing the noise around the signal. We still miss it now. We miss the buzz in the room, the social sounds around the signal, the voice of the speaker. I know I can’t wait until I can stand in a crowded room and listen to Alexei read on stage at a microphone again. By the way, [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]in January 2019, I was at an album launch for the Montreal musician, Jessica Moss and Alexei read poetry as the opening act. She read with her newborn strapped to her chest.\n \n\n10:38\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Album launch, 2019:\n \n\n[Baby: Cries] Even as a new you moves about the womb –\n \n\n10:41\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis little voice that we’re hearing in this recording had already been with her mother on stage for a poetry reading. [Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath]\n \n\n10:48\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox,___, 2019:\n \n\n– the world is smaller than the center of your eye. But when I –\n \n\n10:51\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Audio Recording: Alexei and Baby continue underneath] Going back to readings onstage doesn’t mean that we will not perform with our full selves, with the public and the private self coexisting. Even if the audience doesn’t always see it or hear it that way. With that, let’s return to Alexei and Isla who inhabit a poem with “Womb or the World”.\n \n\n11:15\tAudio Recording, Alexei Perry Cox, Words and Music, March 2020: \t[Baby: crying and cooing] A book without room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from out of time, brimming with life. Fabulous a wing, unfolding in a poultry field appearance while night finds no constellation in night but in it’s eclipse. Like this. [Aside: Kisses baby]. [Baby: Coos].\n \n\n11:54\tTheme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n11:54\tAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words and Music, March 2020:\n \n\nAnd there’s bye-bye to Alexei, who was being seriously upstaged there.\n \n\n12:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat continues and fades]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9662","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.9, Situating Sound, 21 June 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/93f41bc8-fa9e-4603-96f3-5d3b5b1679ca/audio/cf8f93b4-3c4a-42b3-91f3-f2b8c931f7b8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-2-9-situating-sound.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:15:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"14,480,658 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-2-9-situating-sound\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nDionne Brand, recording played on radiofreerainforest, 7 August 1988, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\n“#101 Renee Rodin.” BC Booklook, 28 January 2016,  https://bcbooklook.com/101-renee-rodin/.\\n\\n“Desire Lines: Mapping the metadata of Toronto arts publishing.” Art Gallery of York University, https://agyu.art/project/desire-lines/.\\n\\n“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.\\n\\nKinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.\\n\\nOur Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections,  https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549804285952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["On this ShortCuts, we dive into a new audio collection: Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection, accessible through SFU Library’s Digitized Collections. We’ll hear a recording of Dionne Brand reading in Vancouver with Lee Maracle of the Stó:lō nation. The recording of this reading was then played on the local radio program radiofreerainforest on August 7, 1988. What would it have been like to listen to this reading live in 1988? On the radio? And what is it like to hear it out of context in the archives now? This ShortCuts minisode is about the archival research process. ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod takes us on a brief journey into the research behind an archived tape in SpokenWeb’s collection, all started by and ending with a reading of poetry by Dionne Brand.  \n“a motion heard on my inner ear” – Dionne Brand, Primitive Offensive (1982)\n\n\n00:02\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listened to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project pitch an episode to ShortCuts Season Three. You can start with a blog post on SpokenWeb blog, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno]\n \n\n00:43\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Theme Music]  Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights at every second week, following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? Shortcuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spoken web.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Theme Music] [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: [Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n \n\n01:39\tKatherine McLeod:\t[End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts. On ShortCuts we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Audio Effect: Scissor Snip] from the archives. On this ShortCuts, we dive into a new audio collection, [Underlaid Sound: radiofreerainforest clip with various voices overlapping] radiofreerainforest. radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s.\n \n\n02:16\tAudio Recording, radiofreerainforest clip:\t[Echo Effect] [Various Voices] radiofreerainforest.\n \n\n02:16\tKatherine McLeod:\tRecordings that were played on that program were kept by its producer and host Gerry Gilbert. And they’re now one of SFU’s many audio collections currently being processed by SpokenWeb researchers. Something I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts, is what kind of a framework does audio clip out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms, gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound. I could select a clip and just simply play it. But I feel like that doesn’t give enough context, but I also don’t want to give too much context. My hope is that I can guide you into the listening and then you can take it from there. Where I’m leading you to is a reading by Dionne Brand in 1988. The recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio, on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988. The tapes of this recording and yes, tapes in the plural – more on that in a moment –indicate that it was Dionne Brand reading with Lee Maracle. It took place in Vancouver and as to where, that required a little searching. One tape says R2B2 Books. And I figured out that it was a bookstore on fourth avenue that had once been the location of Octopus Books and later became Black Sheep Books before closing in the early 2000s. I remember going into Black Sheep Books when I lived in Vancouver and I didn’t realize that it had such a history of holding so many readings as R2B2 Books. What else do we know about the recording? Well, it was a long one. It spans two cassettes, not because it was recorded on those two tapes, but because it was transferred onto them. What I’m getting at here is this: imagine pressing play on a tape labeled “radiofreerainforest, 3rd and 28th of July and 7th August, 1988.” The Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle reading starts part way through one side and then on a completely different tape labeled “radiofreerainforest 7th, 25th, August, 1988 and 30th, October, 1988”.\n04:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tThere is the rest of the recording. On that second tape, the Brand reading starts right in the middle when you press play. And that’s where I found myself in it’s sound without knowing the context in which she was speaking from or where that reading was taking place. It was after finding the other tape that I could piece together, that it was on August 6th, 1988, and then aired on August 7th, 1988. And that it was at R2B2 Bookstore. It was in the middle of this that I consulted SpokenWeb’s metadata system to see a photograph of the tape itself. And that’s how I found the date of the reading. But before that, I was going by the fact that Brand mentions an event in solidarity with South African women against apartheid, that would have happened the next day, August 7th. From doing a bit of searching in print archives, I found out from the feminist newspaper Kinesis that as part of the March, the next day Maracle had given a speech in solidarity against apartheid speaking as an Indigenous woman of the Stó:lō nation.\n05:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd that she had also written about this solidarity in a 1988 issue of the Black women’s newspaper Our Lives that Brand had helped to edit. These pieces of context are only the beginning of unpacking the significance of these two women reading together. And unraveling this history all started by wanting to know more about one archival recording. So as we listen to this reading, what would it be like to be there in that room with Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle in 1988? Now in June, 2021, what does it feel like when you hear this recording wherever you might be listening from? How do we understand this recording in relation to the archive that holds it? I am recording this a week after Brand read from The Blue Clerk at an annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists. How does Brand hear time? When she introduces what she reads from Primitive Offensive in the recording we’re about to hear she says that the poetry is made out of the pieces of history, a history that as she says, if you are Black in the Americas, you have to dig for it. How does that resonate with the lines where she chooses to end?\n \n\n06:56\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tI won’t take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [Aside to audience] Okay, that’s it. [Audience applause].\n \n\n07:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs we could hear in that recording, there are noises in the background. We’ll be hearing what sound like cars passing outside, we’ll hear some voices and might wonder if those are people talking outside the bookstore window, or perhaps this recording has been recorded over another one and we’re actually hearing the voices of another time bleeding through the tape. Here is Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive in a recording that was broadcast on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988, and now that recording is held by and shapes an archive.\n \n\n07:58\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t[Static and various background noises throughout] I’m going to read a poem for my grandmother, a poem for my ancestors, really. I wrote this book Primitive Offensive because, for whatever history has left you, if you were Black in the Americas, you have to dig and dig and dig and memorize and memorize and learn and learn it and redo it and recover it and re– you know, because it isn’t anywhere else. And so this was my history book. Sometimes you arrive and find what seems to be nothing, and you have to dig for it. And this is a call to my ancestors about this history. And I looked for my ancestors and I found what there was. And so – and sometimes you find nothing and you make it anyway. [Laughs] You know, you find a piece of cloth, a bit of this, whatever, but you make it humour. So –[Start of reading]  Ancestor dirt/ ancestor snake/ ancestor lice / ancestor whip/ ancestor fish/ ancestor slime/ ancestor sea/ ancestor stick/ ancestor iron/ ancestor bush/ ancestor ship/ ancestor\n09:12\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\told woman, old bead/ let me feel your skin, old muscle, old stick/ where are my bells?/ my rattles/ my condiments, my things to fill houses and minutes/ The fat is starting, where are my things?/ My mixtures, my bones, my decorations/ old bread, old tamarind switch./ Will you bathe me in oils?/ Will you tie me in white cloth?/ Call me by my praise name/ Sing me Oshun song./ against this clamour [Background noise of voices inaudible] / Ancestor old woman/ Send my things after me./ One moment, old lady more questions./ What happened to the ship in your leap? The boatswain, did he scan the passage’s terrible wet face/ The navigator, did he blink?/ Or steer that ship through your screaming night?/ The captain did he lash two slaves to the rigging, for example?/ Lady! My things/ Water leaden, my maps, my compass/ After all, what is the political position of stars?\n10:29\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tDrop your crusted cough, where you want./ My hands make precious things out of phlegm./ Ancestor wood/ Ancestor dog/ Ancestor [tape recording skips] Old man, dry stick, mustache, skin, and bone./ Why didn’t you remember? /Why didn’t you remember the name of our tribe?/Why didn’t you tell me before you died?/ Old horse, you made the white man ride you/ You shot off your leg for him./ Old man, the name of our tribe is all I wanted./ Instead, you went to the swamps and bush and rice paddies for the trading company and they buried you in water/ Crocodile, tears. /It would have been better to remember the name of our tribe./ Now, mosquitoes dance a ballet over your grave and the old woman buried with you wants to leave./ One thing for sure, dismembered woman, when you decide you are alone/ When you decide you are alone, /when you dance, it’s your own broken face.\n11:24\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tWhen you eat your own plate of stones/ For damn sure you are alone./ Where do you think you are going dismembered woman?/ Limbs chopped off at the ankles./ When you decide, believe me, you are alone./ Sleep, sleep, tangential phase, sleep,/ Sleeping, or waking/ Understand you are alone./ Diamonds pour from your vagina,/ and your breasts drip healing copper/ But listen, women, dismembered continent/ You are alone./See crying fool,/ You want to talk in gold/ You will cry in iron./ You want to dig up stones./ You will bury flesh./ You think you don’t need oils and amulets compelling powder and rely on smoke./ You want to throw people in cesspits./ Understand dismembered one, ululant /You are alone./ When waterfalls work, land surfaces./ I was sent to this cave./ I went out one day like a fool to find this cave, to find clay, to dig up metals to decorate my bare and painful breasts./ Water and clay for a poultice for this gash to find a map an imprint of me anywhere would have kept me calm./ Anywhere with description./\n12:30\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\tInstead, I found a piece of this/ A tooth, a bit of food hung on. /A metatarsal, which resembled mine./ Something else like a note. Musical. /ting ting, but of so little pitch so little lasting perhaps it was my voice./ And this too, a suggestion and insinuation so slight, it may be untrue./ Something moving over the brow as with eyes close to black/ a sensate pull/ Phantom! Knocks the forehead back in the middle of a dance. /No, I can’t say dance. It exaggerates./ Phantom. A bit of image./ A motion close to sound, a sound imaged on the retina resembling sound/ A sound seen out of the corner of my eye./ Emotion heard on my inner ear./ I poured over these like a paleontologist./ I dusted them off like an archeologist/ A swatch of cloth./ Skin, atlas, coarse utility, but enough./ Still only a bit of paint, of dye on the stone./ I can not say crude, but a crude thing./ A hair, a marking. That a fingernail to rock an ancient wounded scratch./ I handle these like a papyrologist contours/ A desert sprung here./ Migrations, suggestions, lies./ Phantom. A table and jotting up artful covert mud./ I noted these like a geopolitical scientist./ I will take any evidence of me even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression.\n14:06\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988:\n \n\nOk. That’s it. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was the Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive. The recording was played on Vancouver’s co-op radio on August 7th, 1988 and the recording is held by the archives of radiofree rainforest. Now part of SFU library’s digital collections.\n \n\n \n\n14:32\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: Theme Music]] ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this mini-series and to learn more about SpokenWeb and the SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. End Music: Theme Music] [Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: [Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9663","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 2.10, Alone Together, 19 June 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/alone-together/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/12152e0c-52d7-49a7-9eea-0dccee09b096/audio/ff0bcf56-e9fc-44bf-aa09-abfd557fce3f/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-2-10-alone-together.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:19:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,903,084 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-2-10-alone-together\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/alone-together/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-07-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO SOURCES\\n\\nAli Barillaro’s recording of reading of her blog post, “Tanya Davis performing ‘How to Be Alone’” on SPOKENWEBLOG, 6 August, 2020. \\n\\nTanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone,” recorded at The Words & Music Show at Casa del Popolo, Montreal on 12 December 2012. Listen to the entire audio here: https://spokenweb.ca/tanya-davis-performing-how-to-be-alone/.\\n\\nExcerpt of Cover of “Digging my own grave” by Thrice performed by Ali Barillaro and Vincent Pigeon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y6H9QuL6q8\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nWatch Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s 2010 film of the poem “How to Be Alone”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs\\n\\nWatch the 2020 film made by Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman in which they revisit the poem as “How to Be at Home”: https://www.nfb.ca/film/how-to-be-at-home\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549805334528,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["For our last minisode of season two, ShortCuts dives into the archives of The Words & Music Show, a monthly series of poetry, spoken word, music, and dance performances that has been happening in Montreal for over twenty years. Last year, SpokenWeb RA Ali Barillaro was digitizing that collection when she heard a recording that caught her attention. It was a recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone.” As Ali listened, she felt a dissonance between Davis’s version of aloneness as freedom and the imposed and necessary aloneness of the pandemic. Along with being an academic, Ali is a singer – and this ShortCuts takes us into Ali’s story of navigating her artistic practice through the pandemic. We embark on this sonic journey by starting with one recording – the recording of Davis – which shows what you can make when you pause to notice what catches your attention.\n\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Jazzy Techno] Listeners, we want to hear from you. What short clip of literary sound would you propose we listen to in an episode of ShortCuts? If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, pitch an episode to ShortCuts season three. You can start with a blog post on SPOKENWEBLOG, or go straight for pitching us an episode. If you’re a fan of the show, please suggest an idea by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Jazzy Techno]\n00:43\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Welcome to the SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights, that’s every second week, following the monthly [[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb Podcast episode, join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts miniseries. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts, on SPOKENWEBLOG. So, if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine MacLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n01:45\tKatherine McLeod:\t[End Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] Welcome to ShortCuts where we listen closely and carefully to a short cut [Sound Effect: Scissor Snip] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. This is the last episode of our second season. It’s a chance to think back to our sonic journeys into the archives and the questions that have emerged from them. How does archival listening listen to liveness and sociality? How do we hear time? How do we hear the marking of time in a recording? How can a podcast episode hold sound with care? This season of ShortCuts was a practice in feminist listening with recordings of poets Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Allison, Phyllis Webb, Alexei Perry, Cox, Dionne Brand, and now in this final ShortCuts for season two, Tanya Davis. We’ll start with the clip of Davis from the archives. Usually on ShortCuts, we build towards hearing the clip. But this time we’ll be starting with it because this ShortCuts is as much about the clip as it is about the conversation afterwards, with a special guest. Let’s dive in. Here is spoken word and musician, Tanya Davis, performing “How To Be Alone” at the Words & Music Show in Montreal. It was performed on the stage of Casa del Popolo on December 16th, 2012.\n03:14\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tIf you are at first lonely, be patient./ If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were you weren’t okay with it, just wait./ You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it./ Start with the acceptable places./ The bathroom, the coffee, shop the library, /where you can stall and read the paper where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there/ where you can browse the stacks and smell the books/ you’re not supposed to talk much anyways, so it’s safe there./ There’s also the gym./ If you’re shy, you can hang out with yourself and mirrors, you could put headphones in./ And there’s public transportation because we all gotta go places/ and there’s prayer and meditation./ No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath, seeking peace and salvation./ Start simple./ Things you may have previously avoided based on your avoid being alone principles.\n04:06\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tThe lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow downers/ employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they like you will be alone./ Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone./ When you were comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner./ A restaurant with linen and silverware./ You’re no less intriguing a person if you’re eating solo dessert and cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger./ In fact, some people at full tables will wish they were where you were./ Go to the movies, where does dark and soothing,/ alone in your seat to midst of fleeting community./ And then take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you./ Stand on the outside of the floor until the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you.\n04:56\tAudio Recording, Tanya Davis, Words & Music Show, 2012:\tDance like no one’s watching because they’re probably not./ And if they are assume it is with best and human intentions,/ the way bodies move genuinely to beats is after all gorgeous and affecting/ Dance until you’re sweating and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things/ Down your back like a brook of blessings./ Go to the woods alone./ Trees and squirrels will watch for you./ Roam an unfamiliar city,/ there are always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting./ Give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute./ And those conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches may have never happened had you not been there by yourself./ Society is afraid of alone though./ Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements./ Like people must have problems if after a while nobody is dating them./ But alone is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it/ You could stand…\n \n\n05:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat archival audio was selected by SpokenWeb researcher, Ali Barillaro. Ali selected it for a ShortCuts blog post, or what was then called Audio of the Week. Ali is a SpokenWeb researcher who recently completed her MA at Concordia. You may have heard her present her research on audience applause in archival collections, and you very likely have heard her voice. She sings the vocals [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] in the SpokenWeb Podcast theme song. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental with Feminine Vocals] And so, it is very fitting that my conversation with her here veers into talking about singing and performing and the challenges of doing that through times in which our access to spaces that might otherwise have been used for artistic practices have changed. I invited her to revisit what she had said about Tanya Davis’ recording.\n \n\n06:51\tAli Barillaro:\tI originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How To Be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain about life in the midst of a pandemic.\n07:00\tAli Barillaro:\tI’m someone who under normal circumstances would gladly endorse and espouse Davis’s hopeful, poetic guide to finding freedom in solitude and learning to be comfortable inside your own head. But what struck me about this performance was that it made me realize just how far removed I now felt from Davis’s concept of being alone. The public locations listed as ideal spots to practice being by yourself, the coffee shops, libraries, movie theaters, and even the bus and Metro were no longer available to me. The version of alone evoked in the poem is not the alone most of us have come to know since March, 2020. And it’s hard not to feel a sense of loss while listening. The echo trailing each of Tanya’s words, fittingly conjures up an image in my mind of the poet reciting her work alone at the center of a vast empty room. Even though I know she’s speaking to a crowd from the small stage at Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Though, the recording left me longing for what felt like a lost form of solitude, I have also come to hear it as a calming and quiet reminder to try to find peace amongst the chaos, to reach out to community and loved ones however we can, and to be patient with yourself, as you learn to adapt to a new normal.\n \n\n08:21\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou wrote that about a year ago, was it?\n \n\n08:24\tAli Barillaro:\tYeah it’s been a while.\n \n\n08:24\tKatherine McLeod:\t– Yeah, July, 2020. What does it feel like for you to hear yourself reflect on Tanya Davis’s recording in that way?\n \n\n08:35\tAli Barillaro:\tIt was kind of an interesting experience actually, because I think I do feel differently now. Like I’m not at that same point that I was when I wrote that and when I was experiencing those emotions. With vaccines coming out, getting my first dose, having an appointment for my second dose, having seen quite a lot more people outdoors… I do still have some lingering sense of that strangeness of this new concept of alone and what that means to be alone while we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, even though circumstances have changed.\n \n\n09:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt struck me with listening to it, how they’re actually very public ways of being alone, like the sitting on the bus. And he says the phrase like “alone is a freedom” and just that very statement is much more complicated when alone –that doesn’t feel like a freedom. [Laughs] So, yeah.\n \n\n09:35\tAli Barillaro:\tIt’s actually made me reflect back on something – I used to not really like the phrase “alone together”, but I think that has been –anyone who’s been living through this pandemic and lockdowns and isolation but that lives with a partner, a roommate, someone else that has really [Laughs] – that sentiment, that phrase has really become a reality for a lot of people, and how to navigate that differently when you might have lived together beforehand, but things are different because it’s really most of the time just going to be you and maybe this one other person and how that changes the dynamic of your own relationship, but also of your own personal activities, whether that be work, or hobbies, or just relaxing. Things are now different. So at first, around the time, especially when I was writing this piece for the blog, I think I was feeling a little bit boxed in and in my own apartment. Because, my partner works from home.\n10:39\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd we do have an office space, which we do use as well. He’s also a musician and we use that space normally for music, for recording things or just working on things. But that has had to change during the day, the regular nine to five. I don’t have access to that space. So that is one limitation that I had to deal with. But then in addition to that, what was really frustrating as well on top of that is yes, I have access to the rest of my apartment, but it’s not– I don’t live in a giant apartment. And if I was going to be making a lot of noise that comes with either just practicing or wanting to write or record something, I can’t do that either during those time periods. So that was a block that I felt that I had.\n11:28\tAli Barillaro:\tAnd it was a little bit de-motivating for quite a long time. I’ll also say additionally that even though my partner and I both do music, we really do things or we did tend to do things quite separately where he has his endeavors and I have mine. And I’m also someone who’s very private about music, even though I like to share things when they’re like – when I’m happy with them when they’re finalized. But there is a huge amount of vulnerability that comes with even if it’s not your own original music and even if you’re just working on a cover song, like I’m very –I get very nervous even around this person who is so close to me. So finding times when this person is around to just like practice and maybe make mistakes and things like that was a little hard for me at first.\n12:26\tAli Barillaro:\tBut more recently, just in maybe like the last couple of months even, I have started to say like, “Hey, you know, well, we can try to, we both like this song why don’t we try to work on this together on the weekends when you’re not having to work and be in that space.” And it’s actually been really great. So I’ve tried to [Laughs] – I guess also with this change in mindset that I’ve had in terms of the pandemic in general and aloneness in general, how things have sort of changed that relation to music and performance with this particular person who I’ve been alone together with has also transformed, which has been really lovely. And we did a acoustic cover of a song called “Digging My Own Grave” which is quite an emotional song actually. [Laughs] [Start Music: “Digging My Own Grave”]\n13:31\tAli Barillaro:\t[Music Continues in the Background: “Digging My Own Grave”] It really interesting experience as well, because I was doing primarily the lead vocals on it. And he’s done quite a few covers of their songs prior, just on his own. So it was kind of a nice change as well – and dynamic of that he would be there to be playing the music, but also to be doing the backup vocals and that I would be taking the lead on it. And we had to do some transposing to get that to work for both of us to get that range to be okay on both ends and that we both sound good [Laughs] making this. So yeah, we recorded that in the office slash music space, filmed it just a very basic video and put that together and up on my YouTube channel [Music Continues as Full Interlude: “Digging My Own Grave”].\n14:15\tAli Barillaro:\t[End Music: “Digging My Own Grave”] And people –friends and family were really enjoying it, they were like, “Oh, it’s really nice finally, that we get to hear the two of you together. And not just one of you, like it’s, it’s nice. It’s a nice change.”\n \n\n14:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat is beautiful. And thinking that it’s yeah, the collaboration, the coming together also is that –it almost is representative of the energy that like, okay, we’re slowly being able to see people that we hadn’t seen in a long time. So it feels like it’s part of that energy and part of that slow coming back to being together. One thing I wanted to ask you was about, if you could tell us how you found the Tanya Davis recording in your work for SpokenWeb and the Words & Music archive.\n \n\n15:28\tAli Barillaro:\tSure! One thing I’ll say is it’s been actually probably the best part of my SpokenWeb experience is getting to listen to these collections that we have access to. Because even though I’ve lived in Montreal my whole life, and that I think that I’m involved in the entertainment and the arts scenes and things like that, I didn’t know about the Words & Music Show, even though it’s been around for 20 years. So getting introduced to that and then fully diving into, I was responsible for about half of that. So about 10 years worth of recordings of these shows was really amazing. And essentially with that work, beyond just researching things, I did have to sit and listen. We weren’t creating full transcripts of things, but to an extent we were doing some transcription work which required full listen throughs, if you will.\n16:26\tAli Barillaro:\tSo I became familiar with quite a few different people who I didn’t know about and became very quickly interested in. So sometimes something would catch you, for whatever reason for maybe the types of work they’re doing with sound, especially some of the poets that are more invested in sound poetry, which again is something I wasn’t familiar with. Some of the music that I had never heard from people, either from Montreal, from other parts of Canada, and this particular recording, I don’t know if it was the– I think it was honestly the quality of the sound that really brought my attention to it and made me remember it. It was that echo to everything and how still it was, because often on those recordings, you can hear quite a bit of shuffling around in the audience. You can hear some noise from the bar of people, their glasses moving around or hushed sort of conversations. There’s a lot of extra sort of background noise in many of those recordings. And this was really as if everybody was like holding their breath and just listening. So I think that’s really what made it stand out beyond obviously the content and me being like, oh, wow, this is [Laughs] relatable, but also not quite relatable right now. But yeah, it was that particular sound of her voice and the way it was amplified that really got my attention, I think, when I was doing this kind of work every day.\n \n\n18:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs I talked with Allie, I started thinking about how she is an archival listener who has actually attended, in her own way, almost all of the Words & Music shows. No, she wasn’t standing in a crowd at Casa del Popolo, but she was listening to them and she was hearing the communities forming through performances. She was hearing how artists were invited back often, artists were trying out new work, artists perhaps performing the same piece, but many years later and with a different introduction and in a different context of other performers. Her listening was showing how an archive can document communities forming through sound. [Music Interlude: Strings]\n18:41\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of this episode. Check the show notes for this one to find bonus content, or rather Tanya Davis also revisiting “How To Be Alone” over this past year. Plus find links to more of Ali Barillaro’s music. ShortCuts is a monthly series as part of the SpokenWeb Podcast. It is hosted by Hannah McGregor, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thank you for listening. [End Music Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9685","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.2, Audio of the Month – Improvising at a Poetry Reading, 17 February 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-improvising-at-a-poetry-reading/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/f6a7d497-f14f-46d9-a761-055aa0f16b7d/sw-minisode-2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:06:15\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"6,075,917 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode 2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-improvising-at-a-poetry-reading/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-02-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549806383104,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["EPISODE SUMMARY\nAs we come to the end of a holiday long weekend here in Canada, it’s time for a new episode of SpokenWeb’s Audio of The Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds. This month Katherine shares a recording of Canadian poet Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with improvised flute by Richard Sommer (1972).\n\n(0:00)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:09)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to the SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Just in time for holiday Monday listening here in Canada, whether you’re spending time with family or enjoying a solo moment, sit back, relax, and join Katherine McLeod for February’s SpokenWeb Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:05)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:10)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Maxine Gadd] Well. Okay. Do you want to do, oh, do you want to try, try improvising to, to a chip that’s here? I’ll let you read it.\n(01:18)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Richard Sommer] Seriously, you wanna do that?\n(01:18)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Yeah. It’s just going to be some [inaudible].\n(01:19)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] I don’t know if I should…\n(01:22)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this Audio of the Month, we’re traveling back to February 1972, when poets Maxine Gadd and Andreas Schroeder read in Montreal. They read at Sir George Williams University, or what is now Concordia. They read on February 18th in the Hall Building in Room H-651. The reading started at 9:00 PM. Yes, readings started late and they went on for a long time. After reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gadd invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute. He improvised along with her reading the poem “Shore Animals.” Before starting to improvise, we can hear a negotiation between Gadd and Sommer about what to read and how to perform together, a process that is its own audible improvisation.\n(02:15)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Maxine Gadd] Now, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… He’s never done this one before.\n(02:31)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Richard Sommer] What, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n(02:32)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Okay, this is called “Shore Animals” and it says, “speech feasts peace with flute” and the flute has to listen.\n(02:38)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] Okay.\n  (02:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] And it can pl–, it can speak, too.\n(02:42)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen the audio clip that you’ll hear includes the first two minutes of a six-minute improvisation. Their improvisation is a singular moment when an audience member—in this case, Richard Sommer—formally performs in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, though at the same time, this recording reminds listeners that the audience is always present, ready to improvise, to interject, and even to interrupt. And that the audience is also what we are listening to as archival listeners.\n(03:16)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Maxine Gadd] What, the food? I think it’s over there. For fun. [Papers Crinkling] The same message. I, I’m asking… Richard is gonna make some noise with my flute.\n(03:32)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Richard Sommer] I’ll make some noise if you give me your microphone.\n(03:33)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Okay. Which one you want? Let’s share it. Is–\n(03:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] It doesn’t make any difference.\n(03:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] It goes with a [inaudible].\n(03:42)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] When’d you do that?\n(03:43)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] What?\n(03:44)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] This, this knot.\n(03:45)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] I’ve tied myself in there.\n(03:50)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] Here we go.\n(03:59)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] [inaudible] I can’t find it. [Long Pause] Pieces, pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is. Now, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… He’s never done this one before.\n(04:17)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] What, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n(04:19)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] Okay, this is called “Shore Animals” and it says, “speech feasts peace with flute” and the flute has to listen.\n(04:27)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] Okay.\n(04:27)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] And it can pl–, it can speak, too. You have to listen to it, yeah, you never heard it before.\n(04:34)\tAudio Recording\t[Richard] I think it’s learning how to speak.\n(04:39)\tAudio Recording\t[Maxine] It’s called “Shore Animals,” it’s a speech piece with flute. [Maxine Begins To Recite, Richard Plays Flute] So hearing where the poppy stopped me, small chance to star spiel, all you have told me, gone, false and beautiful gods and groves. People truth. Put it into song. When the traffic is gone, gone, gone a fleet in in the air. My debt to your tongue, Saturn. In your minds, I’ve split a spleen, lust my lust. Come along, fog. Oh! Soul, I have to whistle to you. [Audience Laughs] [Whistling]\n(05:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tThat was Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with Richard Sommer improvising on the flute at a reading that took place in Montreal on February 18th, 1972. [Begin Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the Audio of the Month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n(05:49)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Begin Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about the Audio of the Month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n(06:06)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9691","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.7, Audio of the Month – As Though Her Voice is Dancing, 20 July 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-as-though-her-voice-is-dancing/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/9112f64d-f980-465b-8252-4f130d4ea0f6/sw-minisode-ep-7_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-7_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:05:45\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"5,599,861 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode Ep 7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-as-though-her-voice-is-dancing/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-07-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549807431680,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In episode 7 of The SpokenWeb Podcast (“The Voice is Intact”), producer Hannah McGregor and guest Jen Sookfong Lee listen together to Gwendolyn MacEwen reading the poem “The Zoo” (recorded in Montreal, 1966). As we listen to them listening on the podcast, we hear a gasp and even an exclamation: “Melodious!” What was it in her voice that they were responding to? To try to answer this question through your own experience of listening, this Audio of the Month features another poem of MacEwen’s in this same 1966 recording: “I Should Have Predicted,” published in The Shadow Maker (1969).\n\n00:00\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n\n01:00\n\nTheme Music:\n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n\n01:03\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nIn this Audio of the Month, we’re listening to the voice of Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen. Now, if you’re a regular SpokenWeb Podcast listener, you’ll recognize MacEwen’s voice from episode seven: “The Voice Is Intact.” That episode was produced by Hannah McGregor and featured interviews with Jen Sookfong Lee and myself, Katherine McLeod. At the start of the episode, Hannah and Jen listened to MacEwen’s voice as she reads a poem called “The Zoo.”\n\n01:34\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nHave you ever heard her read?\n\n01:35\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nNo, I’ve never heard her voice.\n\n01:35\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nOh my God, do you want to?\n\n01:35\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nYeah!\n\n01:36\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen reading “The Zoo,” overlapping with Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee’s commentary] A fugitive from all those truths, which are too true, the great clawing ones and the fire-breathers,–\n\n01:46\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\n[Gasps]\n\n01:46\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n–the ones that rake the flesh–\n\n01:47\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nSo much nicer with her voice!\n\n01:47\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n–like piranhas, and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bear their red teeth in the nights.\n\n01:55\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nSo melodious, her voice.\n\n01:56\n\nAudio Recording:\n\nMy mind emulates,–\n\n01:58\n\nJen Sookfong Lee:\n\nI’ve never used the word melodious.\n\n01:59\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n–dragon, fish, and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night–\n\n02:03\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nMelodious, yes. So melodious, her voice. That was their response to her voice now, in 2020. And to be in awe of her voice has been a common response ever since MacEwen started reading poems in the 1960s. She read at places like the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, where poets would gather on stage to read over the sound of a noisy espresso machine. MacEwen would step onto the stage and, as she started reading, in fact, as she often started reciting her poems by heart, her voice would captivate listeners. That voice is one reason for selecting MacEwen for this month’s Audio of the Month. But another is that there is a very memorable moment of MacEwen introducing one poem in particular in SpokenWeb’s audio collection. To set the scene: the reading was in 1966 at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), and it was a joint reading with Phyllis Webb. Part way through the reading, MacEwen introduces the poem “I Should Have Predicted.”\n\n03:11\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen introducing “I Should Have Predicted] This is a poem which, oddly enough, came out in a Mexican magazine in Spanish not too long ago looking completely unrecognizable to me. It’s called “I Should Have Predicted.”\n\n03:27\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nI haven’t been able to locate this publication, but if you have any ideas about which magazine this could have been in, please do get in touch. For now, we know that it exists because of this recording. As we listen to it, hear how MacEwen reads, how she pauses, how her articulation of the poem makes it rise and then fall. Her pacing is exquisite. It is as though she is dancing the poem, as though her voice is dancing.\n\n04:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen reciting “I Should Have Predicted] I should have predicted the death of this city. I could have predicted it if only there had been no such pretty flowers. No such squares filled with horses and their golden riders. By this I mean that outside all was tame and lucky. But inside, oh, inside houses were wilder things, dynasties, wars, empires crumbling, chariots housed in halls, emperors in cupboards, queens and generals in bed, kingdoms rising and falling between the sheets. Thus I did not predict the death of this city. I was deceived by fountains and apple trees. How could I know what civil wars raged inside out of my sight, which focused only on the horses and the gold, deceptive city.\n\n05:06\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThat was Gwendolyn MacEwen reading “I Should Have Predicted” in 1966 in Montreal.\n\n05:18\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n05:18\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nFind the full recording of this reading by heading to spokenweb.ca. My name is Katherine McLeod and my thanks to Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland for their help on the production of this minisode. Stay tuned for the next Audio of the Month: a deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9977","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.1, Sounds, 18 October 2021, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/947a563e-79cd-4cab-8bfa-70414846cd5b/audio/600a1e98-d131-485f-a301-23e7df96f9f3/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-1-sounds.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:11:39\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"11,259,864 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.1 Sounds\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-10-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549808480256,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["ShortCuts is back! Season Three of ShortCuts begins with a listening exercise. We attune our ears to what it sounds like and feels like to hear archival clips ‘cut’ out of context. Join ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod in this exploration of the sonic and affective place-making of ShortCuts as podcast. What kind of creative and critical work can these archival sounds do? On their own, or together as an archival remix? \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series.\n \n\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? We are delighted to have you with us this season as Katherine brings us more voices from the archives, more conversations, and more thoughtful reactions from her practice of close archival listening.\n \n\n00:56\tHannah McGregor:\tShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca [Sound Effect: Wind Chime] for more.\n \n\n01:06\tHannah McGregor:\tIf you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Pitch Katherine your ShortCuts minisode idea by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: Instrumental Electronic].\n \n\n01:21\tHannah McGregor:\tNow, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere we are in season three of ShortCuts. We’re ready to take more deep dives into the archives, through listening closely and carefully to short cuts [Sound Effect: Scissors] of audio. My name is Katherine McLeod. And, over these past seasons, I’ve come to understand ShortCuts as an archival and affective place made through sound where we can talk, listen, feel, question, and think together about archival sound and the world it makes and unmakes. Welcome. This season begins with a warm-up. It’s a listening exercise to get us ready and attuned to archival listening. The short cuts will be from past ShortCuts episodes. Yes, we’re getting meta here by diving into the archives of ShortCuts. We’re doing this in order to hear what ShortCuts sounds like, what kind of place it has made so far, and to hear what it does creatively and critically with its sound. It’s an exercise in a podcast listening to itself in order to grow. All of the sounds will be clips from the ShortCuts archives, and that includes my voiceover. From now on, all of the sounds that you will hear will be found sounds, sounds, sounds… [Katherine’s voice overlapping] And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound.\n \n\n03:09\tMusical Interlude:\tShortCuts Theme Music:\n \n\n03:10\tTanya Davis, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10:\tIf you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if you weren’t okay with it, just wait.\n \n\n03:19\tAli Barillaro, Audio from ShortCuts 2.10:\tI originally came across this recording of Tanya Davis performing “How to be Alone” a few months ago while feeling thoroughly uncertain [Music: Feminine Voice from SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] about life in the midst of a pandemic.\n \n\n03:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tHow can you hear time?\n \n\n03:33\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present.\n \n\n03:35\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tShe has never read it like this before she cuts it up.\n \n\n03:40\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tIt’s called “An Elegy in Joy,” and it’s just the beginning piece. I wanted to do it tonight this way. I’ve never cut it up. Cut it up.\n \n\n03:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Every elegy is the present, freedom eating our hearts. Death and explosion and the world un-begun.\n \n\n03:56\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Voice of Muriel Rukeyser overlapping with same words] Death, and explosion, and the world un-begun.\n \n\n04:03\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tI thought of that very much at the beginning of this month in Mexico.\n \n\n04:08\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.3:\tWhen listening to a recording, can you be listening for time? Can we hear the spring thaw in an archival recording of poetry?\n \n\n04:19\tMargaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tThis is one of the very cold days, I guess about 10 below, cold enough. It’s inside the pane of glass separating inside from outside, comes into a certain kind of sky that goes with that, which is like glass. Again…\n \n\n04:43\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\tSomething I’ve been thinking about while preparing this ShortCuts is: What kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms gesturing as though I’m attempting to hold the sound…\n \n\n04:59\tStephanie Bolster, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tI guess I’ll say that I kept wishing I could seize everything and you know, slow it down and take in the details. Just like the density and the abundance of details. I was scribbling things down and couldn’t keep up. And in that sense, it really felt, you know, the same sense I would have had in a live reading.\n \n\n05:15\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\tAs you get a very, very rainy evening, why do people come and listen to poems? Well, you got some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems? Why do people come and listen to poems? And listen to poems?\n \n\n05:27\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tI listen again, and again.\n \n\n05:30\tMathieu Aubin, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tWhen I was listening to it, the first and second time – because I re-listened to it immediately –it’s different with you obviously because we’re actually responding, and we’re both in on it – like this is about to happen – and you could feel it generations later. That awkwardness. And you’d be like, everyone’s like ‘eee’…\n \n\n05:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tIt’s also interesting that the whole, sort of, joke or pun is about paper and a letter. And then – this – if she does like slam the book down, or – if she, you know – the presence of the weight of the page – [recording of Margaret Avison overlaps] and you read it and you cry, you crumple it up, you throw it down and there are so many emotions happening in this moment…\n \n\n06:13\tMargaret Avison, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tNow I’ll read it again.\n \n\n06:14\tBarbara Nickel, Audio from ShortCuts 2.6:\tI have from years of reading her I have a certain voice in my mind – the voice of the page – and then to hear her voice for the first time…\n \n\n06:25\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.4:\tListen to the breath that the poem creates. Listen with your body. As the poem breaths – in and out – it is breathing…\n \n\n06:36\tDionne Brand, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\t[Reading poem] I will not take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds, every day, even those that do not hold a wind’s impression… Okay that’s enough. [Applause]\n \n\n06:49\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.9:\tThe recording of the reading was broadcast on the radio. On radiofreerainforest… [Sound of the intro music from the radio program and the words “radio free rain forest” are repeated.] radiofreerainforest was a program that aired on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio in the 1980s into the 1990s. [“Words and the sound” are words repeated as part of the intro music from the radio program.]\n \n\n07:09\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Audible sound of background noise ongoing.] The recording doesn’t stop. Nobody presses the button. It continues recording. Now this is the sound of the room. This is the sound of the audience. This is the sound of what it felt like to be there. This recording of the social interactions, even as muffled as they are, conveys the sound of that reading in its time, which is even more interesting to us during our current time of the pandemic when we long for attending an in-person event…\n \n\n07:43\tAlexei Perry Cox, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\t[Reading poem] The samba played in the past and rings the ears presently. The sun would set so high and stings the eyes now. A lullaby operates on its own terms and does its own time…\n \n\n07:59\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\t[Alexei’s reading continues in the background.] We’re listening to the audio of Alexei Perry Cox reading by video at The Words and Music Show online on March 29th, 2020. [Audible sounds of Alexei’s daughter Isla.] She’s reading from Finding Places to Make Places, and she’s accompanied by the voice of Isla, her then 18-month old daughter.\n \n\n08:23\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.8:\tWhen I heard Alexei read at The Words and Music Show, I was so moved by her reading. The interweaving voices. What improvisation at a poetry reading.\n \n\n08:34\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\t…What is that breathing behind? What is that heartbeat? The breathing goes against the heartbeat and these rhythms are set up and the involuntary muscles… And you see the person do it. But beyond that, something is what we call shared. Something is arrived at. We come to something, with almost unmediated – that is the poem among us, between us, there.\n \n\n09:10\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] You brought me clarity, gift after gift, I wear… poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.\n \n\n09:27\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sunbeam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with arrows, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series…\n \n\n10:01\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] While you were away, I held you like this in my mind.\n \n\n10:06\tKatherine McLeod,  Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe hear this holding the quietness of each page.\n \n\n10:11\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem]. In the room. We knew.\n \n\n10:15\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe hear the turning of the page, the room…\n \n\n10:19\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem] The room that held you… is still here.\n \n\n10:23\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tWe are listening to desire in the making. Every time we press play on this recording as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem…\n \n\n10:32\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.2:\tYou get some marvelous summer night. Why do people come and listen to poems?\n \n\n10:36\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\tLet’s hear all of that again.\n \n\n10:39\tMuriel Rukeyser, Audio from ShortCuts 2.5:\t[Reading poem] Who will speak these days. If not, if not you?\n \n\n10:46\tPhyllis Webb, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\t[Reading poem]. Poems naked in the sunlight on the floor.\n \n\n10:57\tKatherine McLeod, Audio from ShortCuts 2.7:\tThe room that held you is still here.\n \n\n11:08\tMusic Interlude:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n11:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9978","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.2, What the Archive Remembers, 22 November 2021, McLeod "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ff53ab4f-79e1-483d-90f4-6eb9312b14de/audio/32603c04-9629-4f27-ae76-99d905b58fde/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-2-what-the-archive-remembers.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:12:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"12,172,687 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Shortcuts 3.2 What the Archive Remembers\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-22\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SHOW NOTES\\n\\nBowering, George. “bpNichol: 1944-1988.” The Long Poem / Remembering bp Nichol. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 122-123 (Autumn/Winter 1989): 294-297.\\n\\nMcGregor, Hannah. “The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020.\\n\\nPolyck-O’Neill, Julia. “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast. 1 November 2021.\\n\\nPound, Scott. “Sounding out the Difference: Orality and Repetition in bpNichol.” Open Letter: bp + 10 (Fall 1998) 50-58.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum Books, 2018.\\n\\nAUDIO CLIPS\\n\\nAudio for this ShortCuts is clipped from a recording of Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1966-1980 available on PennSound, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, and from a recording of bpNichol and Lionel Kearns from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series audio collection.\\n\\nNichol, bp. “Pome Poem.” PennSound. A link to the same recording is also available on the official bpNichol archive. \\n\\n“I wanted to forget you.” bpNichol reading with Lionel Kearns. Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Montreal, 22 November 1968. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/bpnichol-and-lionel-kearns-at-sgwu-1968/#1\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549808480257,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, ShortCuts explores one of the methods of listening from the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode, produced by Julia Polyck-O’Neill, listens to the emotional weight of archives. Julia’s conversations with poet Lisa Robertson uncover the ways in which archives record the relationships between memory, affect, and mortality. In this ShortCuts, producer Katherine McLeod listens to the emotional weight of archives through a recording of bpNichol, reading with Lionel Kearns in Montreal on November 22, 1968. How does the archive record loss? What can the archive never record? And what do we remember as listeners?\n\n00:00\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:10\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to a new season of SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on spoken web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:18\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] a place where we listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ [Sound Effect: Scissors] from the audio collections of SpokenWeb. In this episode, we’ll be using the last full episode of The Spoken Web Podcast to inspire our listening. The last episode was “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”. The recordings that we’ll be listening to in this ShortCuts are of the poet bpNichol. We’ll mostly be listening to a recording of a reading that bpNichol gave on November 22nd, 1968, as part of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Now you might be wondering what does bpNichol have to do with “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”; well, I’m not here to make a case for what they have in common though, if I wanted to start somewhere, I’d start with Coach House Books. What I do want to draw upon from that episode on Robertson and the feminist archive is how producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill talks about archives as having an emotional weight. That emotional weight in the case of that episode was rooted in hearing a recording of someone’s voice, who is no longer here. Yes, this episode touches upon themes of loss, and please do what you need to do to take care while listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]. BpNichol was a poet whose poetry was always aware of presence and absence through its linguistic play, concrete forms and embodied sound. Let’s hear how recordings of his voice invite us to think through and to feel the emotional weight of archives.\n \n\n03:16\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading and singing a poem] What is a poem is inside of your body, body, body, body. What is a poem is inside of your head, inside your head, inside your head, inside your head. Oh…\n \n\n03:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was bpNichol reading, reciting, performing “Pome Poem.” It is a poem that I played years ago, over 10 years ago, in fact, as a graduate student, while presenting on a panel and a grand room at the University of Toronto. I had been discussing a dance adaptation of bpNichol’s poetry, and indeed a dance adaptation of his group, The Four Horsemen’s poetry and well, the performance is a story in and of itself. But to get to the point here, I was talking about how they had ended the performance with “Pome Poem,” and the sounds of the words breathing faded out as the theatre lights went down. I let the recording fade out at the end of my presentation.\n \n\n04:20\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading/singing a poem] Inside of your, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing [Fades out]…\n \n\n04:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tAfterwards, one of my co-panelists told me that he was very moved. He hadn’t expected to suddenly hear Nichol’s voice. It was as though he was there. This was years after the passing of Nichol and, with many recordings existing of Nichol’s voice, it didn’t seem strange for me to hear it. But here was someone who was not a Nichol scholar, he wasn’t listening to the audio recordings in the archives, but rather here, he was someone in the midst of a very public event who had just heard the voice of a dear friend. We can have such visceral reactions to hearing a voice in the archives, even if we don’t know that voice personally. I think of the reactions to Gwendolyn MacEwen’s voice – here’s Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee reacting to MacEwen’s voice on a previous episode of The Spoken Web Podcast.\n \n\n05:29\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\tHave you ever heard her read?\n \n\n05:30\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\tNo. I’ve never heard her voice.\n \n\n05:31\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\tDo you want to?\n \n\n05:31\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\tYeah!\n \n\n05:32\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t[Reading a poem] A fugitive from all those truths, which are two true, the great clawing ones and the fire breathers –\n \n\n05:40\tAudio Recording, Jen Sookfong Lee:\t[Audible Gasp]\n \n\n05:41\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t– the ones that rake the flesh like piranhas and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bare their red teeth in the night –\n \n\n05:51\tAudio Recording, Hannah McGregor:\t[Overlaps with MacEwen’s reading] So melodious her voice! I’ve never used the word melodious.\n \n\n05:55\tArchival Recording, Gwendolywn MacEwen:\t– My mind, emulates dragon, fish and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night\n \n\n06:00\tKatherine McLeod:\tMelodious. Yes. So melodious her voice. And to be in awe of her voice has been a common response ever since MacEwen started reading poems in the 1960s.\n06:12\tKatherine McLeod:\tHearing MacEwen’s voice in the archives is somewhat similar to hearing bpNichol’s in that we’re hearing a poet who has been remembered as one who died too soon. BpNichol in 1988 at age 44 and Gwendolyn MacEwen one year earlier in 1987 at age 47. I think of George Bowering’s memorial for bpNichol in which he writes, quote: “as the years go by, scores of young and other writers and editors will develop the gifts bpNichol passed freely to them, and in that way, his life will go on. We will still bitterly resent the absence of his late life poems.”\n06:57\tKatherine McLeod:\tI think of that too, for MacEwen. Her last book was called Afterworlds, but who is mourning the archival afterlife of MacEwen that we will never know – that we will never hear. There are many unheard archival afterlives that probably will come to mind as I say this. At the same time, Nichol and MacEwen were relatively well-known as poets in Canada, which makes you think about the voices that were never archived. And what about the voices who are recorded in the archives? But those recordings only capture certain periods of their lives and their work? Which versions of themselves are remembered in sound?\n \n\n07:49\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name. I wanted to erase you, I forgot you, your name. I wanted you, I forgot you, I erased your name. You forgot me, I wanted you, you erased my name. I tried you, I forgot you, I erased your name. Wanting you, I forgot you. You erased my name. Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name.\n \n\n08:31\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was the last poem that bpNichol read in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series on November 22nd, 1968, or at least we think that it was the last poem that he read. Nichol’s reading cuts in and out before we can hear the applause or any final remarks. And so we can only assume that it is the end. Plus the poem, as far as I can tell, is one that Nicol read out loud, but never published in print. And so we don’t know if this was “the end” of the poem. Though, if we listen closely, it does seem like it resolves and is even a bit reminiscent of his poem “Evening Ritual”, which evolves through a similar cycle of actions relating to writing. When the poem ends, at least as it ends on the tape, we don’t hear applause, but we can hear sound on the tape. The recording overlaps with a recording of the same recording. The recording somehow gets recorded over itself. And so there are times like this at the end, when you are listening to Nichol and then you hear the faint sound of Nichol in the background at a different point in the same reading.\n \n\n09:49\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] Erasing you, the wanting forgot, I tried your name. [Static]\n \n\n09:55\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere’s another example of what I mean about the recording over itself, and this time we hear the tape rewind and then repeat something that we’d heard before.\n \n\n10:06\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Voice sounds sped up] I’m going to read a poem I wrote last night. That’s waking [Tape noise of rewinding]…\n \n\n10:14\tArchival Recording, Lionel Kearns, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] The imagination explodes. They grow old, quick and die. What’s left. Sometimes there’s something left. [Gentle laughter from audience]\n \n\n10:35\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\tI’m going to do that dangerous thing and read a poem I wrote last night, thus waking Lionel up at 7:30 this morning, which he didn’t quite forgive me for. It starts off with a quote from a poem by Bobby Hogg. And well, yesterday we were up in Carlton doing a reading there…\n \n\n10:54\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis ShortCuts is being released right around the time when this reading took place. We can try to re-enact what it would have been like to gather on this November day in downtown Montreal for this reading with bpNichol and Lionel Kearns. What would it have been like to be in that room? What is the archive unable to record? By staging this ShortCuts in November with a November recording, we are participating in a kind of reenactment. To what extent are we trying, trying to remember or trying to erase a memory that may not be ours in the first place –\n \n\n11:43\tArchival Recording, bpNichol, November 1968:\t[Reading a poem] I wanted to forget you, so I tried to erase your name.\n \n\n11:49\tKatherine McLeod:\t–And yet having heard it, that memory can never be forgotten. The feeling of having heard it is still there.\n \n\n11:58\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n12:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Head to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds in this minisode and to learn more about SpokenWeb and The SpokenWeb Podcast. Thanks for listening. 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Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996.\\n\\nMaracle, Lee.\\nMemory Serves: Oratories\\n. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2015.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.”\\nGerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.\\nSFU Digitized Collections.\\nhttps://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988\\n\\n“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.”\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 21 June 2020.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/\\n\\nTaylor, Diana.\\nThe Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas\\n. Durham, N.C: Duke UP, 2003.\\n\\nWilson, Michelle. “Forced Migration.”\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 6 December 2021.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549809528832,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["As part two of ShortCuts 2.9 Situating Sound—and as one of the many remembrances of Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle—this ShortCuts explores how the archive remembers and who these memories serve. The audio recording for this episode is a 1988 recording of Lee Maracle and Dionne Brand, recorded for broadcast on Gerry Gilbert’s radio program “radiofreerainforest” (Vancouver Coop Radio; SFU Digitized Collections). Building towards Maracle’s reading of the poem “Perseverance,” producer Katherine McLeod selects audio clips from this recording in which we can hear feminist placemaking in action. \n\n00:00\tShortCuts Theme:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on spoken web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. without further ado. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Last time on ShortCuts, we were listening to recordings that made us think about and feel the emotional weight of archives. We were thinking about how archival recordings produce memories that can almost stand in for the lived memory itself. How does the archive remember? Is the archive, the archive as in the colonial archive, or is the archive something more attuned to embodied practice? And that understanding very much resonates with the most recent episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Forced Migration.” That episode asks how stories are passed along in the case of bison migration. Artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines colonial archives in order to create alternative stories of the human relations with the bison of Turtle Island. What do we call the collection of these stories, an archive, a community, and who do these memories serve? That is the question that will take us into the sounds of this ShortCuts, who do these memories serve.\n \n\n02:34\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd here I’m thinking about Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle’s book Memory Serves. On November 11th, 2021 Lee Maracle passed away… And I heard the news after finishing up the last ShortCuts and thinking about archival afterlives. I listened to all the tributes pouring in for Maracle across various media outlets and media platforms. We’re still listening to those tributes and remembrances. Recordings of Maracle’s voice are in SpokenWeb audio collections. For example, if you recall the episode in season two of ShortCuts on Dionne Brand’s reading from 1988, you’ll recall that Lee Maracle had read with her that night. I had planned on a part two of that ShortCuts to listen to Maracle in that recording. And now is the time to listen. At the same time, like in the last episode, I encourage you to take care while listening…\n \n\n03:35\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tTomorrow there’s a celebration of South Africa Women’s Day. And I was asked almost a year ago now, I think to do a poem for the boycott the shipments of sulphur from Vancouver harbour to South Africa. And I’m gonna read that one first.\n \n\n03:59\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is a reading that was broadcast on the radio program, radiofreerainforest. And that’s how we end up with this recording. That is the archive. But the experience of being there is archived in the sound in the cadence of voice, in the noise, in the background, in the laughter in knowing that the recording cannot remember it all. We won’t listen to the entire recording, but we will listen to enough clips that you get a sense of it. And if you’d like to return to it, you’ll know that it is there. The audio clips that we will hear are ones that convey the sound of the room, what it would’ve felt like to be there, how we can hear kinship, how we can hear the relation between bodies in the room. Like in this moment, when Maracle explains that she is going to read an epigram for Dionne Brand…\n \n\n04:56\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tThis is for Dionne. [Laughter] She wrote this book called Winter Epigrams. You should all buy it if you get a chance [Laughter], it’s a great book of poems. But as you know, about 95% of Canada in the winter is covered in snow. So I answered her epigrams about the cold in this fashion. At that time, I hadn’t met Dionne, but I was supposed to read with her and, it never came to pass [Laughter]. Tonight is the first— [inaudible comment from Brand] [Laughter from Brand and Maracle] — and I wouldn’t these, but [Inaudible] [Shared Laughter]… This one’s called “Flowers for Dionne.” I hope I get it right!\n \n\n05:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt feels as though we’re listening to a private moment that has found its way into a more formal archive. There are jokes about how they had planned to read together didn’t and now here they are — and that continues later, when in her reading Brand replies to Maracle with an unfinished epigram in response.\n \n\n06:08\tAudio Recording, Dionne Brand, 1988 Reading:\tLee read the epigram back to me in Montreal. And I was very honoured too, that she had written it back to me and I’ve been trying to write her back an epigram. We might make a book [Audience Laughter]. So I haven’t got very far with the epigram except to say: “Write me out of this epigram, Lee, you are so much water. You are too much water, too much rock, so much eagle. Write me out of this epigram, Lee. I am so much bush, so much ocean, so much rage…” And that’s just the beginning. [Laughter] It’s not finished. [Clapping] It’s supposed to go and like “write us out of this goddamn epigram.” [Audience Laughter]. I want to read a couple poems about South Africa.\n \n\n07:21\tKatherine McLeod:\tBrand starts her reading after Maracle with a poem for South Africa. And that is exactly how Maracle had started hers. I am taking all of these audio clips out of their contexts, out of their linear order in which they would’ve been heard in the reading, but, in doing so, I’m trying to bring to the forefront, the connections that are embedded within it and the conversation happening between poets in the reading itself. Knowing the exchange that unfolds between Brand and Maracle about the epigrams, it becomes even more meaningful to hear what precedes it. And this is why I’ve taken all of that out of context, to build up to hearing this poem, a poem that Maracle introduces by saying that she wrote it for herself. Let’s now listen to Lee Maracle reading “Perseverance”…\n \n\n08:16\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tI once said that poetry is never a self-portrait, you know, poets are famous for writing for so and so and for so and so and for so and so… Well, I was feeling very narcissistic one day, and I decided this was for me. It’s called “Perseverance.”\n \n\n08:34\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\t[Reading poem] There’s a dandelion on the roadside in Toronto, it’s leaves a dishevelled mix of green and brown. A dandelion straggling and limping along. There’s a flower beside a concrete stump on Bay Street in Toronto, perpetually rebelling against spiked heels and blue surge suits. The monetary March passed by five o’clock Bay Street, deaf to the cries of this thin ageing lion’s sneer. Chicken, yellow flower. My leaves, my face, my skin. I feel like my skin is being ripped off of me. There is a flower in Toronto on the roadside. It takes jack hammers and brutish machines to rip the concrete from the sidewalks in Toronto to beautify the city of blue suede suits. But for this dandy lion, it takes, but a seed, a little acid rain, a whole lot of fight, and a black desire to limp along and scraggle, forward. There is a flower. [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:41\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\tThis is for Dionne.\n \n\n09:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat poem ends with the words, “There is a flower.” We can hear that those words are almost covered by the response from the audience — and, well, no, they’re not covered. It’s more that they’re supported by the sound. The sound holds them up. And that’s the moment that Maracle says, “This is for Dionne.” Listening again, I rushed to check a published version of the poem in I Am Woman to see that it ends with “There is a flower” because it really sounds like she says, “Here is a flower.” On the page, it says “There is a flower,” but I listen to it again. And it does sound like “here.” And thinking about it more, I thought, well, how beautiful would it have been? If she had said, “Here is a flower,” because she had said that this poem is for herself. To say, “here is a flower” is like saying a version of: “Here I am.” And that would make even more sense with how her audience responds. It’s as though she’s reached out her arms while saying it, and as though we can hear the warmth of the smiles and nods around her saying, yes, here she is. Let’s listen to that ending again…\n \n\n10:52\tAudio Recording, Lee Maracle, 1988 Reading:\t“…black desire to limp along and scraggle, forward. There is a flower. [Audience Laughter] This is for Dionne. [Lee Laughs] She wrote this called book called Winter Epigrams. You should all buy it if you get a chance. It’s a great book…\n \n\n11:11\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat was Lee Maracle reading with Dionne Brand in 1988. The recording is part of the radiofreerainforest collection, which is part of SpokenWeb’s audio collections held at Simon Fraser University. If you are a SpokenWeb researcher with an audio clip for shortcuts, do get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. If you are listening and you were at one of the readings played here on ShortCuts, please do get in touch at the same email spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n \n\n11:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tShortcuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening.\n \n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9984","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.4, Sonic Passages, 17 January 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/db88c6e3-2a5c-41d6-a316-c3e74f9165c7/audio/aabfa4af-a82c-4737-b0b4-e3c8388c83f3/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-4-sonic-passages.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:11:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,928,423 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Full Episode_Shortcuts 3.4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-01-17\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nAudio in this episode is from a 1970 recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, and from a 2019 interview with Marlatt conducted by Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart and that aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast’s sister podcast, Soundbox Signals, and re-aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast. \\n\\nListen to the full recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal (1970): https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daphne-marlatt-at-sgwu-1970/.\\n\\nListen to the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/.\\n\\nListen to the previous ShortCuts on Marlatt, “Then and Now” mentioned in this episode: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\n“Daphne Marlatt & Diane Wakoski: Performing the SpokenWeb Archive.” SpokenWeb. Concordia University, 21 November 2014,  https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/oral-literary-history/daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski-performing-the-spokenweb-archive/.\\n\\nMarlatt, Daphne. “Afterword: Immediacies of Writing.” Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt. Ed. Susan Knutson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. \\n\\n— “Bird of Passage.” Origin, vol. 3, no. 16, Cid Corman, Jan. 1970, pp. 1–68, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28042112.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Daphne Marlatt reading ‘Lagoon’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 28 November, 2019, https://spokenweb.ca/daphne-marlatt-reading-lagoon/.\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab. UBC-Okanagan, 17 November 2019, https://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549809528833,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts episode responds to poet Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent SpokenWeb Podcast episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” By listening to audio from Marlatt’s previous archival performances, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod considers how we remember feelings attached to reading a poem out loud. What does it feel like to hear a recording of your own voice? Are you reminded of how you were feeling while speaking, and can the archive ever hold the memory of those feelings?\n\n*\n\n“Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to\nreverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.”\n— Daphne Marlatt, “Afterword” (Rivering)\n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? An extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. without further ado. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts. In this ShortCuts, our listening will be inspired by the previous full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That means we’ll be drawing our inspiration from Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” They talk with Marlatt about poetry readings and about her performance with the archive in a poetry reading that had taken place the night before the interview — in 2019. In that reading, Marlatt had read alongside recordings of her past self — a recording from 1969.\n \n\n02:02\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis ShortCuts is inspired by the question of what it feels like to hear a recording of your past self – and asks: how can an archive contain traces of what the self – the body – behind the voice was feeling? In the case of Marlatt, she is a poet who has graciously accepted the invitation by SpokenWeb to listen to recordings of her past self and past voice more than once. I was there in the audience at a previous one. That was a reading that Marlatt gave in 2014 in Montreal. She read along with a recording of her reading in Montreal in 1970. What strikes me in listening back to that 1970 recording after hearing Marlatt’s conversation with Shearer and Butchart on the podcast is the extent to which a recording captures a person in a moment in time in their body. I’m thinking here of the difference between what she thought her voice sounded like in that recording and what she could remember feeling. I had listened to that 1970 recording for a previous ShortCuts with my listening attuned to place — check the show notes for Then and Now — but this time I was listening to that 1970 recording with my attention attuned to where the body was present in this recording. I noticed how she introduces the poem “Bird of Passage.” What she says before reading “Bird of Passage” is quite short but it contains so much, both said and unsaid.\n \n\n03:41\tKatherine McLeod:\tShe says, this is a poem that I wrote.\n \n\n03:44\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tThis is a poem that I wrote when I was about… oh I don’t know, seven or eight months pregnant… [Pause] …Bird of Passage. I wrote it in Vancouver… spring time again…. Bird of Passage.\n \n\n04:03\tKatherine McLeod:\tHere, was Marlatt in 1970 saying that she had written this poem ‘Bird of Passage’ while she was pregnant. That is significant in and of itself when thinking of the body but now I was hearing it with the full resonance of her recent conversation with Shearer and Buchart from the podcast and what Marlatt says when the date of the recording, July 1969, is mentioned…\n \n\n04:30\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”, 2019:\tInteresting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I’d had when I wrote those poems. What was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading – there was so much – my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being, and I think it’s because of the giving birth experience…\n \n\n05:09\tKatherine McLeod:\tHer comment is about a memory of how the body had felt when she was writing those poems. And her comment is also about how she remembers feeling in her body when she was reading those poems out loud. I wonder, then, how would it have felt to read “Bird of Passage” out loud to an audience in 1970. Only she will know that. The archive cannot answer that question. But what we can hear in the archive is the sound of the poem and how it resonates now in relation to Marlatt’s writing. Listen to the sound of passage vibrating in this poem, “Bird of Passage,” not only in the title but in phrases like this one:\n \n\n05:56\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\t[Reading “Bird of Passage”] “…eave swallows cliff, passerine, which I thought meant passing as passenger sails, through an isthmus, time does not constrict…”\n \n\n06:05\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt is as though the poem is moving towards what passage comes to mean in Marlatt’s poems — passage, passing, a moving towards, language as the medium of passage, a passage between…\n \n\n06:19\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tI cannot grasp your sound, breath, stone, you turn dumb, and will not speak, of what sticks at, feathers, uneasy nest, unease, a restlessness, tonight, drips in, passing in return, perhaps light airs, we begin again…\n \n\n06:43\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat is how she ends the poem, and we’re about to listen to it from the beginning in its entirety together, but I’ve played these clips from it in advance to attune ourselves to the poem. It is a poem that one could pass over while listening to the reading, but her brief introductory words made it stand out especially because I was listening with the question of: how can we hear feelings of embodiment in the recording of this reading? Recently, in the afterward to Rivering, Marlatt has written this observation — quote: “Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to reverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.” Here is Marlatt reading “Bird of Passage” in 1970. I invite you to hear the resonances of moving forward, the sound of her voice as passage, surging towards her future poems, her “future years of writing” …\n \n\n07:50\tAudio recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1970:\tThis is a poem that I wrote when I was about – I don’t know –seven or eight months pregnant. “Bird of Passage” I wrote it in Vancouver, springtime again. Bird of Passage. [Reading poem, transcribed as heard – see Show Notes for a link to the poem as published.] Thaw begins tonight, Eaves drip incessant strain rings, wind bell spring brought forward out of time. This bird, dive bird, nestle, why stop nested under the eave of flesh or strong wet bird’s wings. Turned as I am against your anonymous hip, in sleep some cliff must be negotiated. Swallow. Eave swallows cliff passerine, which I thought meant passing as passenger sails through an isthmus, time does not constrict. Helpless, constriction in my throat seeing the picture of oil slick bird, will die. Fixed, its feathers mark coming out of yoke, this black stuff. Fix of its own birth. So a month’s accumulation of tears into icicles, vesicles, leaves, roots. Incessant release can be nothing more than alone, urine past, warm, squat by the window’s cold. Only to lie, quote, alone. Not ceasing its skim in serous medium light as air to us gravity-bound. Head over heels or wing bones supplied to test its limit extent, passage, passing, passenger. Temporary nest high in the air. Hirundinidae, hirondelle in graceful flight and regular migration. Fathered by a bird too sought definition for its passage, bird of sea, bird of passage or, quote, a rolling stone. Jumps in the  womb for joy. A recognition, cognition, knowing whence sound came a rhythm per-vades rocking waves under the face of his, fight to be over the din. We are all born in risk, mute, cliff. I cannot grasp your sound, breath, stone. You turn dumb and will not speak of what sticks at feathering. An uneasy nest, unease, a restless. Tonight, drips in passing in return, perhaps light airs. We begin, again.\n \n\n10:57\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Song] ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Check SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the sounds of these recordings. Thank you for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Song]\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9985","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.5, The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough, 21 February 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/84e938cc-2b23-4f14-b878-f316ed90368b/audio/a1afdd87-27b6-41a9-b7c9-3b8355079a60/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-5.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:20:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"19,369,108 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.5\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-02-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Archival audio in this episode is excerpted from a recording of The Words and Music Show on November 20, 2016 (Casa del Popolo, Montreal). \\n\\nThe performers that night were Eve Nixen, Kaie Kellough, Tawhida Tanya Evanson’s Zenship [Tawhaida Tanya Evanson (voice); Mark Haynes (bass); Ziya Tabassian (percussion); Caulder Nash (keyboards), with guest performance by Nina Segalowitz (Inuit throat singing)], Paul Dutton, and pianist Stefan Christoff.\\n\\nSHOW NOTES\\n\\nKellough, Kaie.\\nMagnetic Equator\\n. McClelland and Stewart, 2020. \\n\\n—“Rough Craft: Notes on the creation of the audio / visual / textual work Small Stones.”\\nSPOKENWEBLOG,\\n22 May, 2021,\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/rough-craft-notes-on-the-creation-of-the-audio-visual-textual-work-small-stones/\\n.\\n\\n“The Show Goes On.” Producer Jason Camlot.\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 7 Feb 2022.\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549810577408,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["On ShortCuts this month, producer Katherine McLeod talks with poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough about a memorable recording from The Words & Music Show.  \n\nWhat are we listening to? Kellough unpacks what we are listening to — which turns out to be a highly technical, performative, and polyphonic sonic object, along with it being an early version of a passage from his Griffin Prize-winning book of poetry,\nMagnetic Equator\n. \n\nListen to this ShortCuts for the story behind one archival recording, and what this story reveals about how we remember the feelings infused within live performance. \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor, and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod, for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SpokenWeb blog [Sound Effect: Wind Chime]. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you are a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings and there is a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening — let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine your audio by emailing spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts: mini stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:29\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts, where we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors] from SpokenWeb’s audio collections. On this episode, we’ll be listening to an audio clip from a performance by Griffin poetry prize-winning poet, Kaie Kellough. It’s a recording of him reading at The Words & Music Show in Montreal, back in November, 2016. You may even remember this clip. It was featured previously on ShortCuts. It’s a memorable recording in which Kellough’s introduction to a poem becomes the poem. I thought I’d return to this clip, partly as a response to the most recent full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast — and do check that out if you haven’t already — and also because I’ve always wanted to ask Kellough about that performance. What are we listening to? And what does it feel like for him to listen to that recording? So let’s travel back in time to the Words & Music Show at Casa Del Popolo in 2016. Kaie Kellough is on stage and he is thanking host Ian Ferrier for the introduction and he’s about to start his set. We’ll hear a recording of that first. And then we’ll jump into my recent conversation on Zoom with Kaie Kellough. We started that conversation by listening to the same recording. Or, as I said to him, I’ll play this very short clip and we’ll listen to it together…\n \n\n02:59\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tWe we’ll play the very short clip and we can listen to it together.\n \n\n03:02\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tSounds good.\n \n\n03:03\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tAnd so let me just share this.\n \n\n03:06\tAudio Recording, Kaie Kellough, Words & Music Show, 2016:\tHello, thanks Ian, for that introduction. And… thanks to all of the other artists tonight… It’s been a very nice night. I’mmmmm going to present something to you, for you, that is… somewhat narrative, I guess… but it isn’t related to my novel. It’s some other narratives and… the narratives are related to adolescence… which is a peculiar time in life…. and I think that they’re relevant nowadays because [Recorded speech begins overlapping, legible words will appear in square brackets] they’re related to adolescence in a particular place in time…in Alberta behind in the [I want to forget] 1980s [high school fever forever] in the moment of [black hair, teens from the] heavy evangelical who drank themselves to activity extreme conservatism [trying to prove themselves that they exist] that they, some of the challenge is that arise growing up [I want to forget my stupid conviction] and trying to live oneself in a climate like that, which seems to be a climate that had to reemerging in spite of that [amber alcohol, all of the DNA] all of the [seeped down centuries of slavery] all of the appearances to the contrary that had appeared [in a far flung] in the past [suburb of empire]. The idea [that slum above] born yesterday was finished [or that born yesterday] was finished [or a bubble] or [a burden was seat and, and done suddenly a wave [a froth that was archived by teenage brains] a wave of [autobiography of conservatism] of conservatism has, has has [crashed] crashed [Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the jaws of life rend and pry it open] suddenly a wa— [like a tuna can] suddenly a [everybody is unconscious] suddenly a wave [is bleeding] has crashed…\n \n\n05:22\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tThat was recorded at The Words and Music Show back in 2016. And I’m wondering, what, what are we listening to there? What are we hearing?\n \n\n05:34\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tWow. 2016! I didn’t realize it was that long ago. Actually, what you’re listening to is a passage from the manuscript of Magnetic Equator. I mean, that was a very, very, very early iteration of that. And it was – one of the themes that became a sort of major thread in the book, which was writing about adolescence in Western Canada in the 80s and 90s. But what I was trying to do in the performance was – you know, in live vocal performance one of the things that is a huge concern is that you only have one voice at a time, right. So how do you multiply that? How do you get to have maybe two voices or three voices at a time, or half a voice? How does that work? So you can multiply or divide voice. And that instantly makes, I think, the sonic field and the vocal field a little bit richer. And then if you can overlap them or layer them, or have them speak across one another — and sometimes sync-up and sometimes diverge — then it becomes not just multiple voices but it becomes an interplay among multiple voices, a sort of directed movement. So one problem was, how do you get around having just one voice in performance? And then what happens when you have multiple voices? What do you do with them? Then another other concern is that, sometimes in live oral performance, the poet, or the presenter plays these dual roles and sort of toggles between them. There’s the role of the poet — the, how can I put this? The MC, the master of ceremonies where you, you say, “okay, so now this next poem that I’m going to present is about”….and, and it’s you, right? The human being. You crack a couple of jokes, you present the poem, or you say something important about it, and then you present the poem. But when you read the poem, you shift into another persona. That’s the performer. That kind of movement back and forth — I’ve always liked to kind of try to subvert that and not to emphasize that too much, or find ways of blending it. So the introduction becomes the poem, or the introduction, in this case, winds up entering into dialogue with the poem. The voice that was the poem was recorded into a Zoom recorder. And then that Zoom was — so I had a bunch of electronics in front of me at the time. So there’s a visual part of the performance that can’t be seen in that intro clip.\n \n\n08:15\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd so it’s sort of the playing up the part of sort of the befuddled button, electronic button tweaker, right? Trying to say something, meanwhile, being distracted by the machine and your voice gets overtaken by the machine, but also –so there’s my voice going through a clean microphone. And then there’s a second voice which been recorded into a Zoom and that’s being played through — actually, no, there are three voices. So there’s my voice, introducing the poem. There’s a second voice that’s going through a mixer and out to the house, and that’s a recorded voice. And then there’s a third recorded voice that’s going back into an effects pedal and then out. So there can always – from the recording there can always be a clean channel and a channel that is run through effects. And I was running it through this really the interesting analog delay pedal that doesn’t sound like your usual delay, but it sort of breaks up and fragments the source sound.[Recorded audio of fragmented sound effect plays in the background] So eventually the voice started to – it would sound like tape delay, like scribing and fragmenting and breaking. [Fragmented Voice: “Wandering out of time / This ship built by oil money / this fort for raw tobacco]\n \n\n09:42\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tSo potentially the voice would start to sound like tape delay, like squiggling and fragmenting and breaking up. But yeah, so there could potentially be three voices, mine, the clean recorded, and the broken.\n \n\n09:48\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tAnd I guess the fact that Ian Ferrier recorded every Words and Music Show, then we have this version, all three voices are captured in Ian’s recording in an interesting way that then –.\n \n\n10:03\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYes.\n \n\n10:03\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\t– it’s like we have one iteration of it, but it would never have been performed the same way twice.\n \n\n10:10\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tThere was another thing — I remember this performance and what I was thinking about was — was also having the introduction to the poem, be sort of halting and… failing to progress fluidly. I wanted to have the work come up under that. So to give the impression that I didn’t know exactly what I might be doing and then have the poem take over in a moment of uncertainty. But yeah, thanks to Ian for recording that stuff, because it was an experiment. I’d been playing with it at home and we decided — I got the chance to experiment— I think that might have been a bill that Paul Dutton was on too.\n \n\n10:52\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tTo imagine then hearing that alongside one of Paul Dutton’s performances too. That adds even more. I think too thinking about when – what you talked about the, almost like the hesitant introduction, it felt like that worked so well too with the poem, because it felt like of thinking back —ok back to adolescence, and hesitating kind of feeling like do I wanna go back or do, and so it sort of felt like that hesitancy was also connected to a bit of the emotional distance from that time too, and really, really hearing that process. It really, yeah – it feels like we’re listening to a process unfolding in the way that the introduction moves into the poem. It feels like a very important part of the process of how the poem evolved eventually to become what it is on the page.\n \n\n11:47\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah. No, the poem changed a lot between that iteration into 2016, and what was later, what was the edited version that was wound up being published. The one that was performed in 2016 — I can definitely say that the poem had probably been written within weeks of that performance. I was trying to — I was trying to, trying to play with the idea that…the sense that maybe the person who was presenting the poems was not fully competent. Their confidence was wavering. And those are not things that you’re supposed to perform, right. Once you get up in the moment of performance, it’s supposed to be pure expertise and excellence. And difficulty, hesitancy — those things are not supposed to be there. Those are supposed to be –you’re supposed to gloss those over with a sense of know-how and knowing what to do in the moment. And so how do you approach a performance and get around the need for constant expertise throughout? Because those other experiences are part of the experience of performing. Even if you don’t perform them, you feel them while you’re performing. You feel hesitant, your brain is racing. You’re not sure what to say next. You don’t necessarily always feel totally capable when you go up there to perform. So how do you emphasize that in a way that works within the context of the performance?\n \n\n13:35\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tHearing this now in the archive, how does this recording sit for you in time?\n \n\n13:40\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah, it’s interesting because it does sit – I mean, it does sit as something that is — it’s like a board tap from a live event. So there’s a raw quality to it. If this were made in a studio, it would’ve been a different piece because it would’ve been created for audio. Right. It would’ve been created exclusively as an audio piece and there would’ve been really limited emphasis on the visual aspect of performance and that communication and with an audience. It would’ve been elaborate in a different way as a sonic object. So, I mean, that does cross my mind, and that’s not necessarily a negative thing. What I mean by that is that just kind of establishes the further context for what it was.\n \n\n14:29\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd that was one of the nice things about, about Wired on Words. If you wanted, you could accept Ian’s invitation to go to the show and you could repeat the same work that you repeated two months before that. And three months before that and six months before that. I accepted a lot of Ian’s invitations, and I always tried to take them as opportunities to attempt something slightly different. And so, I might have repeated myself sometimes, but I was really, really trying to move away from that. And that helped me because there was a thought that I could consistently develop new work and it didn’t have to be perfect and flawless to go out to be presented to the public, but it could be developed and developing towards something, and, in the moment of performance, if I could communicate that well enough people would grasp that. That was also — it also felt like it was the context of the show. There was a looseness to it that kind of allowed for that. It was –I mean, it was a show. So you were presenting somewhat finished works to the public, but the thing about it was that there’s something very casual about it too.\n \n\n15:59\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tI feel that The Words and Music Show still feels that way, and it’s amazing to continue having that spirit through — such a long — through over 20 years of having the show.\n \n\n16:11\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tYeah, especially thinking about it now. I mean we’re in the fourth or fifth wave the pandemic and everything shut down again. The literary world has, and the world of literature and performance has kind of migrated online, with varying degrees of success. I don’t think — like the world of performance — I mean, it’s difficult to feel any inspiration toward performance when you’re sitting in your living room — right? [Laugher] It just seems so ridiculous. And, so to think back on the freedom to just roll out to a venue close by home and to be able to perform and to benefit from what you were talking about earlier about — I mean, that’s what we don’t benefit from with online events, the being able to mill about and talk with people after the event. Like when with an online event, you’re there for the event.\n \n\n17:14\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tYeah.\n \n\n17:15\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tAnd there may be some back and forth in the comments or in the chat, but generally you’re there for the event and with live events, you were partly there for the event, but then there was all of the other stuff that went on in between. In between, in between performances, in between sets, like if I would bring a bunch of gear there, like pedals and synths and stuff like that, other musicians would come up on stage and we would chat about the equipment and about the gear. And, “Oh, what can this panel in your synth do? How did you use this pedal? Oh, I have one that does this” And so on. And so there would also be some casual, impromptu learning that would take place. Someone might ask you if you’ve ever used one of your pieces of equipment in such and such a way, and might show you how to do something with it. So that possibility too was really very much a part of those, those. Or, how did you get that sound, you know? And then you could share information about that. And that learning was a big part of those events too\n \n\n18:22\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tHmm. Yeah, we’re definitely missing it. [Sigh] Well, I think that’s a beautiful note to end on. I want to thank you. Thank you so much, Kaie, for joining me and talking about this clip from Words and Music Show and what we’re listening to.\n \n\n18:40\tKaie Kellough, Zoom recording:\tOh, thanks. Thanks for having me. And thanks for asking me and reminding me of the clip. You asked me [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] what it was like, what I thought about when hearing it and it’s strange to hear that kind of reflection of yourself and to – I didn’t realize it was as far back as 2016, because it feels a lot sooner. I remember what I was thinking about. I remember what my poetry, my poetic preoccupations were at the time. I remember how far that poem came because it was young and sentimental when I wrote it, and then it was not like that by the time it was published. It took on a different sort of personality by the time it was published. But yeah, I remember everything that I was thinking about. I remember how excited I was about it. Yeah. It’s just a — so thank you.\n \n\n19:34\tKatherine McLeod, Zoom recording:\tThank you so much.\n \n\n19:39\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. My guest this month was poet Kaie Kellough. ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9986","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.6, Listening Communities: The Introductions of Douglas Barbour, 21 March 2022, O’Driscoll"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/92fcd7b7-f420-4290-92bb-dc203c24e20e/audio/a0916f80-9412-430b-86c4-bdf060a54182/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts3-6-listeningcommunities.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:22:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"21,576,865 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts3.6_ListeningCommunities\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-03-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nAudio played in this ShortCuts is excerpted from the SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by the University of Alberta. The audio is currently being catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers. \\n\\nAudio of Douglas Barbour reading “The Gone Tune” is from the cassette tape recording of The Bards of March (15 March 1986). \\n\\nAudio of Douglas Barbour’s introductions are selected from readings recorded in 1977-1981. The poets introduced are, in order of audio appearance: Tom Wayman, Phyllis Webb, Fred Wah, Maxine Gadd, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, Penn Kemp, Leona Gom, John Newlove, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and bpNichol.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nNeWest Press: IN MEMORIAM: DOUGLAS BARBOUR (1940-2021),\\nhttps://newestpress.com/news/in-memoriam-douglas-barbour-1940-2021\\n\\nDouglas Barbour (March 21, 1940 – September 25, 2021),\\nhttps://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2021/09/douglas-barbour-march-21-1940-september.html\\n\\n“\\nSounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp.\\n” Produced by Nick Beauchesne & Penn Kemp for\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\nand starts with a clip from the\\nTrance Form\\nreading hosted by Douglas Barbour at the University of Alberta (1977).\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549812674560,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Our guest-producer this month, Michael O’Driscoll, invites us to listen to the introductions of the late Douglas Barbour\n(March 21, 1940 – Sept 25, 2021)\nfrom readings held at the University of Alberta. What are we listening to when we hear introductory remarks from past readings spliced together? By asking us to listen to remember, this episode remembers Barbour in his element —in sonic performance — and what we hear in the selected recordings is a combination both of poetic sound and sounds of deep care as he welcomes each writer to the microphone. \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Piano Overlaid with Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, so if you love what you hear be sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the Spoken Web Project, think about joining Katherine on shortcuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloging recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome back to ShortCuts where we take a deep dive into the archives through a short ‘cut’ [Sound Effect: Scissor Clip] or ‘cuts’ [Sound Effect: Scissor Clip x2] from the sounds of the SpokenWeb audio collections. This month, we have a guest producer, Michael O’Driscoll. He’ll be taking us on a sonic journey into recordings that are part of SpokenWeb’s collections held by the University of Alberta. So I’ll keep my own introduction brief here, but I do want to share the story of how this episode came about because it really does shape what you will hear. Throughout this third season of ShortCuts, I’ve been asking: How does the archive remember? Back in the November episode (and do listen back to it afterwards as it really is a place where many of the questions asked in this episode began) I had just finished making that episode and I was so heartbroken as many of us were to hear the news that writers Phyllis Webb and Lee Maracle had passed away. I happened to be in a SpokenWeb meeting with Michael O’Driscoll the following week and we started talking about what it means to listen to archives as a kind of communal remembrance — for Michael, the writer on his mind was the late Douglas Barbour. And after that meeting, we decided to talk more about ShortCuts as one of many places to explore a kind of listening as remembrance. By the time this episode was made we started to call this “listening to remember.” So here we are now in March 2022 and Michael has created an episode which is both a celebration of the multi-faceted sounds of Barbour’s poetry, and a reflection upon what community and care can sound like in the archives. Let’s listen together to “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Douglas Barbour”.\n \n\n03:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Hello, I’m Michael O’Driscoll, and in this ShortCuts episode we’re going to explore a most under-rated audio-textual genre: the introduction to a literary reading. And to do that we’re going to jump into the University of Alberta’s SpokenWeb collection, and listen in on a master of the genre: poet, professor, critic, and publisher Douglas Barbour. [End Music” ShortCuts Theme Music] If you’re familiar with Doug’s creative work, then you probably know him as one of Canada’s great sound poets…\n \n\n04:08\tArchival Recording, Douglas Barbour, The Bards of March, 1986:\tThis is called “That Gone Tune” and it began when I was at the well known and noted Yardbird suite listening to the Dave Holland Quintet. “That Gone Tune”. [Opening clip of Barbour performing the sound poem “That Gone Tune,” starting with nonlinguistic vocalizations ranging in loudness and then settling into utterances that are mostly vowel-sounds.]\n \n\n05:28\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tThat’s Doug performing in 1986 at Edmonton’s Jubilee Auditorium at The Bards of March event, a celebration of NeWest Press. I first heard Doug’s sound poetry one year earlier at the Bookshop Café in Guelph, Ontario. It was, without exaggeration, life changing—as a young undergraduate student, I’d never witnessed anything like it. Over ten minutes time, in exacting, breathtaking, and sometimes humorous detail, Doug performed the words “full” and “moon” by carefully articulating, extending, and distorting the consonants and vowels of each word—teasing out and making so strange a motif that otherwise, so often, has been the subject of much more conventional lyric poetry. Sadly, we don’t have a copy of Doug performing “Full Moon,” but what we do have in the University of Alberta’s SpokenWeb collection are many, many instances of Doug introducing his visiting guests to a local audience. And that’s where I’d like us to pause briefly today.\n \n\n06:42\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Tom Wayman at the University of Alberta, approximately 1978:\tIndeed, a pleasure to introduce Tom Wayman to you today. He is our writer in residence this year and a great fellow to have around. I can tell you, I’ve been enjoying talking to him and listening to him for the past few months and look forward to that in the future. Today, I’m afraid he’s gonna hack and cough his way through a fairly short reading since he’s come down with a very bad cold in the last couple weeks. But, as various of his titles indicate he is the person who likes to communicate to live audiences, Money and Rain, a title I love, Tom Wayman Live is one of his books and always enjoyed him when I listen to him. I hope you will too today, Tom Wayman. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n07:25\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI eventually came to know Doug when I joined him as a faculty member at the University of Alberta in 1997. Doug, who quickly became a friend, was passionate about many things: he was an inveterate jazz enthusiast, and he was an avid reader and critic of science fiction and fantasy in addition to being astonishingly expert on all things poetic. He was a founding member and President of NeWest Press; he was, along with Stephen Scobie, half of the Re: Sounding performance duo that performed around the world, and he was, at heart, a generous teacher and mentor. I can’t possibly capture his dynamic character in the space of this short account, so I want to focus on one thing: Doug’s cultivation of community. When Doug passed away last September at the age of 81, his life partner Sharon Barbour heard an outpouring of grief and support and memory from hundreds of friends, writers, artists, collaborators, and students from quite literally around the world. So many of us were compelled to express our deep admiration and gratitude for this man with whom we each felt connected. This was, in part, because Doug worked relentlessly to gather together a community of listeners—through collaborative writing and creation—such as the “Continuations” series he wrote with poet Sheila Murphy—by generously sharing and circulating the work of others, in his passionate commitment to teaching and learning, in supporting and nurturing artists near and far, and by opening up their home to visiting writers here in Edmonton. If you search “Barbour” in the University of Alberta’s SpokenWeb collection of literary sound recordings, Doug’s name comes up a couple of dozen times. That’s because year in and year out, there was Doug, pushing the “record” button on a reel to reel or cassette tape recorder, and introducing the authors under his care. Many of my other colleagues shared in the organizing and hospitality that went into building not only UAlberta’s annual reading series, but also what is now the oldest, continuous Writer in Residence program in the country. But as custodians of literary audio, the SpokenWeb collective owes Doug a particular debt of gratitude for helping to capture so many of these moments in creative time. And perhaps nothing better represents Doug’s spirit of hospitality and community building than his introductions to those guests. And that provides us with a unique opportunity to listen to community in the making. Here’s what that sounded like, for Doug.\n \n\n10:22\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Phyllis Webb at the University of Alberta, January 29, 1981:\t[Collage of intros and background audio, sometimes inaudible and ranging in sound quality.] Well, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the first of what I hope will be five readings this term. We haven’t heard from everybody yet, but the next there’ll be two in February and two in March. I have had the pleasure of introducing Phyllis Webb to audiences at U of A before, but my pleasure is really great this time, since she is also our writer in residence this year, something of which I’m very proud. Also for the first time at least here, she’ll be reading, not only from the manuscript for her new book, but from the new book itself, Wilson’s Bowl, which has just been published by Coach House. Alas quick boning around the book store has revealed that it had not yet come in, but it will soon be available in stores in Edmonton. And it’s an incredibly good book indeed. Already available in a very fine book is her selected poems, which is in the bookstore, hither and yawn. Anybody who’s read the journal recently will know I think very highly of Phyllis Webb so I’ll say nothing more than: Phyllis Webb. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n11:26\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Fred Wah at the University of Alberta, March 8, 1979:\t[Tape Click] I’s a real pleasure for me to introduce Fred Wah today, he’s a poet I’ve been reading for a number of years. I actually did read his first work in New Wave Canada in 1966 and although I never did find a copy of lardo or a mountain, which were his first books and are probably very rare by now, I have managed to get hold of his later books published in Canada, Trees, among which is a kind of selected poems from 60s and an amazingly beautiful book from Town Books, pictograms from the interior of BC, which is both very fine poems and a beautiful example of book making, I think. Fred is now working on a book which bpNichol said is easy enough for him to say, but very difficult for people like me and you Doug, because it’s very hard to breathe Nichol or Barbara out that easily, but breathing my name with a sigh is very easy when your name is Fred WAH! So, I look forward to hearing from that book as well as some of his other work today and with no further ado I’ll let Fred Wah read. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n12:39\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\t[Inaudible Sounds] There’s somebody from Vancouver, but Maxine has been putting up very well with frozen cars and everything this morning. She’s published only three books, but she’s been writing for a long time. And as you can see here written a great deal. She doesn’t like to be published. And it seems from what she said to me this morning that the reason two of those books were published… [Recording Drops Out] … grabs some manuscript and ran with it as fast as he could to his blewointment press, uh, those books. However, are guns of the west, the book of Practical Knowledge and how do you pronounce it? Hochelaga?\n \n\n13:07\tArchival Recording Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\tHochelaga. Yeah, I published Practical Knowledge myself.\n \n\n13:09\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\tAnd, Westerns was published in 1975, a collection of those three books. I’m looking really forward to this reading and I hope you are too, Maxine Gadd.\n \n\n13:18\tArchival Recording Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\tThanks.\n \n\n13:18\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing George Bowering at the University of Alberta, February 12, 1980:\tI have George Bowering here today to read to us. He is recently published another [inaudible] but I tend to think of him as the author of A Short Sad Book, Allophanes, and casting backwards a long distance, Touch, and many other works. George was once poet, but now he says he calls himself simply a writer. And he’s a very good writer. I’m glad to have him here. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n13:43\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Roy Kiyooka at the University of Alberta, February 11, 1977:\t…Stood among what I thought were the extraordinarily evocative photographs of his stone gloves and gave a reading at the University of Alberta. He hasn’t been back since, since that time, the book Stone Gloves has been published and last year Talon Books brought out a huge monumental transcanada letters, a book, which is delightful, engaging, and all the things that Roy Kiyooka is, which means multiplex and full of many, many wonders. It is my pleasure to introduce Roy Kiyooka to you today. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:15\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977:\tThey’ll be right up to your feet but that won’t be too bad.\n \n\n14:18\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977:\t…Penny is the author of Most Recently Transformed, which is a marvelous looking book, as well as a very, very fine book…\n \n\n14:27\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980:\t[Audience Chatter] …still a bit of… Not much [Audience Laughter]. We’re happy to welcome Leona Gom. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:36\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981:\t[Audience Chatter] …there’s your friend. There’s a little bit of room if you wanna sit on the floor here!\n \n\n14:40\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981:\t….Just published a body of poetry, which has been seen to be very, very important to Canadian writing: John Newlove. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:50\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Sheila Watson at the University of Alberta, January 28, 1977:\t… I don’t think I have to tell you the pleasure I have in introducing Sheila Watson into this series of readings, so I would just present her with the greatest pleasure I can to you today: Sheila Watson. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n15:03\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Robert Kroetsch at the University of Alberta, November 23, 1978:\t…approach but I feel that the need for an introduction is less than apparent in an audience like this, but it’s nice to have him back again, alumni of this university and one of the best writers, I think, in Canada today. Robert Kroetsch has written numerous novels, The Words of my Roaring, The Stud Horseman, Going Indian, and his most recent one available right now in your bookstore, What the Crow Said, and many books of poetry, including Seed Catalogue and the Stone Hammer Poems. And I don’t think I need to say anything more except welcome Robert Kroetsch. [Applause]\n \n\n15:40\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing bpNichol at the University of Alberta, March 22, 1979:\t[Inaudible] I think I – [Laughs] yeah, those of you who aren’t quite as close to as I am. I wanna say that it’s a great pleasure to have him back at the University of Alberta for a reading today. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1971 for as both an editor, a prose writer, and a poet. And since that time, as well as before, he’s been carrying on in all those areas. He’s a member of the editorial board of Coach House Press, one of the leading little presses in the country. As a prose writer in the past year has seen the publication of Craft Dinner, A Bunch of Proses from 1966 to 1976 collection of his shorter works, including one of the works that helped him win that Governor General’s Award, The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid. He – as a prose writer he also published this year journal, a long work of great complexity and emotional, hard hitting-ness I suppose I can say. And as a poet, of course, he is known as both a sound poet and a concrete poet – as a sound poet, a concrete poet, and as he likes to put a trad poet. In sound poetry in the past year, I have seen him perform solo in Glasgow and with The Four Horseman at the 11th International Poetry Sound Festival – sound poetry in Toronto. And as a concrete poet he is also known internationally for his work in that field. And as a trad poet so to speak, The Ongoing Martyrology amongst as many other work stands as testament to the incredible amount of work and the value of it, I think to us all. So with that, bpNichol.\n \n\n17:28\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tThose samples come from the years 1977 to 1981. Doug’s style—as always—is exemplary: warm, exuberant, welcoming; but, also, each time he affirms at least three important things: the relationships that bind a network of poets and writers cross Canada; his careful attention to the work of others; and the joy of celebrating a shared community of practice. Little did I know that evening in Guelph, as my friends and I sat and listened, jaws agape, to Doug’s 1985 performance of “Full Moon,” that we were being invited into something very, very special that was already in the making: a community of listeners, and a mode of listening, to each other, to ourselves, and to the world around us\n \n\n18:29\tArchival Recording, Douglas Barbour, The Bards of March, 1986:\t[End of the recording played earlier of Barbour performing “That Gone Tune.” Nonlinguistic and songlike utterances compose most of the poem but these words are heard clearly at the end: “Go with it, go with it! If you’re lucky then you’re sounding, and you’re gone,” with a stretching of the word “gone”.] [Audience Applause] Thank you.\n \n\n22:05\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Our guest this month was Michael O’Driscoll. ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and hosted by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n \n\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9987","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.7, Moving, Still, 18 April 2022, McLeod "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/023b5797-abed-48ca-ba69-1868d7cacb3c/audio/0fb8f4d8-ae79-48dd-b220-44cfbb8e03b1/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:17:17\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"16,663,659 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts 3.7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-04-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nPhyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.\\n\\nShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nCollis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549814771712,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, ShortCuts returns to a recording of Phyllis Webb in order to re-listen through this season’s question of how the archive remembers. What is held in the ‘room’ of the recording, and how does that differ from the room where reading took place? Or from the room of personal memory? What exceeds those rooms? And what does it feel like to hear their contours? Join producer Katherine McLeod as she reflects upon these questions while listening to a 1966 recording of Phyllis Webb reading from Naked Poems.\n\n00:09\nShortCuts Theme Music:\n[Piano Overlaid with Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\nHannah McGregor:\nWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nepisode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, so if you love what you hear make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the Spoken Web Project, think about joining Katherine on shortcuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloging recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nTheme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n\n01:28\nKatherine McLeod:\nWelcome to ShortCuts, a monthly minisode in which we listen closely and carefully to a shortcut [Sound Effect: Scissors] from the Spoken Web archives. This month it is April, the month of poetry. The audio that we’ll be listening to is a poem by Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. It is in fact, a series of poems from\nNaked Poems\n, poems that open up space and leave room for the listener to listen, to listen quietly, or to fill up that space with their listening. The space is audible in her reading of the poems, and it is visible on the page, as Webb comments on when she introduces\nNaked Poems\nto her Montreal audience in 1966.\n\n02:15\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nI want to move on now to my latest book, which is called Naked Poems, in which one of your local critics – or at least he wrote for the\nMontreal Star\nthis particular point – exclaimed of the price because there are so few words in the book. [Audience Laughter] It’s $2.25. [Audience Laughter] These poems are very small and therefore very expensive [Audience Laughter] and – came at a bitter price, I may say. To me. They came quite as a surprise and I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote them the first 14 or so. I thought, my goodness, what are these little things doing here? And I couldn’t quite take them seriously. And then I began to see the order that really was intrinsic in them and realized that here was something almost a new form for me to work on. And it’s very bare, naked, undecorated. And I wanted to get rid of all my affectations. And so I decided to to write, oh a couple hundred of them. And I wrote about a hundred and then got hung up on a technical problem and finally reduced them to, I dunno, 40 or so that are in this book. So this is a distillation, let’s say. [Pages Turning] I’m going to read the first 14, which comprised a total poem. In the sense the whole book is a poem. And then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice and your patience will hold out.\n\n04:31\nKatherine McLeod:\nIn listening to how Phyllis Webb tells her audience about Naked Poems we hear what it would’ve been like to be there in the room. We hear the audience and their laughter. The feeling as though she is holding the pages of Naked Poems in her hands, as she is telling us about them. We can almost feel the touch of the page, the small distilled poems, how they came to her at a bitter price. What does she mean by that? Now, if all of this is sounding somewhat familiar it’s because the clips that I’m playing are from recordings of Webb reading Naked Poems that were the focus of April’s ShortCuts last season. We are returning to this recording for a number of reasons, but most of all as a remembrance of Webb. Last year in April, I created the ShortCuts based on the Webb recording as a gift for her. April was her birthday month and I imagined it reaching her ears on the West Coast. In November 2021 Webb passed away at a glorious old age and even with such a full long life, it still felt like such a loss. This season of ShortCuts, there has been an ongoing theme of listening to remember. And if you listen back through each episode, you’ll hear it developing. I produce each episode in the month it is released. And so that development was not planned at the outset. Each episode has been a way to dive deeper and deeper into one of the stories told in that first episode, “What the Archive Remembers”. In that, I talk about an interaction at a conference in which someone told me that they’d really felt the weight and impact of hearing bp nichol’s voice in a recording that I had played. What strikes me now is that we are in a position in which we have vast amounts of recorded materials of poets, and that those recordings are perhaps more accessible then they have ever been before. That’s thanks to the internet, but also thanks to large scale audio digitization projects such as SpokenWeb, among others. What I’m getting at here is that we’ve had recordings of poets voices for a long time now, but have we ever had them so readily available and with a record of their voice from throughout their career, throughout their lives? It is with this in mind that I invite all of us to return back to that recording of Phyllis Webb, reading in Montreal in 1966. And you’ll hear my voice from last year, commenting on that audio followed by my voice now at the end.\n\n07:22\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nAnd then I’ll read a few more, as long as my voice [Pages Flipping] and your patience were hold out.\n\n07:29\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nThe reading was recorded in 1966 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia. At that reading, the second reader was Gwendolyn MacEwen. Imagine hearing Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn McEwen reading in person on the same night. MacEwen would’ve been sitting in the audience, listening to Webb read. Here is Webb reading “Suite I” and “Suite II” from Naked Poems.\n07:58\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n[Webb Reading] “Suite I” Moving to establish distance between our houses. It seems I welcome you in. Your mouth blesses me all over. There is room. And here. And here. And here. And over. And over. Your. Mouth. Tonight, quietness in me and the room. I am enclosed by a thought and some walls. The bruise. Again, you have left your mark. All we have. Skin shuttered secretly. [Page Turning] Flies. Tonight in this room, two flies on the ceiling are making love quietly or so it seems down here. [Audience Laughter]. Your blouse. I people this room with things, a chair, a lamp, a fly. Two books by Mary Ann Moore. I have thrown my gloves on the floor. Was it only last night? You took with so much gentleness, my dark. Sweet tooth. While you were away, I held you like this in my mind. It is a good mind that can embody perfection with exactitude. The sun comes through plum curtains. I said, the sun is gold in your eyes. It isn’t the sun. You said. [Page Turning] On the floor, your blouse. The plum light falls more golden, going down. Tonight, quietness in the room. We knew. [Page Turning] Then you must go. I sat cross-legged on the bed. There is no room for self pity, I said. I lied. In the gold darkening light you dressed. I hid my face in my hair. The room that held you is still here. [Page Turning] You brought me clarity. Gift after gift I wear. Poems naked. In the sunlight. On the floor. [Page Turning]\n\n11:31\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nIn that reading, we hear the space of the poem and we feel the presence of that space. We see the sun beam shining through the air. We see the blouse sitting on the floor of the room. We feel the air thick with eros, between objects, between people, between the poet and subject. What would it be like to hear this in the room in 1966? This expression of female desire to be contained within the archives of this reading series?\n\n12:04\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nWhile you were away. I held you like this in my mind.\n12:10\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe hear this holding. The quietness of each page.\n12:14\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nQuietness in the room. We knew. [Page Turning].\n12:19\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe hear the turning of the page. The room.\n12:23\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nThe room that held you is still here.\n12:27\nKatherine McLeod, ShortCuts 2.7:\nWe are listening to desire in the making every time we press play on this recording, as though we were returning to the same room, the room of the poem, the room of the reading, the voice moving –\n\n12:41\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\n[Ambient Room Sounds].\n12:41\nKatherine McLeod:\n– I hear how in last year’s ShortCuts, I was so interested in that space of the room and what it could hold. I hear that now as speaking to what I was exploring of ShortCuts, as a method of feminist placemaking. A room, an audible place in which to hear women’s voices from the archives. For them to take up sonic space and for us to hear what feelings are made through those sounds. I was interested in and how that related to my role as producer curating this space. How much does one hold up voices by framing them or does one simply press play? One tries (or rather I try) to strike the right balance between supporting the voice with care in how it is introduced, why that voice has been pulled out of the archives, and then letting the listener and the voice embark on their own dance. That is how last year I was hearing the line…\n\n13:53\nArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, 1966:\nThe room that held you is still here.\n13:57\nKatherine McLeod:\nThis year, I still hear it that way but I also hear the room as a precursor to the room that was far from Webb in 1966, but would be the room in which I met her when I visited her on Salt Spring Island in 2017. I think of that room because I wish I could have visited her once more again. And yet I’m also grateful for that time in which I was there. That room in a senior’s care facility was her room. It was her home. In that room of her own we talked about the 1960s. We sat amid her paintings. Her art was holding us in that room, along with the warmth of her smile and generosity. I thought to myself, this is a woman who knows how to live. I say that in the present tense, because it feels like she is still living. The room that held you is still here. And it is still here. We are still listening. What a word still. It implies a pause in motion, and yet at the same time, it implies a persistence. Still moving. Moving. That is what I called ShortCuts last year. Phyllis Webb is still moving. I say that thinking of these words that I wrote at the end of a chapter about Webb in [the book]\nMoving Archives\n, and they feel like some of the only words that can wrap up, that can hold together an episode that does not want to end.\n\n15:42\nKatherine McLeod\n[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] [Reading out loud from the book\nMoving Archives\n] Only Phyllis Webb inhabits the place where her voice dwells. A reminder of this appeared to me by chance while typing these lines. When I noticed that Stephen Collis had posted a photo to Twitter with the caption “Phyllis Webb’s hands”. The camera looks down at an angle at Webb holding her entire body of poetic work\nPeacock Blue: The Collected Poems\n. The book lies open, the table of contents on her lap, a tray of olives and brie sit next to her, ready to be consumed throughout what promises to be a long conversation with Collis about poetry. [Music Pauses] Webbs right hand is held up, long fingers spread wide and flexed as though she is about to turn the page. Quietly, she is moving. [Music Restarts] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. It was recorded in the city of Montreal or what is known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Judith Burr and Kate Moffatt and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. 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Diving into a recording that concluded last year’s symposium, producer Katherine McLeod plays excerpts from Oana Avasilichioaei’s live performance of “Chambersonic (IV)” and Klara du Plessis’s reading of “Post-Mortem of the Event.” What is the sound of this event? Listening to the recording now invites reflections on what this event sounds like: how do we hear its affect, its traces, and how it shifts in time?\n\n00:10\nHannah McGregor:\n[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Welcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nepisode, you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Music Interlude:\nSpokenWeb Podcast\nTheme Music] \n01:27\nKatherine McLeod:\nWelcome to ShortCuts. When this ShortCuts comes out, it will be in the same week of this year’s SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute. At the end of last year’s symposium called “Listening, Sound, Agency” there was an online Words & Music Show. Here is SpokenWeb’s Jason Camlot, welcoming those tuning in and explaining the relationship between this event and the symposium week that was coming to an end.\n01:58\nAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music Show, 2021:\nWell, we’re gonna get things started. I just, I wanted to say a few words before I turn things over to the host of the evening and of all Words and Music Shows – Ian Ferrier – who you just saw. I’m Jason Camlot. I’m a co-host of this show. I’ve actually been co-hosting these, or background hosting them with Ian, since March 2020, when pandemic forced us onto Zoom, out of the Casa del Popolo, which you see in the background of my screen, my fake background. This event was imagined as a celebration of that symposium, and as a way of bringing the local community in touch with some of the participants in the symposium. For me, it’s a really fun way to finish what’s been an amazing week of activity and thinking and sharing.\n02:48\nKatherine McLeod:\nAlong with SpokenWeb and Symposium poets – Kevin McNeilly, Cole Mash, Erin Scott, and Klara du Plessis who performed that night – the special guest for that show was poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei. Oana had performed live at the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium in Vancouver, along with participating in various SpokenWeb events in Montreal. In 2021, her book\nEight Track\nhad just received great acclaim and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Featuring her on that night was part of a way of making a connection between the symposium and local Montreal poets. At the symposium, I had, in fact, presented a paper with Dr. Emily Murphy about Oana’s poetry as notation. For that presentation we had been working with a recording of\nChambersonic\nthat is published digitally in visual and audio formats on the\nCapilano Review\n. But Oana’s performance of a version of\nChambersonic\non that night of the online Words & Music Show was its own version. It was performed live. And, after listening, again, to this performance by Oana, I was struck by what Klara du Plessis chooses to read, following Oana’s performance. In listening to the recording, we are hearing a listening taking place within the event. And so in this ShortCuts we’ll be listening to Oana – and then we’ll be listening to Klara – as a listening to the event. What the event sounds like, what it feels like. What are its traces left behind, and its shifts in time? Here’s Ian Ferrier introducing Oana Avasilichioaei.\n04:37\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\n…our star performer of the evening. Her work interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry-hybrids include\nEight Track\nfrom Talonbooks, which is the finalist for the Klein prize for poetry and the Governor General’s Award, and\nLiminal\nfrom Talonbooks in 2015. She’s created many performance and sound works, written a libretto for a one act opera called\nCells of Wind\nin 2020, and translated 10 books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, most recently Bertrand Laverdure’s\nThe Neptune Room\nwhich is also a finalist for the Governor General’s literary award for translation. She’s performed a number of times in our show and each time has brought amazing work. So please welcome Oana tonight. Yeah.\n05:33\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you, thank you so much, Ian. Thank you so much for having me and I’m super happy to be here. So I’m going to share two pieces. The first piece is a video piece that I made last fall, which I call a filmpoem. It’s called “Tracking Animal (an extemporization)”, and it uses some text from the long work in this – in a track called “Tracking Animal.” And in fact, it will take us back outside. I’m just going to share my screen here and play it for you.\n06:14\nKatherine McLeod:\nWhen Oana said those words, she did take us back outside. The visuals then showed her standing and walking in recognizable local Montreal spaces. She had recorded this video alone during the early times of the pandemic. You could see and feel that aloneness. The tracking of the self. It’s also quite moving that the spaces that she recorded in are spaces that many Montrealers have used to create art on their own during the pandemic — and that those spaces will soon, once again, be vibrant with arts events happening in them this summer outside. It is a beautiful piece, this video, and you can find a link to it in the show notes. The fact that she took us outside resonated with me as a listener, because I remember that when I was tuning into this show, I was listening on my balcony. I took a photo that night of my listening with my computer and Oana and the moon shining above. I sent that photo to her the next day as a form of thanks. And I look at it again now to remind myself that it was live. I stress the word live because the next piece she performed and the one that we’ll listen to was a version of\nChambersonic\n, and it was performed live.\n07:45\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThe second piece I’m going to do is actually going to be a live work. It’s new, it’s from a new body of work that I’m working on called\nChambersonic\n— the larger project. And each piece I’m doing is numbered. So this is “Chambersonic (IV)”, and it’s based on a score, “Chambersonic (I)”, that looks like this [Shows Page to Audience] , and it was a version of both the score and the sound piece that was published in\nThe Capilano Review\nin their fall issue. So, I’m going to need to change some audio settings. And then I’m going to start the piece… [Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] This, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now, this is a variant of being, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now. This is a variant of being… Let form be oral. A foundation…. [Singing] Sonority… An impossible lone sound… —netic … Recording… [Whispered] The ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation… [Voices overlap] Corporeal, phonetic, fragments, re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound…\n10:45\nKatherine McLeod:\nThis, this is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider what is this this-ness — of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound? It is as though she is saying, I am performing now. This is the performance. This. We hear this even while knowing that there is an accompanying score. Is that too a this? She conveys an assertion of presence in the performance itself, which is why it feels so powerful to remember that it is happening live. As you are listening to this recording. How does listening now differ from me listening on my balcony under the moon to the live-stream? Where is the event now? [Audio of Oana’s Performance Begins] Let’s re-enter the sound and we’ll hear Ian Ferrier take us from Oana’s performance into Klara du Plessis’s reading that follows, and you’ll hear why I let the tape play and where Klara’s reading takes us…\n11:56\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] Voice… Of timbre… The voice. Fills the void. The activity of sound, quieter, and louder, longer, and shorter… [Overlapping voice] The activity of sound — and quieter. Higher, and lower. Longer, and short. The activity of sound, louder and quieter, higher and lower… where silence differentiates.\n13:36\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nOh, that was lovely. Yeah. So nice to hear. And I love the sung voice and the talking voice and the whisper voice and the industrial sound beneath it. That’s really just a beautiful piece. Thank you so much.\n13:51\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you. Thank you. Took me a moment to get back. [Laughs]\n13:57\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah, it took me a moment too. I’m still [Sings] louder [Laughs] right. So thank you so much for that.\n14:07\nAudio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021:\nThanks so much for having me again.\n14:09\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah. Nice to see you. Yeah, yeah. And next up we have a person who’s been working quite a bit through the symposium as well. Her name is Klara du Plessis. She’s a poet, a critic, a literary curator too. And she resides in Montreal. She’s the winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial award for her debut collection\nEkke\n, which was published with Palimpsest Press. Her second book, which was released in the fall of 2020 is\nHell Light Flesh\n, and Klara is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University researching the recent, contemporary, and experimental curation of poetry readings. Please welcome Klara du Plessis.\n14:54\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you so much for that really generous introduction, Ian. I’m still astounded by Oana’s performance and everything that came before. And so I feel like I’m still in a transitional phase, trying to get my bearings. It’s also the end of an incredible symposium week that’s been running since Tuesday night, and maybe as a result of that, I made a couple of decisions. One of them is to read new work. I’ve decided to try out some works that are in what I would call a draft and a half [Laugh]. So they’ve been lying around for a while they’re maybe six months or eight months old. But I only really edited them very lightly. I’m reading it because I feel like I kind of trust the people here and feel comfortable with a kind of tradition that Words & Music seems to have for people to try things. But the second reason that I am I’ve decided to read from this work is because I feel like it emanates from the research I’ve been doing at Concordia. And very much is a result of me reading works on archives and doing work in audio, audio and digital, both analog and digital archives. And, it’s a short, long poem. The kind of character in the poem is the event. But while I was writing it, because I was kind of thinking of postmortem and anatomy and so on, I did at some point look at that famous old Rembrandt painting of the anatomy table, which has the kind of famous, strange hand, like the hand, if you look at that painting, it’s got a hand that’s supposed to be the right hand, but it’s actually a left hand or a reverse. Um, and that kind of made its way into this poem also. So it’s called “Post-mortem of the event.” [Klara reading poem] The event lies on the table with its left hand and frontal arm dissected, sinuses and muscles, and maybe one disposable bone strumming like lines from a poem, pink inner exposeé, rationalizes the soul from vessel to enlightenment the latter so mystical, who knows how the verse becomes a multidimensional grid. Logic of the luminous skin of the other hand, intact pale rams brawn of the Cartesian Caucasian corpse. The event opened undocumented archive over the table, displayed, displayed, played, and atomically laid out to rest resist laboratory pages white as coats. Only thing is that the left hand is not the left, but the right, but not the right hand, but a second right hand, multifarious body mirroring itself in hands in hand rippling along its definitions of progress, usage and control. On the one hand, and on the other hand as wingspan on the one hand and on the one hand or on the other hand, and on the other hand, the archive of hands fans out fingers replicating selves, look, really look at this artwork. So strange armoured in mourning like the night…\n18:49\nKatherine McLeod:\nThe poem that Klara is reading from will be part of a forthcoming book in 2024.\nPost-mortem of the Event\nis, in fact, the working title of that collection. Oana’s performance that night is also a work-in-progress. It’s one version of “Chambersonic (IV)” of\nChambersonic\nand the written textual material traces of that project will be coming out as a book also in 2024 under the title,\nChambersonic\n. Let’s hear how Klara’s poem ends, and then we’ll hear Ian’s voice again, asking what comes next?\n19:25\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Klara reading poem] …with eight men and an extra dead struck still in time in the instant before darkness hits before bodies speed up moving the event, rapid fire and risqué rinsing themselves in light and a handshake with air. Thank you.\n19:48\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nWhat a great piece. And that’s in progress?\n19:53\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nYeah, this is new stuff. [Laughs]\n19:55\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\n[Laughs] Yeah, it’s really great. It’s really, really, really stunning all the different parts connecting around the event. So thank you very much for that. And thank you for your work on this conference and to Jason and to Ali as well. It’s been an amazing journey, which I guess you get to relax from tomorrow. Or do you do a post-mortem, or what happens at the end of all this?\n20:22\nKatherine McLeod:\nWhen Ian asks Klara about the post-mortem of the event, it’s quite funny to hear that now because our symposium committee for listening sound agency has gone on to produce many collaborative outputs. The event has not ended. There’s an art book called\nQuotes\nedited by Klara and Emma Telaro about to be at this year’s symposium; also to be launched is a vinyl record with sounds from symposium participants, compiled by Deanna Fong, Angus Tarnowsky and Jason Camlot; a podcast episode has been released about the symposium and it was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stephanie Ricci. And there will be a forthcoming issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches to Literary Studies” edited by Jason Camlot and me, Katherine McLeod. So when you hear the end of this event, know that it is not the end, just like the poems that we have listened to continue to be in progress. This, this too is the event. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n21:32\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nSo nice to see everybody tonight. Thanks for your performances to Klara, to Cole, to Erin, to Oana, to Kevin. It’s been a really fun ride tonight. So thank you.\n21:43\nAudio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021:\nThank you. Thank you both.\n21:46\nAudio Recording, Kevin McNeilly, Words & Music, 2021:\nThanks so much. It’s terrific.\n21:49\nAudio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021:\nGoodnight, everyone. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming.\n21:51\nAudio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music, 2021:\nWe’ll see you all soon.\n21:58\nKatherine McLeod:\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. If you want to learn more about where the sounds you’ve heard have come from head to SpokenWeb.ca and check the show notes for ShortCuts. If you’re listening to this on the release day, and you want to tune-in to SpokenWeb’s Symposium this year, head to spoken web.ca and click on “Symposia.” Plus you can find the podcast episode based on last year’s symposium by checking previous episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll find “Listening, Sound, Agency: a retrospective listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium” as the March, 2022 episode. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, and Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. 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Chronicles: Early Works. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “Unarchiving the Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 3-31.\\n\\n“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.\\n\\nKinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.\\n\\nOur Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections,  https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.\\n\\n“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.\\n\\n“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.” Produced by Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 21 June 2021. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/.\\n\\n“Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” Produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 6 June 2022. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549815820289,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In the making of ShortCuts, series producer Katherine McLeod often talks about how recorded sound is held not only within archives but also by the work of contextualizing whenever one selects an archival audio clip and presses play. Returning to an audio recording of Dionne Brand played in ShortCuts 2.9 “Situating Sound” (June 2021), Katherine reminds us that the process of unarchiving sound is an embodied one. We listen as bodies to the archive. Moreover, how we choose to contextualize sound impacts any listening to it, and written transcripts too frame our understanding of the audio content. Building upon the most recent episode of The SpokenWeb, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity,” this episode of ShortCuts explores the transcript as another version of holding the sound, while, at the same time, invites a listening to that which exceeds that holding.\n\n“…even those that do not hold a wind’s impression”\n– Dionne Brand from Primitive Offensive\n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music:\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you, especially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask, what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG, so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work, especially if you’re a student that has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings that there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening. Let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n00:58\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\n \n\n[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to ShortCuts. Last month we immersed in the world of the SpokenWeb symposium. The ShortCuts episode called “The Event” included audio that resonates with both this year’s and last year’s symposium and institute. And if you were at the symposium you’ll know that I was recording ShortCuts Live! A new type of ShortCuts episode recorded live on site with various researchers within the SpokenWeb network. Stay tuned for ShortCuts Live! in the next season. This month, we continue the season’s theme of how the archives remembers. We’ll be listening to a clip from a past ShortCuts – one from last June, exactly one year ago – and we’ll listen to it again in the context of the transcription episode on The SpokenWeb Podcast released at the start of this month. In that episode, Kelly Cubbon and I talk about transcription as a process that is rooted in conversation and collaboration. Do check it out – Episode 9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”. After making that episode, I thought I’d take a look back at some of the transcripts for ShortCuts. When Kelly transcribes the audio, it is usually quite straightforward but when there are questions they’re often questions related to providing further context as to where the sound is coming from, or if we should put a cue for the reader as to where that voice is from, or where it was recorded, right in the transcript. To quote Kelly herself making one of my favourite points in our episode…\n \n\n03:08\tKelly Cubbon, S3E9, SpokenWeb Podcast:\tThe overlapping sound is one thing, but I think also overlapping context for lack of a better word has been something I’ve I think we’ve been working to indicate such as if someone appears in an episode in a Zoom interview and then in an archival recording of them, and that archival recording includes them speaking to the audience as an aside and then performing poetry. And then maybe they’re in kind of a more formal voiceover audio. There might be four instances of slightly different context to indicate.\n \n\n03:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tKelly and I have talked so much about how these questions are not transcription problems but rather generative transcription challenges and situations to learn from. Another challenge that can emerge in ShortCuts is how to transcribe words from a poem read out loud. What we have gone with is an approach that transcribes the words as spoken out loud (though including in brackets that the speaker is reading a poem since often the tone of the voice has changed.) That way the transcript is not attempting to reproduce the poem on the page as it is published – rather, the transcript aims to represent the sounds heard in the podcast and to make them more accessible. Those examples of what can come up in the process of transcription speak to what I’ve described in past ShortCuts as a figuring out, a navigating of how much to frame the archival audio clips that I play for you here. How much do I explain their context? Or do I simply press play? A phrase that captures this balancing act (at least for me!) is one that emerged out of the partial replay that we’ll be hearing in this ShortCuts. [Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding and Stopping] … is what kind of a framework does audio clipped out of context need to feel supported? And I say that while holding out my arms, gesturing as if I’m attempting to hold the sound. [Sound Effect: Tape Rewinding and Stopping] I’ve returned to this image and to this phrase and to this act in many moments in these episodes when thinking about as place held, supported, with my arms outstretched, as an embodied experience – an audible place created as a feminist placemaking. Holding with arms outstretched conveys that the work of framing is my intervention in it – I am not neutral in how I frame the sound even if I am also offering it to you to do what you wish with it, letting you know that the sound is there ready to be listening to. I Am holding the sound carefully, knowing how difficult it can be to take a recorded voice, with all of its situated affect attached to it, out of the archives. To unarchive carefully. That got me thinking, a transcript is also an attempt to hold the sound – it attempts to hold the sound in such a way that increases accessibility to the content while also recognizing that the transcript is, in some way, mediating the experience. With all of this in mind, let’s return to the episode aptly titled “Situating Sound” and hear it again in this moment in time. It is an episode that could be situated in the context of “Communal Memories” which I produced afterwards in December 2021, and that is based on the second part of this recording with the voice of late Stolo writer Lee Maracle. Hearing “Situating Sound” now makes me feel there’s no episode that necessarily comes before or after, but that these episodes continue to cycle around each other. With that let’s dive into “Situating Sound” from June 2021. [Sound Effect: Tape Fast Forwarding] And you’ll hear a recording of Dionne Brand reading in 1988. I invite you to think of how the transcript holds the sound, how the information I provide holds the sound, [Sound Effect: Tape Stops, Presses Play]. And how my voice holds the sound in that I am telling you about what you are going to hear, and to listen for moments when sound exceeds this holding… [Start Music: Piano Instrumental]\n \n\n07:39\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\t…and she had also written about this solidarity in a 1988 issue of the Black women’s newspaper Our Lives that Brand had helped to edit. These pieces of context are only the beginning of unpacking the significance of these two women reading together. And unravelling this history all started by wanting to know more about one archival recording. [End Music: Piano Instrumental]So as we listen to this reading, what would it be like to be there in that room with Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle in 1988? Now in June, 2021, what does it feel like when you hear this recording wherever you might be listening from? How do we understand this recording in relation to the archive that holds it? I am recording this a week after Brand read from The Blue Clerk at an annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists. How does Brand hear time? When she introduces what she reads from Primitive Offensive in the recording we’re about to hear she says that the poetry is made out of the pieces of history, a history that as she says, if you are Black in the Americas, you have to dig for it. How does that resonate with the lines where she chooses to end?\n \n\n08:57\tArchival Audio, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t… [Ambient Background Noise] [Reading Poetry] I won’t take any evidence of me, even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [Aside to Audience] Okay, that’s it. [Audience applause].\n \n\n09:14\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\tAs we could hear in that recording, there are noises in the background. We’ll be hearing what sound like cars passing outside, we’ll hear some voices and might wonder if those are people talking outside the bookstore window, or perhaps this recording has been recorded over another one and we’re actually hearing the voices of another time bleeding through the tape. Here is Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive in a recording that was broadcast on radiofreerainforest on August 7th, 1988, and now that recording is held by and shapes an archive.\n \n\n10:00\tArchival Audio, Dionne Brand, 1988:\t[Static and various background noises throughout] I’m going to read a poem for my grandmother, a poem for my ancestors, really. I wrote this book Primitive Offensive because, for whatever history has left you, if you were Black in the Americas, you have to dig and dig and dig and memorize and memorize and learn and learn it and redo it and recover it and re– you know, because it isn’t anywhere else. And so this was my history book. Sometimes you arrive and find what seems to be nothing, and you have to dig for it. And this is a call to my ancestors about this history. And I looked for my ancestors and I found what there was. And so – and sometimes you find nothing and you make it anyway. [Laughs] You know, you find a piece of cloth, a bit of this, whatever, but you make it human. So –[Start of reading] Ancestor dirt/ ancestor snake/ ancestor lice / ancestor whip/ ancestor fish/ ancestor slime/ ancestor sea/ ancestor stick/ ancestor iron/ ancestor bush/ ancestor ship/ ancestor old woman, old bead/ let me feel your skin, old muscle, old stick/ where are my bells?/ my rattles/ my condiments, my things to fill houses and minutes/ The fat is starting, where are my things?/ My mixtures, my bones, my decorations/ old bread, old tamarind switch./ Will you bathe me in oils?/ Will you tie me in white cloth?/ Call me by my praise name/ Sing me Oshun song./ Oya against this clamour [Background Noise Rises; Inaudible Voices] / Ancestor old woman/ Send my things after me./ One moment, old lady more questions./ What happened to the ship in your leap? The boatswain, did he scan the passage’s terrible wet face/ The navigator, did he blink?/ Or steer that ship through your screaming night?/ The captain did he lash two slaves to the rigging, for example?/ Lady! My things/ Water leaden, my maps, my compass/ After all, what is the political position of stars? Drop your crusted cough, where you want./ My hands make precious things out of phlegm./ Ancestor wood/ Ancestor dog/ Ancestor ancestor, old man, dry stick, mustache, skin, and bone./ Why didn’t you remember? /Why didn’t you remember the name of our tribe?/Why didn’t you tell me before you died?/ Old horse, you made the white man ride you/ You shot off your leg for him./ Old man, the name of our tribe is all I wanted./ Instead, you went to the swamps and bush and rice paddies for the trading company and they buried you in water/ Crocodile, tears. /It would have been better to remember the name of our tribe./ Now, mosquitoes dance a ballet over your grave and the old woman buried with you wants to leave./ One thing for sure, dismembered woman, when you decide you are alone/ When you decide you are alone, /when you dance, it’s your own broken face. When you eat your own plate of stones/ For damn sure you are alone./ Where do you think you are going dismembered woman?/ Limbs chopped off at the ankles./ When you decide, believe me, you are alone./ Sleep, sleep, tangential phase, sleep,/ Sleeping, or waking/ Understand you are alone./ Diamonds pour from your vagina,/ and your breasts drip healing copper/ But listen, women, dismembered continent/ You are alone./See crying fool,/ You want to talk in gold/ You will cry in iron./ You want to dig up stones./ You will bury flesh./ You think you don’t need oils and amulets compelling powder and rely on smoke./ You want to throw people in cesspits./ Understand dismembered one, ululant /You are alone./ When waterfalls work, land surfaces./ I was sent to this cave./ I went out one day like a fool to find this cave, to find clay, to dig up metals to decorate my bare and painful breasts./ Water and clay for a poultice for this gash to find a map an imprint of me anywhere would have kept me calm./ Anywhere with description./ Instead, I found a piece of this/ A tooth, a bit of food hung on. /A metatarsal, which resembled mine./ Something else like a note. Musical. /ting ting, but of so little pitch so little lasting perhaps it was my voice./ And this too, a suggestion and insinuation so slight, it may be untrue./ Something moving over the brow as with eyes close to black/ a sensate pull/ Phantom! Knocks the forehead back in the middle of a dance. /No, I can’t say dance. It exaggerates./ Phantom. A bit of image./ A motion close to sound, a sound imaged on the retina resembling sound/ A sound seen out of the corner of my eye./ Emotion heard on my inner ear./ I poured over these like a paleontologist./ I dusted them off like an archeologist/ A swatch of cloth./ Skin, atlas, coarse utility, but enough./ Still only a bit of paint, of dye on the stone./ I can not say crude, but a crude thing./ A hair, a marking. That a fingernail to rock an ancient wounded scratch./ I handle these like a papyrologist contours/ A desert sprung here./ Migrations, suggestions, lies./ Phantom. A table and jotting up artful covert mud./ I noted these like a geopolitical scientist./ I will take any evidence of me even that carved in the sky by the fingerprints of clouds every day. Even those that do not hold a wind’s impression. [End of reading] [Aside to audience] Ok. That’s it. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n16:09\tKatherine McLeod, S2E9, ShortCuts:\tThat was the Dionne Brand reading from her book, Primitive Offensive. The recording was played on Vancouver’s co-op radio on August 7th, 1988 and the recording is held by the archives of radiofree rainforest. Now part of SFU library’s digital collections. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music].\n \n\n16:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. It was recorded in Montreal or what is known as Tiohtià:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, mixed and mastered by Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9990","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.10, [Replay] Moving, Still, 18 July 2022, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/replay-moving-still/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/d939009b-0129-4515-85b9-34a39f7b18fd/audio/25ff9391-8f6a-4558-b9e0-9ca82e415aa9/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-3-10-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:18:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,073,435 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-3-10-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/replay-moving-still/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-07-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["*Transcript In Progress*"],"contents":["This month, ShortCuts is replaying a past episode as a response to this month’s full episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode – “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam (produced by Stephen Collis) – is a moving commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Along with archival clips, the episode features conversations with two poets – Isabella Wang and Fred Wah – in which they talk about an unpublished poem of Webb’s. Listen to this replay of ShortCuts Ep. 3.7 “Moving, Still” and then, listen to Collis’s episode about Webb as a collective listening. What does the archive remember?"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nPhyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.\\n\\nShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nCollis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549816868864,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"9991","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.1, Introducing ShortCuts, Live!, 16 October 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts-live/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/cf9825d7-2330-4377-a62d-caa50ba79c7b/audio/33a2eb71-61fd-4394-a32d-9dfd116279a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-master-1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:08:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"8,078,777 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-master-1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/introducing-shortcuts-live/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-10-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Archival audio sampled in this episode is from these past episodes: \\n\\nShortCuts 4.2 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n,\\n21 Nov 2022\\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-sarah-cipes-about-feminist-audio-editing/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.3 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project Archives,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 20 February 2023\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.4 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 20 March 2023\\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.5 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Annie Murray,” produced by Katherine McLeod,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\n, 17 April 2023\\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-annie-murray/\\n\\n \\n\\nShortCuts 4.6 “What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival Archives,” produced by Ella Jando-Saul,\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast, \\n\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\\n\\n \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549818966016,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Welcome to Season 5 of ShortCuts. \n\nShortCuts started out on the podcast feed as a ‘minisode’ during our first season and it soon took on a life of its own. ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod would take you on a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio. What did it feel like to hear archival audio? And how could we carefully unarchive its sound? These questions evolved into conversations, and thus emerged ShortCuts, Live! Last season featured Katherine’s conversations with Sarah Cipes, Faith Paré, Chelsea Miya, Nick Beaschesne, Ariel Kroon, and Annie Murray, along with a special episode produced by Ella Jando-Saul. And, this season, ShortCuts Live continues. It will be even more ‘live’ and in-person season than ever before, but before we go there, we do what we always do to start a new season. We perform what\nShortCuts\nsounds like\nin sound.\nListen to this episode, listen to past episodes, and then stay tuned for our new season on\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\nfeed. \n\n(0:00) \nShortCuts\nTheme Music\n[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:01)\nKatherine McLeod\nWelcome to\nShortCuts\n. On\nShortCuts\n. We listen closely and carefully to a short ‘cut’ [scissor sound] or ‘cuts’ [scissor sound] from the archives.\nShortCuts\nbegan in season one of the\nSpokenWeb\npodcast. It started out as what we called a minisode,  a short episode to engage with interesting clips from the audio archives that caught my attention as a producer and curator. \n\nBut this soon evolved. Episodes became a way to really dwell in the sound, to listen again – and again ­– to audio clips from the archives, as a place to practice a feminist listening in the archives and think about what we are listening to, how we are listening to it, and what it feels like to listen.\nShortCuts\nhas evolved onto the page. I’ve written about the first seasons of\nShortCuts\nas feminist placemaking through podcasting in a forthcoming chapter, co-written with Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland. Last year’s trailer ended up transforming into a short forum contribution to English Studies in Canada, published earlier this year. That piece is called “Archival Listening.”\n\nTalking about what it feels like to listen to audio from the archives evolved into wanting to talk with other people about what it feels like to hear these sounds. \n\n[\nShortCuts\ntheme music fades] Thus\nShortCuts\nevolved into what was last season, ShortCuts Live! Conversations with\nSpokenWeb\nresearchers about a short ‘cut’ of audio from the archives. This season, we continue\nShortCuts\nLive and aim to be even more live and on-site than\nShortCuts\nhas ever been before. But first, I want to do what we always do to start a new season of\nShortCuts\n, and that is to dive into its own archives of last season. \n\n[\nShortCuts\ntheme music swells]\n\nBecause me telling you the story of\nShortCuts\nevolving is one way of explaining what it does. But what if we ask, what does\nShortCuts\ndo in sound? In the following mix, you’ll hear the voices of Sarah Sipes, Faith Pare, Chelsea Mia, Nick Beauchesne, Ariel Kroon, and Annie Murray, along with Ella Jando-Saul from the special episode Ella made with Mathieu Aubin, Misha Solman, Sophia Magglioca, and Rowan Nancarrow. And of course, check the show notes after for the full story of all the archival sounds. [Theme music ends]\n(02:33)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\n…[fades in] do the same thing that I have done for the other ones that I did this week, which was – is – actually going to podcast voice to do the opening [Katherine laughs]. It feels like somehow you need headphones to go into podcast voice [Katherine laughs].\n(02:47)\nAriel Kroon, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\nYeah, put it on. It’s – part of the – part of the suit!\n(02:49)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\nExactly. [Katherine laughs]\n(02:51)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nSo what do you wanna talk about?\n(2:53)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nWell, [Katherine and Annie laugh] first, I’ll say, welcome to\nShortCuts\n.\n(03:00)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.3\n[\nShortCuts\ntheme music plays] Welcome to\nShortCuts\n. Welcome to\nShortCuts\n, this month on\nShortCuts\n, we’re here live on Zoom with the Atwater Poetry Project curator Faith Pare. Faith joins me for this conversation…[Theme music ends]\n(03:16)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \n…We’re recording this\nShortCuts\nLive in 4th Space at Concordia University during the\nSpokenWeb\nSound Institute. I’m here with Sarah Cipes. Thanks so much for joining me, Sarah.\n(03:26)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2\nThanks so much for having me.\n(03:30)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.3 \nThis really is a\nShortCuts\nLive by the fact that my three-month-old daughter is also here with me, and for long time\nShortCuts\nlisteners you’ll remember that back in season two, the voice of a poet’s young daughter has already been heard on\nShortCuts\n.\n(03:41)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nKatherine has just handed me a tape called “Over 60 Minutes with Luba.” Luba is on the front. It was issued by Capital Records and EMI Canada 1987.\n(03:56)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nYou’ve been immersed in the EMI Collection at University of Calgary. What are you, what are you noticing? How does this speak to you as an, as an archival object?\n(04:05)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nWell, what’s interesting about this tape…\n(04:07)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4 \nCould you tell me and listeners what we’re listening to?\n(04:12)\nChelsea Miya, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.4\nSo we’re, that was a clip from the Voiceprint episode, “Room and a Voice of One’s Own.”\n(04:17)\nFaith Paré, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.3 \nThe APP archives are interesting, I think for me as a former SpokenWeb RA, in that they’re all digital. The series started to be regularly recorded in 2010. This was also really firmly embraced by the library too, and thinking about the Atwater Library and Computer Center’s mandate…\n(04:38)\nElla Jando-Saul, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \n[Sound effect of heart beat plays and fades] In 1985, Allan Lorde with help from a team of close friends, organized ultimatum, a literary festival that took […]\n(04:46)\nSophia Magglioca, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nYeah, the weird heartbeat noise is really interesting to me because I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, and it’s doing really interesting things with the poet’s voice.\n(04:59)\nAriel Kroon, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5 \nThat was a clip from Joanne Coombs, and she came on as a guest. Uh, she was working as an editor for academic papers. I think maybe an academic journal at the time. And so she was really talking about her practice of feminist editing at the time, and we were so fascinated by what she had to say, because it struck us as very resonant and relevant to discussions that are all around us.\n(05:25)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \nAnd so bringing that into audio was a really interesting idea for me because redaction, restriction, and censorship and all of these things that have a lot of negative feelings around them for researchers can actually be turned into positive things, I think, particularly within audio, that actually allow users to listen to tapes that they might otherwise be totally barred from, and so my desire was to create sound edits that allow the listener to hear the vast majority of, of the tape…\n(06:05)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2\nMm-hmm.\n(06:06)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \n– while also protecting the privacy of those on the tape. Or even in this case, someone who’s mentioned who’s not there. \n(06:15)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \nMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.\n(06:16)\nSarah Cipes, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.2 \nBut really a feminist edit could also be about amplifying voices that are not usually central to the microphone –\n(06:30)\nMisha Solomon, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.6 \n[Sound effect of heartbeat plays and ends] What I find really interesting about the mystery of the sound is that it’s a reminder of the missing information on these tapes. That these tapes are representative of performances that involved some visual aspect, and that aspect is missing entirely. And so when the sound changes, or disappears, one could imagine someone in an outrageous outfit playing a percussion instrument in the corner and producing that sound…\n(07:00)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\n… and one particular song, that that song perhaps could, you know, appear at some point, or audibly in this –  \n(07:10)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nOr a clip.\n(07:11)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nA clip. Exactly. It would just a, just little-\n(07:13)\nAnnie Murray, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nMaybe the most dramatic part.\n(07:15)\n[Music builds to the chorus of “Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry”]\nSinger sings: \n\nEvery time I see your picture I cry \n\nAnd I learn to get over you\n\nOne more time because…\n(7:33)\nKatherine McLeod, archival audio from ShortCuts 4.5\nExactly. [Katherine laughs]. So, um, I think that’s, you know, a perfect note to, to end on. And I, I want to thank Annie Murray for joining me here on\nShortCuts\nLive in 4th SPACE at Concordia University. Thank you so much, Annie.\n(07:46)\nKatherine McLeod \n[ShortCuts\nmusic begins to play] You’ve been listening to\nShortCuts\n.\nShortCuts\nis released monthly as part of the\nSpokenWeb\npodcast. Feed. The\nSpokenWeb\nPodcast team is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber Zoe Mix and co-host Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. \nFind out more about the sounds that you heard on this month’s episode by checking the show notes or heading to spokenweb.ca and click on podcast. This episode of\nShortCuts\nwas produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [Theme music ends]\n \n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9994","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.2, ShortCuts Live! A Magical Audio Tour with Jennifer Waits, 20 November 2023, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-a-magical-audio-tour-with-jennifer-waits/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/569ffe3e-7643-47e3-8dca-6e676f7bd9a3/audio/5ced2478-171e-40d6-b2b0-e59df3b49fba/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-5-2-master.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:18:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"17,602,395 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-5-2-master\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-a-magical-audio-tour-with-jennifer-waits/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-11-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"ARCHIVAL AUDIO\\n\\nArchival audio excerpted from this episode of Radio Survivor:\\n\\nhttps://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/11/podcast-22-were-all-moving-to-the-fm-dial-now/\\n\\nBlog post with photographs from Jennifer Waits’s tour of Radio K:\\n\\nhttps://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/10/my-grand-tour-of-college-radio-station-radio-k/\\n\\nA past Radio Survivor episode featuring SpokenWeb:\\n\\nhttps://www.radiosurvivor.com/2021/02/podcast-284-spokenweb-and-literary-sound/\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549820014592,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts presents the first of many conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us? Join us for this ShortCuts Live in which a conversation with Jennifer Waits that takes us on a magical audio tour into the sounds of campus radio stations.\n\n(0:00)\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(0:04)\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts. This month we’re back with another ShortCuts Live! Talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. Many of these conversations were recorded on site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. So, what will we hear and who will we talk with? Stay tuned for this season – and, to start us off, this episode is a conversation with Jennifer Waits. Yes, that is the Jennifer Waits of Radio Survivor, the podcast that explores the future of community radio and college radio, low-power FM and public access TV, along with podcasting and internet radio – and she often explores that future by diving into the past, and in fact the clip that Jennifer plays for us is from one of her tours of a college radio station.\nLet’s listen in as SpokenWeb Podcast’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood talk with Jennifer in a recording booth at the University of Alberta. Here is Shortcuts Live. [Theme music fades]\n(1:19)\tKate Moffat\tPerfect. And it’s recording. Okay. I’m just gonna move this a little closer so I’m not ….Alright, so, hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live, recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. I am sitting here, my name is Kate Moffatt and I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb Podcast, stepping in for our usual intrepid host, Katherine McLeod, and I’m sitting here with Jennifer Waits, who we are so excited to talk to today. Jennifer, would you mind just introducing yourself for us?\n(1:50)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah, thanks so much for having me. I am Jennifer Waits and I’m one of the co-founders of Radio Survivor, which is a website and podcast and syndicated radio show about the culture of radio, audio, sound. Um, so I’ve written pieces there as well as these audio productions. And, um, I’m also a long time college radio DJ, write about radio culture and other spaces besides radio survivor and obsessively tour radio stations. [Kate laughs]\n(2:23)\tKate Moffat\tThat’s fantastic. We’re so excited to chat today, so we’re gonna listen to something together and I don’t know, would you like to say something about it before we start?\n(2:34)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. So, I decided to bring– it’s an excerpt of the Radio Survivor show. I think at this point it was just a podcast and not a syndicated radio show. It’s from October, 2015. And in part of this episode I shared one of my radio station tours where I had recorded some audio. So, um, I just thought that would be fun to share.\nAt this point I have written up tours to just over 170 radio stations. So, I mean, really an obsession. I started in 2008 and I don’t always make audio, but when we started doing the Radio Survivor podcast, I started recording some audio and occasionally use that on the show.\n[Sound effect of old tape player starting]\nWe’re gonna hear an excerpt from my tour of Radio K at University of Minnesota, KUOM. And this was recorded in October, 2015.\n[Sound effect of tape player stopping and starting]\n(3:40)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\t[fade in]…tour guide. He’s a junior named Paul Benson, and he had all the time in the world on a Friday afternoon to show me around the station. So, for me, that’s like my dream tour because I could stay at a radio station for hours on end and he didn’t have anywhere to go and he enjoyed exploring things at the station he’d never seen before with me. So it was an incredible tour, super fun. I saw every nook and cranny.\nI saw places that aren’t normally on tours when they tour people around. The station itself occupies pretty much a whole floor of this building on campus called the Rerig Center. And I was kind of blown away by how massive their space is. They’ve got lots of different studios. All the different spaces seem to be behind these closed doors, so you don’t really know what there is until you open the door. And then there’s something magical behind it. Either it’s a studio or a production room. They’ve got a large live studio where they have live bands play.\nIt’s pretty much like a professional recording studio. And it even had an area sectioned off to put drums, which I’ve never seen before at a radio station where, you know, they’re even thinking about putting drums in a separate space so you don’t have sounds spilling over. [Soft piano music fades in] Um, and that room also had a disco ball that was cool. And a piano too. [Piano music fades out] And then one of my favorites, they had all these hidden closets that were full of music. So.\n(5:20)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tSo what exactly is this room that we’re in?\n(5:23)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor \tThis is just –\nIt looks like just a dilapidated vinyl. Edgar Winter. I’m finding all of the vinyl of songs that we’re playing for our Halloween show and marching band.\n(5:37)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor \tSo do you come in here and, you know, poke around?\n(5:40)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor \tThis is one of the first times I’ve actually been in here just because I don’t, I can’t steal any of them or upload them to my computer. So I just like, I guess I just haven’t explored all the weird vinyl that we have.\n(5:55)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tAre you guys able to play 78’s? Do you have a 78 needle?\n(5:59)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor\tOh God. You know, I don’t, I don’t know.\n(6:03)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tBecause look, this is probably a 78, super fragile.\n(6:06)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor\tHow do we know? It’s just sound effects. Oh my God. This is airplanes, continuous airplanes.\n(6:15)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tThis is 13 army planes in formation.\n(6:19)\tArchival audio of Paul Benson from Radio Survivor \tThis is, we’re out of formation. It sounds different.\n(6:22)\tArchival audio of Jennifer Waits from Radio Survivor\tAnd then, in that same closet there were a bunch of 1970s, like very mainstream K Tel records. So these collections of mainstream hits from the seventies and a Jimmy Swaggart record and then like some really cool punk seven inches, like all in the same closet.\n[Sound effect of tape stopping]\n(6:40)\tKate Moffatt\tThank you so much. That was a very joyful thing to listen to, somehow. [Kate laughs] I feel like I was trying really hard not to laugh throughout it. That was, that was so great. Please. Yeah. What were we just listening to?\n(6:53)\tJennifer Waits\tIt is for me too. So, we’re touring Radio K at the University of Minnesota. And this student, Paul Benson, you know, like I mentioned at the beginning, I was in the station with him for about three hours on I think a Friday night, and you know, often I’m staying like longer than people want me [Kate and Jennifer laugh].\nBut he was so down, and I have such fond memories of this and I’m so glad I have this audio record of it because, yeah, every time… I was excited to play it again because it brings back that joyful feeling that I had and is also just, you know, it’s sort of an artistic representation of what these tours are like for me.\nLike the tours serve a lot of different purposes.  You know, I’m trying to document college radio culture. I feel like I’m preserving these stories and what stations are like at a particular point in time. And now this is essentially history, you know, ’cause this was 2015 and my mind is traveling to places. Like I wonder if —like, there were some really old—the records we were talking about, the sound effect records of planes in formation. There were a ton of ’em. And, and these were in these sort of, if I remember correctly, they were in green envelopes, you know, kind of like they were military. And, and so I, at the time I wondered where these came from and, you know, now I wonder if they’re still there. And Radio K has a very, or radio at University of Minnesota has a very long history going back to the twenties.\nSo, you know, they could have records that have just been in that library for a very long time. So I was pretty excited. I think it was the same tour where we also saw some vapor wave cassettes. So it was all over the map. And that was my tour guide playing the piano in that live room that we heard.\n(8:52)\tKate Moffatt\tOh wow. I thought it was cool that there was almost this parallel between the way that you guys were interacting with the boxes and the way that you described the shape of the radio station itself, where you were like, there’s all these doors sub in boxes. You’re like, every time you open it, you don’t know what’s gonna be in there, sub in boxes. Right? Like, you know, and then you open it and there’s something magical. Like it was cool that I, that there was like an echo there almost of the two.\n(9:19)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. And there were even cages in one part. It was for what sort of a storage room. So there were some of these metal cages that had things behind it and there was a Radio K costume, and he put it on. Yeah, and he put it on for me it was almost like it had matching gloves. It was sort of a stuffed [Jennifer laughs] like a, not a stuffy, but, yeah, I mean it’s a trip and in the room with the cages that there was some really historic material in that room too.\nI mean it’s, yeah, it’s like a fever dream actually this whole tour. And it’s in this sort of brutalist building and it’s unbelievable. I can’t believe how much space they have in the first place. And then the fact that they have all this interesting material there and that he was excited, you know, to go on this journey was, was pretty amazing.\n(10:17)\tKate Moffatt\tTo get to spend that much time in there and, and looking at it. I kind of have two questions here. And one is like, I’d love for you to tell us more about like if this audio kind of also, I don’t know, relates to or informs your research that you do kind of more generally. And also maybe in a connected sort of way, the role of listening in your research as well.\n(10:38)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. So I just started visiting stations again after, you know, the pandemic. So, you know, starting in fall 2022, I started visiting again, and I felt so rusty I’d kind of forgotten about all the things I’m trying to capture. And, and on this recording you can hear my camera snapping so-\n(10:58)\tKate Moffatt\tWhich I loved, by the way.\n(10:59)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah! So, it’s, you know, I take a ton of photos and then occasionally I’m recording audio. Sometimes I sit down and record a more formal interview. But sometimes like this time, you know, the microphone is kind of in the middle somewhere so you can hear me sort of in the distance at times because we’re not mic’d like we’re doing a, you know, professional recording. [Kate laughs]\nAnd so it’s a struggle for me because I’m trying to listen to and capture so much I’m trying to capture, you know, all the things I’m seeing visually. And then as you can tell from this, there was so much in the ambient, you know, environment of this place that was interesting. Like the spontaneous piano playing on the tour. And, I don’t think I captured this with audio, but at one point some other, I was at a college radio conference and there was an official tour of Radio K and at one point that official tour came into the record library where we were.\nAnd so it’s like we intersected for a moment. [Kate laughs] But I was on my own private, you know – magical tour. So, yeah, it’s a challenge actually for me to capture everything and, um, and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a better structure. So I think on these tours that I’ve been taking just in this past academic year, I’m trying to set aside like a space where, alright, why don’t we do an interview first where we’re seated and I’m not stressing about taking photos, and then, and then walk around a little bit.\n(12:37)\tKate Moffatt\tI’m so interested too. And you being like, kind of hyper aware of what you’re missing, even as you’re trying to capture it all. Like it’s, it’s really the impossibility of capturing everything, right? It’s kind of part of why the archives are still sitting there the way that they are. Right? That’s just the wealth of material.\n(12:55)\tJennifer Waits\tI’m missing so much. And then I’m, you know, I fear that when I get home and I’m sitting down to write my story that I haven’t taken the photo that I want to illustrate it, and I use a lot of photos, but, you know, sometimes I come back, I’m like, oh, I wish I’d taken this particular photo.\nOr more of this ’cause this one isn’t quite right. And I try to take photos of the people that I’m interviewing too. You know, ’cause a lot of, a lot of what college radio is about is the community and the people. And you know, I’ve started enjoying doing these portraits of people in the studio – like maybe grab your favorite record or a weird record or, you know, where do you wanna stand? And so I try to also compose some of these photos to capture the personalities.\n(13:47)\tKate Moffatt\tIt’s so, I feel like everything you’re saying is really making me think about the different ways, both literally and metaphorically that we listen to the archive.\nI think as like, a final question, but like, sort of like to kind of turn us in a bit of a, we’re obviously this is live, we’re at the conference and we just actually listened to the last, the last plenary panel of the symposium. I’d love to know what you’re listening to now. Either, you know, either in your research or just kind of like more generally, would love to hear, you know, what, what have you, what you’ve been listening to.\n(14:20)\tJennifer Waits\tOh, I mean, it’s interesting. My teenage my teenage child, you know, listens to music all the time and talks about how, you know, he doesn’t notice me listening to music, you know, and I think increasingly I’m listening to the world around me rather than musical sounds. Although I do college radio, so for me, like that’s the time when I’m actively doing my music listening is during my radio show every week. And it’s incredibly healing. [Jennifer laughs]\nYou know, I love that immersion. And so for me it’s that college radio space is when I’m immersing in those sounds. And, I’ve been doing college radio for a really long time and what I listen to changes from year to year and, you know, I’ve gotten increasingly into more experimental sounds. I guess, you know, also things like sound art and transmission arts. So, you know, there’ve been talks at the conference and also installations at the conference that touch on this, like the intersection between, you know, things that are intermedia that involve visual components as well as audio components. So, you know, things that are, maybe challenging and harder to understand that things like that are kind of capturing my ears  more so than maybe the familiar [Jennifer laughs] The familiar music that we hear.\n(15:54)\tKate Moffatt\tYeah, wonderful. Oh, that’s fantastic. I think this has been such a neat way to think about —I agree, I’ve been listening to this experimental stuff that we’ve been listening to this week has just been so interesting, especially in that I feel like I’m kind of physically, I keep describing it as bathing. I feel like I’m bathing in the sound and it’s because it feels very embodied somehow, which is just making me think back to that clip you played and how embodied that that sounded and the fact that I could, I could hear you moving through the space. I could hear him moving through the space. I could hear you opening boxes, taking pictures.\n(16:20)\tJennifer Waits\tYeah. I mean, it’s all about the space. And I think that’s what was challenging for a lot of people during the pandemic, you know, who work in college radio or community radio, that we weren’t in our spaces and a lot of us were, you know, trying to figure out how to do radio from home. And, I think this academic year, people are trying to get back to that sense of community and being back in our spaces and connecting on that level too, because that’s where a lot of the creativity happens is going through the stacks and, you know, finding the records that you don’t know about or –– or finding unexpected things, rather than, I mean, this is the thing about looking for music online. You kind of find what you’re looking for rather than being surprised a lot of the time.\n(17:09)\tKate Moffatt\tLike browsing the stacks in the library versus buying an ebook.\n(17:12)\tJennifer Waits\tExactly. Yeah.\nKate Moffatt\tI think that’s a beautiful place to stop if you’re, if you’re happy to, if you’re happy to stop there. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for joining us.\n[ShortCuts Theme music fades in]\nThis has been so much fun. That just, I’m still thinking about that camera click and the piano music that was played in there. It’s just, that was just fantastic. Thank you so much for bringing that along.\n(17:32)\tJennifer Waits\tOh, thank you. I’m glad that you enjoyed it.\n(17:38)\tKatherine McLeod\tYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. That was a ShortCuts Live conversation with Jennifer Waits recorded in May 2023 at the SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. Thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for making that interview happen. And thanks to our current supervising producer Maia Harris for the help in re-listening to that interview together. The SpokenWeb Podcast’s sound designer is James Healey and transcription is done by Zoe Mix. My name is Katherine McLeod and, as always, thanks for listening.\n[Theme music ends]\n \n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9995","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.3, ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux, 18 March 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-listening-to-wide-screen-radio-with-brian-fauteux/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ee46116d-d019-4f1d-abad-4f2d80ec7d83/audio/c0dedf34-0b8f-4f5f-bb09-eca79069ca45/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-shortcuts-5-3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:15:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"14,433,010 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-shortcuts-5-3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-listening-to-wide-screen-radio-with-brian-fauteux/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-03-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.\\n\\ndeWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. “Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians).” Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 – 278. [open access]\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549821063168,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts presents one of the ShortCuts Live! conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us?\n\n(00:03)\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:16)\tMiranda Eastwood (Recording)\tI’m like, maybe I should get sound effects from [overlap]\nThis is fun. Like maybe footsteps or something. Get whatever the name of this building is and like where we are located since we will be hearing the space and people will naturally –\n(00:17)\tKate Moffatt\tIs it the old arts building?\n(00:23)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah, that’s kind of the Arts and Convocation Hall. But because we have a fine arts building, a lot of people call this the old arts building.\n(00:27)\tKate Moffatt\tOkay. [laughs] I might let you say that, actually. [laughs]\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Voiceover] Welcome to Shortcuts. This month, we’re back with another shortcut live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short-cut of audio. Many of these conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.\n(01:08)\tKate Moffatt\t[Back to audio recorded on-site.] Uh, hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. We are live at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. My name is Kate Moffitt, and I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb Podcast. Stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. I’m sitting here with Brian Fauteux today.\n(01:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah. My name is Brian Fauteux. I’m an associate professor of Popular Music and Media Studies here at the University of Alberta, and I work in this building.\n(01:24)\tKate Moffatt\tAmazing. Yeah. That echo that the listeners, that you’re hearing right now. It is because we are sitting in the arts and convocation hall building –\n(01:49)\tBrian Fauteux\tIn the lobby, just outside Convocation Hall where we have a big old pipe organ, and we have music that takes place and sometimes I teach, back in the day, I used to teach, not that long ago, [Kate laughs], a couple years ago, I would teach big intro to popular music classes there before the upper balcony was deemed unsafe. So I’ve been moved elsewhere, and I think they want to renovate it and make it a little bit more “state of the art” in there. It’s very beautiful.\n(01:56)\tKate Moffatt\tInteresting. It is. It’s absolutely stunning. Okay, amazing. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. Do you wanna play that for us?\n(01:57)\tBrian Fauteux\tSure. Let’s play.\n(03:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Distorted Audio Of Paul Mccartney’s mid-nineties radio show called “Oobu Joobu” plays in the background.]\n(03:12)\tBrian Fauteux\t[Audio ends.] That’s probably enough.\n(03:23)\tKate Moffatt\tIncredible [Brian laughs]. Thank you so much. Yeah. Miranda is also here, and we’re both sitting here and our heads just started [laughs].\nPlease tell us what we just listened to.\n(04:25)\tBrian Fauteux\tThis is a radio program that Paul McCartney did in the mid-nineties called “Oobu Joobu.” That was kind of a weird sort of experimental radio program that, I think aired on an American network for about 15 shows. And it’s a collection of, as you heard, different songs, audio clips.\nI think he was sort of playing around on a guitar there as well as he introduced it. And I think in 97 parts of this, 1997, parts of this was packaged with his “Flaming Pie” CD release. I think it mainly circulates as sort of bootlegs now or as this recorded version that was kind of sold at Best Buy. It was like a compendium of some of the shows, but I don’t know if the full complete package has ever resurfaced. But what I find interesting about it is it sometimes airs on the Beatles channel on Sirius XM Radio, which is sort of subscriber-based radio.\n(05:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tAnd it’s something I’ve been researching for the last little while, and I’m writing a book on now, and I’ve kind of been drawn to these places where celebrity clash with kind of weirdness and experimentation, but in a very kind of gated commercial subscription setting.\nSo it’s like people kind of paying for access to a radio service that kind of digs around and finds these oddities and packages them on these channels that are all about bands like “The Beatles” or “Tom Petty” or “Bruce Springsteen.” I also like in this clip, and the reason I chose this one, it was probably hard to hear from the laptop into the recorder, but early on, it emphasizes that it’s widescreen radio. And I think that the development of satellite radio kind of piggybacks on satellite television.\n(05:18)\tKate Moffatt\tI was gonna ask, widescreen TVs [laughs].\n(05:25)\tBrian Fauteux\tExactly. So it’s this idea of, we aren’t just your, you know, grandpa’s old radio. This is sort of –\n(05:25)\tKate Moffatt\tOh wow [laughs].\n(05:51)\tBrian Fauteux\tYou know what I mean? It’s like; it’s trying to introduce radio as being new, even though it’s still embedded in longermhistories of institutions like commercial radio broadcasting has used satellites for long periods of time. So it gives it a sheen of newness. Some things are kind of new about it, but I think it’s an interesting way of thinking or complicating ideas around new media, particularly around the turn of the millennium.\n(06:30)\tKate Moffatt\tWell, I’m really fascinated by how, I would love to talk about the listening, like the actual sound, sound of what we just listened to, ’cause that was so delightful.\nThe first thing I thought was mid-nineties television that I grew up with. It was kind of like the sound that I got from that.\nBut I’m really, I have to ask, as like a book historian myself, about the materiality that you’re kind of engaging with as you’re following its trajectory and thinking about how people are engaging with it.\nI don’t know. Can you speak to that at all? Thinking about the ways in which it’s becoming available, or how, I guess literally, the material of the media is informing it.\nIsn’t there a famous quote about that? The media is the –\n(06:30)\tBrian Fauteux\tMessage.\n(06:33)\tKate Moffatt\tYeah. That’s the one [laughs].\n(07:53)\tBrian Fauteux\tI mean, to even talk about McLuhan a little bit too, I think, thinking through about finding these oddities or these sonic traces of satellite broadcasting from the earlier days and this isn’t being played earlier. The Beatles channel comes in, I think, around 2015, if I’m not mistaken, but it’s very limited when something airs. Some of it is archived, some of it is kept online for maybe four weeks.\nYou can access it on demand, but then it goes away, or it’s kept in this place, this company, this publicly traded, massive media conglomerate now SiriusXM is owned by Liberty Media, which has stakes in like Live Nation and Ticketmaster and all these things. So researching that is different from some of my work on campus radio history where you can track stuff down. It’s still kind of scattered, but people are willing to give it to you. And now they’re not.\nSo, McLuhan also writes a bit about acoustic space and cyberspace coming together and how it’s like all around and you sort of dig around and look for these things. So that’s kind of where I end up finding a lot of this stuff is through spending time on the internet and seeing who’s put something somewhere online that you can listen to.\n(08:26)\tKate Moffatt\tRight. I was gonna ask next about listening. The role of listening in both, I guess, how you were finding it and listening to it, but also how you see this kind of… not elite, that’s not the right word.\nExclusive, exclusivity that’s applied to something that was experimental and odd. Yeah, I don’t know. Something about the, yeah I guess just a bigger kind of broader question about the role of listening in the work that you’re doing and what that, how that interacts with what you, what you do and how you do it.\n(09:36)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s a good question because part of what I’m looking at is the reasons why media institutions develop in the ways they do. And you can read annual reports and a lot of it is going through tons of trade press stuff over the years and seeing who’s talking about these companies as they develop. But then you wanna find stuff to listen to as well. And it’s not all perfectly available.\nEven most research paths people take, that’s never the case. But part of it ends up being, like listening a lot of the time to different satellite stations, satellite radio stations, or channels.\nThere’s only one station now I guess, but they have a variety of channels. And then trying to find things like this and thinking about is this available elsewhere? And in the cases where it’s maybe the work of a major celebrity, like I’ve written a bit on Bob Dylan’s theme time radio hour, which is kind of like this, where it’s, you know, somebody using their time on the radio who has like the star power but wants to use that time to showcase all these old quote unquote forgotten songs or songs that haven’t really entered the canon, so to speak, but have been massively influential.\n(10:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s a big part of what that radio, that radio show is doing. When you have people like that, you do have hardcore fans, too, who have recorded all of this and put it online. So stuff like that you can find. And then when you find that, I just listen to as much of it as I can. So there were about a hundred and so a hundred plus episodes of theme time, radio hour, and for, you know, a month or so, I just listened to every single episode to see what is not only what is he playing but how is he talking about it? What’s he introducing, what’s it like, and how does his voice seem to connect with these subscription radio listeners? And, you know, really spending time with the stuff I can find.\n(10:35)\tKate Moffatt\tAnd do you almost get a sense of his listening?\nIn terms of thinking about what they’re finding and putting together, and there’s a curatorial aspect to it.\nDo you kind of start to get a sense you can start to become familiar with yourself?\nOh, I bet so and so, put this one together.\n(11:18)\tBrian Fauteux\tYou also, I mean, you kind of become like held captive slash hostage to this sort of weird way of doing radio. Like, especially with the Dylan voice, and I’m gonna play a bit of it on the Friday morning radio panel that we’re doing as part of the SpokenWeb Institute.\nBut you do get a sense of his own relationship to these songs. But then, through digging a little bit as well, you find that he’s crafted as the curator or the person who has all these shows. It turns out it was a major TV producer responsible for massive commercial television productions. Oh, wow. Over the years, that has the music collection that Dylan’s kind of borrowing from. So you have these other connections –\n(11:21)\tKate Moffatt\tThere’s layers of curations.\n(12:07)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah, there’s layers, totally.\nThat they’re working in. And he makes it sound like he’s, you know, he constructs this whole world where he is broadcasting out of this historical Abernathy building, but really he does a lot of it on tour and from his house and, you know, it creates this radio world, but it is kind of an entryway into a different side of these massive celebrities and their personalities that people will pay for.\nAnd these satellite radio companies kind of know that. So, you know, know, part of what I’m interested in is before we even get to your Spotifys and Apple musics, this radio company was kind of setting the stage for that idea of exclusivity or, you know, giving big name performers, big talent contracts to then entice subscribers to say, I’m gonna pay like $16 or $20 a month to have access to this stuff –\n(12:12)\tKate Moffatt\tWhich we’re now so familiar with. Like, it’s just so all the time that’s everything.\n(12:15)\tBrian Fauteux\tEverything’s a subscription.\n(12:33)\tKate Moffatt\tWow. Yeah. Wild. Okay. Well I think one last question which is, I’d love to know what you’re listening to now. Like you know, either in your research currently, like maybe something like this, but anything else that’s fun or even just more generally, like what are you listening to right now that really excites you?\n(13:10)\tBrian Fauteux\tSure. I am listening to a lot of music from around the early two thousands when Sirius XM came out for the purpose of this research, but also kind of unrelated but also sort of related to this.\nA colleague of mine and myself just started a campus radio show here. So every week we’re kind of listening a lot to a radio show based on a theme or a topic each week. So I’m kind of constantly thinking about what would be good to put on this week’s show. And a lot of that is Canadian. We have, you know, Canadian content regulations and these sorts of things. So that’s been a lot of fun and that, I know that’s not really answering anything specific, but –\n(13:11)\tKate Moffatt\tNo, I think that’s great actually [laughs].\n(13:41)\tBrian Fauteux\tAnd then, at the same time I’m among the jury for the Polaris Music Prize here in Canada. And the long list voting for that just opened. So I’m just listening to a ton of Canadian music right now that’s been recommended on Google Group listserv. Things that I haven’t listened to. A new album that I quite like a lot out of Edmonton is by a band called Home Front, and that’s been an album I’ve been playing a lot to give sort of one precise thing.\n(13:52)\tKate Moffatt\tI’m actually really curious, you were talking about the campus radio stuff that you’re doing. Do you feel like a little bit like you’re kind of doing the stuff that you research? Like are you Yeah, for sure. You’re taking that curatorial role almost –\n(14:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tA little bit like that, but also before this I wrote a book on campus radio and stepped back from, like when I was an undergrad, I did a little bit of, of campus radio production work, but then when I was researching it, I stepped back and wanted to have more of an arm’s length relationship to it. And I’ve been meeting since I’ve, I moved here and came here to get back into it.\nAnd I kind of just took, you know, another person to be here too and be like, let’s do it together. And that it makes it more social and more fun. And it has been a lot of fun.\n(14:26)\tKate Moffatt\tFantastic connection to the conversation we just had with Jennifer. Waits. Jennifer was talking about how important community is to campus radio, that it’s so inherent to kind of getting it going and keeping it going–\n(14:34)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah. We were both just on a panel in Washington DC a few days ago talking about campus college radio. Incredible. So we, we have a lot of overlaps in what we are interested in.\n(14:34)\tMusic\t[Music begins playing in the background].\n(14:40)\tKate Moffatt\tThat’s so fantastic. Okay. Was there anything else that you wanted to share? Should we call it there?\n(14:41)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat sounds good.\n(14:50)\tKate Moffatt\tOkay. Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the end of a very long day and a very long couple of days.\nBut this was just such a fun way for us to wrap this day up.\n(14:50)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s great. Thank you for having me.\n(14:52)\tKate Moffatt\tAmazing. Thanks.\n(14:52)\tMusic\t[Music ends]."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9996","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.4, Re-Listening to Improvisation in the Archives, 24 April 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-listening-to-improvisation-in-the-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3507e689-cef7-4ff3-9c42-9593e0987fdd/audio/cf7c9da1-1404-41d3-9a60-11b4f653287d/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"master-v1-shortcuts-april-23.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"6,753,010 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"master-v1-shortcuts-april-23\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-listening-to-improvisation-in-the-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-04-24\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549822111744,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["As April is the month of poetry, we’ve taken a pause in this year’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to one of the first episodes of ShortCuts, “ShortCuts 1.2 / Audio of the Month: Improvising at a Poetry Reading.”\n\nIn the archival clip played in this episode, we hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder. She asks the host Richard Sommer if he would like to improvise with her for the poem, “Shore Animals.”\n\nListening now, we can ask: what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? It is a truly memorable moment of listening and worth returning to now in this fifth season of ShortCuts.\n\n00:00\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts.\n00:04\tTheme music\t[Electronic music plays]\n00:07\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month, it is April, the month of poetry, and I thought that we’d take a pause in this season’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to an early episode of ShortCuts – to hear an early version of ShortCuts: thinking about what means to be an archival listener.\n00:28\tKatherine McLeod\tBy the way, this episode is such an early episode of ShortCuts that I hadn’t even come up with the name “ShortCuts” yet.\nYou’ll hear me refer to it at one point as “Audio of the Month,” that was what I was calling it in that first season.\n00:43\tTheme music\t[Theme music continues]\n00:45\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat was the archival clip of this episode? Well, you’ll hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder to ask–\n00:55\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tDo you want to try improvising?–\n00:58\tKatherine McLeod\tAfter reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gad invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute.\n01:05\tRecording\tI gotta find it first –\n01:09\tKatherine McLeod\tListening now, we can ask, what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? Improvisation is so rooted in the experience of being there. So, what does it feel like to hear improvisation again? To hear it in the archives and even in this replaying?\n01:31\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, considering these questions, we can also listen to the extent to which we can hear the audience’s excitement for this spontaneous moment amid the reading and Gadd’s invitation for the flute to listen.\n01:45\tSound Effect\t[Sound of pressing play on a tape player]\n01:50\tKatherine McLeod\tLet’s listen now together to Shortcuts 1.2,\nAudio of the Month: “Improvising at a poetry reading.”\n02:05\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tYeah. It’s just going to be some sounds [inaudible].\n02:10\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tIn this “Audio of the Month,” we’re travelling back to February 1972, when poets Maxine Gad and Andreas Schroeder read in Montreal. They read at Sir George Williams University, or what is now Concordia.\nThey read on February 18th in the Hall Building in room H651. The reading started at 9 pm.\nYes, readings started late and went on for a long time. After reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gad invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute. He improvised along with her, reading the poem Shore Animals. Before starting to improvise, we can hear a negotiation between Gad and Sommer about what to read and how to perform together. A process that is its own audible improvisation.\n03:02\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOh, here it is.\nNow, how it goes, you have to keep quiet until…\n[Random Flute Notes]\nSee now,  [laughs] he’s never done this one before.\n03:15\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tWhat, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n03:18\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay, this is called “Shore Animals.”\nIt’s a speech piece with a flute, and the flute has to listen. And it can speak, too.\n03:30\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tThe audio clip that you’ll hear includes the first two minutes of a six-minute improvisation. Their improvisation is a singular moment when an audience member, in this case Richard Sommer, formally performs in the Sir George Williams poetry series. At the same time, this recording reminds listeners that the audience is always present, ready to improvise, interject, and even interrupt. And that the audience is also what we are listening to as archival listeners.\n04:03\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tThe flute, I think it’s over there.\nFor fun.\nThe same message?\nI’m asking; Richard’s going to make some noise with my flute.\n04:19\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tI’ll make some noise if you give me a microphone.\n04:21\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay. Which one you want? Let’s share it. Is–\n04:25\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tIt doesn’t make any difference.\n04:26\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tIt goes with the poem [inaudible].\n04:28\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tHow’d you do that?\n04:29\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tWhat?\n04:31\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tThis, this knot.\n04:32\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tI’ve tied myself in there.\n04:32\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tHere we go.\n04:33\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tI don’t know where I can find it—[Long pause] pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is.\nNow, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… [Laugh] He’s never done this one before.\n05:04\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tWhat, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n05:06\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay, this is called “Shore Animals,” and it says, “speech feas—piece with flute,” and the flute has to listen.\nAnd it can pl–, it can speak, too. You have to listen to it. Yeah, you never heard it before.\n05:21\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tI think it’s learning how to speak.\n05:26\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tIt’s called “Shore Animals,” a speech piece with a flute.\n[Maxine begins to recite, Richard plays the flute]\n“So hearing where the poppy stopped me,\nsmall chance to star spiel, all you have told me,\ngone, false and beautiful gods and groves.\nPeople truth. Put it into song when the traffic is gone, gone, gone.\nI’ll fling it in the air—my debt to your tongue, Saturn.\nIn your minds, I’ve split a spleen, lust my lust.\nCome along, fawn. Oh! So, I have to whistle to you.”\n[Audience laughs] [Whistling]\n06:23\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tThat was Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with Richard Sommer improvising the flute at a reading that took place in Montreal on February 18, 1972.\n06:34\tTheme music\t[Theme music fades in]\n06:38\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the audio of the month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name is Katherine McLeod. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n07:00\tTheme music\t[Theme music ends]\n \n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9997","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.5, ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang, 20 May 2024"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-hybrid-poetics/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7870778a-a9bf-49d8-a85e-431dd4a12705/audio/b6cd0426-b37e-451f-8416-8453d559a884/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-may-17-mix-v1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"24,935,487 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-may-17-mix-v1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-hybrid-poetics/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-05-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nHuang, Xiaoxuan.  “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”\\n\\nSinister Flower, the radio show curated by Lucía Meliá and what Xiaoxuan talks about listening to recently.\\n\\n*\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nRead “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang,\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549822111745,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.\n\nIn this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”  The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound.\n\n\n00:00\tKate Moffatt:\tKatherine will write a little host, or she has a little host intro that goes in. I don’t know if she writes new ones for each one. Sometimes, she does, but we can also introduce it a little.\n00:08\tMiranda Eastwood:\tShe does. No, she will do it, especially for the live Shortcuts. She does. It’s just to be like, “That’s what’s going on,” because they’re special.\nRight.\n00:13\tKate Moffatt:\tThe live ones are the best ones.\n00:14\tMiranda Eastwood:\tThey’re very good.\n00:16\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tLive things tend to be–\n00:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Kate and Miranda laugh] Yeah. Yeah. They’re very good. And is it recording right now already?\n00:21\tMiranda Eastwood:\tIt is recording right now.\n00:22\tKate Moffatt:\tI love this little behind-the-scenes, where it’s like [Laughter] “What the heck are we doing?”\nThat’s so perfect. Did we decide how we wanted to start the episode?\n00:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tCould I have a […] I mean, I’m just gonna drink some water. [Laughter]\n00:31\tKate Moffatt:\tPlease go for it. Yeah. Yeah.\n00:34\tMiranda Eastwood:\tNope, we can do whatever we want. We can just go for it. Whatever feels right. Okay. [Laughter]\n00:39\tKate Moffatt:\tUm, I will wait until you’re done with your water bottle.\n00:41\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYou can say, “This is Shortcuts with Kate Moffatt.”\n00:44\tKate Moffatt:\t“Welcome to Shortcuts Live.”\nDo I need to introduce myself? No.\n00:46\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYou should. It would–\n00:47\tKate Moffatt:\tDoes Katherine introduce herself?\n00:49\tMiranda Eastwood:\tWell, no, but she’s the producer. We–\n00:51\tKate Moffatt:\tShe’s always the person who does it. Oh my gosh. Okay.\n00:54\tMiranda Eastwood:\tBut she does say, “I’m Katherine.”\nShe does say, “I am Katherine McLeod.” I think. Now my brain’s just zoning it out ’cause I’m like, “Oh, I know, I know. It’s Katherine McLeod” [Laughs]\n01:03\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI think it’s always nice as a listener, [overlap: “to know who you’re listening to.”] even if you’re a long-time listener.\n01:07\tKate Moffatt:\tWorst case, we can cut it out.\n01:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t[SpokenWeb Shortcuts Theme Song Starts Playing]\nWelcome to Shortcuts. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m the producer for this Shortcut series on the podcast. Yes, they were right, I am introducing myself and telling you about what you’re going to hear.\nThis month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a shortcut of audio. These Shortcuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. For this conversation, we’re sitting down with Xiaoxuan Wong to talk about sound, language, video, poetry, voice, making room for the indeterminate, and more, like playlist recommendations – listen to the end for that.\n02:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe conversation is led by Kate Moffatt, and you’ll occasionally hear Miranda Eastwood recording in the background and adding a few comments, including an enthusiastic applause that I have left in at the end. I love that applause because it really emphasizes that this was recorded live. Let’s jump back into that onsite conversation and let the conversation speak for itself.\n[Music fades]\n02:30\tKate Moffatt:\tHello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. My name is Kate Moffatt. I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and I’m hopping in for Katherine McLeod on this particular episode of Shortcuts. We are so excited to sit down with Xiaoxuan Wong today, and actually, yeah. Xiaoxuan, would you mind introducing yourself?\n02:55\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tOf course. I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Kate, for sitting down with me. Yeah. My name is Xiaoxuan Wong. I also go by just Xiao and sometimes publish under Sherry as well, Sherry Huang. But yeah, I am a poet, first and foremost. But I feel most at home, kind of playing around with different mediums and voicings and spaces. So, I kind of describe myself as working in “hybrid poetics.”\nThe piece that we’re gonna be maybe talking about and hearing a little bit from will sort of be a good example of how my practice converges a few different\nmediums.\n03:48\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. And I think we are, we’re gonna just start by\nlistening to this. Is that right? Okay. Let me pull it up. And here we go.\n03:58\tXiaoxuan Wong, Audio of Xiaoxuan Reading “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them” \t[Audio From A Video Poem Played. Ambient Music Plays And A Voice Reads The Words As A Poem.]\nI don’t know the names of trees, but I can tell what time it is from the way their shadows lean. It might feel sometimes like we are here just to run out of time. I want you to know, it hurts me, too. One day, we will drive through the mountains. The weather will be unusually hot. Actually, it will be your birthday again. You will pull over on the side of the road and say, “come here. I wanna show you something.” And it will be the tops of trees. I go to a lot of parties, hoping I’ll see you there. Often, what I remember the next day is all the people outside smoking. The air flares up in turns, like a circle of lightning bugs. Someone offers me a drag, I refuse, or no one does. And I ask for one, forgetting I was supposed to be leaving just like in previous years. This summer, too, is likely to leave us with its heat mixed into us. The trees are thinking of what I’m thinking of – your face next to mine in the absenting light due to atmosphere. Due to all the time we don’t have.\n06:07\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Xiao, can you please–\n06:11\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you–\n06:12\tKate Moffatt:\tTell me what we were just listening to.\n06:15\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. So, we’re recording this at the SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at U of A. And this piece was sort of, you know, made with existing […] the text was pre-existing, and the ambient guitar that you hear was improvised.\nBut this iteration of this project was made in response to the call of this year’s symposium “Reverb Echo.” So yeah, this piece is like around six minutes. It’s an audio-visual piece as well as a poetry collage of, I guess, fragments that I took from a longer project, which was my master’s thesis called “All the Time.”\nBut, this iteration of this project, the six-minute audio-visual poetry collage, is called “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them,” which itself is a fragment from “All the Time.” So, I think what I said before about multiple mediums and practices kind of informing me, my mode of practicing “hybrid poetics,” this is one version of how it sometimes shows up. Generally, I think about sound and musical sound and ambient sound or ambient musical sound, I guess, as a part of the voicings of my poem. But, it’s not necessarily the most authoritative one. I love my poems dearly when they’re just on the page as well. And also just, you know, read.\nAnd so there’s these multiple registers of voicings that I’m really interested in playing with. And kind of sensing through how certain ways of displaying the poem could, on some levels, create a different type of room that we can all enter together and that feels different from the room that is made through just a stanza, which itself also means room.\n08:55\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. [Laughter] It’s been one of those concepts that have long haunted me, and I’m sure long haunted many other thinkers and poets, as well. But, it feels really appropriate to me ’cause I think that’s part of what I wanna do with language, is to create an atmosphere as well as tell a story. I know that my relationship to language and poetic language has always been something I am gonna continue to grapple with. But I think I was having a conversation, earlier where I said that these remediations of poetry and poetic text through music and performance and video and image components as well. I’ve done some screen printing, as well, of my poetry.\n10:00\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so cool. [Laughs]\n10:02\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd, yeah, these are all kind of ways to push back against languages, urge to close in on itself and signify too quickly, or kind of seal itself off from the indeterminate.\n10:22\tKate Moffatt:\tTo be contained–\n10:23\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah, yeah.\n10:24\tKate Moffatt:\tWhich has some interesting kind of echoes of the idea of like the room that you were talking about, an atmosphere for, to resist that containment that a word has kind of inherently.\n10:34\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tPrecisely. And I think I wanna give the room – and also language itself like room – to come and go and alter. And I think that’s the kind of, when language is employed like that, it gets me really excited. And it sort of lives in my body differently. It lingers. It has longer staying power when there’s a kernel of indeterminacy to it. Because I find that it sort of becomes more rich with wider application–\n11:20\tKate Moffatt:\tThe possibility that comes with almost like the embodiment of it.\n11:24\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAbsolutely. Yeah. And, so in this video piece what I guess our listeners can’t see is there are sort of bad subtitles on screen. So\nthe visual is just actually like an iPhone footage. One long shot of, I think a blood moon from last year that I took.\nAnd, the image of the moon has kind of accompanied my short, relatively short career as an artist. I’m only 30, so yeah. And, I’m sure it’ll stay with me. But, on top of the video are these like yellow kind of traditional, like yellow font?\n12:21\tKate Moffatt:\tI noticed that sometimes, there’s like the square brackets where there’s words missing or bits and pieces, and not everything is subtitled. Right?\n12:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. And that was kind of a decision that I made on a fly. And I think that aesthetically evoking this, the way I play with space on the page too, when it’s a textual, like a purely textual piece I use a lot, I consider a lot about the space on the page. I don’t really use traditional punctuation. I forgo conventional capitalization and punctuation for spacing. And I think spacing itself is like one of the main ways that I write with.\n13:09\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. Our listeners aren’t gonna know this, and maybe you don’t either, but I absolutely had goosebumps while I was reading the sort of yet partial subtitles unfinished in a way. But, yeah, that very intentional kind of creating of space in the subtitles itself was, yeah. Anyways, I got goosebumps. So that’s kind of fun. [Laughs]\n13:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat’s beautiful. Thank you for telling me that. Thanks, Kate.\n13:34\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, of course. It was, it was stunning. I can’t wait to watch the whole thing. Actually. I feel like, I wish we could just have played the whole thing. It was so lovely. Those first couple of minutes.\n13:45\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you. Yeah. The square brackets felt important to me over parenthetical, like curve brackets. There’s something about the square brackets aesthetically that I feel have less associations with an “aside” or, you know, a kind of “lower register of signification.” I didn’t necessarily want those connotations of like this is an “aside” or what is being redacted, totally being redacted is less important. Or rather, that what is unsaid is less important. I think that with the square brackets, my hope is to kind of invite in room for kind of, again, the indeterminate what is unsaid, what can’t be said, and what even sometimes the square brackets are on screen when the, the voice in the audio is actually completing the line.\nSo also, you know, putting those two intentions, like the visual of the square brackets, the text being withheld on screen while the voice is kind of speaking in utterance.\n15:10\tKate Moffatt:\tWhy is it something that can be voiced but not written down?\n[Overlapping: Right. Right.] What makes you kind of question the gap that’s maybe occurring?\n15:18\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat’s such an interesting reading of that. Yeah. I love that. And, I think one of the best parts of my conference experience, especially with SpokenWeb, is the conversations that I get to have with everyone else who loves thinking about sound and exalting the unspoken and silence and the fullness and the capability of silence, potentiality of silence.\n15:47\tKate Moffatt:\tI’d love to, if you don’t mind, just hop back quickly to[…]you were saying that you do get this kind of like multiple registers of voicing in the poem and thinking about different ways of engaging with like the room or the containment. And I’m just[…]you bringing up the conference and kind of what we’ve been discussing over the past couple of days. We’ve often brought up, you know, these ideas of echoes, particularly the ways that echoes are created or the way that reverberations sound in rooms, spaces, or architecture. And I just wanted to ask if to bring this around a little bit to listening and the role that maybe thinking about those spaces and how sound is created in those spaces, or how you think about creating sound in things like a room. If there’s a particular role that listening plays, if there are multiple registers of listening because you’ve got multiple registers of voicing, and how the space that this is happening in, or the space that you’re creating for it, how that impacts that.\nI don’t know. That’s a big, long, twisty question. Feel free to take anything from there that feels like it speaks to you.\n16:53\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI love it when questions twist, ’cause then that allows my answers to twist.\n16:57\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Give us a twisty answer.\n16:59\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tSo one part of this video that we didn’t get to hear later, the voice says, “some ways of listening, turn the whole body into an ear”–\n17:15\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, wow.\n17:16\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd I –\n17:18\tKate Moffatt:\tI got more goosebumps. [Laughter]\n17:21\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI mean, think in a way that[…]talk about a twisting, right? Like the body itself in turning becomes an apostrophe. Like, apostrophe is, means, to turn. And, I –\n17:40\tKate Moffatt:\tStunning. That’s so stunning. Sorry, I need a second. [Laughter]\nThat’s so lovely.\n17:45\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. I love that question because I think that[…]and I love that we’re recording this in a sound booth, which in a way is attempting to like erase the space or the contours. [Overlap: Oh, yeah.]\nI think with that line, the way I’m feeling it now in conversation with your question is like, I’m thinking about turning’s relationship to listening and like what it does to turn a body to face a certain way. And so, now I’m thinking about orientation, what we choose to focus on. And we all know that listening is as much about attention and focus as it is about volume. So, I think that ultimately, listening is an orientation that we get to choose. I mean, to a certain extent.\n18:46\tKate Moffatt:\tRight? No, but I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. That there is, that we should not feel like it’s something passive that’s only happening passively. There is so much intentionality, and that intentionality can shape that entirely.\n18:57\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Yes. Yeah. [Laughter]. Yes. Yes. That’s it. [Laughter].\n19:02\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, that’s such a wonderful answer. And I feel like even as you were saying that about us being in the booth too that we have kind of prioritized, we are choosing to forgo the space, the larger space that we’re in. For the sake of like a clear voicing. In technical terms, like a clear particular voicing of our conversation.\n19:28\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tUhhuh [Affirmative]\n19:28\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd like, yeah.\n19:30\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Um, like I love analog technology because of its grit. And it’s like the grain, like Barthes talks about, like the grain of the voice. And I just, um, yeah. Like incredible.\nMy friends make fun of me. This is off-topic now, but my friends – I love it – make fun of me for all my playlists. Like, my music taste is like boys who can’t sing and sad indie girls. And, um, [Laughs]–\n20:02\tKate Moffatt:\tI love it. I love it. You’re really selling your playlist, actually. I love it.\n20:07\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd I like, I don’t know, there’s something about hearing flaws\nand, um, hearing texture when things aren’t super smoothed out and polished, that is so compelling to me. And so, when I take that as like a, um, I think that’s informed by like my, the way I grew up in small-town Ontario, music scenes and, um, Kingston, Ontario – shout out to Kingston [Laughs] – um, such a rich music scene for its like per capita in terms of its–\n20:47\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that–\n20:48\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tIt’s population. I think there are so many wonderful things, like collectives working together to bring and sustain God. We know, we all know how hard it is to sustain a scene; takes all of us. And yeah, like I think my embracing of the grittiness and not erasing certain contours or not blurring, I guess like cleaning up things too much is informed by experimentation and just doing it. Not being interested in being, I don’t know, an apprentice in [Laughs] for too long before actually picking up a guitar or picking up some drumsticks.\n21:41\tKate Moffatt:\tBut that imperfection is actually part of the, it’s part of the magic that’s happening in the first place.\n21:46\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. And it allows for you to put on a show then…Like, I don’t know why I love that–\n21:53\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s more important than making it perfect first, right?\n21:56\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Yeah.\n21:57\tKate Moffatt:\tOr making it perfect at all. Amazing.\nOkay. Well, I’d like to finish with one last quick question, which is: What are you listening to lately? Like in your research or at the conference–\n22:08\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tOh, gosh.\n22:09\tKate Moffatt:\tOr even just generally. This is kind of hopping off of that lovely little playlist tangent you sent us on. But we can end with this one, but yeah. What are you listening to?\n22:19\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI, okay, so I am listening to…I love radio. I love the intimacy of radio, especially community radio, campus radio, you know, hearing myself being addressed. One-on-one. So it feels like, to me I’ve had, I’ve written about it. I’ve kind of, that’s a relationship to another’s voice that feels really special.\n22:57\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n23:00\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThanks. So, I guess like radio shows, I don’t know. I workout to like\nNTS’s “Infinite” mixtape, [Laughs] that they have on there, and make some cool discoveries there. And yeah, I think I’ve, the internet has introduced me to a lot of connections too, like Lucía Meliáwho is based out of Mexico City. She is, yeah, she is a radio…she has a radio show called “Sinister Flowers.” That great name, right?\n23:42\tKate Moffatt:\tGreat name. [Laughs]\n23:43\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat is a, I think the most ideal. It’s everything I want in a radio show. It has critical theory. It has music and like field recordings. Poetry works its way in there. And Lucía’s taste is just like, right on. So I, yeah. And right now I’m listening to “Sinister Flowers.”\n24:13\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m gonna have to write that down. Well, I think we’ll stop there. Thank you so much. It was so lovely. It was so, words are not capturing this properly. It wasn’t lovely. It was so much more than lovely, but it was lovely. So thank you so much, so much for joining us and\n24:27\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tSee you at the conference.\n24:28\tKate Moffatt:\tSee you at the rest of the conference, yeah.\n24:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThere’s a cabaret tonight.\n24:31\tKate Moffatt:\tThere’s a cabaret. We’re gonna go listen together at the cabaret.\n24:35\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you so much, Kate.\n24:36\tKate Moffatt:\tThank you.\n24:36\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay! [Miranda cheers]\n24:39\tMusic:\t[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\n24:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to Shortcuts.\n24:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tThanks to Xiaoxuan Wong for talking with us in this episode. And a big thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for conducting and recording the conversation.\nShortcuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber, Yara Ajeeb, and co-host Hannah McGregor, and myself, Katherine McLeod. Like all of these Shortcuts live\nconversations from last year’s symposium, there really is a sense of being there. And, I thought that this conversation in particular was such a great way of thinking back to the feeling of being there last year and looking ahead to this year’s symposium. In fact, we’ll be rolling out the last of these Shortcuts Live conversations as a full episode in the very same week as this year’s SpokenWeb symposium takes place. Stay tuned for that in the first week of June, right here on the podcast feed. And, for now, thanks for listening."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9998","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.6, Open Door Listening, with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press, 29 July 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/open-door-listening-with-brandon-labelle-at-errant-bodies-press/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/291d921e-f868-4021-87cf-786ea58df875/audio/50ec4344-8b6b-4319-8f76-062ea1d7b47c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"audio-sample-shortcuts-errant-bodies-press.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:21:34\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"20,770,108 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts - Errant Bodies Press\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/open-door-listening-with-brandon-labelle-at-errant-bodies-press/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-07-29\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"REFERENCES\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey, Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod. “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice.” Podcast Studies: Theory into Practice, eds. Dario Linares and Lori Beckstead, Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming in December 2024.\\n\\nLaBelle, Brandon. “Poetics of Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 273-277. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903562.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Archival Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-331. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903565.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549825257472,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["ShortCuts as a series on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed is coming to an end.\n\nFor the past five seasons, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been bringing you deep dives into the archives. Through this process, ShortCuts has asked the question of what it means to listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ of audio. ShortCuts has become a sonic space to practice feminist listening and that listening has informed and continues to inform audio-based research, performances (including performances based on ShortCuts audio), and print publications (such as “Archival Listening” and “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice”).\n\nFor this final ShortCuts, we listen to a conversation with Brandon LaBelle recorded on-site at Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. Listen to hear a reading from LaBelle’s “Poetics of Listening” (as published in ESC “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies”), to hear about Errant Bodies Press and what it sounds like to be there, and to hear the open door as a way of listening. That open door listening will continue even after ShortCuts ends.\n\nStay tuned for what is next!\n\n[Sound of walking down stairs and door opening] (00:00)\n\nKatherine McLeod (00:22):\n\nWelcome to Shortcuts. \n\n[Door closes and theme music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThis ShortCuts is recorded in Berlin. It is a conversation with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press. The episode explores the sound of Errant Bodies Press as a space of listening. It just so happened that where I was staying in Berlin was within walking distance. We laughed about that when I arrived.\n\nMy conversation with Brandon LaBelle took place after his piece “Poetics of Listening” was published in the special issue of English studies in Canada that I edited with Jason Camlot. The special issue is called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” And when I sat down with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Body’s Press, there was the journal issue on the table. It had made it to Berlin and it was ready to make itself heard in this space of listening.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (01:56):\n\nWould you like some tea, or water?\n\n \n[Music]\n\n \nKatherine McLeod:\nThis is such a, a beautiful space. I was –\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (02:10):\n\nYeah. Yeah. No, we really enjoyed it. I’ve had it for a couple years now, and yeah. I’ve been kind of working here as a studio and, and then like having a home for the press. Yeah. And lately it’s become more, I’ve started to invite some friends to join me, so now we’re kind of creating a little bit of a collective more like a kind of a study group. \n\n \nKatherine McLeod\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative> \n\n \nBrandon Labelle:\n\nWe’re all like focusing around listening and planetary. So yeah. We’re having kind of study sessions and making workshops and small events, so the space really is conducive to that. \n\n \nKatherine McLeod (02:53):\n\n‘Cause I was so interested in how the space is both a press and also a space of practice and developing methods and collaboration together. And so this combination of space adds again, the, both like the physical presence of books, but also a space of real performance and enactment that that clearly takes place in it too. So that’s, it’s a really fascinating combination. Even just as I look around, I see the books are so present, and yet it feels like at these tables, action takes place and listening takes place. So it feels like the kind of space that invites both.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:34):\n\nYeah.\n\n \nKatherine McLeod (03:35):\n\nYeah. And the Listening Biennal, does that take place here? Or is that,\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:40):\n\nYes\n\n \nKatherine McLeod\n\nI mean, I see the poster.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:42):\n\nYeah. Yeah. This is actually our new poster. Oh, that was from last\n\n \nKatherine: \n\nYear. Oh, thank you. \n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:47):\n\nTwo years ago. Yeah. And yeah, so what we’re planning now is to actually Yeah. Install the biennial here. Okay. To make a listening lounge. So we’ll kind of get rid of the tables and just have some carpets and pillows and oh, nice. Yeah. And sort of have, be open on the weekend and, and sort of diffuse the audio works and yeah. Create a kind of cozy environment for people to be here and listen together. So that’s kind of the plan. Next week we have the Listening Academy, which is focusing on the somatic. And then we’ll have a performance on Saturday with Sixth Dancers that we’ve been developing called The Open Body.\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nOkay.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (04:32):\n\nWhich really takes listening as the basis for movement Right. And developing different strategies around that. So yeah. We’re, yeah, I’ve been rehearsing that the last month. \n\n \nKatherine: \n\nHave you been part of that as well? \n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (04:45):\n\nI’m sort of conceptualizing the project. \n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nAmazing. \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (04:48):\n\nAnd then yeah. Working with different performers. Yeah. But it’s coming along, and should be interesting to stage it. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nWhere will that take place?\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (04:58):\n\nIt’s at a performance venue just in the neighborhood here. It’s an old ballroom Oh, wow. With former East Berlin, and yeah. It’s been running as a venue for probably 20 years now, so it’s a wonderful space. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nYeah. Yeah. I was reading a bit about the old ballrooms that are, maybe it’s even that same one that is in this neighborhood that oh, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And then the space can kind of become part of the Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> the performance.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle:\n\nYeah. It’s a wonderful environment. They have a, it’s sort of set in a park, which is partly a cemetery.\n\nThey have these large, very large windows in the space that we’re gonna uncover and just look out into the, into the trees, use the sunlight and the, the evening twilight as the, the lighting. Oh, beautiful.\n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nBeautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s, oh – \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (05:46):\n\nThat’s nice. She should be lovely.\n\n \n\nKatherine (05:48):\n\nYeah. Sounds beautiful. Yeah. And then thinking of what I, what I do in shortcuts is almost like a, like, I call it like a deep dive into archival sound and where we can, you know, really listen to one clip or one sound. So I was thinking about this space itself that we’re in and thinking of almost like if this is a shortcuts episode, almost like a deep dive into the sound of err bodies press <laugh>, and a close listening to it. So I thought maybe if I ask you a sort of a more formal question of what are we listening to now?\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (06:25):\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative>  Well, let’s, let’s take a moment. Yeah. I mean, I guess for myself, what has always been really essential that I’ve tried to kind of find ways of developing is maybe what we could think of as the open door. \n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nMm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. \n\n \n\nBrandon:\n\nSo, and maybe Berlin particularly sort of offers this opportunity for artists or for, as my friend always says idealists, to sort of really manifest the imagination. To find space for really playing out. Sort of ideas and imaginaries and creative explorations. And so I think being in Berlin for me has, you know, I really embraced that and really sort of feel like I thrive in that kind of cultural environment. And so having a space like this and locating oneself and, and in, in such a manner, which is like about a certain kind of privacy. But at the same time, having this relationship to the street. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative> \n\n \n\nBrandon: \n\n– and having an address where others can enter. And so I think this open door, and this kind of threshold, public and private, is really also something I try to integrate or learn from through my practice. So maybe we are hearing that open door. \n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nYeah. I’m very aware of both the sounds of our voices in the space. Like if I slightly move my foot, feeling like the texture of the floor and the sounds like going up to the high ceilings, but also, but I’m so aware in this sort of beautiful kind of echo of the space, the sounds from of outside coming in, that sound of the bird or the cars passing and voices. And so yeah, I think that the, the door is where we are listening to the door <laugh>, and and it’s doing something very powerful right there, a car is passing. And there’s also something too about even seeing, looking around and seeing the, the books now seeing CDs as well the books from the press behind you, it feels like we’re, we’re kind of listening to that too as well in simply sort of by their presence here.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (09:02):\n\nYeah, that’s true. I know that often people enter and also really enjoy that material – being sort of enveloped in that kind of material of books and, and documents and media. That becomes very immediately enticing, and evocative. And so I kind of also appreciate that as a, yeah. As also a creative expression in itself. So for instance, these binders over here are a set of, they came out of a, a project I developed called The Other Citizen, and they were part of like, almost like an archival installation I made at Transmediale a few years ago. And they’re really designed, they’re like, each one is referencing a certain discursive framework. But they try to kind of be quite creative with how you sort of house or categorize knowledge. So they’re intentionally quite enticing as well, you know, in terms of what they suggest. And they’re kind of topics that come out of my own readings and my own activities, but also picking up from what is present around us in, in sort of current, current discussions or issues. So they’re, they’re inherently stray from a particular disciplinary structure and try to be more transversal and playful. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\n<Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:41):\n\nSo I think this also is part of what is present in the room. Mm-Hmm.\n\nSpeaker 4 (10:46):\n\n<Affirmative>. Yeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:47):\n\nThis relationship to knowledge and discourse is also sort of enlivening\n\nKatherine: \n\nYeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:54):\n\nSuggestive. Imaginative.\n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nYeah, that just made me think when you said that of sort of dis – in thinking of disciplinary listening you know… it is a space that it’s hard to say, oh, this, you couldn’t say, you could look say on one shelf and be like, oh, okay, I see the discipline. Maybe, you know, sound studies. I’ve seen some titles there. But then as soon as you move to the next shelf, there’s another sort of disciplinary approach that’s very present. But also thinking again, of what this space is, where we are, where we are at the table what kind of disciplinary listening takes place here, which would feel quite different than on the shelf. \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (11:38):\n\nYeah. This is the top shelf. Is the CDs.\n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nYeah, yeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (11:44):\n\nA sort of particular format we came up with. Yeah. Which, which sort of takes the shape of the book more. Oh, may. Okay. Yeah. And they always kind of have this Yeah. Like an elaborated booklet inside. \n\nSo it was very much about keeping the idea of, of sound and sonic practice close to kind of discursive reflection. Right. Or textual Right. Matter as well. So that one would kind of read and listen or listen and read. So these things, bringing them close together, it’s quite important in that series. ’cause Sometimes, yeah. I mean, I guess there’s, there’s some, on some level there’s a kind of often a sort of idea that, you know, you have like a kind of community of practitioners often coming from an experimental music sort of arena that, you know, doesn’t necessarily relate itself to more academic informed investigations. And I always, I try to make this sort disregard this separation Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And so practice in theory being very integrated feels really, you know, part of the room.\n\n \n\nSpeaker 4 (12:55):\n\nRight. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Yeah. Do you see that as, say the, the word, the words like research creation that get sort of talked about a lot these days? Is that something that you, you, do you think of research creation as a framework that you work in? Or is that, is it sort of maybe something that you do but don’t think of it in that way…\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (13:19):\n\nNo, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, the other day we were having a meeting sort of study session, and everyone around the table really, we kind of realized at a certain moment that we all occupy this kind of artistic research framework and that feel quite comfortable in that, or sort of supported by that term. And I think there is something to that. And, and even though I don’t necessarily really forefront that as defining of my work I think it’s somehow in the background Yeah. It’s around. And I’m sure that I’m, I’m very much participating in those communities. More and more, of course, as they get more alive and present, and maybe as you also suggested, how these separations are also becoming more or less important or less clear between sort of art and academic, or between the book and the cd. \n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nAnd certainly that’s, it’s been something that I’ve thought more about what research creation does in that the way in which SpokenWeb as a research network it has been attempting to sort of like activate archival materials or like, make, make things with them as whether in the case of the, the sort of the listening and making that I was talking about, or other kinds of, of sort of performative kind of curations that make things with archival materials. And so I think about how research creation is so important as academic work, and that it is indeed like it’s, it’s getting recognized as valid scholarship. Or even the podcast, it’s kind of a form of research creation in some way that you’re, you are you’re making something new and you’re making something that is often more creative that might not necessarily be following the same pathways as whatever the academic pathway, which often somehow gets defined as uncreative, which at the same time, it is creative too.\n\n \n\nSo it’s it’s almost a, a false, a false separation there between the, the research and creation to begin with. But, but it does feel like the there’s more support for that kind of work than, than there had been, or even, so even these, some of these formal categories help with that in some way, but yeah, that’s true. Yeah. But yeah, the just looking at the <laugh>, the collection here I was thinking that it would be beautiful to hear you read the opening to your piece, if you would be open to that. Sure. Because Sure. It is thinking as poetics a poetics of listening. It is a very poetic opening. And I thought, oh, to, to actually hear how you would voice that would be, would be a real a gift to use a word that is over there on the archival boxes. Let me turn, turn to it here – \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle:\n\nOkay… [Begins reading]  It has already begun… the time … the time-space… of… speaking… of speaking that moves itself… toward knowing nothing… something you… the use that arrives from the particularities… as the basis for a giving… enacting a rhythmic… of breath… breathing toward… away\n\n \n\n[Pause – music begins]\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod (17:28):\n\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. ShortCuts has been a monthly feature on the SpokenWeb podcast. It is now in its fifth season, and this may be the end of shortcuts, but who knows, there may still be shortcuts inspired Mini sos as short bonus content on the podcast feed. It is fitting that this is or could be the last episode of shortcuts. Shortcuts started as me alone recording short audio pieces as close and careful listenings to audio cut from spoken webs, archival collections. The first three seasons were quite solitary listenings, though they did make some long lasting connections with their listeners. The fourth and fifth seasons have been more and more social and live featuring conversations with spoken web researchers about archival clips of their choice and about their sound-based research. So it seemed like it could not be more fitting to conclude with a conversation with Brandon LaBelle as an expert listener, and within a space like Err Bodies press as a space of listening and a making. And to be far from the closet where I recorded so many episodes of shortcuts to be in Berlin.\n\n \n\nI edit this conversation back home in Montreal, and I record this voiceover from SpokenWeb’s podcast studio at Concordia. And as I think back over what shortcuts has made and the conversations it has sparked, I can’t help but be moved to do something that I love doing so much in shortcuts to listen again and again, and to let the sound speak for itself. And so with that, let’s listen once more to LaBelle’s reading from “A Poetics of Listening.” As I edited the audio of him reading, I noticed how he makes audible, the pauses in the text, the dot, dot dot, the ellipses. And I thought about how he rendered them in such a way that they invite a response in between the pauses. What if we listen to it like this?\n\n \n\n[Music ends]\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (19:55):\n\n[Audio replays of LaBelle reading with voice overlaping – transcribed as heard] It has already begun. It has already – the time begun. The time-space, the time of the time space of speaking, that speaking moves itself, itself. Speaking that moves. Knowing nothing toward something, knowing nothing. You something. The uses that arrive from the, use the particularities as the basis particularities. A giving as the basis for a giving a rhythm, enacting breath, a rhythm, breathing toward breath away, breathing toward, away.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod (20:43):\n\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Thanks to Brandon for talking with me, amid the books and sounds of errant bodies. Press check the show notes for links to the press and to the Listening Biennal. ShortCuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast. The podcast team is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy transcriber, Yara Ajeeb podcast co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. ShortCuts has been designed and produced by me, Katherine McLeod, and thanks to all who have joined me on it along the way. As always, thanks to you for listening.\n\n "],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9686","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.3, Audio of the Month – Where does the reading begin?, 16 March 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/82798c7c-9e61-462e-be60-0d337f42f2a1/sw-minisode-ep-3_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-3_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,663,633 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Sw Minisode Ep 3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-03-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549826306054,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month our SpokenWeb minisode features Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show, Nov 20, 2016. As Kellough starts to introduce his reading, a pre-recorded voice slowly mixes with his live words. Where, then, does the introduction end, and where does the reading begin?\n\n00:00\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. You know the drill. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This series is an extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca with Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s March edition of Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n\n01:08\n\nTheme Music:\n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n\n01:08\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nIn this Audio of the Month, we’ll be listening to a recording of Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal. The reading was on November 20th, 2016. Kellough’s voice has been recorded many times throughout the past 20 years of Montreal’s Words and Music Show, a monthly cabaret of spoken word, poetry, music, and dance established and organized by poet and musician Ian Ferrier. The recordings of these shows have now been digitized and cataloged by SpokenWeb researchers at Concordia University. During the digitization process, student research assistant Ali Barillaro noticed that this performance by Kellough stood out from the rest. As Kellough starts to introduce his own reading, a pre-recorded voice slowly mixes with his live words. Where, then, does the introduction end, and where does the reading begin?\n\n02:10\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Kaie Kellough] Hello, thanks Ian for that introduction and thanks to all of the other artists tonight. It’s been a very nice night. I’m going to present something to, at, for you that is somewhat narrative, I guess. But it isn’t related to my, to my novel. It’s some, some other narratives and the narratives are related to adolescence, [Audio, a recording of a masculine voice, overlapping with Kaie speaking. It progressively gets louder and more audible] which is a peculiar time in life. And I think that they’re relevant nowadays because they’re related to adolescents in a particular place in time–\n\n03:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] …gripping, steering…\n\n03:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in Alberta–\n\n03:04\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice]…pumpjacks, a sign behind…\n\n03:07\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in the–\n\n03:09\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] …I want to forget–\n\n03:09\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –1980s.\n\n03:10\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –high school fever–\n\n03:12\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] In, in–\n\n03:13\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –forever. Forget articles in _The Herald_–\n\n03:15\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in the moment of–\n\n03:16\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –about black-haired teens from the reserves–\n\n03:17\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –heavy evangelical–\n\n03:18\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –who drank themselves to death–\n\n03:19\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –activity–\n\n03:20\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –in macho contests–\n\n03:20\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and extreme conservatism and–\n\n03:22\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –trying to prove to themselves that they exist.\n\n03:24\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –some of the [Stutters] ch-ch-challenges–\n\n03:25\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] As night dripped into next day’s headlines,–\n\n03:27\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that arise when growing up–\n\n03:28\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –I want to forget my stupid conviction–\n\n03:28\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and trying to live and become oneself–\n\n03:31\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –that a boy had to be distilled–\n\n03:33\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in a climate like that–\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –into a man.\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –which–\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] That the terror of being bloodline–\n\n03:35\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –seems to be a climate that,–\n\n03:37\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –had to be spiked with rum.\n\n03:37\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that is reemerging in spite of–\n\n03:39\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] That amber alcohol preserved–\n\n03:41\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –all of the,–\n\n03:41\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –the DNA–\n\n03:41\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –all of the-,-\n\n03:42\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –that seeped down centuries–\n\n03:44\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –all of the,–\n\n03:44\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –from slavery.\n\n03:45\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –appearances–\n\n03:46\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] That coloured this reflection on boyhood\n\n03:46\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –to the contrary, that had, that had appeared–\n\n03:49\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –in a far-flung suburb–\n\n03:50\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –in the past.–\n\n03:50\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –of empire,–\n\n03:51\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] The idea–\n\n03:52\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –a mighty slum,–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that, that–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –a bubble, born yesterday–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –that–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –or a 12-pack of empties–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –born yesterday, was finished–\n\n03:53\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –or a bubble in a bottle,–\n\n03:58\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and that–\n\n04:00\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –broken in the back seat,–\n\n04:00\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –it was gone and, and, and done–\n\n04:02\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] –a froth that slicked between–\n\n04:02\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Kaie] –and suddenly a wave… [Kaie begins distorting his own voice, deliberately stuttering, repeating, and cutting out as the recording of the masculine voice continues to sound clearly] A w-w-w-w-wave of c-c-c-c-conservatism has has has has has crashed…\n\n04:03\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Masculine Voice] — slides archived by teenage brains. Autobiography of an outsider screamed at the dragon. Nobody is [inaudible] crashed oldsmobile [inaudible] supreme…\n\n04:14\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n04:18\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThat was Kaie Kellough reading at The Words and Music Show in Montreal on November 20th, 2016. Head to spokenweb.ca to find out more about where this recording is from. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9687","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.4, Audio of the Month – Dorothy Livesay listening to the radio, 20 April 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-dorothy-livesay-listening-to-the-radio/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3e711ac8-1ac2-4526-9497-8f7c82102e60/sw-minisode-ep-4_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-4_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\" 7,242,441 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Sw Minisode Ep 4\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-dorothy-livesay-listening-to-the-radio/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-04-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549827354624,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this Audio of the Month minisode Katherine Mcleod features recordings of poet Dorothy Livesay. We hear Livesay read selections of her work including “Bartok and the Geranium,” a poem that is often anthologized and, in fact, you may have studied it in a course on Canadian poetry. But do you know how Livesay wrote it?\n\n00:00\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n00:10\n\nHannah McGregor:\n\nWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. An extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. Without further ado, here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n\n00:52\n\nTheme Music:\n\n[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n\n01:03\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nIn this Audio of the Month, we’ll be listening to Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay. We’ll hear a clip of a recording of Livesay reading in Montreal on January 14th, 1971. The Audio of the Month is selected from a series of Audio of the Week posts that I’ve been creating for the spokenweb.ca site [Audio, recording of Livesay introducing “The Unquiet Bed overlapping with Katherine] and a previous Audio of the Week features Livesay reciting one of her most song-like poems “The Unquiet Bed.”\n\n01:31\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay reciting “The Unquiet Bed”] The woman I am / is not what you see. / I’m not just bones / and crockery. / The woman I am / knew love and hate / hating the chains / that parents make / longing that love / might set men free / yet hold them fast / in loyalty. / The woman I am / is not what you see / move over love / make room for me.\n\n01:57\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThat was Livesay reading “The Unquiet Bed” and this Audio of the Month features another musical poem by Livesay from that same reading in Montreal in 1971. The poem is “Bartok and the Geranium.” This poem is one that is often anthologized and in fact, you may have studied it in a course on Canadian poetry. But do you know how the poem began?\n\n02:24\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay] The poem simply began because I was teaching an evening class of housewives the art of creative writing. And I gave them an assignment to write an imagistic or perhaps a haiku-type poem… When they got home, to look around the house and find two objects utterly different and disparate and just see if they could link these objects in a tension, which would create a poem. Well, the next day I was, had sent the children to school after lunch and was sitting in the dining room listening to CBC Concert and heard music that I hadn’t heard before at all, a violin concerto it seemed to be. And in the window as I was listening, there was this red geranium. So I thought to myself, well, I’ve given my class an assignment, I wonder if I could do the same thing. And at the end of the concert, they announced it was a Béla Bartók violin concerto. So suddenly these two elements, the music and the geranium, did seem to link in my mind and immediately I wrote the poem, which I think I’ve never revised. I’ll tell you afterwards what some of the professors have said about the meaning of the poem. [Audience Laughs]\n\n03:49\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThis poem, the subject of probably thousands of student analyses by now, all started from an assignment that Livesay had given to her own students, a class full of women. How ironic that Livesay ends up producing a poem that then finds its way into the lecture notes of male professors who claim to reveal the true meaning of it or, as Livesay herself puts it:\n\n04:16\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay] He informed the class that this poem represented the conflict between nature and art. While at first I was a bit dumbfounded, you know now how the whole thing began and then what I felt about the he and she of it.\n\n04:32\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nWhat I find fascinating about Livesay’s story of writing the poem is not so much that she uncovers its origins. Our own interpretations of the poem are still valid and Livesay remains open to these varied interpretations, too. What I hear in her story is a story of her poetics. By this I mean that Livesay’s story of how she wrote “Bartok and the Geranium” is a story that fuses the imagism of her early poems of the 1920s with the tension of the social that informs her poetry from the mid-1930s onwards. The poem bursts forth from a moment of listening, a private moment of listening to something entirely new, her attention caught by the sound of the Bartók violin concerto and then framed by the space of domesticity in which she listens. It is instantaneous in this moment of listening that Livesay forges a connection between the sound of the music transmitted through the radio and the image of the flower framed by the window.\n\n05:45\n\nAudio Recording:\n\n[Audio, Dorothy Livesay reciting “Bartok and the Geranium”] She lifts her green umbrellas / Towards the pane / Seeking her fill of sunlight / Or of rain; / Whatever falls / She has no commentary / Accepts, extends, / Blows out her furbelows, / Her bustling boughs; / And all the while he whirls / Explodes in space, / Never content with this small room: / Not even can he be / Confined to sky / But must speed high and higher still / From galaxy to galaxy, / Wrench from the stars their momentary notes / Steal music from the moon. / She’s daylight / He is dark / She’s heaven­held breath / He storms and crackles / Spits with hell’s own spark. / Yet in this room, this moment now / These together breathe and be: / She, essence of serenity, / He in a mad intensity / Soars beyond sight / Then hurls, lost Lucifer / From Heaven’s height. / And when he’s done, he’s out: / She leans a lip against the glass / And preens herself in light.\n\n06:53\n\nMusic:\n\n[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n\n06:59\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nHead to spokenweb.ca to find out how to listen to the entire recording of Dorothy Livesay reading in Montreal in 1971. I’m Katherine McLeod and thanks for listening. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sound archives of SpokenWeb.\n\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9689","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.5, Audio of the Month – Then and Now, 18 May 2020, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-  \",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/58452fcb-56ec-4594-bb2b-e732c0fcbafc/sw-minisode-5-then-and-now_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-5-then-and-now_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"7,406,281 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode 5_Then and Now\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-05-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549827354625,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month our SpokenWeb minisode features Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt reading “Lagoon” from Vancouver Poems (1972), a deeply local collection that she had not yet published when this reading took place at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in Montreal. When listening to Marlatt reading “Lagoon,” we can hear the many futures of her listening, then and now.\n\n(00:00)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This is an extension of Katherine’s Audio of the Week series at spokenweb.ca. Katherine brings her favourite audio each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. As the cherry blossoms fall in Vancouver and the snow melts away to spring flowers in Montreal, we’re reminded that spring is a time of renewal, to reflect on the past and celebrate new beginnings from coast to coast. While we find ourselves in uncertain times the season beckons us to collectively celebrate and regenerate in the then and now. No matter where you are listening from, take a deep breath of crisp, spring air and join Katherine in listening back with our ears towards the future. Here is Katherine McLeod with May’s SpokenWeb Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:25)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:30)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this Audio of the Month, we’re going to be listening to the poem “Lagoon” by Daphne Marlatt. In 1970 in Montreal at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), Daphne Marlatt read in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. She began her reading with Vancouver Poems. These poems are from a deeply local collection that she had not yet published when this reading took place.\n(02:00)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daphne Marlatt] I thought that what I’d do first is read to you from the Vancouver Poems.\n(02:05)\tKatherine McLeod\tBefore reading the first poem, “Lagoon,” she tells her Montreal audience that she’ll explain the local references as she goes along, starting with the first poem that refers to Lost Lagoon in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.\n(02:20)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daphne Marlatt] I’ll just try and explain allusions as I go along for those people who have never been to Vancouver or know it because the poems tend to be pretty local as they were intended to be.\n(02:34)\tKatherine McLeod\tMarlatt could not have anticipated that those poems from Vancouver Poems published in 1972 would become pathways to revisit the city when republishing many of them, years later, in Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now published by Talon Books in 2013. Akin to Marlatt’s revisiting of place in the book Steveston, Liquidities _revisits and revises the city and the poetic voice. As Marlatt writes in her introduction to _Liquidities, “Vancouver Poems was a young woman’s take on a young city as it surfaced to her gaze.” By the way, she calls this introduction “Then and Now.” Marlatt’s return to the poems is not unlike the poet listening again to her own recorded voice. And that’s exactly what Marlatt did in November 2014 at Concordia when she read alongside and responded to her voice from that 1970 recording in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series. And again, five years later in September 2019 at UBC Okanagan, when Marlatt listened and responded to recordings of her voice and other voices in the Sir George Williams Poetry Series and in the UBC Okanagan-based SoundBox collection.’\n(04:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tI met Marlatt here in Montreal when she read alongside that recording of her voice from 1970. She signed my copy of _Liquidities _with the words “Vancouver connection.” Now, by now, if you’ve been listening to these Audio of the Months, you may have figured out that I’m from Vancouver and that the Vancouver-Montreal connection is a meaningful one. I open this book now and read these poems of Vancouver here in Montreal. And I think of the then and the now and whether to hold them together in my reading and in my listening, or let them go, move, slip, liquid, changing, and to listen to the poems, listening to this change. With that, let’s listen to Marlatt reading “Lagoon” in 1970 here in Montreal, listening to her reading in a voice that she will later listen to in a reading, and listening to the many futures of her listening then and now.\n(05:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Daphne Marlatt reciting “Lagoon.” Some words are absent or different than the version in _Liquidities_] Lagoon, / down a cut on the city side, apartments / shacked uphill, through shadow and hulls and ribs we walk. / You’ve come home. On either side dark nets remember / how a wind fishing for that extent both left and right / ruffles your hair. Here. The city drinks what it collects. / Water or ducks, a nesting place. A neck of land. / Whose profile somehow looks more narrow in the street. / Our eyes reflect … kites, banners, a populous sky. / What you or others brought, come back to / Lie when we / outwalk our dragons, thus, their future tails: catch / fire. / You confirm that we sail to the east at nine, shore wise / having no place, antique, a houseboard. Wind ships our / ship, stands, having completed its turn to, gather to / the bridge… / Wait! I can’t get my hand out of green / pockets green, dissected, frogs. The edges of their / vision littoral. We skirt red. I’m half in, wanting to / pull up reeds to plant. / Your coin proves nothing, no / bottom, don’t. Go (in shoes sucked under). Water / scuttles old men on benches dangle under conifers. Listen: / their edges are always murmuring, Marshes, Your / forced march. / Could we afford your going? A salmon run? On the / corner there, half indecisive, tarnish of atrophied / fish in raffia swung: a house sign, a place to / enter. / Where I’d make tea, your lips on the future, / caught, so you could read me.\n(07:16)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(07:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to spokenweb.ca to find out more about where this recording is from. My name’s Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"9690","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 1.6, Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen, 15 June 2020, Aubin"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Mathieu Aubin"],"creator_names_search":["Mathieu Aubin"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/cef978e4-dfa7-45e2-a2c9-0d9a4a465a38/sw-minisode-ep-6_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-minisode-ep-6_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:11:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"10,734,072 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"SW Minisode ep 6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-15\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549828403200,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month we bring you a very special guest curator edition of SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month. In this minisode, Katherine McLeod is joined by SpokenWeb researcher and postdoctoral fellow Mathieu Aubin for a glimpse into the life and work of Canadian poet bill bissett – from poetic surveillance to an avant-garde dinner fit for a Queen.\n\n(00:00)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(00:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWelcome to our SpokenWeb minisodes. Each month on alternate fortnights—that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode—join me, Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month miniseries. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives. This month, we are excited to share a special guest curator edition of the SpokenWeb minisodes from SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow Mathieu Aubin. Without further ado, here’s Katherine McLeod and Mathieu Aubin with SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.\n(01:03)\tTheme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n(01:03)\tKatherine McLeod\tFor this Audio of the Month, I’d like to introduce you to a special guest who will be guiding us through a variety of recordings of Canadian sound poet bill bissett. Our guest is Mathieu Aubin, a SpokenWeb postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University. So how did this Audio of the Month come about, you might ask? Well, Mathieu started by pitching an idea to the Audio of the Week series, and if you’re a SpokenWeb researcher and an audio clip catches your attention, please do get in touch and your audio clip could become part of the Audio of the Week or even an Audio of the Month. Now, what was it that caught Mathieu’s attention? He was conducting an oral history interview with bill bissett and bill started telling him about “that time when he had dinner with the queen.” Yes, had dinner with the queen. That caught my attention, too. But to get to that part in the story, let’s hear, Mathieu set the scene through sound.\n(02:08)\tMathieu Aubin\tThis month, I have the pleasure and privilege to be your Audio of the Month curator. As your curator, I’ll be introducing and briefly discussing three audio clips documenting a decade in bill bissett’s life. As you may or may not know, bissett is a visual artist and award-winning gay poet who has published over 50 books. He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, November 23rd, 1939, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, 1958. There, he co-created blewointment magazine and blewointment press, which published visual, concrete, and sound poetry. Though bissett is now an iconic poet, he faced many difficulties during the late 1960s and the 1970s. For instance, in the late 1960s, when Vancouver narcotics police officers raided counter-cultural communities, bissett was arrested for possession of cannabis. You can hear about this experience in the recording of the poem “another 100 warrants” read during the Sir George Williams Reading Series on October 31st, 1969. Let’s listen.\n(03:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, bill bissett reciting “another 100 warrants issued”] Another hundred warrants issued. News flash. Seven men entered a Vancouver graveyard only to disappear in a flash of white light. What’s it like, oh straight person, square-jawed, to be able to shop around save three vets from the Army & Navy without being stalked, harassed, etc. by the narcs at every turn you take. Hey, what’s it like to get up in the morning, gathered, you and your friends, close ones, around the warming stove without the RCMP crashing through the veils within the embargo of mistrust. Canada, etc.\n(03:45)\tMathieu Aubin\tExperiences such as these with the mounties and narcs were documented by other poets in Vancouver, such as Sharon Thesen in her poem “Chrysanthemum Perfume,” which is discussed by our sister podcast SoundBox Signals in their episode “Only the Imagination Carries Forward.” Though he was freed from jail with the help of UBC English professor Warren Tallman, bissett remained on the local police’s radar. This forced him to spend many of the 1970s living in secrecy while continuing to run his blewointment press, publishing his work with presses such as Talon Books. In 1977, bissett’s poetry was debated in the House of Commons because Conservative MPs cited his work as evidence of the Canada Council’s misuse of public funding. That year, bissett’s Canada Council funding was heavily reduced, causing members of Vancouver’s literary community to come together and defend their friend. In last month’s Audio of the Week post titled “bill bissett on CKVU-TV September 1978,” we hear an example of these efforts. In the recording from the PennSound collection, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, we hear Pia Shandel, then-host of The Vancouver Show, document what had happened to bissett as he chants in the background and reads the poem “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police.”\n(05:03)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, bill bissett reciting “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police”] The wonderfulness of the mounties, our secret police. They open our mail, petulantly they burn down barns they can’t bug. They listen to our political leaders phone conversations. What could be less inspiring to overhear? [Audience Laughs] They had me down on the floor til I turned purple, then my friends pulled them off me. They think breastfeeding is disgusting. Every time we come here to raid this place, you always have that kid on your tit. They tore my daughter’s doll’s head off looking for dope. One of my more memorable beatings was in the backseat locked inside one of their unmarked cars. They work for the CIA. At night, they drive around and shine their searchlights on people embracing and with their PA systems, tell them to keep away from the trees. They listen to your most secret farts, rewinding the tape, looking for hidden meaning. Indigestion is a national security risk.\n(06:13)\tMathieu Aubin\tIn the poem, the speaker documents the mounties surveillance tactics, such as opening people’s mail, recording phone calls, expressing heterosexist comments, and physically attacking him. While I’ve thought about this decade in bissett’s life for many years and I’ve met with him on several occasions to talk about this time in his life, when we last spoke, he shared a surprising twist to the story. In an oral history interview with him, I shared with bissett that Pierre Elliot Trudeau, then-prime-minister, was apparently upset about the accusations against the Canada Council. bissett was surprised when I told them this as he recalled attending a dinner at Ottawa’s Château Laurier hosted by Trudeau and attended by Queen Elizabeth II. The dinner was supposed to be a showcase of Canada’s Avant-Garde artists, including writers like bpNichol, Carol Bolt, Michael Ondaatje, and bissett himself. As bissett told me this story, I learned that his life of being pursued by the Vancouver police and the mounties, living in secrecy, and facing homophobic attacks in the House of Commons had as a counterpoint an experience of dining with the queen and explaining sound poetry to her. Oral histories can be incredible sources of twists and turns. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to have so many fruitful conversations with bissett and that he shared this story with me. Here is a story by bissett about him and his friend Carol Bolt, author of the play One Night Stand, meeting the queen sometime in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did when I first heard this story.\n(07:49)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, bill bissett] There were a lot of beautiful guys there.\n(07:52)\tAudio Recording\t[Audio, Mathieu Aubin] Mhm.\n(07:52)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And the queen… Carol Bolt was there. She had gone to bed early for a person and she wrote a great play called One Night Stand.\n(08:05)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Okay.\n(08:05)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And it got a lot of performances all across Canada. And she wanted to meet the queen. I was wearing a powder– no, I was wearing a blue tuxedo with a powder blue shirt, frills going down the middle of it.\n(08:25)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] I can picture it, yeah.\n(08:25)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And I just loved it. I just… I was so happy and no one had gotten anywhere for me to spend the night, I’d forgotten about that. Everyone else, don’t know.\n(08:35)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(08:35)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And so anyway, so I wasn’t worried yet. And so I was bringing Carol Bolt over to meet the queen. Like Pierre Trudeau, she’s really short. And I was taller than her as well. And I said, “Your majesty, I’d love you to meet Carol Bolt. And she’s the author of a wonderful Canadian play called One Night Stand. Do you know what a one night stand is?” And she said, “Well, not now, but I did.” And then Carol disappeared. I said, “Good heavens, she’s disappeared.”\n(09:12)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(09:12)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And.. no, it was the queen that said, “Good heavens.” I said, “Oh my God, she’s not here. She got so shy she ran away.”\n(09:19)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Aww.\n(09:19)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] She couldn’t do it. I understood that. And so then she said, “Well, what do you do?” She said to me. I said, “I do sound poetry.” And she said, “What is that?” I said it was poetry that the main emphasis is on sound and, you know, just make sounds. The sounds are the enchantment or the experience–\n(09:42)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(09:42)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] –rather than the meaning. And she said, “Oh, that sounds very interesting.” And then the queen was going to leave after, a little while after that… We’ve been reported a sniper in the lobby or something. And then Carol came back and she said, “I can do it now. I took a deep breath.” I said, “Okay, let’s go.” And so I went after the queen and I touched her on the shoulder, which you’re not allowed to do.\n(10:04)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] [Gasps] Oh!\n(10:04)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] Her skin was like smooth–\n(10:05)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Yeah.\n(10:05)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] –like smooth. And I said, “Your majesty, Carol’s here!” She said, “Oh, blessings, you’ve reappeared! How excellent,” I mean, she was very festive.\n(10:17)\tAudio Recording\t[Mathieu] Aww.\n(10:17)\tAudio Recording\t[bill] And it was, yeah, it was a lovely evening.\n(10:21)\tMusic\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n(10:26)\tKatherine McLeod\tThat was bill bissett in conversation with Mathieu Aubin. My thanks to Mathieu for suggesting these audio clips from SpokenWeb, PennSound and an oral history interview conducted as part of Mathieu’s postdoctoral SpokenWeb research. Find out how to listen to all of these recordings and more by visiting spokenweb.ca. Thanks to Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland for working with me to produce this minisode. My name is Katherine McLeod and tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10022","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, George Bowering and David McFadden: Performing the Spoken Word Archive, 12 October 2012"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/george-bowering-and-david-mcfadden-performing-the-spoken-word-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["George Bowering","David Mcfadden"],"creator_names_search":["George Bowering","David Mcfadden"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/34469976\",\"name\":\"George Bowering\",\"dates\":\"1935-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/7405434\",\"name\":\"David Mcfadden\",\"dates\":\"1940-2018\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Performance_Date":[2012],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2012-10-12\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080570\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University Henry F. Hall Building, H-110\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1455 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4973133\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57887617280701\"}]"],"Address":["1455 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University Henry F. Hall Building, H-110"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["<strong>Friday October 12, 2012\nExhibits at 6:00 P.M.\nReading at 7:00 P.M.\nH-110, Henry F. Hall Building, Concordia University</strong>\n1455 De Maisonneuve Street West\n(514) 848-2424 ext. 2340\n\nThe SSHRC IG SpokenWeb Research Team is pleased to announce its first event in the \"Performing the Spoken Word Archive\" series. The event will be held Friday, October 12th, 2012 at 6:00 P.M. in H-110 of the Hall Building (1455 De Maisonneuve West), and will feature readings from poets George Bowering and David McFadden. Bowering is the recipient of two Governor General Awards for poetry and one for fiction, and is the author of more than ninety books. McFadden has published over fifteen collections of fiction and poetry and has been a nominee for the Governor General's Award and the Griffin Prize for poetry, among other honors.\n\nAs a live event component to the SpokenWeb project, an online digital spoken word archive, the series explores various ways that the archive can re-enter public space and become performance. In this event the authors will \"read alongside their past selves\"--that is, selections of archival audio recorded during the Sir George Williams University Poetry Reading Series (1967-1974). The readings will be followed by a panel discussion on the audio archive and the social and cultural import of the poetry reading, with Stuart Ross, Jason Camlot and Darren Wershler. The event will also feature an exhibition of period photos from the Concordia Archives, an interactive sound installation by Max and Julian Stein, and audience members can participate in an oral history memory clinic, where they will be invited to record their experiences with performed poetry.\n\n<a href=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/performing_the_spoken_word_archive_poster.jpeg\"><img title=\"performing_the_spoken_word_archive_poster\" src=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/performing_the_spoken_word_archive_poster-212x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"212\" height=\"300\" /></a>\n\nCheck out our blog post about this event <a href=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/blog/performing-the-spoken-word-archive-event-october-12th-2012/\">here</a>"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549828403202,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10027","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Virtual Book Launch for CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event, 12 November 2020"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-book-launch-for-canlit-across-media-unarchiving-the-literary-event/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1OuJPlv2IO5zQ_wUO5LY2SRfrVcdVlY-k\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"camlot-jason-and-mcleod-katherine_canlit-across-media-launch_zoom_cu_2020-11-12.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:21:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"585,009,402 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"camlot-jason-and-mcleod-katherine_canlit-across-media-launch_zoom_cu_2020-11-12\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-11-12\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event is an innovative collection that evaluates diverse methods of recording, archiving, and remediating literature and literary culture in Canada.\n\n\nEditors Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod managed to hold one in-person launch for CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event before the COVID lockdown, but they were not able to launch the book with the contributors themselves.\n\n\nOn Thursday November 12, 7pm ET (4pm PT), join nearly all contributors to CanLit Across Media in a virtual conversation that promises to be one of liveliest and \"live\" book launches (on Zoom) you may ever attend!\n\n\nRSVP for the Zoom link here.\n\n\nFind out more about the book and how to order it from MQUP here.\n\n\nContributors:\n\nJordan Abel (University of Alberta)\n\nAndrea Beverley (Mount Allison University)\n\nClint Burnham (Simon Fraser University)\n\nJason Camlot (Concordia University)\n\nJoel Deshaye (Memorial University of Newfoundland)\n\nDeanna Fong (Simon Fraser University)\n\nCatherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada)\n\nDean Irvine (Agile Humanities)\n\nKarl Jirgens (University of Windsor)\n\nMarcelle Kosman (University of Alberta)\n\nJessi MacEachern (Concordia University)\n\nKatherine McLeod (Concordia University)\n\nLinda Morra (Bishop's University)\n\nKaris Shearer (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)\n\nFelicity Tayler (University of Ottawa)\n\nDarren Wershler (Concordia University)"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.mqup.ca/canlit-across-media-products-9780773558663.php\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason, and Katherine McLeod, editors. CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549829451776,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10028","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV,\nVirtual Listening Practice Guided by Faith Paré, 21 October 2020"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/virtual-listening-practice-guided-by-faith-pare/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Faith Paré","Jason Camlot"],"creator_names_search":["Faith Paré","Jason Camlot"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Faith Paré\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1BbWZ_xaWyxZuT5q78ke3YwmSzaoh7c4h\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"Faith Paré_Final_Edited.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:01:00\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,664,737,683 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"Faith Paré_Final_Edited\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-10-21\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Black Noise: Poetics of Afro-Congregation\n\nIf dispersal created the Afro-diaspora, then who do we become when we are gathered? This SpokenWeb Listening Practice session will feature early thoughts on how Black creators across poetry, music, and performance have explored the soundscapes of congregated Blackness, from the hold of the slave ship to contemporary uprisings in urban centres across North America.\n\nBlack congregation has been a massive anxiety of, and threat toward, state power since Bois Caïman due to fear of revolt. Black congregation has also been a vehicle of social justice and healing. Together, we will first discuss the weaponization of sound against public gathering in the 21st century, before expanding into artistic considerations of how Black sociality serves as an antidote to hyper-individualism in Western economic, political, and cultural realms."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549829451777,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10029","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, All Team Meeting Zoom Concordia, 18 December 2020"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KHEHb7xFqYoqIvot6dcOdstUFlltN6SP\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"all-team-meeting_zoom_concordia_2020-12-18_zoom_0.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:52:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,312,136,429 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"all-team-meeting_zoom_concordia_2020-12-18_zoom_0\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-18\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Jason Camlot opened the meeting and introduced Ben Hymes who took over the\nCheck-ins: \nJason Camlot for Concordia University: Nearly done processing Words Music Collection, Allan Lord Collection\nRedescribing Sir Goerge William's Collection so that it works in Swallow\nHosted a number of events like Listening Practices, workshops, performances. Working on managing fellowships for curators and artists in residence.\nFelicity of University of Ottawa: were unable to do collection processing because archives are closed due to pandemic. Focused on event activities.\nBrian: working on automatic methods to diarize recordings.\nYin: Black Writers Out Loud in collaboration with SpokenWeb. Launching poetry on screens.\nMike, University of Alberta: Developing web portal and translating wire frames into design principles; collection processing, completed time stamping and metadata for a new collection from University of Alberta archives; \nInitiating the front end of Swallow\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549829451778,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10033","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Performing Technology: SpokenWeb presents Oana Avasilichioaei, 14 November 2019"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/performing-technology-spokenweb-presents-oana-avasilichioaei/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Home recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Nik Forrest"],"creator_names_search":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Nik Forrest"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/58498867\",\"name\":\"Oana Avasilichioaei\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nik Forrest\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Performance_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1-rXG2CkijyHo0n7xgQ18-ISnplhlqD9V\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"Forrest.Avasilichioaei.McLeod_PerformingTechnology_2019.11.14.TrLR.WAV\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:44:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,658,797,184 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"Forrest.Avasilichioaei.McLeod_PerformingTechnology_2019.11.14.TrLR\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-11-14\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"4th Space, Concordia University\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["4th Space, Concordia University"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"contents":["Performing Technology is an investigation into the electroacoustic tools and methods that poets and sound-artists use to manipulate and create sound poetry and sound art. Join us for performances and conversations about methods of listening to our sonic environments.\n\nOpening performance debuts a new sonic creation \"Sonic Thresholds: 4th Space\" by Concordia PhD student, Nik Forrest, the recipient of a SpokenWeb research creation award.\n\nFeature performance by poet and sound-artist Oana Avasilichioaei performing her multimedia piece OPERATOR, which explores the subject position(s) of military drone operators through text, video, improvisation, and live electroacoustic sound.\n\nAfter the performances, a Q&A panel with performers explores the technology used in their artistic practice, along with questions such as: How can technology compose poetic sound? Can ‘smart’ tech be ‘smart’ sound? What happens when improvisation meets technology? Audience members are encouraged to ask questions and to reflect upon the experience of hearing this performance with and through technology. Free to attend and all are welcome.\n\n\nOana Avasilichioaei interweaves poetry, translation, photography, sound, and performance to explore an expanded idea of language, polylingual and polyphonic poetics, historical structures, borders, and orality. Her six poetry collections include We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn 2012, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry), Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015), and Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019), a poetic, sonic, visual investigation of ideas around tracks/tracking. Recent sound-performance works include EIGHT OVER TWO (2019, Semi Silent Award) and OPERATOR (2018), and she is currently writing a libretto for a one-act opera (FAWN, Toronto). She has also translated eight books of poetry and prose, including Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis (Book*hug 2017, Governor General Literary Award). Based in Montreal, Avasilichioaei was the 2018 Audain Visual Artist in Residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Read more about Avasilichioaei's work here: https://www.oanalab.com/\n\nNik Forrest is a trans-disciplinary artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Currently a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia, their research combines sound studies, gender studies and creative practice in sound performance and installation. Their sound installations have been shown at Oboro (Montreal), Eastern Block (Montreal), Paved Arts and New Media (Saskatoon), Latitude 54 (Edmonton) and most recently at the Kunsthalle Mulhouse (France). Their short experimental videos have been shown widely at festivals, galleries and museums both in Canada and internationally. Previous sound & video performance: https://vimeo.com/275675933"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549830500352,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10034","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Approaching the Poetry Series Conference, 5 April 2013"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/approaching-the-poetry-series"],"item_language":["English"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creators":["[]"],"contributors":["[]"],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"\",\"longitude\":\"\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["SpokenWeb will be hosting a two-day conference to be held at Concordia University, Friday, April 5 – Saturday, April 6, 2013.  This mini-conference invites scholars and digital developers to engage directly with the recordings of “The Poetry Series” and to present work that explores either methodological or technical approaches one might take—as literature scholars or digital developers—to such documentary literary recordings.\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">As a critical/creative constraint for participation in this conference we have asked presenters to engage directly with some facet of the primary-source audio held in our archive and made available via the SpokenWeb site.  Lit papers may build upon ongoing work about specific authors who read in the series, avant-garde poetics, literary performance, etc., by integrating specific examples from The Poetry Series, or may perform substantial close-listenings of particular documented performances in the archive.  From the tech side, we have encouraged presentations and demos of methods or tools useful for annotating, searching, visualizing or otherwise manipulating the digitized audio recordings, using audio from The Poetry Series as test data.</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Suggested topics to explore in the original CFP included:</p>\n\n<ul style=\"text-align: left;\">\n         <li>Close Listening Methods</li>\n         <li>Methods for historicizing the Poetry Reading Series in the 60s and 70s</li>\n         <li>Avant-Garde Performance</li>\n         <li>Meta-Poetic Discourse (intros and poetry banter)</li>\n         <li>The Poetry Reading as Oral Pedagogy</li>\n         <li>Defining a Prosody of Poetic Performance</li>\n         <li>What We Look at When We Listen</li>\n         <li>What Literature Scholars Do When They Listen</li>\n         <li>Tools for Searching Spoken Word Audio (i.e. Sound Searching)</li>\n         <li>Theories and Methods of Transcription</li>\n         <li>Audio Annotation</li>\n         <li>Audio Visualization</li>\n         <li>Audio Navigation</li>\n         <li>The Limits of The Audio Timeline</li>\n         <li>Pitch, Amplitude and Other Features</li>\n         <li>Web-based DAWs (digital audio workstations)</li>\n         <li>Touching Sound (the haptic web and sound visualization)</li>\n         <li>Controlled Vocabulary, subject-index schemes, collaborative tagging, etc. for poetry/literature</li>\n</ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">For more information on this conference, please email the SpokenWeb team: spokenwebcanada@gmail.com</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/web_conference.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2051 aligncenter\" src=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/web_conference-212x300.jpg\" alt=\"web_conference\" width=\"212\" height=\"300\" /></a><a href=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/web_vav.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-2050 aligncenter\" src=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/web_vav-212x300.jpg\" alt=\"web_vav\" width=\"212\" height=\"300\" /></a></p>"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549831548928,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10035","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Daphne Marlatt & Diane Wakoski: Performing the SpokenWeb Archive, 21 November 2014"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski-performing-the-spokenweb-archive-november-21st/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Daphne Marlatt","Diane Wakoski"],"creator_names_search":["Daphne Marlatt","Diane Wakoski"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/92127388\",\"name\":\"Daphne Marlatt\",\"dates\":\"1942-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/79051243\",\"name\":\"Diane Wakoski\",\"dates\":\"1937-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Performance_Date":[2014],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2014-11-21\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=1400+Boulevard+de+Maisonneuve+Ouest+Montreal&zoom=3&minlon=-202.32421875000003&minlat=7.536764322084078&maxlon=8.613281250000002&maxlat=86.47837380767697#map=19/45.496753/-73.577927\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Please join us for the second instalment of the Performing the SpokenWeb Reading Series. A collaboration project between the English &amp; History Department.  All events are open to the public.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<img class=\"alignnone wp-image-3199 aligncenter\" src=\"https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SW2014MarlattWakoski1-212x300.jpg\" alt=\"SW2014Marlatt&amp;Wakoski\" width=\"254\" height=\"359\" />\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>FREE AFTERNOON WORKSHOP WITH THE POETS</strong></span>\n\n<strong>Oral Literary History: The Poetics of Real Life Stories with Daphne Marlatt &amp; Diane Wakoski\n</strong><strong>Friday November 21st at 11am-12pm</strong>\n\nCentre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling\nConcordia University\nLB- 1042\n\n<em>Sign Up at: <a href=\"http://storytelling.concordia.ca/events/oral-literary-history-poetics-real-life-stories-daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski\">http://storytelling.concordia.ca/events/oral-literary-history-poetics-real-life-stories-daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski</a></em>\n\nTheir discussion will focus on oral history and poetry in order to explore the manner in which memories, facts and fiction intertwine when writing poems.   Wakoski whose work has been published in over twenty-five collections creates innovative poems encapsulated in epistolary text, so that the four books can be read as a progression from her epistolary. Marlatt who has published almost thirty books, has also published a work based in oral history entitled <em>Opening Doors in Vancouver's East End: Strathcona.  </em>We hope you will be able to join us for this engaging discussion before the reading!\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>MAIN EVENT</strong></span>\n\n<strong>Daphne Marlatt &amp; Diane Wakoski: Performing the SpokenWeb Archive\n</strong><strong>Friday November 21st, 2014</strong>\n\nListening Stations &amp; Memory Booth starting at 6:00 P.M.\nReading at 7:00 P.M.\n\nConcordia University\nGrey Nun’s Building\nRoom:  GN-M100\n\nAddress Entrance: 1185 Rue Saint Mathieu, Montréal, QC H3H 2H6\nPhone: <a href=\"tel:%28514%29%20848-2424%20ext.%208000\">(514) 848-2424 ext. 8000</a>\n\n<a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/performingthespokenwebarchive\">https://www.facebook.com/performingthespokenwebarchive</a>\n\nThe poets' books will also be available for purchase. Wine &amp; Cheese to follow the main event.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>ABOUT THE EVENT</strong></span>\n\nThe SSHRC IG SpokenWeb Research Team is pleased to announce its second event in the “Performing the Spoken Word Archive” series. The event will be held Friday, November 21st, 2014 at 6:00 P.M. It will feature readings by poets Daphne Marlatt and Diane Wakoski.  Marlatt, a member of the Order of Canada and winner of the Dorothy Livesay prize in poetry for <em>The Given. </em>She has written close to thirty books. Diane Wakoski was a Distinguished Professor and Poet in Residence at Michigan State University from 1975 – 2012. Her work has been published in more than 25 collections, including most notably <em>The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems</em> in 1972 from Simon &amp; Schuster and a book of selected poems, <em>Emerald Ice</em>, published in 1989, which won The William Carlos Williams prize from the Poetry Society of America.\n\nAs a live SpokenWeb event this reading will explore how an archive can re-enter public space and become performance. In this event the authors will “read alongside their past selves”–that is, selections of archival audio recorded during the Sir George Williams University Poetry Reading Series (1966-1974). The event will also feature listening stations from the SpokenWeb Oral History project where audience members can listen to past interviews conducted by the team.  Furthermore, there will be an onsite memory clinic where audience members can enter a private booth where they will be invited to record their experiences with the event or performed poetry more generally."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549831548929,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10036","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 1 The Uses of Spoken Audio Collections in Research and Creation: New Literary Methods Keynotes, The Literary Audio Symposium, 2 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Al Filreis","Darren Wershler","Bill Kennedy"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Al Filreis","Darren Wershler","Bill Kennedy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/97812951\",\"name\":\"Al Filreis\",\"dates\":\"1956-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/19971732\",\"name\":\"Darren Wershler \",\"dates\":\"1966-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Bill Kennedy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"day1_session1.wav\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:53:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,961,128,960 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"day1_session1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-02\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549831548930,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["AL FILREIS (U Pennsylvania)\n\n“The Digital Curation of Audiotexts for Literary Research”\n\nThis talk will draw upon the case of PennSound and its approach to collecting, curating and augmenting content in order to establish a compelling digital environment for the study and appreciation of literary audiotexts. Using PennSound as a starting point, the main aim of this talk will be to frame fundamental questions about methodological approaches to the critical study of literary sound recordings, and will outline some strategies that digital spoken word archives may take to enhance research with these audible materials.\n\nAl Filreis is Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Publisher of Jacket2, and most importantly for the purposes of The Literary Audio Symposium, he is Co-Director of PennSound—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon, Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word.\n\nDARREN WERSHLER (Concordia U)\n\n“A Political Economy of Audio Collections, or, The Politics of Audiotextual Inheritance”\n\nThis talk will both explore the kinds of questions scholars and students might ask of literary audio collections, and work towards theorizing the ideological contexts that inform the formulation of such questions in the first place. Why have literary audio collections emerged as important materials for research and study? How are decisions about which collections will be digitized and preserved made? What are the generational politics that have arisen as a result of the ubiquity of poet’s archives? How do questions about humanities audio collections challenge some of the most basic methodologies that have informed literary studies for over a century? These are some of the questions that will be considered in this presentation with the aim of helping to frame discussion for the day’s work on spoken word collections and methodological approaches.\n\nDarren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2) and a co-editor of Amodern. He conducts most of his research through AMPLab: between media & literature, and with the Technoculture, Art and Games group (TAG), an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on game studies, design, digital culture and interactive art. Darren is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy. With Jason Camlot he co-organized the “Approaching the Poetry Series” conference in 2013 and co-authored “Theses on Discerning The Reading Series”, published in Amodern 4 (2015) and has been a Co-Applicant through Camlot’s development of the spokenweb project. His expertise in Contemporary Poetics, Media history and Theory, Digital Humanities, and in questions of digital economy, positions him as an ideal interlocutor with Al Filreis on core questions surrounding the use of humanities audio collections for research.\n\nBILL KENNEDY (Intelligent Machines)\n\n“New Contexts for Old Voices: Rethinking the Literary Archive”\n\nBill Kennedy is the author of two books of poetry (with Darren Wershler and a team of trusty web robots), Apostrophe (ECW, 2006) and Update (Snare, 2010). A longtime literary organizer, Bill ran the Café May Reading Series in Toronto (with Michael Holmes) in the early 90s, and the Lexiconjury Reading Series (with Angela Rawlings) a decade later. He was also a ten-year Artistic Director of The Scream, an alternative literary festival in Toronto that ended its run in 2011. He has edited and designed several award-winning books poetry through Coach House Books. He currently curates the official bpNichol archive (bpnichol.ca, with Gregory Betts).\n\nIn real life, he is the Development Director of Intelligent Machines, a digital consultancy and development agency that works mainly in the arts, education and publishing sectors. He specializes in the theoretical, bureaucratic, technical and design issues that come with building online arts archives. He was the director of the first Artmob team, a York University research project focusing on intellectual property issues in arts archivism. He is currently working on several projects with the University of Berkeley in partnership with the Agile Humanities Agency. He is unreasonably giddy at the possibility of working on an archive of twenty years of Gilles Deleuze’s lectures, newly transcribed from extant audio tapes and translated into English, pending the vicissitudes of funding and the caprice of an uncaring universe.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10037","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 1 The Uses of Spoken Audio Collections in Research and Creation: New Literary Methods Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 2 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Deanna Fong","Tony Power"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Deanna Fong","Tony Power"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Tony Power\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"day1_session3.wav\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:40:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,738,286,080 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"day1_session3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-02\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549832597504,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["DEANNA FONG (Simon Fraser U)\n\n“Itinerant Audio-biography: Digitizing, Editing and Managing the Roy Kiyooka Digital Audio Archive”\n\nThis presentation will detail my activities digitizing, developing, annotating, and managing the audio archive of Canadian poet, Roy Kiyooka. Kiyooka’s archival fonds at Simon Fraser University contains over 400 analog audio recordings inscribed on a variety of media: cassettes, mini-cassettes, and reel-to-reels. Recorded between 1963 and 1988, a burgeoning period of literary and artistic production, the tapes record the voices of many of Vancouver’s avant-garde figures, such as Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Carole Itter, Al Neil, George Bowering, Alvin Balkin, and Gerry Gilbert. The focus of my presentation will be on the archive’s non-traditional audio genres, which include conversation, performance, ambient sound, and field recordings. I will outline the material, organizational and ethical challenges that these genres pose, attending to questions of navigation, access, privacy and consent.\n\nDeanna Fong is a poet and PhD student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of performance, audio archives, literary communities and intellectual property. She is a member of the federally funded SpokenWeb team, who have developed a web-based archive of digitized audio recordings for literary study. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the Fred Wah Archive, and is currently developing the digital audio archive of Canadian artist and poet Roy Kiyooka.\n\nTONY POWER (Simon Fraser U)\n\n“Literary Audio in SFU Library’s Contemporary Literature Collection”\n\nThe Contemporary Literature Collection in SFU Library’s Special Collections & Rare Books Division is a large, focused, mature collection of 20th & 21st C. avant-garde/’innovative’ poetry in English.  Dating from the founding of the university in 1965, it is comprised primarily of published and archival materials but also includes many audio recordings.  In this talk the collection’s curator will provide some background on the CLC as a whole, its history and definition and the collection policy that informs its contents.  With this as context, he will then describe the audio component of the collection – its size and content, the present state of its digitization, as well as the significance of its considerable overlap (as far as writers recorded) with the Sir George Williams poetry series recordings held in the Special Collections at Concordia University in Montreal.  This presentation will be coordinated with other participants from SFU, and in particular with Deanna Fong’s presentation on the audio holdings of a single author (Roy Kiyooka) held within the Contemporary Literature Collection.  \n\nTony Power is a special collections librarian (M.L.S.) at SFU Library.  Since 2000 he has been curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection. The CLC is a large, focused collection of 20th & 21st C. avant-garde/’innovative’ poetry in English. It is comprised primarily of published and archival materials but also includes many audio recordings\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways.\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10038","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 2 Digital Preservation: Digitization, Cataloging, Storage, and Access Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 3 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Jared Wiercinski","Tomasz Neugebauer","Tim Walsh"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Jared Wiercinski","Tomasz Neugebauer","Tim Walsh"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Jared Wiercinski\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/40170000303071901556\",\"name\":\"Tomasz Neugebauer\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Tim Walsh\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102517.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"02:06:19\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"303,144,750 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102517\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-03\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549832597505,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["TOMASZ NEUGEBAUER (Concordia U)\n\n“Selecting an access and digital preservation platform for humanities research in audio and video format: Avalon & Archivematica”\n\nConcordia University Library selected the combination of Avalon Media System and Archivematica as the access and digital preservation platform for revealing aggregation of a vast and diverse range of audio and video recordings relevant to humanities research. Avalon needs to be combined with software designed specifically for digital preservation tasks that ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility a wide range of media over the very long term. In this presentation (co-delivered by Neugebauer and Wiercinski) we discuss the process of selecting an access and preservation platform and explain which aspects and features of Avalon facilitate the use of humanities audio and video content for unique curation, design and pedagogical-oriented projects.\n\nTomasz Neugebauer is the Digital Projects & Systems Development Librarian at Concordia University, where he participates in the design, development and implementation of various library applications, including Spectrum Research Repository. His multidisciplinary research experience is focused on open digital repositories, information visualization, and open source software development. He has published in various scholarly and professional journals, including: PLoS One, Information Technology and Libraries, International Journal on Digital Libraries, International Journal of Digital Curation, Art Libraries Journal, Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Systems and Services: International digital library perspectives, and The Indexer. He was the primary investigator on the “Developing an Open Access Digital Repository for Fine Arts Research in Canada” grant (SSHRC, 2013) and an e-Artexte Researcher in Residence, instrumental in the launch of e-Artexte, Artexte’s library catalogue and digital repository for contemporary Canadian art publications.\n\nTIM WALSH (Canadian Centre for Architecture)\n\n“Selecting an Access and Digital Preservation Platform for Humanities Research in Audio and Video Format: Avalon & Archivematica”\n\nTim Walsh is the Digital Archivist at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), a research museum in Montréal dedicated to the notion that architecture is a public concern. Among his other tasks at CCA, Tim develops and manages workflows and software tools for processing born-digital archives, oversees development and use of CCA’s Archivematica-based digital preservation repository, and facilitates end user access of digital archives in the Study Room. He holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a BA in English from the University of Florida.\n\nJARED WIERCINSKI (Concordia U)\n\n“Selecting an access and digital preservation platform for humanities research in audio and video format: Avalon & Archivematica”\n\nConcordia University Library selected the combination of Avalon Media System and Archivematica as the access and digital preservation platform for revealing aggregation of a vast and diverse range of audio and video recordings relevant to humanities research. Avalon needs to be combined with software designed specifically for digital preservation tasks that ensure the enduring usability, authenticity, discoverability and accessibility a wide range of media over the very long term. In this presentation to be presented by Wiercinski and Neugebauer, we discuss the process of selecting an access and preservation platform and explain which aspects and features of Avalon facilitate the use of humanities audio and video content for unique curation, design and pedagogical-oriented projects.\n\nJared Wiercinski works as Interim Associate University Librarian (Research & Graduate Studies) at Concordia University where he is responsible for the development and coordination of the library’s user services and projects in support of research and graduate studies. As liaison librarian for the Departments of Music and Contemporary Dance, he supports students and faculty through collection development and research assistance. His research contributions, co-authored with Annie Murray, include publications and conference paper presentations on methodological and multimodal cognitive concerns surrounding the design of web-based sound archives. He was a co-applicant on the “SpokenWeb: Developing a Comprehensive Web-Based Digital Spoken Word Archive for Literary Research” grant (SSHRC, 2012) and a collaborator on the “The Spoken Web 2.0: Conceptualizing and Prototyping a Comprehensive Web-based Digital Spoken-Word Interface for Literary Research” grant (SSHRC, 2010).\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10039","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 4 Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 5 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Catherine Cormier-Larose","Kevin Austin"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Catherine Cormier-Larose","Kevin Austin"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/1425168453529466300006\",\"name\":\"Catherine Cormier-Larose\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kevin Austin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102523.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:58:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"283,985,502 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102523\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-05\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549833646080,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["KEVIN AUSTIN (Concordia U)\n\n“Ear Training in Electroacoustics”\n\nThis talk will introduce a variety of issues surrounding ‘ear-training’, or rather, refined hearing, in the domain of electroacoustics (referring to both acoustical engineering and, with examples, electroacoustic music). The starting premise of this talk is that hearing / listening, is all perception. The presentation will frame core questions surrounding ‘how’ auditory perception functions, and therefore considerations of the applicability of different kinds of tools to different data sets. This will include matters of sonic identity and character, and sonic transformation with understanding more deeply various models applicable to pattern identification for manual and automated sound searches.  The talk will also include a brief exploration of how symbolic notation / representation may be approached to develop concepts for multi-dimensional hearing, the fundamental proposition being that ‘how’ we hear will be at the educational core of auditory perception. The refinement of hearing increases the depth of perception, a skill applicable across disciplines, from music to text-sound composition, to spoken literature.\n\nKevin Austin, Professor of Music at Concordia University, is a Montreal-based composer, educator, arts animator and electroacoustics archivist. A specialist in electroacoustics – all areas, composition, theory [electroacoustics and music], ear-training and music history. For 25 years he was the Coordinator of the Concordia Electroacoustic Studies area at Concordia University. He was a Charter and Founding Member of the CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), and the director of The Concordia Archival Project (CAP). This important initiative, funded by Heritage Canada through Canadian Culture Online, using the Concordia Tape Collection – over 3,000 pieces, has produced the largest single primary resource for the history of electroacoustics in Canada available anywhere in the world.\n\nCATHERINE CORMIER-LAROSE (Poetry In Voice)\n\n“Poetry In Voice: Teaching Poetry With Audio”\n\nThe Poetry In Voice project is a recitation contest for Canadian high schools. Its aim is to encourage young readers and students to become interested and involved in an appreciation of poetry through an engagement in the live, spoken performance of literary works. The project archives every one of its organized live readings, as well as selections from professional poets, as a means of providing modelling materials for its student users. Recordings of the recitations are essential to the project as they stand documentary examples for the students who use the PIV website. 875 Canadian high schools were involved in the PIV project last year; 50 000 students recited a poem at school level as a result of this involvement, and over a half a million people visited the PIV site. This presentation will report on the approach to live and online pedagogy through poetry performance that this project has pursued.\n\nCatherine Cormier-Larose is the Quebec French-language director of the Poetry in Voice project which organizes recitation competitions and online teaching tools to encourage poetry performance and appreciation in high schools across Canada. As the longstanding artist director of Les Productions ARREUH which organizes an annual festival, gala and numerous events of literary performance, she is deeply involved in the development of public reading as an important facet of community culture.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10040","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Keynotes, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Steve McLaughlin","Tanya Clement"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Steve McLaughlin","Tanya Clement"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Steve McLaughlin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/335161696233716120004\",\"name\":\"Tanya Clement\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102519.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:57:27\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"281,871,672 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102519\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-04\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549833646081,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["TANYA CLEMENT (U Texas at Austin)\n\n“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”\n\nCo-Presented with Steve McLaughlin.  Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing large, messy sound archives. In response to this lack, the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project is developing a research environment that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for describing unprocessed spoken-word collections of keen interest to humanists. This paper describes how we have developed, as a result of HiPSTAS, a machine learning system called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). I describe a use case for finding moments of applause in the PennSound collection, which includes approximately 36,000 files comprising 6,200 hours of poetry performances and related materials. We conclude with a brief discussion about our preliminary results and some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about unprocessed spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.\n\nClement’s research centers on infrastructure information impacting academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools/resources in the digital humanities. Projects include High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship, “Improving Access to Time-Based Media through Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning” project. Important articles include: “Measured Applause: Toward a Cultural Analysis of Audio Collections.” Cultural Analytics 1; “A Rationale of Audio Text.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10; “The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory.” Information & Culture 49; and, “Distant Listening: On Data Visualisations and Noise in the Digital Humanities.” Text Tools for the Arts. Digital Studies 3.\n\nSTEVE McLAUGHLIN (U Texas at Austin)\n\n“High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship”\n\nCo-Presented with Tanya Clement.  Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing large, messy sound archives. In response to this lack, the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project is developing a research environment that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for describing unprocessed spoken-word collections of keen interest to humanists. This paper describes how we have developed, as a result of HiPSTAS, a machine learning system called ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). I describe a use case for finding moments of applause in the PennSound collection, which includes approximately 36,000 files comprising 6,200 hours of poetry performances and related materials. We conclude with a brief discussion about our preliminary results and some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about unprocessed spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10041","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Ian Ferrier","Louis Rastelli"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Ian Ferrier","Louis Rastelli"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/91437046\",\"name\":\"Ian Ferrier\",\"dates\":\"1954-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106193035\",\"name\":\"Louis Rastelli \",\"dates\":\"1969-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102521.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:51:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"267,929,600 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102521\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-04\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549833646082,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["IAN FERRIER (Wired on Words)\n\n“The Wired on Words Analogue Audio Collection”\n\nAfter curating a spoken word poetry series for over fifteen years, and recording each and every reading and performance over that period, what to we do with the boxes of cassette tapes, mini discs, DAT tapes, and digital audio files on USB that comprise the the collection of audio that documents the events of the series? Ian Ferrier will discuss the nature and significance of the documentation of the Wired on Words reading series that he has curated since 2000, and present his organizations collection as a case study for considering the different kinds of digital development one might take in rendering such a historical series accessible and usable by researchers, artists and the wider public.\n\nIan Ferrier is a pioneer in Canada’s spoken word poetry scene. A musician and composer as well as a poet, he currently tours Canada, the States and Europe in solo performance and with the spoken word/music/dance company For Body and Light. He is a founder of the spoken word and music label Wired on Words, curator and host of Montreal’s monthly Words & Music Show which has been presenting poets monthly since 2000, and director of the annual Mile End Poets Festival which started in 2009. essays have appeared in Journal of the Americas and Canadian Theatre Review as well as in the online Canadian Review of Literature in Performance (LITLIVE.CA), a journal he co-founded in 2009. He has taught at the Banff Centre and is a past-president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. In 2011 he was the recipient of what is now the League of Canadian Poets’ Golden Beret Award for outstanding contributions to spoken word.\n\nLOUIS RASTELLI (Archive Montreal)\n\n“The Audio Materials of Archive Montreal”\n\nThis contribution will present the audio collection held by the non-profit community organization Archive Montreal, which consists of thousands of hours of audio materials relevant to community cultural activities in Montreal from the 1950s to the present in a wide range of formats ranging from wire recordings, reel tape, cassettes, acetates, vinyl, DAT tapes, minidiscs, CDs, etc. How should such a collection be catalogued, digitized and presented online for use in research and community activities? What audiences may such a community-developed collection serve, and how might this collection be enhanced through collaborative efforts around digital preservation platforms and collection aggregation with other kinds of institutions, for example, universities? These are the questions we will seek to explore in bringing forward the ARCMTL materials as a case study for consideration at The Literary Audio Symposium.\n\nLouis Rastelli is the founding director of Archive Montreal (ARCMTL), a non-profit community archive centre which serves as a valuable reference for researchers and provides material for use in exhibits and projects touching on Montreal culture and history. Archive Montreal’s preservation activities involve the ongoing acquisition of independently produced local cultural artifacts and publications in multiple formats. Deeply involved in numerous community outreach activities, including the distroboto art dissemination programme, Expozine: Montreal’s largest annual small press fair, and a weekly Archive Montreal radio show, on which audio content from the archive is played, ARCMTL’s participation will bring extensive experience in the development of a community-focused archive and will contribute not only to discussion of the digital development of ARCMTL’s holdings, but to questions of audience and use of the kinds of archival materials.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10042","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 3 Digital Audio Tools: Sound Searching and Visualization Panel I, The Literary Audio Symposium, 4 December 2016 "],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Patrick Feaster","Steven High"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Patrick Feaster","Steven High"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/21877397\",\"name\":\"Patrick Feaster \",\"dates\":\"1971-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/48918685\",\"name\":\"Steven High\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102520.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:50:34\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"265,375,868 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102520\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-04\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549834694656,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["PATRICK FEASTER (University of Indiana, Bloomington)\n\n“Putting Existing Tools to Unanticipated Purposes in Audio Digitization”\n\nAs we go about surveying software applications that are available to us for cultivating our heritage of literary audio in various ways, it’s worth bearing in mind that—with a little creative thinking—we can sometimes put existing tools to uses that differ significantly from their intended ones.\n\nI’ll first illustrate this point in connection with a couple pieces of software recently developed for Indiana University: MediaRIVERS /MediaSCORE, designed to quantify the value and “degralescence” risk of audiovisual collections, and a Physical Object Database designed to track media objects passing through our digital preservation workflow. We created these tools to answer some specific needs which existing software didn’t seem capable of satisfying, but in both cases we’ve ended up putting them to unanticipated uses as our circumstances have evolved—often successfully, but with limitations, as I’ll explain through a brief case study of Orson Welles broadcast recordings held by our Lilly Library.\n\nI’ll then delve into some even more radical cases of repurposing. For the past nine years, I’ve participated in efforts to educe (i.e., “play” or “play back”) older representations of sound on paper, including phonautograms of dramatic oratory recorded by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s and paper prints made from gramophone discs of poetry recited by inventor Emile Berliner in the 1880s. This work has been carried out primarily with software designed for other spheres of application, such as ImageToSound and AudioPaint, both intended to support experimental sound art. I’ll describe the strategies and challenges involved in applying these programs meaningfully to historical inscriptions, as well as some striking results achieved to date by doing so. However, our need to rely on “repurposed” software in this work is now receding. By way of conclusion, I’ll introduce Picture Kymophone, a new program I’ve written specifically for playing phonautograms and other similar sources, and outline some remaining desiderata for the future.\n\nPatrick Feaster received his doctorate in folklore and ethnomusicology in 2007 from Indiana University Bloomington, where he is now Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative. A three-time Grammy nominee, co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and immediate past president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he has been actively involved in locating, making audible, and contextualizing many of the world’s oldest sound recordings.\n\nSTEVEN HIGH (Concordia U)\n\n“Beyond the Juicy Quotes Syndrome: Building Digital Tools and Platforms in Partnership with Source Communities”\n\nIf the “archival turn” has taught us anything, it is that archives are not neutral sites of storage and preservation. Extractive approaches to data-collection and analysis risk ignoring the ways in which “the archive itself orders the material within its realm, and the possibilities of knowledge production” (Geiger et al, 2010). We must therefore go beyond what Mike Savage calls the “juicy quotes syndrome,” to engage with the project archive as an object of study and to re-imagine how we design and build them. Building on past work as part of Montreal Life Stories, which recorded the life stories of 500 Montrealers displaced by mass violence, we recently embarked on a new project that will result in the Living Archive of Rwandan Exiles and Genocide Survivors. This online archive will enable researchers and community members to follow threads, identify patterns, track changes, map, and listen in new ways to more than 90 hours of video recorded interviews. We intend to do this in partnership with survivors, forging a methodology around participatory database-building where the coding, access conditions and research infrastructure itself serve both university-based researchers and community needs. A toolkit of inter-operable and freely available open source tools is also being developed, and will likewise be developed in collaboration with the source community.\n\nSteven High is the co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and has spent a number of years on the development of digital tools that will facilitate the analysis of recorded oral history interviews at varying scales. He is also examining the potential of collaboratively produced “living archives” where researchers work closely with ‘source communities.’ He was a member of the Spokenweb research team and contributed to the special issue of Amodern on oral literature.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10043","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 2 Digital Preservation: Digitization, Cataloging, Storage, and Access Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 3 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Lee Hannigan","Michael O’Driscoll","Cecily Devereux"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Lee Hannigan","Michael O’Driscoll","Cecily Devereux"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lee Hannigan\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31722451\",\"name\":\"Cecily Devereux\",\"dates\":\"1963-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102518.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:48:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"260,680,098 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102518\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-03\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549983592448,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["LEE HANNIGAN (U Alberta)\n\n“Not Listening: Preliminary Initiatives for Inventorying and Cataloguing Literary Audio Corpora”\n\nThis presentation will identify the core questions one must ask upon preliminary examination of an audio collection. The University of Alberta (UA) has hosted and recorded regular reading events since the mid-1960s and holds a collection of recorded poetry readings consisting of over 100 media objects (reel-to-reel, cassette tape and digital formats) containing at least as many hours of audio. This collection, in the process of being inventoried, seems to hold a coherent set of recordings of the UA Writer-in-Residence Program (WiR) that has run uninterrupted for forty years, a series of recorded readings held during the “Poet & Critic Conference” of 1969, and an extensive set of reel-to-reel recordings that hold local readings by poets from across North America. The core research questions to be explored pertain to fundamental issues in cataloguing, organization and prioritization of the materials, in relation to questions of available resources for digitization and development and the identification of potential audiences for segments of the collection.\n\nPhD candidate Hannigan earned his MA from Concordia University in 2015, where he worked for two years as a research assistant with the SpokenWeb project. His Master’s Major Research Project, titled “The Critical Archive: A textual analysis of the SpokenWeb project,” considered the possibility of studying the literary reading series as a coherent object. Hannigan’s first academic publication (Al Flamenco and Aurelio Meza), titled “Reading Series Matter: Performing the SpokenWeb Project,” will appear in Making Humanities Matter, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). His Doctoral dissertation will be the first material, theoretical, and sociopolitical analysis of the characteristics of the concept of removal in late-20th and 21st-century American poetry. His presentation on the University of Alberta audio holdings will provide important case study material for the symposium, allowing him to frame core questions that are at the centre of his Doctoral research.\n\nMICHAEL O’DRISCOLL (U Alberta)\n\n“Audiographic Coding, or, Whose Sound is this Anyway?”\n\nProceeding from both Jacques Derrida’s insight the “archivization produces as much as it records the event” and Jerome McGann’s case for “bibliographic coding,” this presentation will consider the status of the digital artifact that is the remediated spokenword object, with particular attention to the “audiographic coding” of the digital file. How does technology listen? And how, in the UAlberta collection, will that listening condition the work of researchers and students of literary performance? SpokenWest will digitize and make publicly available the rich archive of recorded creative readings held at UAlberta since 1969, featuring readings by many authors of international prominence. This panel will introduce the UAlberta collection, which includes four priority fonds, including fifty-six reel to reel recordings produced 1969-82 and twenty-five cassette recordings dated 1973-86, as well as recordings conducted at several major conferences (1969, 1975, 1978) that highlight presentations by major literary figures.\n\nO’Driscoll is co-lead in the development and implementation of a digitized archive of five decades of creative readings at the University of Alberta, and the collaborative design of portable research methodologies and pedagogical strategies focused on the material production, circulation, reception, and analysis of oral literary performance. His disciplinary expertise in the areas of archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies are relevant to the successful outcome of this project. He has extensive experience in the design and execution of major collaborative research projects. As former Associate Dean Research, he oversaw the activities of the University of Alberta’s Arts Resource Centre, a team of nine computing and multimedia experts focused on the support of social science and humanities researchers.\n\nCECILY DEVEREUX (U Alberta)\n\n“SpokenWest: Creative Reading Recordings at UAlberta, 1969-1986”\n\nFrom the late 1960s to the 1990s, the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta developed and maintained a collection of cassette recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work. These materials were part of a larger collection of audio cassettes used primarily for teaching. Materially ephemeral and in some cases absolutely unique, the cassettes represent not only an important record from the department that houses the longest-running Writer in Residence program in Canada, they are also part of a much larger national archive of creative communities in the\n\npost-Centennial era in Canada. They thus serve at this time as a compelling case study of non-professional, intermittent, institutionally housed recordings of late twentieth-century author readings in Canada–and, crucially, of the lives of the media on which they have been reproduced. This paper considers the nature and the implications of anachronistic and disintegrating media for the teaching and study of late twentieth-century literary culture in Canada, and makes a case for the importance of digital preservation for public access to cultural histories.\n\nCecily Devereux is Chair of the Research Board of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de Littérature Canadienne at the University of Alberta. She has been working with student research assistants and colleagues in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta for more than a decade to catalogue, safely store, and move toward the preservation and digitization of the department’s collection of cassette and reel-to-reel recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10044","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 4 Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy Keynote, The Literary Audio Symposium, 5 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Jentery Sayers"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Jentery Sayers"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/42150083796914941563\",\"name\":\"Jentery Sayers\",\"dates\":\"1978-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102522.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:45:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"253,174,596 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102522\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-05\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549985689600,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["JENTERY SAYERS (U Victoria)\n\n“Prototyping Impressions of Sound: Pedagogy across the Lab and Gallery”\n\nWhile many digital methodologies rely on tools for recording, analyzing, and visualizing sound, they may also prompt us to “remake” or prototype historical audio. Drawing on research conducted across a humanities lab and art gallery at the University of Victoria, this talk foregrounds the pedagogical affordances of such remaking. It focuses on what may have been the first magnetic recording, conducted in Denmark in 1898 during various experiments with volatile impressions on piano wire. Today, no audio from these experiments exists, and all visual evidence of them is speculative at best. However, enough detail remains to re-perform them with new technologies in the present moment. As a form of laboratory research, prototyping early audio becomes an opportunity to learn about its material composition as well as the embodied contexts of its reproduction. Installing these prototypes in a gallery setting encourages people to test them and also attend to how differences emerge across recordings. As a collaboration involving the arts and humanities, this prototyping process ultimately privileges a historical approach to sound that resists empiricism via screen-based tools and instead fosters a shared space for contingencies to speak.\n\nJentery Sayers bring expertise in digital pedagogy that involves teaching with sound in humanities contexts. He is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria. His sound studies publications include, “Making the Perfect Record: From Inscription to Impression in Early Magnetic Recording” (American Literature 85.4) and “An Archaeology of Edison’s Metal Box” (Victorian Review 38.2). He is the editor of two forthcoming collections, Making Humanities Matter (U. of Minnesota Press, Debates in the Digital Humanities series) and the Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (Routledge). He is also the co-editor of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (Modern Language Association, with Davis, Gold, and Harris). At the University of Victoria, he teaches courses in media studies, digital studies, critical theory, and U.S. fiction after 1940.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10045","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 4 Teaching with Sound: Digital Audio Pedagogy Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 5 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Annie Murray","Jason Wiens","Jordan Bolay"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Annie Murray","Jason Wiens","Jordan Bolay"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106059085\",\"name\":\"Jason Wiens \",\"dates\":\"1973-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/56158427835306060257\",\"name\":\"Jordan Bolay\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102524.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:57:08\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"137,104,196 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102524\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-05\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549986738176,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["ANNIE MURRAY (U Calgary)\n\n“Overcoming institutional barriers to engagement with sound and media archives”\n\nIn this presentation, Murray will address some of the barriers that prevent libraries and archives from developing accessible media archives, and will discuss the path that the University of Calgary is taking to overcome them. She will describe a large-scale audio digitization project currently underway, and how it can benefit the literary recordings in our care. She will outline the themes of fundraising, inter-departmental cooperation, relationship building, and risk taking as keystones in Calgary’s approach to developing capacity in the preservation of media-rich archives, with the aim of framing discussion around the prevalence of barriers and the ways around them for large-scale audio digitization projects.\n\nAndrea (Annie) Murray is Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at the University of Calgary. She oversees significant archival and rare book holdings, particularly in the field of Canadian cultural production. As a Co-Applicant on the Spokenweb project (Camlot, PI), she contributed to the development of the first Spokenweb interface, has co-presented project findings at the conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, and has co-authored articles that appeared in First Monday and Digital Humanities Quarterly, with Jared Wiercinski from Concordia University.\n\nJASON WIENS (U Calgary)\n\n“Incorporating Archival Audio Practices in Teaching”\n\nBuilding upon Wiens’ recent course design and implementation, this presentation asks how we might best ask students to examine archival audio sources alongside published literary texts, and then to engage in a digitization project of selections from the archival fonds of literary recordings held in the University of Calgary collections. With the aim of bringing to the classroom an awareness of the material conditions under which literature is produced, my discussion will consider not only how students might integrate archival records in literary analysis but contribute to the archive by institutional digitization projects.\n\nWiens is a Tenure-Track Instructor in English at U Calgary with a research and teaching focus in Canadian literature, archives, pedagogy and contemporary poetry. He has developed courses in which students digitize and curate materials from Canadian writers archives. Wiens’ recent work extends this curricular development to include archival audio holdings, with the aim of exploring their pedagogical applications.\n\nJORDAN BOLAY (U Calgary)\n\n“Re-teaching reading and listening through experimental poetry and audio archives”\n\n“How do you grow a poet?” Robert Kroetsch famously asks in his long poem Seed Catalogue. The second half of the 20th century saw many new poets and types of poetry growing in Canada. Of particular interest to scholars (and of particular difficulty for students) are the formally experimental poets of the post-structural movement, including Earle Birney, bp nicol, and occasional works by Kroetsch (i.e. The Ledger). This paper will examine how audio recordings of these poets’ work, housed in the University of Calgary’s Special Collections Archive, can give direction to students’ readings but also destabilise the notion of singular linear ways of reading or hearing a text. My hope is that this research will demonstrate both the importance of oral readings in the classroom and of audio recordings in the archive.\n\nJordan Bolay is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the intersection of contemporary Canadian poetics, archives and methodologies of the archeology of discourse and knowledge. He is presently focusing on the writing of Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch and of the Canadian West in a broader sense. His participation in The Literary Audio Symposium will complement his research interests and allow him to apply his knowledge of Kroetsch to a consideration of the possibilities for research and teaching of the Kroetsch audio recordings in the University of Calgary collections.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10047","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Deep Curation II, 14 February 2019"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/deep-curation-2/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Klara du Plessis","Deanna Fong","Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Klara du Plessis","Deanna Fong","Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2019-02-14 Deep Curation II February 14, 2019.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:52:23\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"940,869,124 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"2019-02-14 Deep Curation II February 14, 2019\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-02-14\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Join us for a Deep Curation poetry reading, an experimental approach to literary event organization, the curator selecting the works to be read, as well as the thematic arc of the works' placement and progression in relation to one another.\nThis reading will synthesize poetry and scholarship by members of the SpokenWeb team to form a vibrant, challenging, and cross-genre listening experience. SpokenWeb is a research initiative based at Concordia University's English Department.\n\nReaders: Jason Camlot, Klara du Plessis, Deanna Fong, Katherine McLeod\nCurator: Klara du Plessis"],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"On \\\"amplab storage 2\\\"\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549986738177,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10048","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Pussy Listening: Building an Activist Listening Practice, Literary Listening, 13 November 2024"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/institutes/#/spokenweb-futures-new-projects-collections-methods-collaborations"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Nina Sun Eidsheim"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Nina Sun Eidsheim"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/316557652\",\"name\":\"Nina Sun Eidsheim\",\"dates\":\"1975-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"4SPHDR__2411131454_0034.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"02:00:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,432,829,304 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"4SPHDR__2411131454_0034\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-11-13\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["Nina Sun Eidsheim will offer a workshop entitled “Pussy Listening” as part of Jason Camlot’s new Literary Listening series. 4th Space, Concordia University, Mezzanine, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West. 3pm – 5 pm. Description: “Pussy Listening: Building an Activist Listening Practice” – To be wherever we are in our lives and work now, a large portion of our lives to this point must have been (inadvertently) dedicated to listening correctly and to avoid listening “incorrectly.” This kind of relationship to listening comes from a place of submission and forwards the agenda of those in power. In contrast, “pussy listening” is a life-making and meaning-making action. I assume everybody draws on the magic of pussy listening daily, however, to protect our own safety, we may not don’t recognize it as such. This participatory session is dedicated to recognizing pussy listening."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786752,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10049","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Sounding New Sonic Approaches, 12 February 2024"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/sounding-new-sonic-approaches/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Annie Murray","Klara du Plessis","Mathieu Aubin","Julia Polyck-O’Neill","Jason Wiens","Kelly Baron","Nina Sun Eidsheim","Juliette Bellocq","Daniel Martin","Kristen Smith","Gascia Ouzounian","Ellen Waterman","Katharina Fürholzer","Kristin Moriah","Mara Mills","Andy Slater"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Annie Murray","Klara du Plessis","Mathieu Aubin","Julia Polyck-O’Neill","Jason Wiens","Kelly Baron","Nina Sun Eidsheim","Juliette Bellocq","Daniel Martin","Kristen Smith","Gascia Ouzounian","Ellen Waterman","Katharina Fürholzer","Kristin Moriah","Mara Mills","Andy Slater"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Mathieu Aubin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/43152682594823312099\",\"name\":\"Julia Polyck-O’Neill\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106059085\",\"name\":\"Jason Wiens\",\"dates\":\"1973-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kelly Baron\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/316557652\",\"name\":\"Nina Sun Eidsheim\",\"dates\":\"1975-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Juliette Bellocq\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Daniel Martin\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristen Smith\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/15149233544176512036\",\"name\":\"Gascia Ouzounian\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106069023\",\"name\":\"Ellen Waterman\",\"dates\":\"1963-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/244144647692026868411\",\"name\":\"Katharina Fürholzer\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/305268048\",\"name\":\"Kristin Moriah\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/1340148523891920970006\",\"name\":\"Mara Mills\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Andy Slater\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"4SPHDR__2402121559_0001.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:03:54\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"19,485,292,484 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"4SPHDR__2402121559_0001\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-02-12\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["In May 2023 a triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) was published on the topic of “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” Edited by Concordia’s Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, the issue, designed to explore the ways in which sound, literature, and critical methodologies intersect, included thirteen scholarly articles, and an interdisciplinary forum on the place of listening as a methodology in a wide range of scholarly and artistic fields. The issue is substantial in its contributions to imagining new ways of combining literary studies and sound studies, and it warrants a public celebration.\n\nAs the editors considered what kind of “launch” would be best suited to this issue, they felt it should build on the printed scholarship, but also take it further – respond to it, sound it, and perform it. What is the sound of “New Sonic Approaches”? What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices? This event will enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor has been invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances will unfold in sequence as a long collaborative work that speaks to questions of literary expression, performance, sounding, and listening.\n\nJoin us for the unfolding of this performance, a live recording session of a future scholarly soundwork, to listen, and at times, to add to the sounds of the event as it unfolds."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786753,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10050","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Eight Voices: Finalists for the First QWF Spoken Word Prize, 4 November 2022"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/eight-voices-finalists-for-the-first-qwf-spoken-word-prize/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Caitlin Murphy","Debbie Braide","Erín Moure","Johanne Pelletier","Liana Cusmano","Lucia De Luca","Raïssa Simone","Roen “Blu’Rva” Higgins"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Caitlin Murphy","Debbie Braide","Erín Moure","Johanne Pelletier","Liana Cusmano","Lucia De Luca","Raïssa Simone","Roen “Blu’Rva” Higgins"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Caitlin Murphy \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Debbie Braide\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Erín Moure\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Johanne Pelletier\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Liana Cusmano\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lucia De Luca\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Raïssa Simone\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Roen “Blu’Rva” Higgins\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"221104-1254_8Voices.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:03:18\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"9,550,916,668 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"221104-1254_8Voices\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-11-04\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["In an exciting world premiere, the eight finalists for the inaugural Quebec Writers’ Federation Spoken Word Prize will offer short performances showcasing their talents. The prize is open to all forms of spoken word performance, from storytelling to sound poetry, hip hop, and dub. Presented by the Quebec Writers’ Federation and Concordia’s SpokenWeb project, the event will be hosted by poet and SpokenWeb director Jason Camlot. For more information on the performers, see the finalist list below.\n\nIn accordance with public health guidelines, mask wearing is optional, though strongly encouraged. For those that cannot attend in person, the event will be livestreamed on the 4th Space Youtube channel. The 4th Space is fully accessible from the Maisonneuve entrance, with an elevator located at metro level for those travelling underground.\n\nCaitlin Murphy is a writer, director, and dramaturg. She has performed in one-woman shows, stand-up and sketch comedy, and a web-series she created called Mothers Try. Caitlin has also written and directed plays and short films and recently launched a digital collection of her pandemic-related art, Candy for Covid.\n\nDebbie Braide is an energy and development specialist, spoken word poet, World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and British Chevening alumna. An Abuja Literary Society Poetry Slam Champion, she has performed for such organizations as the United States Embassy and VSO International. She is committed to sustainable development and gender equity.\n\nErín Moure is a poet and poetry translator. Her most recent work includes Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz, 2021) and her own chapbooks Retooling for a Figurative Life (Vallum, 2021) and Arborescence (Columba, 2022). Her translation of Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life(Book*hug, 2020) won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for translation.\n\nJohanne Pelletier is a storyteller with work featured in Canada and the US. She is the winner of the GRIT 99-Second Story Grand Slam, the producer of Good Gyn-Bad Gyn: Women’s Health Stories, and an amateur boxing judge. She teaches storytelling to scientists and start-ups.\n\nLiana Cusmano (Luca/BiCurious George) is a writer, poet, spoken word artist, and filmmaker. They were the 2018 and 2019 Montreal Slam Champion and runner up in the 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship. Their first novel, Catch and Release (2022), was published by Guernica Editions.\n\nLucia De Luca is an English teacher and spoken word poet. She was a finalist at the 2021 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam and recently participated in Brickyard Spoken Word’s mentorship program. As an organizer, she brought McGill University its first slam and, in the summer of 2022, oversaw the Grove Campus Poetry Show.\n\nRaïssa Simone is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). She has competed at numerous national poetry slams and been invited to perform at multiple spoken word shows, including the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, Toronto International Poetry Slam, Hillside Festival, and When Sisters Speak.\n\nRoen “Blu’Rva” Higgins is an award-winning spoken word poet, educator, speaker, and creative evangelist. As the founder of The Elevated Creative, her mission is to elevate others through creative literacy and help them find their flow and tap into their genius zone."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786754,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10051","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, NOTA: Next on the Agenda–Writing Futures in Quebec, 4 October 2022"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/nota-next-on-the-agenda-writing-futures-in-quebec/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Rachel McCrum"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Rachel McCrum"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Rachel McCrum\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"221004-0950SW.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"06:40:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,485,623,038 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"221004-0950SW\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-10-04\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["NOTA is a conference for English-language writers, publishers, event organizers, and literary professionals to discuss the changing contexts for literature and to explore how writing careers are developed, supported, and sustained in Quebec in 2022.\n\nNOTA Program (10am – 5pm)\n\n• 9.30am: arrival and coffee\n\n• 10.00am – 10.15am: Opening remarks\n\n• 10.15am – 11.30am: Long Literary COVID: How has the pandemic changed our literary practices and communities? Speakers: SpokenWeb: Jason Camlot, Tomasz Neugebauer, Francisco Berizzbeitia; The Violet Hour Reading Series & Book Club: Chris DiRaddo; Metatron Press: Ashley Opheim; Quebec Writers Federation: Lori Schubert.\n\n• 11.30am – 12.45pm: Quebec Writers’ Federation - Have Your Say!\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #1(in person): Building a Career as a Writer (getting published, building a reputation, using an agent, etc.) Facilitator: Tahieròn:iohte Dan David (Kanienkeha:ka)\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #2 (in person): Connecting to the French Literary Community (getting books translated, collaborating, etc.) Facilitator: Julie Barlow\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #3 (online): Making a Living as a Writer (freelancing, mentoring, finding and applying for grants, understanding copyright, etc.) Facilitator: stephanie roberts\n\n◦ QWF Focus Group #4 (online): Support Services for Writers (mental health, disabled, queer & racialized writers’ issues, independent authors, etc.) Facilitator: Christie Huff\n\n• 12.45pm – 1.30pm: Lunch (suggestions for venues provided for those onsite)\n\n• 1.30pm – 1.45pm: Special Presentation, TBC\n\n• 1.45pm – 2.45pm: Making the Writing Life Sustainable. Moderated by Rachel McCrum. Speakers: Klara du Plessis, Erín Moure, and tbc.\n\n• 2.45 – 3.00pm: Coffee break\n\n• 3.00pm – 4.15pm: Challenging the Field: Black Publishing and Writing in Canada. Moderated by Firoze Manji. Speakers: H. Nigel Thomas, Kwame Scott Fraser, Dorothy Williams, and Yara El-Ghadban.\n\n• 4.15pm – 4.30pm: Presentation by Espace de la Diversité//Diversity District\n\n• 4.30pm – 5.00pm: Closing remarks"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549987786755,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10052","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, A Belly Full of Vlarf: a Poetry Book Launch by Jason Camlot and John Emil Vincent, 26 November 2021"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/a-belly-full-of-vlarf-a-poetry-book-launch-by-jason-camlot-and-john-emil-vincent/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","John Emil Vincent"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","John Emil Vincent"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/12560703\",\"name\":\"John Emil Vincent\",\"dates\":\"1969-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Author\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"contributors_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"Presenter_name":["Katherine McLeod"],"Performance_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VMlQ7xNMy6JN2li4hkMyeFkril4DAY9W\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"211126-1632.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"02:00:35\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"18,188,567,815 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"211126-1632\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-26\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["A Belly Full of Vlarf. Seriously fun readings from brand new poetry books by Concordia faculty Jason Camlot and John Emil Vincent. Hosted by Katherine McLeod.\n\nDESCRIPTION AND FORMAT:\n\nInspired by the long-format readings held at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in the 1960s, this book launch will celebrate two new titles, Jason Camlot’s Vlarf and John Emil Vincent’s Bitter in the Belly (both published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press), with substantial readings and presentations of the books by the authors. Katherine McLeod will moderate the proceedings as the poets alternate between readings of 25 minutes each (x2), allowing the audience to experience a substantial performance with commentary by the authors of these new home-grown collections. Each book creates its own gleefully strange and sadly hilarious world from a wide gamut of emotions and texts. It will be a poetry event of the fun variety.\n\nThe format will be hybrid. 25 in-person attendees, local broadcast to the streets of Concordia, and streamed to YouTube Live.\n\n\nABOUT THE BOOKS:\n\nBitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light - what there is of light, when the light is on.\n\nIn Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love. Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning.\n\n\nJason Camlot is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Animal Library, Attention All Typewriters, and What The World Said. He is professor of English and research chair in literature and sound studies at Concordia University in Montreal.\n\nJohn Emil Vincent has written several books of poetry including Excitement Tax and Ganymede’s Dog. He lives in Montreal and teaches creative writing in Concordia’s Department of English."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/1255713311\",\"citation\":\"Camlot, Jason. Vlarf. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. \"},{\"url\":\"https://search.worldcat.org/title/1262058592\",\"citation\":\"Vincent, John Emil. Bitter in the Belly. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549987786756,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10053","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, How Are We Listening, Now? A SpokenWeb Podcast Conversation, 18 June 2020"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/how-are-we-listening-now-a-spokenweb-podcast-conversation/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Internet recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Aphrodite Salas"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Aphrodite Salas"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Aphrodite Salas\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Stacey Copeland","Klara du Plessis","Alvaro Echánove","Marlene Oeffinger"],"contributors_names_search":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Stacey Copeland","Klara du Plessis","Alvaro Echánove","Marlene Oeffinger"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/3614174516024815930000\",\"name\":\"Oana Avasilichioaei\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Alvaro Echánove\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Marlene Oeffinger\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Oana Avasilichioaei","Stacey Copeland","Klara du Plessis","Alvaro Echánove","Marlene Oeffinger"],"Performance_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"SpokenWeb_EDIT.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"01:07:04\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,698,913,056 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"SpokenWeb_EDIT\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-18\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Concordia researchers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod co-produced “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence” for The SpokenWeb Podcast series in order to document our reactions to the changes in our sonic environments during this time of social distancing and self-isolation. Listen to the full episode or tune in to the re-broadcast on the 4TH SPACE Reruns Series on Tuesday June 9 (12noon). Then, on Thursday June 18, 12-noon ET, join Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, and special guests from the podcast - Oana Avasilichioaei, Stacey Copeland, Klara du Plessis, Alvaro Echánove, Marlene Oeffinger, and more - for a virtual conversation via Zoom. Moderated by Aphrodite Salas (Assistant Professor, Journalism, Concordia) and hosted by Concordia’s 4TH SPACE, this virtual conversation will be a lively and interactive opportunity to revisit the question at the heart of this podcast: How are we listening, now?"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549988835328,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686},{"id":"10055","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Sounding Signs and Broadcasting Temporalities and Sounding Together, SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, 16 May 2022"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page "],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Michelle Levy"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Katherine McLeod","Michelle Levy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"contributors_names_search":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Aubrey Grant\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristen Smith\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kiera Obbard\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Joseph Shea-Carter \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariel Kroon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Carlos Pittella\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lee Gilboa\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kristin Franseen\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Aubrey Grant","Kristen Smith","Kiera Obbard","Joseph Shea-Carter ","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya","Ariel Kroon","Carlos Pittella","Lee Gilboa","Kristin Franseen"],"Performance_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2022-05-16 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - 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Together, they may suggest questions about how sound has been represented in literary works from different historical periods, how time has structured the way literary works sound (as with poetic metre), how readings and recitations sound literature across a span of time, and how time is sounded in different literary cultures and communities. Explorations of non-Western temporal frameworks, as in Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, and a recent special issue on Black Temporality in Times of Crisis edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, for example, reveal diverse meanings of temporality across cultures. As a concept, sound is always moving through time, and so, descriptions of sound involve the description of time in motion. Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly perceptible. As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing.  It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history. \n\nSounding Signs\n\nChair: Jason Camlot\n\nAubrey Grant [IP] (Concordia), “Resounding the Hollow: Repetition and Onomatopoeia in Poe’s ‘The Bells’”\n\nKristen Smith [IP] (York), “Diagrammatic  Codes, Lines, Crosshatchings: Finding Sound in Non-Linguistic Poetry”\n\nKiera Obbard [IP] (U of Guelph), “Close Reading the Sonic Topology of Instagram Poetry with Poemage”\n\nBroadcasting Temporalities\n\nChair: Katherine McLeod\n\nJoseph Shea-Carter [IP] (U of Guelph), “(Re)sounding Text: Time is Away and Sonic Re-Presentations of Literature”\n\nNick Beauchesne [IP], Ariel Kroon [IP], and Chelsea Miya [IP] (U of Alberta), “‘’A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio”\n\nSounding Together\n\nChair: Michelle Levy\n\nCarlos Pittella [IP] (Concordia), “’We’ the People: Collective Lyric Self in 21st-Century Poetry”\n\nLee Gilboa [V] (Brown), “Sound Together: The Chorus as a Possible Framework for Collectivity”\n\nKristin Franseen [IP] (Concordia), “Gossip, Musical Meaning, and (Im)possible Queer Pasts in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Short Fiction”\n\n"],"score":3.2638686},{"id":"10056","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Radical Voices and Sonic Memories and Improvising Language, SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, 17 May 2022"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Xiaoxuan Huang","Annie Murray","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Xiaoxuan Huang","Annie Murray","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Xiaoxuan Huang \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes","Megan Stein","Thade Correa","Donald Shipton"],"contributors_names_search":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes","Megan Stein","Thade Correa","Donald Shipton"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sophia Magliocca\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Shazia Hafiz Ramji \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kyle Kinaschuk\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Effy Morris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Linara Kolosov\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sarah Cipes \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Megan Stein\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Thade Correa \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Donald Shipton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji ","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes ","Megan Stein","Thade Correa ","Donald Shipton"],"Performance_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2022-05-17 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - 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As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing.  It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history. \n\nRadical Voices\n\nChair: Jason Camlot (Concordia U) and Xiaoxuan Huang (UBCO)\n\nSophia, Magliocca [IP] (Concordia) “Discovering Sexual Agency in Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom: Linguistic and Bodily Mutation” \n\nShazia Hafiz Ramji [V] (U of Calgary) and Kyle Kinaschuk [V] (U of Toronto), “Sounding the Wind: Acoustic Kinships in Disappearing Moon Cafe” \n\nEffy Morris [IP] (Concordia), “Tone As Tonus: (Un)grammaring Ontology With Kamau Brathwaite’s Nation Language”\n\nSonic Memories\n\nChair: Annie Murray\n\nLinara Kolosov [V] (SFU), “Sixty years of Readings in BC: Access to Memory (AtoM) of the largest SFU sound collection”\n\nSarah Cipes [IP] (UBCO), “Finding Due Balance: Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary 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Labs\",\"dates\":\"2005-01-01\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"SpokenWeb Project\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Collective.\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Series organizer\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Blonk, Jaap","Bök, Christian","Tagaq, Tanya"],"contributors_names_search":["Blonk, Jaap","Bök, Christian","Tagaq, Tanya"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Blonk, Jaap\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Bök, Christian\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Tagaq, Tanya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"performer_name":["Blonk, Jaap","Bök, Christian","Tagaq, Tanya"],"Performance_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-10-28\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/events/jaap-blonk-christian-bok-tanya-tagaq/\"},{\"date\":\"2023-10-29\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/events/jaap-blonk-christian-bok-tanya-tagaq/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080570\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University, Henry F. Hall Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"Concordia University (SGW Campus), Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Ville-Marie, Montreal, Urban agglomeration of Montreal, Montreal (administrative region), Quebec, H3H 1M4, Canada\",\"latitude\":\"45.497286\",\"longitude\":\"-73.578966 \"}]"],"Address":["Concordia University (SGW Campus), Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Ville-Marie, Montreal, Urban agglomeration of Montreal, Montreal (administrative region), Quebec, H3H 1M4, Canada"],"Venue":["Concordia University, Henry F. Hall Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"content_notes":["https://spokenweb.ca/events/jaap-blonk-christian-bok-tanya-tagaq/"],"contents":["A Public Performance From Exceptional Artists\n\nWe are pleased to present Dutch composer Jaap Blonk, Canadian poet Christian Bök, and Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq for a public performance onOctober 28, 2013 at 7PM in the Henry F. Hall Building (Room-767) at Concordia University (1455 De Maisonneuve W. Blvd.)."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549997223939,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","score":3.2638686}]