[{"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":7.8633175},{"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":7.8633175}]