[{"id":"9280","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1E3, Invisible Labour, 2 December 2019, Sallam and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e202a10c-3703-4bcd-b7ad-a2766139698c/sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"37:20\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"34.2 MB\",\"bitrate\":\"128kbps\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3\",\"title\":\"sw-ep3-invisible-labour_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-12-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/invisible-labour/\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"49.94217525,-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Tallman, Warren. “[Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’].” N.d. Home recording. Reel-to-reel tape. SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan, SoundBox Collection, Warren Tallman fonds, 2012.002.005.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549483421696,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["From archival work to domestic and care work or the hidden labour behind the podcast you’re listening to right now… invisible labour is everywhere. That is, the work and the people not always seen from the outside or valued in our day to day lives. This month we reflect on the often invisible (or inaudible) labour entangled in the SpokenWeb archives. The SpokenWeb team at University of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox Collection – in its digitization, editing and creative-critical action that bring these archives to life.\n\nOur producers this month are the members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Karis Shearer with additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to SpokenWeb. A special thank you to AMP members Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode.\n\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web Podcast stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Okay. Picture an archive. What do you see? Maybe it looks like the library in Beauty and the Beast, all soaring shelves and rolling ladders or maybe you’re imagining Gandalf the Grey blowing dust off crumpled parchment tomes in a stone room lit only by a single candle or, okay, maybe you’ve actually been in an archive, so you’re picturing stacks of numbered boxes and metal rolling carts and maybe that pair of white gloves you have to wear before turning the pages. But whatever you’re imagining right now, ask yourself, how did those boxes get there? Who labeled and cataloged and stored them? Who collected and organized those books and oil, those ladder wheels? Who’s been preserving those dusty old tomes until a wizard gets to them. Archival work, domestic and care work, even the labor of editing and scripting and production behind the podcast you’re listening to right now; invisible labor is everywhere and we absolutely can’t talk about archives without talking about what kind of labor goes into curating and preserving our cultural history. This month our Spoken Web team members reflect on the often invisible or inaudible labor entangled in the Spoken Web archives. The Spoken Web team at university of British Columbia Okanagan invite us to listen in to the personal stories of labour hidden behind the tapes found in their SoundBox collection, in its digitization, editing and creative critical action that bring these archives to life. Here is Karis Shearer and the UBCO team with episode three: Invisible Labour.\n02:36\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer and I’m a professor at UBC Okanagan where I teach poetry, I teach in the digital humanities, and I’m really interested in literary audio and what, from a feminist perspective, we’re able to discern or hear around women’s labor in the audio archive. I’m the team lead here at UBC Okanagan on the Spoken Web project and I am working with an amazing team of almost 12 people, I think we’re at now, who’ve been working to process the SoundBox collection. And we bring I think, really interesting strengths as a team in both archiving digitization, literary studies, and research creation. As users or as listeners to audio recordings when we access them online in a digital repository, whether it’s PennSound or Spoken Web, I think often we don’t understand or see the labour that is behind that presentation. That is to say the condition assessment of the tape, the digitization of the tape, the editing of the tape, the making of singles if we’re listening to a single. So that’s what this podcast is going to do is to unpack some of that labour behind the scenes. And so what I wanted to do with this podcast was introduce you to the team behind the recording. So you’re going to hear from some of our team members who will talk about what their contributions are and what they’ve been doing kind of in the collection and the work more broadly, but also with respect to a particular recording – it’s a very special one. So what is the Soundbox collection? It’s a collection of about 166 audio tapes that we have here at UBC Okanagan, housed in the AMP Lab. It’s a really interesting collection because unlike some of the other SpokenWeb collections across the network that were formed around a reading series that took place in usually the 1960s, 70s, 80s, at a particular location. Our collection is not formed around a reading series. It is a collection of very conversational tapes, tapes that were made in the classroom. They’re pedagogical recordings, sometimes they’re interviews, they’re often very informal, and they’re messy tapes because there’s a lot going on in them. People are listening to the television, they’re talking over top of each other, they’re at various distances from the reel-to-reel machine or the tape deck. And that makes them challenging to work with, but also very, very interesting. The tape collection, the SoundBox collection that is, came to me through Jodey Castricano, who’s a colleague of mine. I had been sort of talking about how excited I was about the work that was happening with PennSound, and that I knew was just sort of in the process of starting at Concordia, which would become SpokenWeb and how I was hoping to, you know, create a similar archive of audio recordings. And Jodey said to me, she said, “Just a second, I need to go to my basement and get something for you.” And she came up with a cardboard box and in that cardboard box was a collection of tapes that had been given to her by a professor from UBC named Warren Tallman. And Warren Tallman had given those to her in the early 1990s and said, “Someday you’re going to know what to do with these.” And Jodey said to me, “I think, I think this is it.”\n06:14\tAudio Recording:\tFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious. / Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose.\n07:20\tKaris Shearer:\tSo the clip that you’ve just heard is an interesting example of something that’s come out of the collection. I talked about the collection being conversational and having many voices on it. In this particular clip we have just Warren Tallman and he’s reading a Walt Whitman’s poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ What we hear first though is Tallman recording the poem solo voice and then it seems that he recorded over top of that initial recording. We still have about 20 seconds of the first one, but he recorded over top of it and created a new type of recording where he’s playing Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in the background. So we have music, we have voice, Tallman’s voice, merge together and it’s this beautiful kind of cadence that he’s timed the poem in a way that works very beautifully with the music. What do we know about this recording? We know that Tallman made this recording roughly around 1966 or ’67, we have that labeled on the box and one of the other recordings on the tape is made in 1966. We also know that Tallman was teaching a Walt Whitman graduate course around that time. In his retirement speech, he says “In 1967 I taught a graduate Walt Whitman course. We put on a Walt Whitman reading, really a group effort if there ever was one, so I gave identical first-class marks to each and all 12 participants.” So we obviously need to do more research. You know, we have lots of questions about this tape, what don’t we know. We don’t know for sure that this was connected to that course, but I think it probably was. I suspect that what we’re hearing is him practicing the type of reading and reading aloud that he was inviting his students to do. We also know from other students in his class that reading aloud was a really important pedagogical approach that he took to reading poetry. So he often made students read over and over again to figure out particular stresses and ways of performing poetry. So it seems to me that this is very likely linked to that, and the idea of adding music is a curious thing. Why Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins? Why that music? I hope that we’ll see scholars coming out of music history and theory approaching this and thinking about the relationship between ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ and what we know about Whitman and that particular recording. I’d also really like to know what recording are we listening to? What version of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins are we hearing here. We know for example that Tallman was recording the poem on his reel-to-reel deck. He can’t be using the same reel to reel deck to play Bach. So does he have a record player in the room with him? He has another device that he’s playing the music on. So you can do some work to narrow down what recording or what version of that music he’s playing in the background, and that’s really interesting to me. The other thing that we hear on this recording, which I find fascinating, is the technology. We hear technology making itself present. Warren Tallman moves a little bit too close, I think, to the mic at a certain point and we hear the feedback, early on in the second part of the second recording. We also know that he hasn’t fully erased the tape when he’s gone to tape over, so we also hear voices and the, and the things that were recorded on the magnetic tape in the past, kind of bleeding through in the present recordings. So we hear other voices that weren’t meant to be necessarily part of that and it has a kind of a ghostly effect. So there’s much to say about recording technology as we’re listening to this tape.\n11:21\tCraig Carpenter:\tMy name is Craig Carpenter. I’m a poet, a freelance journalist, and a sound engineer. I stumbled onto the Spoken Web project when I interviewed a former student of Karis’s for a short profile I was writing for UBC Okanagan. The story focuses on how Lee Hannigan’s graduate work with Spoken Web began with a work study project digitizing the UBCO SoundBox collection. I was immediately intrigued by the project and emailed Karis asking if there was any way I could be of assistance. Aside from my audio background I mentioned in the early nineties I was a student of Robert Hogg’s who had been a member of the TISH poetry collective in the 60s at UBC. Turns out Bob had recently donated quite a number of cassettes to the collection and he and Karis were quite close. So we met and I started helping out refining the digitization process, suggesting equipment and helping with training and the creation of a digitization module. Because I’m old enough to actually remember editing on magnetic tape, I knew stuff like how to thread the reel-to-reel and I was really keen to listen to these old tapes. So I immediately got to work. We had discovered a lot of the Tallman reels were recorded at an odd speed and after some research figured out that the machine these tapes were recorded on used an unusually slow speed that was meant for speech. And our machine, and actually hardly any machines have this speed when we play them back they sounded like chipmunks. With this particular reel of Tallman reading Whitman, it was one of the first I helped digitize and I was explaining to Karis this work around, I was figuring out how we were going to, you know, slow these chipmunks down. And I noticed faintly in pencil on this reel box the word Whitman. And our machine you can switch from playing tracks one and two to tracks three and four, and so I hit that button switching to tracks three and four, and that’s when we heard the speed shift to, you know, regular speed and the unmistakable voice of Warren Tallman come in. And then this warble of classical music swelling up beneath him and Karis was like, “Whoa, what’s that?” And at first I thought maybe the reel wasn’t properly erased. I remember we used to have these big magnets that you’d flip a switch and you’d zap the reels to erase them, and if you didn’t leave them on the magnet long enough they’d leave these sort of ghost recordings. But that wasn’t the case, and with this one, and Karis’s sort of eyes widening. She says, “No, he’s recording himself, reading to the music and he’s reading in perfect time.” And so I turned it up and we both sat there a little bit awestruck at what we were hearing. It was just so beautiful. And there was this added element to how we discovered it so unexpectedly. But what was really interesting is it’s him reading Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ a poem where Whitman imagines a future where people would be experiencing what he’s seeing. “The men and women I saw were all near me, others the same others who look back on me because I looked forward to them…” And we were both looking at each other jaws dropping eyes, getting wider because really felt like Tallman had recorded it knowing that more than half a century later we would discover this recording. I mean, he was likely making it for his students, but in some way it really felt like he was reciting it to us and that we were looking back on him now because he had looked forward to us just as Whitman says in the poem. So there’s this really special sort of chance-becoming-kinetic kind of feeling with this recording. In terms of the work done on the file to improve the sound, I tried not to do too much because I never want to overprocess anything. But so people can more easily listen without straining I did a few things in post-production on this recording a few more things than I usually would. At times it was difficult to hear what Tallman recites over the music. He’s probably playing the music on a record player and using his tape machine to record with a dynamic microphone and you could hear him getting closer and further away from the mic at times. I did some EQing and I used some very light noise reduction, and then compression. And often with restoring audio, if you do too much, you lose too much coloration, you know, you pull out too many of the frequencies and you lose sort of the presence and the ambient kind of feeling that adds a unique quality to the recordings. Of course with these tapes, we always want to keep a master that will be like a mirror for archival sake. But for the sake of listening back and for presenting the audio to audiences I used, on this one, I used a convolution reverb to bring back some of that presence, which was lost with the noise reduction, and that’s not a usual thing I do, but it’s just something in this case I thought I’d try. It was a new plugin that uses this technique where they shouldn’t impulse through the space that they want to recreate. And in this case, I believe it was a church in Chicago. The jury’s out whether or not it necessarily sounds that much better, but it’s definitely easier on the ears than the original one, which is what we’re going for and hopefully not losing too much of that analog character.\n17:18\tAudio Recording:\tFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! / Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high. I see you also face to face. / Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, How curious you are to me. / On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations than you might suppose. / The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, / The simple compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, / every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, / The similitudes of the past and those of the future, / The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, / on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, / The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, / The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others, the life, love, sight hearing of others.\n18:50\tMegan Butchart:\tMy name is Megan Butchart and I am a BA student at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. I joined the SpokenWeb project as an undergraduate research assistant in May, 2018 and one of my main roles on the project has been to catalog the SoundBox collection, which is a collection of tapes held at the UBCO branch of Spoken Web. The SpokenWeb collection is sort of unique among the SpokenWeb network in the sense that it’s not really connected to a university library or special collections archive, but rather was a collection of audio recordings which were gifted to Dr. Karis Shearer by various poets and colleagues. And so as a result, it was never organized or cataloged in the same way that most of the other collections in SpokenWeb were, and so one of the first things I did when I came onto the project was to organize the recordings into fonds, which are collections of artifacts that come from the same source, and so in our case donors. And you know, assess the conditions of the tapes and from there I work to create item level descriptions for each recording. So in the early stages most of the collection was not digitized, and so I sort of began by doing a survey of the collection and cataloging whatever information could be learned from the physical artifact itself. So the box, the label on the cassette or reel or any accompanying material. And I really just created a really simple spreadsheet with categories that I felt would be sort of useful in describing these artifacts, so that included sort of administrative metadata, which sort of recorded the relationships between the tapes and the donors and creators. And then I also created sort of descriptive sorts of metadata, so things like the title, date speakers sort of anyone just connected with the making of the tape, venue, checklists, contents, recording medium tape brand, et cetera. And this is something which grew and evolved as I learned more about sort of different playing speeds and different categories of metadata for audio recordings. Anyway, this was the first stage in cataloging the collection, but as I quickly discovered, while this is fine to get a sort of overview of the collection listening is absolutely imperative to generating accurate metadata for these types of objects, which are quite opaque, sort of in and of themselves. As, you know, we found out things have sometimes been mislabeled or perhaps have been recorded over and then original labels haven’t been changed. And so you can’t just take what the object says sort of at face value. So for example, with this particular recording of Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, it was recorded at the end of a tape that has a recording of a bill bissett poetry reading. And in very faint pencil on the back of the box that holds this tape, it says something which is kind of cryptic, it just says ‘music dash voice Whitman experiment’ which in and of itself could kind of mean anything. So now that we are in the process of digitizing the collection at UBC Okanagan I’m going back and sort of filling in those gaps now that we can actually hear what are on these tapes. And this time, you know, I’m using the much more robust metadata schema that SpokenWeb has developed for cataloging tapes, and entering that information into the metadata ingest system or database that SpokenWeb has developed called SWALLOW at the beginning of using the SpokenWeb metadata schema a few of the challenges that arose really had to do with using a sort of standardized set of metadata categories when our collection, you know, had significant differences from many of the other collections in the Spoken Web network. And so something I kind of discovered early on is that the tapes in the SoundBox collection are, in many ways they’re quite amateurish and they’re kind of casually produced. So for example, they’re not, you know, sort of official finite recordings of an official finite reading series, in which each tape holds sort of a single recording of one event, but instead the collection contains many home recordings and sort of things like audio collage. And so very often these recordings are sort of casual conversations among poets or informal living room readings, recordings of lectures, or simply, you know, a collage of audio clips, either from poets reading, or from, you know, the radio. And so one of the challenges of creating descriptive metadata for this particular collection was navigating sort of challenges that were inherent to these types of unpredictable and sort of multiple recordings. And so the bill bissett Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman tape is a great example of this sort of challenge, you know, we have two very different types of recordings in terms of content, and so the context in which each were made, but they were held on the same tape. And so the bill bissett recording is a public poetry reading, the Warren Tallman is a home recording, you know, and he’s got classical music playing in the background while reading the poem. And so really all of this has been a huge learning process for me, but I’ve also found the work really exciting.\n24:29\tEvan Berg:\tSo my name is Evan Berg. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UBC Okanagan majoring in visual art and minoring in art history and visual culture. I also hold a documentary film certificate from Capilano University. I became involved in the SpokenWeb project because Karis Shearer, who’s the director, the AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, and the leader on the SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan was aware of my work within the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, as she thought that some of my skills would lend themselves to some of the challenges that they were facing within the lab. Some of those skills involved photography video, both filming and editing and graphic design work. So I was brought on as kind of a ‘do-everything’ person, I didn’t have a necessarily specific role, but one of the ideas was that I would be doing creative engagement within the lab and be able to take on a variety of different tasks that were given to me. Some of those were documenting the archives. So taking documentary photos of our archival objects so that we could catalogue them online. Other things were working with Caitlin Voth and being mentored by Myron Campbell in the design process of both the logo for the Spoken Web project as well as internal logos for the AMP Lab and producing video content. Karis had put a lot of emphasis on creative engagement with the archive in terms of trying to mobilize these archival objects, past just being that, exactly that, archival objects or just sound pieces that would exist online for kind of research purposes. But she wanted some more creative engagement, and so one of the things that I was commissioned to do was focused on a recording by Warren Tallman in which he is reading a Walt Whitman poem called ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And when I first heard the poem it just struck me as being very cinematic, and so I thought that it lent itself very well to some of the stuff that I was doing with video. With this work, I was really thinking about time, and also in the poem itself, Whitman’s poem, it’s discussing kind of these almost mundane moments in life, but then relating them to this kind of much larger universal theme of just human experience. And he’s also talking about people hundreds of years from the point in which he is crossing the Brooklyn ferry, and thinking about the people a hundred years from now who will be doing the same thing. Just thinking of this thread of time of Whitman in the 1800’s, Tallman in the 1960s and then myself in 2019 and kind of adding to this layering where Whitman started the poem, Tallman reads it again, but he’s kind of putting himself into this space – like you can hear the space of the room. He’s adding other kind of artistic elements to this recording by playing Bach in the background, which added a really cinematic feel to the recording. And so I wanted to kind of add myself to this archive And so what I did was I drew on my own experience of never having crossed the Brooklyn ferry, but having lived in North Vancouver and taking the SeaBus from North Vancouver into Vancouver, and that kind of experience that resonated with me when listening to this recording. So this, this poem that is very much about a shared human experience and that was my relation to that human experience of ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.’ And so what I did was in a very short amount of time, just a few days in Vancouver, I went out each evening at kind of sunset and I crossed the SeaBus from Vancouver to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver and back to North Vancouver and back to Vancouver multiple times as the sun was setting. And I recorded, I filmed various people taking this trip.\n29:25\tAudio Recording:\tThe similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smaller sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\n30:00\tEvan Berg:\tUnless you have a reel-to-reel player and have the tapes themselves, the physical tapes, then you can’t listen to these recordings, and so the entire point was to make them publicly accessible but also searchable so that it was user friendly. People could find these things, download, listen to them, but there’s a great amount of labour that goes into that. Also I think this kind of work can be really beneficial to the SpokenWeb project because first of all, there’s so many hours of recordings on these tapes and so sometimes just making a decision to curate one specific recording and then kind of further its accessibility, because in this case, making a video, adding visuals to this audio piece, I could make it more accessible for some younger people who are constantly consuming visual content online. And I think just making the huge collection less intimidating, it offers an entry point for, a more accessible entry point for people first approaching the SpokenWeb project online and seeing these hundreds of hours of the recordings.\n31:30\tLauren St.Clair:\tMy name is Lauren St. Clair, I’m a third and a half yearin computer science at UBCO. I have an interest in sound field recording and the analog format. What brought me to the AMP Lab was actually one of the Tech Talks, part of the Tech Talk series, which was the tape surgery where you got to actually take apart a tape and then turn it into some sort of art piece based off of collage and then you could break apart the tape. I turned mine into a tape loop. So the main reason I went was just an excuse to break apart a tape and try turning it into a tape for the first time. After that I started attending more AMP Lab events, more Tech Talk series and meetings, and then got involved with the larger SpokenWeb project. Later on, after a couple of months of attending events, I was offered the ability to design the SoundBox collection website, which is the collection part of the Audio Media Poetry Lab here at UBCO. And through that we went through a couple iterations of the actual design itself. What’s supposed to be included on the website is information about the authors, the actual recordings, how to get involved with the AMP Lab and its involvement within the SpokenWeb project. And another focus of the website is to make it accessible and a low barrier entry point for those already interested in the collection or those that are just being introduced to the collection for the first time and don’t know about the SpokenWeb project at all. The iterations were mostly things like we need to include this element, how are we going to focus on making sure people are visible in the website and how are we making sure that they’re visible then in terms of the larger SpokenWeb project, so how do we make community something visible apart of this website when we’re introducing people to the project. So another large focus of this is not only making it accessible, but how do we convey the fact that community and undergraduates and students are a part of this project? So right now we’re on the beta of the website and that we have a list of the SoundBox writers and we also have some featured writers, a part of the SoundBox collection, which will have a photo of them, some information about them, and also an audio file taken from one of the collections that we have apart of the SoundBox collection. And then later on we’re going to expand that where we can go through the recordings of all of the writers that we have, such as Warren Tallman, where people will be able to access the Warren Tallman tape. Right now the Warren Tallman tape is not available on the website, but it will be shortly once we expand our website for more writers and audio files to be available. So you need the digitized files and you need the website, and you can kind of think of it and like a project management framework for one of them has a dependency on the other. So you need at least specific things digitized for your beta website in order to have it up and have those things accessible. But also you need to continue on digitization so that would be an interesting balance. Just stay posted for more information about the website, and for what is to come, there will be more provided online as more things are digitized and more rights are cleared.\n35:15\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks so much everyone for listening to episode three of the Spoken Web Podcast. It’s been such an exciting process for me starting to bring this podcast to life, working with an amazing team across the country, getting the chance to find out what my colleagues are up to at institutions that I haven’t had the opportunity to visit, and also starting to ask the question of how we might use podcast to tell stories about different kinds of research. If you’re listening right now and there are certain kinds of stories or ideas you would really love to hear more about, please get in touch with us and let us know. You can always reach out to us spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com and if you’re part of the Spoken Web project and you’re listening to this right now, maybe consider sending us an episode pitch. Spoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are the members of the Spoken Web, UBC Okanagan AMP Lab with audio production by Nour Sallam and Craig Carpenter and additional audio courtesy of the SoundBox collection. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and stay tuned for more AMP podcast magic coming soon to Spoken Web a special thank you to AMP members, Karis Shearer, Craig Carpenter, Megan Butchart, Evan Berg and Lauren St. Clair for their candid interviews and contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds."],"score":5.7495356},{"id":"9582","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E6, SoundBox Signals presents “Is That Me?”, 2 March 2020, Sallam and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-that-me/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Nour Sallam","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Nour Sallam","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3ccdbdb9-0f96-49d2-b089-cea33234e046/sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:07\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"24,186,088 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-that-me/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-03-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.937244975827596\",\"longitude\":\"-119.3903559234036\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bill bissett’s Breth (Talonbooks):\\n\\nhttps://talonbooks.com/books/breth\\n\\nbill bissett on PennSound:\\n\\nhttps://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/bissett.php\\n\\nCut and Run Podcast by Brady Marks:\\n\\nhttp://furiousgreencloud.com/wordpress/blog/author/furiousgreencloud/\\n\\nSarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying (MQUP):\\n\\nhttps://www.mqup.ca/art-of-dying–the-products-9780773552715.php\\n\\nIan Ferrier at the Inspired Word Cafe:\\n\\nhttp://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549524316160,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a new podcast in the SpokenWeb family – SoundBox Signals – inviting us to listen in close to UBCO’s SoundBox Collection. In this episode, Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin and guests Lauren St. Clair and Nour Sallam invite us into a “close listening” of a previously unpublished poem from Canadian poet bill bissett. You can find the full-length recording of the bill bissett clip and more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n\nSoundBox Signals is a podcast that brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode features a conversation with a curator and two special guests. Together they’ll listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history.\n\nSoundBox Signals Artwork by Myron Campbell.\n\n00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. When we listen to recorded poetry, taking the time to attend closely to the recording, to tune into the rhythm, the cadence, the sense of space and place, new connections and intimacies emerge. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we’re excited to share with you the new SoundBox Signals Podcast, inviting us to listen in close to UBC Okanagan’s SoundBox collection. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close reading and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and two special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider what a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin, and guests invite us into a close listening of bill bissett’s previously unpublished poem from around 1966. Here is Karis Shearer with “Is That Me?” episode one of SoundBox Signals. [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Melodic Instrumentals Overlapping Voices] I see you. [Inaudible] What is the [inaudible] Where is this voice? Coming! [inaudible] How curious you are to me…[Click]\n \n\n02:45\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today at UBC Okanagan [UBCO] by guest curator Mathieu Aubin, who recently finished his PhD with a dissertation entitled “Here and Queer in Vancouver,” which touches on the work of bill bissett. Also joined by Lauren St. Clair, who is a Computer Science major, Data Science minor and is the president of the Quantitative Science Course Union here at UBCO. Also joined by our podcast producer extraordinaire Nour Sallam, who is pursuing her honours English degree here at UBCO. Welcome everybody.\n \n\n03:20\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping] Hello. Hi. Hi.\n \n\n03:20\tKaris Shearer:\tWe are here today to listen to a clip by bill bissett. So we’re going to rewind to 1966 and listen to that recording, which is part of our SoundBox collection here at UBCO.\n \n\n03:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Audio, bill bissett recording] This. Well. Palpitation jelly gold. Were saying [inaudible] tomato. You got that should be enough. Look like needles and what just fires. Enter greenly splotch us belly holes and ice and stitches and wrestle them water in hay wires. Is that blood on my pillow? Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle in their sitting room? Is that me on the windowsill in worm slice. Oooze. How did she do it at feet radiators. And [inaudible] unslow on my, you know. Keep wishing we were in his 40 cent bed. This is the second we left Istanbul, which is Mediterranean. [Click]\n \n\n05:00\tKaris Shearer:\tSo what you just heard is a clip from a longer recording made on magnetic tape. It’s on reel-to-reel, probably made by Warren Tallman. It was part of his collection and is by poet bill bissett. Mathieu, do you want to give us a little bit more context of this recording?\n \n\n05:19\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, of course. So in this recording, what we have is — if it is in fact from 1966 as the material, the tape, indicates — bill bissett is likely around 26 or 27 years old. It is one of the earliest recordings that we have of bill bissett reading his work and what he’s reading in the, in the recording as a whole beyond this clip is some poems that have been published later on in some format in we sleep inside each othr all, which was published by Ganglia Press in Toronto in 1966. And one of the exciting things about this clip in particular is that this poem was never published. As bill bissett indicates, lines of this poem were published in other poems such as “Veronica,” which have been, or which were previously published, now published in his new [inaudible] books called breth. But otherwise, this is an unpublished poem and what we have access to is a really raw bill bissett and a very youthful bill bissett, which you can tell by his voice. And what’s really exciting about this as well is we don’t really know where it took place necessarily. Based on bill, it possibly was recorded with Warren Tallman, but also perhaps with Doug Geissman who he recorded with a lot. And we don’t have access to any sense of audience, which is a little odd for people who are often used to going to his readings and hearing the audience banter back with him. There’s mostly silence between the poems, which gives it a different feeling.\n \n\n06:46\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, yeah, it sure does. It’s, it was an exciting recording to discover in the sense that I think the performance is quite different from bill’s typical performances today.\n \n\n07:00\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n07:00\tKaris Shearer:\tLauren, you were one of the early listeners to this recording, you helped digitize it. And it’s a strange and fascinating style of reading to encounter, isn’t it?\n \n\n07:11\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n07:11\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you talk a little bit about, like, your impressions of it, what it reminds you of in terms of style?\n \n\n07:17\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah, like it sounds almost robotic and it definitely is not based in sounding robotic because it’s from the ’60s. But, to me, when I first listened to it, it almost sounded like a literal voice translation of like sticking the poem into a machine and having it be played out. Like when he speaks, it sounds almost spliced together and not like he’s speaking in the actual moment. Like it’s kind of like a collage–\n \n\n07:49\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm!\n07:49\tLauren St. Clair:\t–of words in a way. Like if you took a bunch of words from a magazine and kind of just stuck them together and read it out, that’s kind of the impression it gave me when I first heard it.\n07:58\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, it has a kind of very chopped version of it. Nour, you were thinking about some of how the way in which the style is connected to the content of the poem and that kind of fragmentation that we’re hearing both stylistically, but then also within kind of the body of the poem. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that fragmentation’s playing out here?\n \n\n08:20\tNour Sallam:\tYeah, it’s a lot like what Lauren was saying. It’s very spliced and it does give off the feeling that it’s a little bit like a collage, which I find really interesting because the fragmentation kind of gives you that feeling of isolation that he is experiencing from the body. Like when he says, “Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle? Is it me on the windowsill? Is that my body?”, you really get that sense of fragmentation and isolation, especially in the way he reads it and the way he sounds out the words and pauses between them.\n \n\n09:02\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n09:02\tKaris Shearer:\tThere’s kind of an alienation almost from the body, isn’t there?\n \n\n09:06\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:06\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n09:06\tNour Sallam:\tYeah, an alienation from the body. I picked up on it specifically through the way he sounds out and pauses between all the words or pieces them together in a way that if you, if he was just saying them and if he was just speaking in a non-performative way, maybe you wouldn’t have picked up on that.\n \n\n09:28\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, ’cause we’re getting like, we’re getting a lot of like the blood, “Is that blood on my pillow?” Right? That’s part of him. But he’s also seeing it, right? So there’s, you know,–\n \n\n09:36\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:36\tKaris Shearer:\t–there’s the speaker looking at pieces of himself. He’s a puddle. He’s, you know, there’s blood on the pillow.\n09:44\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:44\tKaris Shearer:\tSo that contributing–\n \n\n09:45\tNour Sallam:\tAnd the form of questioning, too. He, it’s, it almost gives you the sense that he’s unsure. Is it me? Is it someone else? Like what, what am I looking at?\n \n\n09:56\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s a great observation. That’s, that kind of like uncertainty around–\n \n\n10:00\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n10:00\tKaris Shearer:\t–what he’s perceiving.\n \n\n10:01\tNour Sallam:\tYes, exactly.\n10:03\tKaris Shearer:\tSounds wonderful. Matt, I’m going to come over to you and ask you a little bit about this, you know, continuing on this question of style–\n \n\n10:10\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:10\tKaris Shearer:\t–of reading. Can you talk a little bit about how this style that we’re hearing here–\n \n\n10:14\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:14\tKaris Shearer:\t–that Nour and Lauren just talked about in terms of its fragmentation, the kind of almost computerized voice, which is so curious, you know, 1966. It’s not modeled after anything that we would necessarily, that we’re familiar with now.\n \n\n10:33\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:33\tKaris Shearer:\tHow does the style that we’re hearing here differ from bissett’s contemporary performance style?\n \n\n10:40\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. There’s so many great threads that you’ve been bringing up so far. I mean, the sense of the technology perhaps or technological voice in some sense and bill is, bill bissett’s very much interested in that idea of like, well he’s using the typewriter to write most of his poems and like that idea of like what is a tape recorder, perhaps, to bring to it too, what does it mean to become maybe like a robot in that sense? But the question of collage too is essential to his art practice. He’s often thinking about intersplicing different lines of poems in his oral performance of the poetry. And even on the page he’s really thinking about putting things together and collaging them literally, so I really liked that observation, that in sense of like what you’re hearing, which also carries over to the page.\n \n\n11:22\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat we have here in this recording is a really young bill bissett. And what surprised me when I first heard this last spring was that youthfulness. And having been to many of his readings in past few years, what surprised me was some of the elements that were perhaps different or maybe missing that I was expecting. And perhaps it’s because of it being maybe an early recording or the fact that it’s in a private context, but there’s something to be said about the private versus the public. When he’s reading in the public context, there’s an audience very much knowing his work and are able to respond to him and he’s very humourous in his performance. You still hear that a bit in this recording. However, the humour depends on obviously an audience responding to it and that’s not as present in this recording.\n \n\n12:09\tMathieu Aubin:\tThe other thing, too, that I’m surprised is there is no instrument that’s being played in this and he’s known for having maracas on stage very often, and chanting with it. And there’s no “hummina hummina”, you know, the ways of bringing different lines together. And what doesn’t surprise me though is when I found out that this is a poem that was of course never published, but has lines that have been published in other poems, is this improvisational aspect of it. And part of his performance today is still that idea of improvising and working with things. And I was rewatching some of his performances on YouTube the other day and I thought it was really interesting that he’d often start with philosophical questions, those kinds of questions that Nour is bringing up are in this poem, but of course are being asked differently. So I think there are a lot of similarities, but there’s of course a development around that idea of the public audience listening that isn’t in here.\n \n\n13:00\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I like that. So you’re seeing a kind of, or hearing a through line from this early work through to his performance now–\n \n\n13:08\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:08\tKaris Shearer:\t–but also seeing some of the differences, particularly around the live audience, right?\n \n\n13:11\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n \n\n13:11\tKaris Shearer:\tThe improvisation, the responding to the audience. We hear that a lot in his contemporary work.\n \n\n13:16\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:18\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m gonna come back to Nour and I want to ask you about, again, the question of listening. We’re hearing a lot of onomatopoeia and like real sound play here around words. We hear words like, “Oooze”–\n \n\n13:31\tNour Sallam:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:31\tKaris Shearer:\t–that are really, that really play out in a way that point to or signify the concept that they represent. Can you point to a couple other moments where we’re hearing that sound play?\n \n\n13:44\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. Specifically in the beginning of the recording that we heard, there’s a theme of liquids–\n \n\n13:52\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm!\n13:52\tNour Sallam:\t–going on and you can hear that a lot in the specific words like “oooze” and like “palpitation jelly” that he splices or stresses and so on. And “splurged” and words like that where he is really emphasizing that the idea of liquids, but also like the theme of fluidity, which is really interesting to me because of the fragmentation of the poem.\n \n\n14:20\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. It’s kind of a tension between like the chopping up of words, right? “Palpitation.”\n \n\n14:24\tNour Sallam:\tYeah!\n14:24\tKaris Shearer:\tWhich is about poking, right?\n \n\n14:25\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. And the “oooze”-ing.\n \n\n14:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, the elongation of those sounds to signify liquid or fluidity.\n \n\n14:33\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. It truly is, it’s a very masterful reading, I think, of what he’s, he’s trying to portray.\n \n\n14:40\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah, that’s nice. Matt, do you wanna say, I mean we’re hearing there’s so many, there’s so much sound play–\n \n\n14:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n14:47\tKaris Shearer:\t–in this particular performance, particular poem. Can you comment a little bit about what we’re not hearing in this particular recording?\n \n\n14:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, so again, I think the, of course we have those sounds and like the vocalization and the polyvocality and then we were talking about hearing the playing with that. But again, to return to my earlier point about what I don’t hear in the recording, is one, an audience, which surprises me because I know that based on what he shared with me, bill is not reading alone in this room. What would the person be responding to? Were they responding at all? Are they maybe having a cigarette, let’s say, or what were they doing? Were they just casually listening? If not, if there is no audience or no response from the audience because they’re likely is an audience, what does it mean for him to just be reading it this way? And it is a work in process or progress or whatever you want to call it. But he’s reciting this and I am thinking back to this close listening that we did last summer at Congress and Jason Camlot, talked about the idea of, it sounds like almost like a recitation of the poem. And knowing a bit more context about the poem, it sounds about right in that it is just him working through the poem that never ended up being published.\n \n\n16:05\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut the other part that I’m surprised that I don’t hear is, you know, the musicality and almost like a sense of, a lack of banter, which is so essential to his practice today. There’s just banter and he’ll stop and say something hilarious in the middle of the poem and then go on to read the poem. Here what you have is someone who is just reading the poem and of course emphasizing certain words like “splurge!”, but he’s also like very much going through the poem. And something that we might not hear, too, is what is the context? Are we in a living room? We kind of hear the hum in the background of the digital, not the digital, the analog technology and in the recording, but we have zero idea of where this takes place. We’re assuming that this is in Vancouver if it is in fact with Warren Tallman, but we don’t hear that. And then the other thing, too, is often when you see him on stage, he’s opening up a water bottle or all those other kinds of sounds. But this is such a crisp recording that makes you think, “Okay, what, is he just sitting here at a table reading his poem?” And in other parts of the recording, though, you hear him turn a page and that poem is from we sleep inside of each othr all and what’s interesting is the poem has even been changed.\n \n\n17:23\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo looking at the archival material, my partner Emma Middleton was thinking about like, “Okay, well, is that exactly how it sounds in the recording?” And it’s not. So what are the pages? How is he, how is he going through this? So we know at least that we can hear the page, so he has that, but we have very limited context about that.\n \n\n17:41\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. So in the body of recordings that we have of bill bissett or that are available online for listening, PennSound, for example–\n \n\n17:48\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n17:48\tKaris Shearer:\t–this becomes quite an unusual–\n \n\n17:49\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n17:50\tKaris Shearer:\t–example because of that kind of studio quality, if you will. Quite uncharacteristic of bill bissett. So it strikes me that one of the research questions that a person could pursue would be to map the arc of the recordings. And so maybe to kind of point out where we start to see some of the contemporary style that we have. Lauren, I’m going to go over to you and I want to ask you this kind of question around the difference between the studio recording and the live recording. You are a real music fan, I know. And so my question for you is, like, what is for you the difference between the studio recording and listening to, I mean, not necessarily experiencing the live show but hearing the live recording–\n \n\n18:32\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n18:32\tKaris Shearer:\t–of something. Do you have a preference and what are you listening for in those contexts and what makes those different for you?\n \n\n18:39\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah, I guess it really depends on what you’re listening for and more of like the technical way you might be listening for the studio recording, for like how the sound is balanced or whatnot between the live version. But if you’re listening to it for more of, like, the piece itself, you might be listening to the live because it feels more intimate. You might be hearing like banter that you wouldn’t be hearing otherwise.\n \n\n19:05\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n19:05\tLauren St. Clair:\tYou hear those intimate moments shared between the musician or the performer having with the audience that you wouldn’t have captured otherwise or is only shared in that specific recorded moment.\n \n\n19:17\tKaris Shearer:\tExactly, yeah. They’re event-based, aren’t they?\n \n\n19:19\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah!\n19:19\tKaris Shearer:\tSo you have that, you know, unique interaction–\n \n\n19:22\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n19:22\tKaris Shearer:\t–of that particular concert or that particular event.\n \n\n19:26\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n19:26\tKaris Shearer:\tWhich we don’t have here in this recording because of that lack of play with the audience or even as, you know, someone who recorded a lot of material, Warren Tallman doesn’t on this recording introduce it or tell us, you know, exactly what date it’s recorded or where, which was fairly typical that he, he often did do that. So even in our collection, it becomes an unusual example. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]\n \n\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m gonna fast forward now to contemporary, we’re gonna take us out of 1966 to the contemporary moment. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] I wanna ask you about any shout-outs that you have to poetry sound events that are happening, any digital archives you want to mention that are maybe inspired by or related to this archive. I’m going to start with Matt.\n \n\n20:18\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, so as I mentioned, the book breth recently published by Talon Books is a collection from basically the whole of bill bissett, including works that have never been published. So if you pick up that book, what will be great to see, too, is parts of this clip that we just listened to, some lines will be found in different poems in that book. And he’s also been celebrating his 80th birthday and tons of events in the whole greater Toronto area, including St. Catharines, Ontario, and that are just really, I guess, commemorating his career and the amount of publications that he has done. So it’s really exciting. So really make sure to check out that book.\n \n\n20:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd one thing I want to mention, too, is that idea of PennSound and another recording just 13 years later, is making sure that like there are other places that you can also access this and compare that if you’re really interested in doing that.\n \n\n21:07\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Thanks so much. Lauren, I’m gonna go over to you, a kind of event or thing you want to mention.\n \n\n21:14\tLauren St. Clair:\tCool. Yeah, I wanna give a shout-out to the podcast Cut & Run, which is run by Brady Marks, who is a computational sound artist based in Vancouver. And she also has the handle furiousgreencloud if you’re interested in following her on social media or checking out her website where you can go check out her computational art that’s usually based in sound. It’s very cool. And the Cut & Run podcast is a focus on music and specifically like experimental music usually.\n \n\n21:45\tKaris Shearer:\tCool.\n21:45\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n21:45\tKaris Shearer:\tThat is very cool. Nour, I’m gonna go over to you, wanna give a shout-out?\n \n\n21:51\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. I’d like to give a shout-out to the Canadian poet in the contemporary setting, her name’s Sarah Tolmie. I recently came across her poetry because I picked up a copy of the Griffin 2019 Poetry Prize and she was one of the shortlisted winners. And her poetry is really, is really beautiful to the contemporary settings specifically in like contemporary issues. And yeah, she’s super cool.\n \n\n22:18\tKaris Shearer:\tAwesome. Sarah Tolmie.\n \n\n22:20\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n22:20\tKaris Shearer:\tGreat.\n22:20\tNour Sallam:\tHer book is The Art of Dying.\n \n\n22:21\tKaris Shearer:\tThe Art of Dying.\n \n\n22:23\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n22:23\tKaris Shearer:\tFantastic. Thank you–\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tSounds optimistic.\n \n\n22:24\tKaris Shearer:\t–so much. And I’m gonna give a shout-out to close. Ian Ferrier of SpokenWeb and much other fame is going to be here in Kelowna on January 23rd. He’s reading with Samuel Archibald at 7:00 PM at Cool Arts studio on Cawston as part of the Inspired Word Cafe series. So that should be a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to welcoming Ian to Kelowna.\n \n\n22:52\tKaris Shearer:\tI want to thank all of you for being here today and giving some really great insights into this particular recording, doing your curated close-listening and listening and talking. That’s what this is all about. I also want to thank bill bissett for giving us permission to use this particular clip and host it on our website and to the estate of Warren Tallman for their permission as well. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]\n \n\n23:23\tKaris Shearer:\tThat was episode one of SoundBox Signals. You were listening to a recording by bill bissett from our archive called the SoundBox Collection, which is housed in the UBCO AMP Lab. You can find full-length versions of our recordings online at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. I’m your host Karis Shearer and I’ll see you next time.\n \n\n23:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab, that’s A M P  L A B, .ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Nour Sallam, and Lauren St. Clair for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.7495356},{"id":"9604","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6E3, Sound Box Signals Presents – “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings'”, 2 December 2024, Drew, Chircop, and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Sofie Drew","Emily Chircop","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sofie Drew\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Emily Chircop\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c42f89ac-b9dc-42d9-8fca-240f2598846c/audio/4976f18d-ed74-4fde-91c1-f1ac6d19fad6/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:36\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,746,880 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s6e3-mixdown-normalize\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-box-signals-presents-sharon-thesens-reading-at-the-bowerings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-12-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.93921425\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39841307186015\"}]"],"Address":["1148 Research Road, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Columbia Okanagan Creative and Critical Studies Building"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"“Side A: Sharon Thesen’s Reading at [George and Angela] Bowerings’” from Sharon Thesen fonds, nd. 2019.002.002, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/sharon-thesens-reading-at-bowerings/\\n\\nSharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: Studio Reading of “The Fire.” Ed. Amy Thiessen. https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/reading\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.\\n\\nThesen, Sharon. Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems. Ed. Erin Moure. Talonbooks, 2023. https://talonbooks.com/books/?refabulations\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 1 “Stories of Spoken Web”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/\\n\\nSpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 2 “Sound Recordings Are Weird”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/\\n\\nThe Capilano Review, The Sharon Thesen Issue. Spring 2008. https://thecapilanoreview.com/issues/spring-2008-the-sharon-these-issue/\\n\\nSpecifically, Thea Bowering’s article “Sharon Thesen: Poem in Memory, and growing up there”\\n\\nhttps://journals.sfu.ca/capreview/index.php/capreview/article/view/2674/2674\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549676359680,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast is happy to showcase an episode from our sister podcast, the SoundBox Signals Podcast from SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan. SoundBox Signals is hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer.\n\nIn this episode, from Season 2, Episode 1 of the SoundBox Signals Podcast, University of Exeter undergraduates Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop carry out a close listening of a 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen reading from her first book Artemis Hates Romance at George and Angela Bowerings’ house. Drew and Chircop’s conversation focuses on the intimacy, sociality, and ambiguity of the recording, and how this shapes interpretation. The episode features multiple archival clips from the digitized cassette tape, alongside interview audio from Karis Shearer and George Bowering. “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings’” was co-produced by Emily Chircop and Sofie Drew as part of the Press Play project. The SoundBox Collection is part of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.\n\n00:00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and–\n00:00:37\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod.\nEach month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n00:00:55\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we present an episode from our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals.\nThe episode we selected was produced by Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop.\nThey are students at the University of Exeter, and this episode was produced as a collaboration between their university and the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, home to the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nIt is not the first time that SoundBox Signals has made an appearance on the SpokenWeb podcast feed.\nAnd like in those past episodes, this episode is another close listening and real conversation about archival audio.\nWe’ll let Sophie and Emily introduce you to that audio at the start of the episode.\nHere is episode three of season six of the SpokenWeb podcast: “Sharon Thesen’s Reading at the Bowerings.”\n00:01:52\tEmily Chircop\tWelcome to season two, episode one of the SoundBox Signals podcast.\nWe are your guest hosts for the episode.\n00:02:00\tSofie Drew\tHi, I’m Sophie Drew.\n00:02:01\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I’m Emily Chircop.\nWe’re undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, and this is part of the Press Play Project.\nWe are very excited to collaborate with UBCO researchers to explore and share these recordings with a wider audience.\n00:02:15\tSofie Drew\tWe’re here in the Digital Humanities Lab in Exeter to discuss the circa 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen’s reading at the Bowerings of her first published collection of poetry, Artemis Hates Romance.\nWe will be looking at “side A” of this tape in which Sharon Thesen, introduced by fellow poet Robin Blaser, reads the first half of this poetry collection.\n00:02:33\tEmily Chircop\tThis recording is available to listen to in full at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca\n00:02:40\tSofie Drew\tBefore getting into the recording, we’re going to play you a clip from our interview with Karis Shearer about the tape.\n00:02:45\tKaris Shearer\tHi, I’m Karis Shearer. I’m an English professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, and the director of the AMP Lab.\n00:02:55\tSofie Drew\tGreat!\nWe wanted to ask you a little bit about the tape recording and how it got to the AMP Lab.\n00:03:02\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, that’s a great question. I had already been working on a box of tapes that a colleague, Jodey Castricano, had given me, and we were digitizing them.\nWe’d done some presentations about them. So it was known–People knew we had this box of tapes. They knew the lab was busy digitizing, doing scholarship on literary audio recordings. And Sharon Thesen was a colleague of mine in the creative writing department, and she one day gave us two tapes. And her sound is now part of what we call the “SoundBox collection.”\nAnd so it’s two tapes, one of which you’ve worked with.\n00:03:46\tEmily Chircop\tCould you just describe the tape for us, for the listeners? Give an idea of what the event was and what the format was?\n00:03:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. So this is a tape that George Bowering made at his home in Vancouver. And the occasion is he and his wife, Angela Bowering, have invited Sharon Thesen to launch her very first book at their home.\nMy understanding is that that was their reading, and literary events in their home was something that happened quite a lot and they often recorded.\nSharon is introduced by an American poet named Robin Blaser, who was living in Canada. And she reads the entire book, and then she reads a little bit of new work. And so it’s both a kind of presentation of her, a launch of her first book, and then also, you know, what I love about that is a kind of sounding out of new work with a friendly audience.\n00:04:48\tEmily Chircop\tWe also wanted to ask you about the George Bowering oral history that you conducted for us.\n00:04:54\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, so when you listen to a tape that’s been recorded in an amateur context, people don’t necessarily say their names the way we said our names at the beginning of this recording. So we don’t really know who is speaking on the tapes. And so the tapes are full of mystery.\nOne of the ways that we can do some research and solve some of those mysteries is by inviting people who we know are on the tapes or who gave us the tapes to do some oral histories with us. So we invited them to listen to the tape first.\nHaving, you know, having digitized it, we share it with them, and then we set up an oral history where I get to ask them, or people who work on their research team, get to ask them questions about the context, the history, what they hear on the tapes. And they have all kinds of insights about things that, of course, there’s no way that I could know they can describe the setting as George Bowring does in that particular tape. He says, “Oh, it was a living room.”\n“Do you know how big the living room is?”\n“You know, my living room was?”\nAnd I was like, “I have–I have no idea”.\nSo he is able to sketch out and give me a visual sense of the scope of that room and setting, who was there, and all the. As you hear, what the kind of social context and circumstances of the recording were.\n00:06:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s the kind of context we were looking for when we listened to the recording.\n00:06:27\tKaris Shearer\tYeah. And in some ways, those questions that you have, the tapes themselves, generate all kinds of questions. Right.\nSome of these questions can be answered with research, and some remain mysteries.\nBut I love it–That’s one of my favourite parts of working with archival literary audio. Like, this is the kind of really wonderful questions that they generate and the kind of mysteries that are on them, partly because they’re not often well labelled or they’re, you know, people don’t document in the way that would be useful, but also it’s fun.\n00:07:05\tEmily Chircop\tThank you so much, Karis.\n00:07:06\tKaris Shearer\tThank you.\n00:07:08\tSofie Drew\tIn this episode, we will take you through the recording, delving in and out to explore the sounds of this poetry reading.\n00:07:15\tEmily Chircop\tFirstly, we’re going to play you a clip from the very start of the recording before the poet is even introduced.\n00:07:36\tAudio Recording from the Literary Event at the Bowering\t[Overlapping voices]\nWell, go get one, George.\nGo get one. Go get one.\nGet yourself.\nSomebody might take your seat.\nNo, respect you.\n00:08:06\tSofie Drew\tSo before we hear anyone’s clear voice, there’s a series of sounds that set the scene. There’s whistling, there’s laughing, the sounds of people clearing their throats.\nAnd it really sets the image of a lively, excited group that Thesen is about to be reading to.\n00:08:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it immediately places you in a very intimate household setting. And it really sets the tone for the whole recording by placing you in that atmosphere.\n00:08:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely, and you pointed out that we can even hear a child in the background. It really adds to that household setting.\n00:08:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it does seem like a child’s voice in the background as well.\n00:08:42\tSofie Drew\tIt feels like this little community that’s all gathered.\n00:08:45\tEmily Chircop\tDefinitely, yeah, it is. It’s a community feel. And that’s, I mean, exactly what poetry reading feels like when you’re listening to it. It feels like a very community-based event, a really social event, and a really intimate one. Yeah. And it sets the tone for the whole reading because that’s a thread that’s carried through for the whole performance.\n00:09:06\tSofie Drew\tSo one of the first voices that we hear is, we presume, George Bowering saying that he doesn’t have a beer, which is quite an informal moment, really, that’s captured there. And he gets responses from various people telling him to go and get one or just wait.\nAnd there’s really that sense of familiarity there between the audience members. They’re not afraid to accidentally offend him by telling him to wait. And it’s that really nice view of the intimacy of the setting. And it’s something that’s continued throughout.\n00:09:36\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And it’s a really funny moment as well. It sticks out from what you expect a poetry reading to be like. It’s a very informal moment, and it sets the tone.\n00:09:49\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:09:50\tEmily Chircop\tSo, we hear a man we believe to be Robin Blaser introduce Sharon Thesen on the recording.\n \n\n00:09:55\tAudio Recording, Robin Blaser\tA little respect here.\nI always feel very peculiar introducing somebody that everybody knows. Actually, I kind of like–I very much like introducing Sharon. I’ve been watching her for a long time, and what fascinates me about this book of hers is–she’s going to read to us tonight.\nShe’s going to split it, she tells me, and she’s going to give it the rest in the middle, and she’s going to add to it.\nOne, two, three, newborn something. Anyway, whatever she decides, she wants to do. But Artemis Hates Romance fascinates me. One, Artemis–\n00:10:37\tSofie Drew\tSomething that really stuck out to me about this part about his introduction of Sharon Thesen is probably the pronunciation of the word “romance.” It was quite unfamiliar to me, with this pronunciation putting emphasis on the “ants” at the end of it.\nAnd really, that small change there, for me, conjured up ideas of “courtly romance” of knights in shining armour.\nWhen Sharon Thesen then goes on to talk about her thoughts on the title, she says the word “romance” in a way that is more like how I would. How I’m used to it completely changed the meaning of romance to something a bit more informal, a bit more casual.\nAnd I think it shows us how the recording as a whole does that kind of thing, opens up all these different interpretations that if you were just reading the collection of poems, or perhaps even if you were in the audience, you wouldn’t think too much about.\nAnd I think that really sums up something that the whole reading does: the idea of these different available interpretations. Something Thesen also taps into when she talks about the context around each poem, her insight into them.\n00:11:42\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, the recording and the extra content we get from the introduction and Thesen’s explanations add something to the meaning of the poems.\nWhat I found interesting about the introduction was that this man says that “I always feel very peculiar when introducing someone everyone already knows,” which highlights how social this reading was. And again, the intimacy we mentioned before kind of blurs the boundaries between what should generally be a public event or a book launch with the very private friendship group and household intimacy.\nAnd it’s-it’s very interesting. It really adds something to the meaning of the poems. When you listen to them, you feel–\n00:12:23\tSofie Drew\tThat everyone there is contributing to make this reading work. When people talk about–and they’re discussing whether to have the lights on and, yeah, you really get this feeling that although it is Sharon Thesen doing the reading, she has this supportive audience around her who are all helping to make this happen.\n00:12:41\tEmily Chircop\tSure. It becomes almost a collaborative performance when you hear the whole thing. You can hear the audience as well as Thesen reading. And it adds to the performance. It becomes one whole rather than a reading on its own.\n00:12:54\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:12:57\tEmily Chircop\tWhen we first listened to this recording, I remember we talked about our first impressions. And a lot of the stuff that came up was about these kind of small background noises–\n00:13:11\tSofie Drew\tlike underneath that of the—\n00:13:13\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And interspersed throughout the whole recording. And I mean, there’s a wide range.\nThere’s a moment where a door opens. You can hear someone come into the room. There are cars in the background as well. We can hear cars on the street outside the house, as well as just an ever-present static behind it all. A child laughing in the introduction–\n00:13:39\tSofie Drew\tPeople clearing their throats, that kind of thing.\n00:13:42\tEmily Chircop\tAnd I mean that really made an impression on me when I listened to it. It’s just something I wasn’t expecting at all. I was expecting it to be more of a formal kind of poetry reading.\nAlthough, of course, it, you know, with it, with the setting, that isn’t how it is. But those extra background noises, they take that to a whole different level for me.\n00:14:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I think the sound of the door opening or closing, especially. Especially as we don’t know if it is opening or closing, if someone’s leaving or entering.\n00:14:13\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s this constant reminder of the people in the room that the recording is. And that the performance is more than just the speaker. It’s more than just the reading of the poems. It’s a recording of the whole room. It’s a recording of the audience. It’s a recording of the whole event.\n00:14:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd in turn then you wonder where that line is between the actual reading and the performance as a whole. Including the audience, including the setting.\n00:14:39\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I think that’s one of the main questions I have about this recording. Where is the line between what is performance and what is just coincidental noise picked up by the tape?\n00:14:51\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely. And I guess having that constant awareness that the audience is there. When you’re listening to Thesen speak, you also know that you’re accompanied by all these other people also listening to her, and you feel as if you are part of that little community there.\n00:15:09\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. You almost get kind of sucked into the recording, sucked into the atmosphere of the tape, because it’s just so. It’s so tangible.\nYou can tell that they’re in a residential area because you can hear the cars on the road. You can know. You can hear the doors; you can hear the people. And it just really places you in the material surroundings of this recording.\nEven though it was recorded 40 years ago, it still feels like it’s happening presently around us when we listen to it.\n00:15:43\tSofie Drew\tYeah, yeah. You experience similar sounds, cars going past all the time. It’s things that we’re familiar with, even though it was that long ago.\n00:15:50\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, that’s definitely–It’s the familiarity. It pulls you into the recording makes you feel part of the audience, which, of course, you are part of the audience listening to the tape.\n00:15:58\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:15:59\tEmily Chircop\tThe original audience adds to the performance, but at the same time, you become part of that audience.\nThe way that it’s been recorded, being able to pick up on all those background noises, it’s not just a poetry reading. It’s a much bigger experience when you listen to it.\n00:16:14\tSofie Drew\tI think it’s a moment in time captured in a way.\n00:16:17\tEmily Chircop\tYes.\n00:16:17\tSofie Drew\tAll these individuals are people you can make out little bits of what they’re saying and doing rather than just the focus being on. Although the focus is on decent speaking, you’re also very aware that there are all these other individuals who have all come together for this one moment.\n00:16:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, I like that. A moment in time. That’s a really interesting way of putting it. That’s definitely how it feels to listen to kind of like a poetry time capsule.\n00:16:45\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nYou will now hear the voice of George Bowering, the host of the reading and Thesen’s fellow poet and friend, who was interviewed by Karis Shearer.\nKaris Shearer’s Interview of George Bowering\n00:16:54\tKaris Shearer\tGeorge, one of the things I was thinking about when I was listening to this tape, I realized there is kind of a difference between reading in someone’s house amongst friends and versus, reading at a public library or launching a book at a bookstore.\nOne of the things that’s happening in this tape, especially in the second half, is that people are responding. People are laughing. People are–There’s twice in the reading, someone asks her [Thesen] to read the poem a second time.\n00:17:27\tGeorge Bowering\tYeah.\n00:17:27\tKaris Shearer\tAnd I wonder if you could say something about it.\n00:17:30\tGeorge Bowering\tJust used to do that a lot.\nWell, when you’re at–in somebody’s house like that, especially somebody that you’re close to, right? And that you’re really good friends of, you feel a little bit like that thing that I said about Robin, that you’re not doing a performance, that isn’t that formal thing staying in front of you is rather that they know that you’ve been writing this work for a long time and you finally seem to have got it done.\nAnd it’s almost as if they helped you. Right. It’s like a joint production, and they were there. I really do remember not enjoying it. It might not be the right word, but I felt as if it was important to my soul, you know because it was because of the continuity that I was talking about.\nAnd sometimes, we would do something like work that was not finished and say, here’s where I’ve got so far. And people would read it and get familiar with it. And then later on, you know, when it was 3/4 finished, another one. In a sense, doing something that’s in your house, in somebody’s house. Well, you could have done it in a bookstore, or you could have organized it for, you know, the Western Front or something like that could have happened. But deliberately.\nWould you go to somebody’s house and do it? Because of the sense of community and to use it. We knew this poem was coming, right?? And we knew we. We had read quite a bit of the poem before that. We have it. So it wasn’t as if it was, oh, geez, there’s the poet, et cetera. It was so high.\n00:19:32\tEmily Chircop\tShared.\n00:19:33\tGeorge Bowering\tIt’s shared. Right. Yeah. It was also because. Partly because Sharon, like, she and Angela were best friends at the time, at least, and they were.\nThey spent a lot of time at each other’s place. It was not just an extension of the poetry, but it was an extension of that friendship as well.\n00:19:59\tSofie Drew\tThat was the voice of George Bowring.\n00:20:03\tEmily Chircop\tSo you were talking about the ambiguity and the different interpretations of the poems that are opened up by the recording. Could you tell me a bit more about that?\n00:20:14\tSofie Drew\tSo, yeah, really, some of the most interesting moments of the recording for me were actually the bits where I couldn’t quite hear it.\nI couldn’t quite make out what was being said. And I think it’s due to the sound quality, really, of something recorded. So Long ago. But really, I found that when there were moments where I couldn’t quite make out the words, I was, without really thinking, replacing those ambiguous moments with words that felt more relatable to me and, you know, things that perhaps I would have liked to have written about, that kind of thing.\nSo, one particular moment where I noticed this was something like meeting the sweetest sky at night, meeting the sweetest guy at night, or even sweeping the sky at night. And I thought it was that variety of interpretations that could be taken from the reading that really made it so fascinating.\nThere was another moment where, until we had access to the written versions of the poems, we listened to the recording quite a few times without any knowledge of the actual text.\nJust what we had to hear Thesen speak about it and say because quite a few times, she adds in bits. And you can’t always quite tell where the poem starts and where the explanation ends.\n00:21:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, it all blends together.\n00:21:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd so there was one moment where there was a word, we realize now it’s “Creeley”, which is the name of an American poet, but we weren’t sure of that until recently. And so it was this moment where we just really had no clue what these lines were, but it really added to it. It felt like there’s this intimate audience that presumably understands that reference, and we’re almost outsiders to that, in a way, and yet.\nSo that just increases that idea of familiarity among the audience, among Thesen, that we, as listeners, are hoping to catch a glimpse into and join. So, in continuing on from the idea of the listener of this recording being somewhat of an outsider to the community of this reading, is when in one of her poems, she mentions stc, and it’s not explained within the poem, but then afterwards, she explains to the audience that it’s Coleridge.\nAnd the audience reacts to this by laughing. They all burst into laughter, insane laughter. And so it’s like, oh, it must be some kind of inside joke. Must have perhaps expected that kind of thing from her. And yet. So we see that it’s an inside joke. And yet, as the outsider, in a way, we still don’t exactly know what the joke is. We’re not allowed in on it.\n00:23:06\tEmily Chircop\tNo, no. In a sense, yeah, definitely it is.\nThere is that barrier which, to me, amplifies that sense of the sociality and the intimacy of the reading. It really makes you feel the social atmosphere, that they’re all friends, and that they’re all close.\nThey all know each other.\n00:23:28\tSofie Drew\tYou kind of want to get invited in, you know, you want to become one of them.\n00:23:32\tEmily Chircop\tI guess listening to the recording, the fact that it was recorded and has been kindly given to the Amp Lab for us to listen to, is kind of like them inviting us into the moment, which is the only way they can.\n00:23:44\tSofie Drew\tYeah, I like that.\n00:23:46\tEmily Chircop\tIn a way, the kind of ambiguity that you get through the recording, it both alienates us from that original recording context because it also reminds you that it is a recording and that’s why you can’t hear.\nBut then at the same time, it kind of brings you back into that potentially because you are acting more as an audience than ever and trying to understand.\n00:24:10\tSofie Drew\tYes, definitely.\n00:24:13\tEmily Chircop\tI think it does both, which is very interesting as a listener. It’s a very strange experience to be both pulled into the recording and pushed out of it at the same moment.\nBecause I don’t think that’s something you experience when you’re listening to something live.\n00:24:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\n00:24:31\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you miss something, you don’t feel like you’re being pushed out of the experience.\n00:24:36\tSofie Drew\tAnd you could even make a point that today when we’re listening to something, there’s subtitles available or, you know, there’s the whole Internet out there ready to explain it to you, but when you’re looking at something from a while ago, you know, you do lack that.\n00:24:55\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah. The prevalence of captions and transcriptions, I think it definitely changes the way we listen to things. We kind of expect to be able to hear every word and know what the correct word is.\n00:25:08\tSofie Drew\tIn fact, when I went through the written versions, I had a completely different insight really, to some of the poems that I just read. I wouldn’t have gotten just from listening to it.\n00:25:20\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. Listening to poetry being read is a completely different experience. And listening to a recording of a reading, I would say is even a different experience to that. When we’ve been talking about this recording, the way we talk about the recording versus the way we talk about listening to a reading of a poem, it’s completely different. It brings so much more to it.\nI mean, all the things we’ve been talking about today are things we would never really consider in a live reading. We wouldn’t be talking about how the door opens at this point or there’s a car in the background, or we can hear laughter.\nBecause of it being recorded makes all of those things more obvious and noticeable.\n00:26:03\tSofie Drew\tYeah.\nAnd I think, live, your brain probably automatically filters out those background sounds like doors opening and cars driving past.\nBut when you’re listening to a recording, it’s all there at the same level, really, as each other, and you have to work a bit harder to figure out which bits to filter out and which bits to focus on.\n00:26:22\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. And, I mean, personally, I think none of it should be filtered out. While a lot of those noises might not be intentional, they’re still part of the recording. They add to the art and add to the performance. And I think if you cut out all of those background noises, it would be a completely different reading. The impressions we get from it, and the emotions and ideas that are conveyed.\nThe audience has such a huge hand in portraying that to us, and you wouldn’t get it if you cut out all that background noise. It’s interesting. I wonder if they recorded the whole room because that’s the technology they had available or if they recorded the whole room because they wanted to hear their friend’s reactions to their friend reading a poem. In our interview, Karis Shearer had some really insightful comments about this, which we’ll now play for you.\n00:27:11\tKaris Shearer\tYeah, I think that is such a great question. And it’s something that I find I listened to a lot, actually, and I have a research assistant who works on the project, Megan Butchart.\nWe both do a lot of listening for intention. Like, what did people think they were recording? What did they think the occasion was, and what did they think the purpose of the tape was? The recording captures bookends in some ways that exceed the intended purpose of the event.\nSo the sort of sociality, the, you know, George Bowering says, “oh, I gotta have to get another beer from the fridge.”\nProbably not, you know, an intended part of the recording, but nevertheless something that tells us a lot of information about the kind of conviviality of the setting and the way in which people were, you know, food and drink flowing.\n00:28:05\tSofie Drew\tSo another area of the reading that we wanted to focus on was the poem Kirk lonergren’s home movie, taking place just north of Prince George, with sound.\n00:28:14\tEmily Chircop\tAnd you can hear a clip from that play, now.\n00:28:18\tAudio Clip, from N/A\tThis one is a prose piece. It’s a description of a movie that a student of mine brought to class. Instead of an essay, they had that choice.\nIt was one of those kinds of classes. You could do something else. So this kid brought this movie, and he had bright red hair. He was a Sagittarius, and he was into archery completely and thought that archery had a lot more integrity going forward as far as killing things and guns and so on.\nAnd he and all these other archers would go up to a place just outside of Prince George every year and hunt for bears with their bows. And this movie was a–they took up their little movie camera, and they made a movie of one of these little trips, these little hunting trips that they took.\nThis is a description of the movie. And it was very artistic, the movie, the beginning. Some landscapes and words about nature. That particular landscape and what it harbors. Shots of woodpeckers, porcupines, the swamp lilies, bears and moose. And the three archers, one old guy, one medium guy, one young guy, Kirk.\nThis is called “Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.” Taking place just north of Prince George, with sound. That was another thing that was really interesting about it. It was sound. Okay, so.\nAnd one young guy, Kirk, all dressed in camouflage clothing, like those green–\n00:29:53\tSofie Drew\tSo something that really stuck out to us was the introduction to this, in which Sharon Thesen uses quite intimate, small details about this Kirk Lonergan, saying he’s got red hair, that he’s a Sagittarius. Quite unusual details.\nYou can kind of get an insight into her mind that these are the specific details. Not the common details you’d use to describe someone, but those are the ones that stick with her.\n00:30:18\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:30:19\tSofie Drew\tAnd it’s that kind of thing as well that I think perhaps lots of people can relate to. When something’s quite personal to you, you do remember those small, perhaps unusual details.\nAnd so you get this feeling that what she’s about to read is definitely an insight.\n00:30:36\tEmily Chircop\tAnd it’s humorous, of course, mentioning that he’s a Sagittarius and then describing all of this archery.\nYou can really get that insight into the humour that’s present throughout this whole reading as well.\nThe bit I find most interesting is what she said–She says the film is very artistic, and the room laughs at this. And you just–I just don’t know, does she mean it seriously? Does she mean it’s an artistic movie, or is she saying it’s sarcastic?\n00:31:06\tSofie Drew\tWe have no clue what face she’s making as she says this. Or if people just naturally get from the context that it’s meant in a humorous way.\n00:31:16\tEmily Chircop\tI think either way, whether it’s sarcastic or genuine, it’s a really wonderful moment.\n00:31:21\tSofie Drew\tIt’s great to see the audience engaging with the poem like that.\n00:31:25\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:31:27\tSofie Drew\tAnd she continues to engage with the audience.\nHalfway through reading it, she decides to go back to the title, give a bit more description, context for the poem.\n00:31:37\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. The way she reads this poem is really interesting because in most of the poems, she reads the title, and then she reads the whole poem.\nSome of the poems don’t have titles in this collection. But in this one, she explains what the prose piece is about, and she explains the context behind the movie and the fact that it was a submission to her as a teacher, but she doesn’t give the title.\nShe starts reading the piece and gets to the name “Kirk.” Then, she has to interrupt herself because she realizes, or at least we presume she realizes, that the audience does not know who Kirk is. She interrupts and says, “oh, this is called Kirk Lonergan’s Home Movie.”\nAnd then she goes back and repeats herself, “Kirk,” and continues with the reading. And it’s really–I find it really fun, a very different way of reading poems, but it brings it back to just the presence of the audience in the intimate setting.\n00:32:32\tSofie Drew\tDefinitely.\n00:32:35\tEmily Chircop\tThe fact that that interruption to put the title halfway through the poem is likely a necessity of just the way she was reading it and in the context of the moment rather than a deliberate decision. And yet it’s a really lovely way to read the poem because you don’t need to know the title until you get to that part where you mentioned Kirk. And the way it flows, I think, is actually–It flows really well. I think it’s a really good way of conveying that to the audience.\n00:33:08\tSofie Drew\tAnd in fact, by not introducing it with the title initially, it is almost as if what Thesen is speaking is actually just her thoughts she decided to share with the audience.\nThere’s that sense that she feels comfortable around them. Comfortable enough to interrupt a poem in the middle of it to add on to it more.\n00:33:26\tEmily Chircop\tIt feels very organic, I think, I would say.\n00:33:29\tSofie Drew\tAnd you had some interesting ideas about the form of it.\n00:33:33\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, yeah.\nI think this section really showcases the medium of the recording because you have this prose piece which already stands out in a poetry collection, but that prose piece is a visual, written-down rendition of an audio-visual medium of the home video itself. Then we receive it in an audio format with no visual element. The descriptions are still so immersive and striking, even when you take away the visual aspect that you would expect to be central to a description of a video.\nAnd I think it’s a really. It’s a really interesting experience to be able to convert what was written visually about a visual medium into purely audio. And how that–Then we’re listening to it now, and we can visualize that movie, and I think we get something from it that we wouldn’t get from seeing it written down in the way that she describes it, the way her voice sounds and the way the audience responds.\n00:34:41\tSofie Drew\tAnd I think the fact that in the title, it’s added on at the end “with sound,” I think that really highlights element of the different forms merging together.\n00:34:52\tEmily Chircop\tYeah. So, considering the medium and the fact that it is purely sound-based, how do you think it interacts with the imagery in the poem?\n00:35:02\tSofie Drew\tWell, the images are quite disturbing; some of them, especially in the last few lines, talk about how there’s blood on the hunter’s hands but not on the bear. And I think the fact that these images are so vivid, again, contributes to the idea of the different forms of media kind of coming together there.\n00:35:23\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, there’s convergence of the different elements.\n00:35:26\tSofie Drew\tExactly. The descriptions, the–some of the disturbing simile metaphors that she uses are when she compares things: Cuddling their dead teddy bears.\n00:35:35\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:35:38\tSofie Drew\tBut I think the fact we get almost, perhaps a better description, a more emotional description of these things in the video than we perhaps would get from actually just watching the video.\nWe do get that sense that there is emotion behind it for either the people in the video or for Thesen watching it.\n00:36:00\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, definitely.\nAnd I think it is because we feel quite pulled into the audience because of the way the recording is formatted, the way that the listening experience–You feel like you’re part of that audience. You feel very kind of taken and potentially like, shaken by what she’s saying. And it’s very–It is quite off putting, but in a very mesmerizing way.\n00:36:28\tSofie Drew\tYeah, definitely.\nIt’s almost like we’re–You feel that…\nWell, yeah. In the gruesomeness of the imagery, Thesen is being forced to watch the video, in a sense, as–I mean, if these people have submitted it–\n00:36:43\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:36:44\tSofie Drew\tAs work, then she is forced to watch it, in a sense.\nAnd it’s like she’s taking the audience along, us along with her, into being forced to see these gruesome images. It’s almost–\n00:36:56\tEmily Chircop\tSee, I don’t know if this is the right word.\nThe way we’re listening to this is almost voyeuristic, as the content of this video is viewed through the very, like, opinionated lens of Sharon Thesen’s work. And to see someone’s home video through that lens, it’s–I think it definitely changes the meaning. We might feel the same way if we were to see that video or just read a less opinionated description. But the nature of it being prose poetry, really, it just adds that extra level of vividness, that extra level of, like the grotesque metaphors that she uses similes.\n00:37:34\tSofie Drew\tAnd we really get the feeling that it is something personal, even to Kirk Lonergren, because his full name is in the title of this poem.\nI wonder if he knew that he would have a whole poem.\n00:37:46\tEmily Chircop\tI wonder.\n00:37:47\tSofie Drew\tAnd the fact that it’s a home movie.\nYeah. We’re seeing something that’s very personal to this guy, Kirk. What’s, then, very personal to Thesen becomes personal to us.\n00:37:57\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, It’s. It’s just. It’s also intimate, isn’t it?\n00:38:01\tSofie Drew\tAnd yet, while we see the intimacy of this reading as a positive thing, very friendly, comfortable.\nThe intimacy that we see in the. Well, see, in the reading of this poem of the home movie, it’s very disturbing.\nDefinitely not a comfortable. Definitely not comfortable for the reader or the audience.\n00:38:24\tEmily Chircop\tThe next clip we’re going to play for you is from near the end of the recording. And it is the start of the poem, “The Shifting Sands Motel.”\n00:38:35\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tThe Shifting Sands Motel.\nSome transients for you, Robin.\nClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nI get this blue stuff from the Safeway called intensive care.\nBaths and the mineralmakend it makes the water just Mediterranean blue.\nIt’s wonderful.\n00:39:06\tAudio Recording, Sharon Thesen reading “The Shifting Sands Motel”\tClose your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.\nYou are soon to have lunch with a movie star.\nOpen your eyes and pretend your bath is the Arctic Sea.\nYou are soon to eat your companion in the rowboat.\n00:39:24\tSofie Drew\tSo, from the very start, you seemed quite interested in this poem in her description at the start of it. Why is that?\n00:39:32\tEmily Chircop\tYeah, this part of the recording really was one of my favourite parts. I find the way that she pauses her reading of the poem really intriguing. She says the first two lines, “close your eyes and pretend your bath is the Mediterranean.”\nShe then explained that the bath beads she got from Safeway make the water really blue.\nAnd then, she goes back and repeats the first two lines. And in doing that, the explanation, that additional context, becomes part of the poem.\nWhen you’re listening to it, it becomes part of the performance. And it brought a lot of extra meaning to the poem for me. And I just. I just think it’s a really interesting concept, especially the explanations throughout this whole recording.\nBut I think this really exemplifies it. Well, the way the explanations are presented and the audience’s reaction. You can hear them laughing when she provides the content, the way that it kind of works its way seamlessly into the performance itself.\n00:40:31\tSofie Drew\tYeah. I mean, do you feel like it, at least, I think, possible?\nI feel like when she’s describing it, it almost feels like she’s talking to you as a friend, you know, like, “oh, check out these great bath bombs that I get.”\n00:40:44\tEmily Chircop\tIt’s very casual, isn’t it, outside of just the intimacy that’s so prevalent in this recording. And it’s both an interruption to what you would expect to be quite a, like, formal, straight-through-the-poem kind of performance.\nIt’s both an interruption to that aspect, and also it slots right in and makes the poem a lot more, I would say, tangible.\nIt makes it more tangible because you can imagine just how blue that water is.\nAnd by rooting it more in the home, it really picks up on that idea of, like, imagine your bath is the Mediterranean. Not just imagine you’re in the Mediterranean. Imagine your bath in the Mediterranean. And by describing the bath beads that she buys herself, I think it really amplifies that aspect of it, being your bath and the location. Yeah.\n00:41:33\tSofie Drew\tShe’s trying to connect to her audience on that kind of level.\n00:41:36\tEmily Chircop\tThat’s exactly it. It connects to you.\nSo, just to finish off now, I’ve got to ask, what is your favourite part of the recording?\n00:41:45\tSofie Drew\tI think for me, it’s probably within the first poem, “Japanese Movies.”\nI just–I really loved the image created there, especially of death, really. But the main line is where a cold snow lady waits with blackened teeth to cure you of the fear of life. And it’s something that throughout the rest of the recording, that image from the very start really stayed with me.\nI love the representation of death there, really. The idea is that if you trust death long enough, you end up risking more, and death will come down on you twice as hard.\nYou know, the idea that the poem just conveyed, I really loved it, and I think it set a tone for the rest of the poems.\nSo what about you? What was your favourite part of this reading?\n00:42:29\tEmily Chircop\tI think we’ve honestly talked about most of my favourite parts so far. The “hunting piece” and the “Shifting Sands Motel” poem are two of my favourites.\nBut one part we haven’t talked about yet is the poem from which the title of the collection, “Artemis Hates Romance,” comes. And I love this part of the recording.\nBesides, it is just a wonderful poem; you also get this interruption of Thesen talking about the inspiration from COVID-19, which I loved hearing. I loved getting that extra insight into the whole collection, especially with it being a book launch.\nI think getting that kind of extra information about COVID and about the process behind not just writing these poems and reading them but shaping the text into the book form that we end up hearing. Being read from, I think, is something extra special that we get from this recording.\n00:43:24\tSofie Drew\tIt’s something that we probably don’t really think about the majority of the time.\nYou know, you see, like a collection of poems–\n00:43:30\tEmily Chircop\tYeah–\n00:43:30\tSofie Drew\tYou take it; those poems are as they are. You don’t think about how they came to be put together, how you choose the title, that kind of thing.\n00:43:38\tEmily Chircop\tYeah.\n00:43:38\tSofie Drew\tThis really reminds me of when Thesen reads her poem, “It Being Over, There Being No Other Way,” when at the end she says how she hates it and that she only put it in the collection because Robin Blaser told her to.\nAnd I think that just really highlights that collaborative element of this collection of poems.\nThere’s a personal insight there from Thessa and the people around her. All these individuals have come together to create the collection and create the reading.\n00:44:08\tEmily Chircop\tI think that idea that you touched on about taking the poems as they are is really key in the way we listen to this recording because we’re not taking the poems just as they are.\nWe’re getting so many other layers of meaning and layers of interpretation from the audience, from the recording, from listening to her speak them aloud, and from the fact that it was recorded in the past. That kind of temporal shift. All of it just adds layer upon layer upon layer to the point that you’re not just taking the poem as they are, you’re taking the recording as it is. And that’s, to me, what makes this recording so special.\n00:44:47\tSofie Drew\tYou’ve been listening to the SoundBox Signals podcast with Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop from the University of Exeter.\n00:44:53\tEmily Chircop\tI study English and Communications, and I’m particularly interested in podcasting and how different mediums can influence texts.\n00:45:00\tSofie Drew\tI’m studying Classical Studies in English, I’m pursuing writing poetry, and I’ve written and directed a couple of short audio dramas with the BBC.\n00:45:07\tEmily Chircop\tYou can check out the full recording we discussed today on the SoundBox website.\nThe link can be found in the show notes.\n\n00:45:13\tSofie Drew\tIf you enjoyed this podcast, you can read more of Sharon Thesen’s work in her newest book, Refabulations.\n00:45:20\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental music]\n00:45:45\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month’s episode was a guest appearance by our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals. It featured producers Sophie Drew and Emily Chircop.\n00:45:54\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n00:46:05\tKatheryn McLeod\tTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.\n00:46:14\tKatheryn McLeod\tIf you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media.\n00:46:21\tKatherine McLeod\tPlus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.\nFor now, thank you for listening."],"score":5.7495356},{"id":"9609","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E10, SoundBox Signals presents “Is Robin Here?\", 6 July 2020, Shearer and Sallam  "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-robin-here/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3c9851a8-a26b-4ce2-a34d-55fd66f7201c/sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:40:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"39,404,818 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"http://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-robin-here/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-07-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94219\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39907\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The SoundBox Collection: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\\n\\nAmy Thiessen’s Honours Project / Digitial Exhibition on Sharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net\\n\\nThe Real Vancouver Writers’ Series: https://realvancouver.org/\\n\\nEpisode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast featuring Hannah McGregor: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/\\n\\nSecret Feminist Agenda podcast: https://secretfeministagenda.com/category/podcast/   \\n\\nChristine Mitchell’s “Can You Hear Me?”:  https://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/ \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549691039744,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor and Emily Murphy to question what we can uncover about the dynamics of a space through listening. Together they invite us into a ‘close listening’ of Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church (Vancouver) March 14, 1970. Recorded on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Listen to find out if “Robin” is here.\n\nProduced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what *listening* allows us to know about cultural history. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\n\n00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:26\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast SoundBox Signals. We’ll hear some new voices to the podcast, as well as some that might sound a little bit more familiar, like mine. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close-listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together, they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor—that’s me—and Emily Murphy. Together, we discuss Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “‘Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church in Vancouver on March 14th, 1970 on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Here is Karis Shearer and SoundBox Signals asking: “Is Robin Here?” [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Begin Music: Gentle Ambient Instrumentals] [Various Recorded Voices] I see you face to face. What is the voice? Certainty of others for life, love, sight, hearing of others. Where is this voice…coming from? I see you also face to face.\n \n\n02:45\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today in the studio at UBC Okanagan by guest curator Amy Thiessen, who is the SpokenWeb RA and our very own project manager and she’s also completing a honour’s thesis on the work of Sharon Thesen. I’m also joined by Emily Murphy, who is a professor of digital humanities and assistant director of the AMP Lab. And today we have from Vancouver Hannah McGregor, who’s assistant professor in publishing at Simon Fraser University and host of the Secret Feminist Agenda. Welcome everybody, thanks for joining us.\n \n\n03:22\tHannah McGregor:\tThank you, I’m delighted to be here.\n \n\n03:23\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, I too am delighted.\n \n\n03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tAmy, are you also delighted?\n \n\n03:28\tAmy Thiessen:\tSuper.\n \n\n03:31\tKaris Shearer:\tFantastic. We’re here to talk about a really special recording, a weird recording. So we’re gonna rewind to March 14th, 1970 and have a listen to Warren Tallman introducing an event that is called the Charles Olson Memorial. So here we go.\n \n\n03:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Audio, Warren Tallman] Some people who were planning this, that we would have all the poets lined up in front on a sheet of paper so that it could be read off one, two, three, four, five. It didn’t work out. So all you poets are in the audience. And so it’s going to have to be when it gets around to that point at which you would like to read for this reading, it is, it’s going to have to be kind of Quaker, you know, or what I assume is Quaker that you stand up on your feet and walk forward in some calm or pause that has taken place. And…yes? [Someone Asks A Question] Yeah. You can’t hear? [Person Speaks More, Inaudible] Oh, I– yeah. I’m supposed to make an announcement about how long to read. It’s always impressed me as rather ridiculous to tell a poet how long to read, but I will tell all of you poets this, that if there’s a rhythm that’s going, which makes for three or four or five minutes, if you break it by reading for 40 minutes, everybody in the audience will hate you. [Laughs] So I would say three or four or five minutes, although you understand that’s not an instruction to impede on the freedom of any poet to read. [Crashing Sound] [Laughter] I– I am, I am, I’m being deliberately rather facetious and frivolous, so that we can have that to work on, to move into an actually more serious occasion. And since we do not have any listing of the poets, you must choose your own occasion as it occurs to you. But first, I would like to have Robin. Is Robin here? Okay. Well, Robin Blaser is going to start this with a reading. It is going to be interrupted with a tape and there’ll be an interruption after the tape of about three or two minutes or so. And then the poets will read whatever has occurred to them to read on the occasion of this memorial for Charles Olson. [Click]\n \n\n06:43\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy, you chose this recording. Can you tell us a little bit about what we know about it?\n \n\n06:48\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. So this recording, as Karis said earlier, was recorded on March 14th, 1970. We know that they are gathered at St. Anslem’s church on the UBC Vancouver campus and that it was recorded on reel-to-reel.\n \n\n07:04\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And it’s about, it’s an excerpt, it’s the very beginning of a whole recording. It’s about an hour long. It also features a number of different poets. Robin Blaser, obviously, is mentioned. Judith Copithorne, Peter Quartermain, Lionel Kearns, Richard Sommer from Montreal, Maxine Gadd, and quite a few other poets. It’s a weird introduction to a poetry reading. Hannah, I’m going to turn that over to you. You’ve been to a lot of record–, poetry readings. What, what’s weird about this?\n \n\n07:38\tHannah McGregor:\tI mean, so one of the, one of the major jobs when I think about what hosts at poetry readings are trying to do, one of the major things that they are doing, is sort of set tone and norms for what’s about to proceed. And a lot of that, a lot of the work at literary readings has to do with establishing how long people are allowed to read for. Because in my experience, without that, people will read for a wild amount of time. And even with the norms, people will read for a wild amount of time. And so what really… The first listen through to this, what really struck me was that invitation to a Quaker-like sort of self-electing process in which poets will get up, “you poets” will just get up, and read when they feel moved to do so and are sort of given this like, you know, read for four to five minutes or whatever feels right. Probably not 40. Which is… There’s a lot of lateral movement in that four to 40 minutes.\n \n\n08:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you bet. It’s, I mean, there’s a sort of sense of spontaneity, but Emily, it’s kind of, it’s, it is controlled, right? I mean, he is setting up some boundaries. What are the boundaries that you’re hearing in this?\n08:48\tEmily Murphy:\tSuper controlled. I mean, I think that one of the major boundaries is this idea that social pressure will help keep boundaries around the poets, which many of us know probably wouldn’t work. But one of the things that I did find really interesting about this is that buried in this desire for spontaneity is kind of like a series of conventions about what’s going to count as it. Like, even down to instructions for movement, right? Like some kind of Quaker ceremony where you, like you stand up in a moment of silence and walk towards the front of the room. There’s already like a really embodied physical dimension being made explicit in his instructions, which indicates to me then that there are actually like quite clear boundaries for what counts as spontaneity and probably what counts as improvisation of a sort in this room that, I mean, we often think of improvisation as a thing that just kind of springs from you internally. But there are, there’s plenty of research that is calling for a kind of richer understanding of what the conventions of improvisation are or kind of conventions that signal this sort of authentic, spontaneous contribution.\n \n\n09:59\tHannah McGregor:\tI was just thinking even in that “be totally spontaneous, but four to five minutes” suggests that this really interesting tension between the desire to establish an environment of spontaneity and sort of free responsiveness to what’s happening alongside the need to state and establish norms. And that tension is really interesting and also leads me to wonder, you know, historically, at what point do we start establishing norms of five-minute readings of 10-minute readings? Like, when you hear about readings that last 45 minutes, how and when and why are we starting to arrive at a sense of what is supposed to be, apparently, kind of innate or kind of intuitive or kind of felt the sense of how long is an appropriate length to read?\n \n\n10:53\tEmily Murphy:\tMy– I mean, my hunch is that that history is probably a religious one, right? That we probably start seeing shorter readings while, when more people are literate, essentially. I mean, my own, any of my knowledge, which is limited, about how people would read in public is about kind of belletristic traditions, right? Where you would read letters because you weren’t reading to a literate population and you would read verses and sermons that were timed to like the bells that would go off in a public square. And so that’s like, that’s a really religious background to public readings. And here we have an extensively secular event that’s held in a church and that—can I give a spoiler about the first reading?\n \n\n11:42\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you sure can.\n \n\n11:42\tEmily Murphy:\tThe first reading is from Revelations. So it’s like shot through with these religious contexts.\n \n\n11:50\tKaris Shearer:\tIn addition to the invocation of the Quaker-ness, right? There’s actually—\n \n\n11:53\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n11:53\tKaris Shearer:\t–quite a lot of religiosity evoked in this. One of the questions we ask on the podcast is like, what does listening allow us to know about cultural history? And I’m going to turn this over to Amy to ask you what kind of information do we hear in this podcast, do we gather through listening in terms of like space or numbers of people? I mean, we have a list of poets, but what kind of sense do we get of the setting here?\n \n\n12:21\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. Quite a few times, and even just this short bit of the recording, we can hear the audience like laughing or talking, or there’s that point at the beginning when Warren’s not sure what the, I think woman at the back is saying, and there’s a moment that doesn’t turn out to be the technical difficulty that “Oh, you can’t hear?” But that’s something that… You can tell that technology is present in that room and it’s, we can hear it through the tape and we can tell that Warren is miked and that there’s sort of that… He’s in front of people and there’s a crowd there. And yeah.\n \n\n12:57\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I mean, there’s also one more point, at least one more point, in the tape too where we get a sense of like how many people are… Like Warren’s perception of how many people are in the audience. What is, it’s actually one of your favourite parts if I remember. What is that moment?\n \n\n13:14\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, we get the moment when Warren, isn’t sure if Robin is there. You can sort of sense that he’s looking around and maybe doesn’t see him right away. Yeah, is unsure. It’s not like there’s a crowd of 15 people and you can see him, right?\n \n\n13:28\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah, “Is Robin here?” And he’s looking in the crowd. Somebody has also suggested that this recording that it’s possible that the lights are turned down and he’s not able to actually see into the audience. And I’m not sure. You know, obviously there’s limits to what we can know through listening.\n \n\n13:47\tHannah McGregor:\tThere is that feeling though, right? Like, including the way that he addresses the audience as “you poets.” And sort of doesn’t like, “Oh, sorry, you can’t–” Like he, you know, he doesn’t call people by name. And if you’re sort of thinking, like you’re familiar with the people who are here, then you would say somebody’s name when they are talking to you. So there’s certainly the sense that he can’t necessarily see them. And that question of is it because there’s a huge crowd or is it because it’s dark or is it because I’ve never been in this space? Like, what is this venue like? Is it full of weird pillars that hide people? I don’t know.\n \n\n14:21\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And I guess one, I mean, certainly one of the research questions are the things that we’ll do when we’re pursuing research on this type is actually go to St. Anselm’s Church and have a sense, have a look at its architecture. I want to pick up on something that you’ve kind of moved us towards, which is that relationship between Warren Tallman and the audience. He’s an English professor. He’s not himself a poet. But he certainly had a good relationship with poets and was, through the facilitation of events like this, through his teaching of poetry. What do we hear in terms of his relationship with the audience? And I’m gonna go to you Hannah first and then I’m gonna go over to Emily.\n \n\n15:00\tHannah McGregor:\tWell, like, I keep mentioning it, Karis, because you pointed it out to me and now I really hear it whenever I listen, is his addressing the audience as “you poets.”\n \n\n15:09\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I can’t get over that.\n \n\n15:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is very funny. It has this kind of… This familiarity and also this sort of joking disdain. Like, “You know what you poets are like, just gives a vibe of the sort of… When you are familiar enough with a group to make fun of them. Which suggests a sort of an intimacy of environment, right? That you don’t make fun of an audience unless they are your friends. Which sets up this sort of warmth. Like you don’t get the feeling that this is a random public reading. The audience are the speakers, it’s a community gathering, and you can feel that in the way that he is addressing an audience that is at once the sort of participants and the listeners for the event.\n \n\n15:53\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Emily, what about you? What do you hear in terms of that relationship between Tallman and the audience and maybe that kind of question of authority?\n \n\n16:02\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, question of authority. I mean, I don’t want to be the person who keeps bringing it back to religion, but I guess—\n \n\n16:10\tKaris Shearer:\tGo for it.\n \n\n16:10\tEmily Murphy:\t–that’s my role. I just, like, I always hear this tape in terms of like the situation of mourning. And it always sounds to me like a wake. And as a bit of background to that, I’m born in Ireland and my entire family is Irish. We are not the kind of Irish people who have wakes. That’s actually like quite specific. But it’s still this sort of community gathering among friends where you’ll tell jokes and sing songs and maybe read from Revelations. But there is a sort of bondedness and a kind of joy in the mourning. And so I think like, I mean, what’s an authority figure in Irish culture if not a priest, right? And he is sort of like in a way, like literally speaking to a flock, right?\n \n\n17:01\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:01\tEmily Murphy:\tAnd that’s also interesting in terms of the relationship of the professor to students, professor to poets who he is actively engaged in making the, like the canonical poetic community of his age. Yeah.\n \n\n17:23\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. We were talking a little bit about that professorial feel, right? Like, it does not surprise me to hear that this person is a professor because I hear in the way that he is addressing the audience, the gathering, something that sounds a lot to me like how I talk to my students, that sort of facetious and sort of like self-undermining, like making fun of yourself a little bit, which sets a very particular tone of like, “Okay, I’m in charge here, but like, not that in charge. So, you know, here’s some structure, but also I really want you to feel free to take over and for this to be your space to do with as you want. But you also…” Like Emily was saying, you know, total freedom, total improvisation is sort of impossible without structure. So you need somebody taking that role and saying like, “I am going to be the guiding hand here,” but how do I guide people into a feeling of openness and spontaneity and participation and sort of some level of safety, ’cause what you’re asking people to do, step forward and just begin to read, does require some level of comfort. So, you know, how you establish that tone. I hear in that humour some of that work happening.\n \n\n18:35\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, definitely. Amy, what, like, what are you hear in terms of like picking up on what Hannah was saying about shared authority and sort of self-deprecating humour? He’s getting prompts from the audience and I guess maybe that’s what I’m asking about. Like those moments where the audience is prompting him around certain things that he’s meant to say up at the front.\n \n\n18:56\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, there’s the moment in the tape when you can’t hear the person speaking, but he’s like, “Oh, I’ve been, I’m supposed to tell you that you can only read for this amount of time.” And there’s other points of interaction, I guess. And one thing that I sort of notice is that it seems to me that he’s not necessarily taking cues from the audience as to like his tone or like his approach to what he’s saying. Like he’s being sort of like goofy and funny in the first bit, but in a way that I would imagine someone else, they say something funny, the audience laughs, “Oh, I’m going to say something else funny now.” But I think he’s just genuinely being… It sounds like he’s just genuinely being himself and speaking sorta without that intent to get a laugh.\n \n\n19:45\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I mean, and you’ve listened to a lot of recordings with Warren, you know, where Warren Tallman is, he’s giving a lecture to a class or I think you’ve got a really good feel for him as a person and this is very much very Warren Tallman-esque, if you will. I think a little bit more about mourning, right? He changes register partway through this tape from being what he calls deliberately facetious and he’s being a little self-reflexive about that. And the register changes from being funny to serious. Emily, I wanna come over to you and ask you about a little bit more about mourning. What kind of space is being created for mourning here and what is the role of humour, seriousness, the kind of gravity?\n \n\n20:32\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great question. One of the things that I love about this tape is I feel like there’s this kind of subvocal like landscape of the emotion in the room in a way. Like probably the most explicit way that you can hear it is something that Hannah has pointed out to me, which is the sort of the murmur that goes through the crowd when Warren Tallman says, “We’re not going to have five people! Instead, you’ll just do whatever!”\n \n\n21:03\tHannah McGregor:\tHe counts them, like, “Oh, he’s going to have you numbered up at the front, like one, two, three, four, five.” It’s like, thanks, Warren, I forgot how numbers work.\n \n\n21:15\tKaris Shearer:\tWell, and then as you pointed out, like everyone starts going like, excuse me, what?\n \n\n21:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. You hear it. Like, it kind of sounds like this is the first they’re hearing of it. Right?\n \n\n21:23\tKaris Shearer:\tOh, for sure.\n \n\n21:23\tHannah McGregor:\tThat they also were led to believe that they would have an order and that they are now finding out that no, in fact, Quaker-style, you will be self-electing.\n \n\n21:34\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd it’s kind of like this weird, this rejection of like the pedagogical, right? Like that one, two, three, four, five, right? Like he’s counting, he’s physically counting them, but that’s, that’s not what’s gonna happen, right? So he performs the thing that’s not going to happen in this really kind of, you know, it becomes almost, it is almost humourous, right? It’s like very… There’s a kind of physicality to it, of an establishing of space on the stage. And it is like making the, you know, creating for us the thing that will not happen, which is like overly pedagogical, overly constructed. And it is the thing to be rejected in favour of this more spontaneous… Yeah, spontaneous form that is more appropriate for mourning? To when we make a connection, Emily, between–?\n \n\n22:20\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. I mean, he makes this rhetorical move, right, where he says, like, “I’m being deliberately facetious and frivolous” on what is actually like quite a, that you say, solemn occasion, maybe? And so there’s sort of like, there’s more than one switch, right? Like there’s the like… Or maybe not more than one switch, but the switch does, has two roles, right? That we have the like humour as the lead-in, as a setup for a solemn occasion that will entail reading verses from the Bible. But humour as also a kind of, a kind of marking of occasion, right.? And a kind of framing of the mourning and of the solemnness. And I still, like, I feel like so much of the, like the evidence that I gather from this tape is just like a feeling in the room, like a kind of warmth that’s, it’s difficult to point to like any one thing that you might be able to hear from the audience, but it feels like maybe the, like maybe the echoes in the room are like are letting you know that people might be like kind of chatting to their neighbour while he’s making jokes at the front of the room or that they’re like laughing and chuckling to themselves, right? So there is a kind of like a… It’s not like, it’s not quite joy, but it is sort of fellow feeling and warmth. Which indicates to me that like there is a really nice acknowledgement of the social role of mourning, right. And the social embeddedness of that kind of loss.\n \n\n23:57\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. ‘Cause I mean, they’ve gathered on the occasion of the death of a major American poet.\n \n\n24:02\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n24:02\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd the way that they’re gonna celebrate that or mark that occasion is through the act of reading. And I think, you know, again, like make–, you know, making space for different types of… Like, that mourning is individual and therefore the space needed to read or mark that occasion is also individual, whether it’s short, three to four minutes or, well, not, not 40 minutes.\n \n\n24:30\tEmily Murphy:\tWell, like it’s so individual, but it’s so communal as well, right? Because I mean, if mourning is so individual, stay in your own house and read for 40 minutes to yourself. Right? But instead there’s this nice tension between not infringing on the freedom of any poet to read. Um, and don’t read for 40 minutes, everyone will think you’re a jerk.\n \n\n24:51\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd the expectation, right? So feeling the pause in which—\n \n\n24:55\tEmily Murphy:\tYep.\n \n\n24:55\tHannah McGregor:\t–you stand up and read means attentive listening, right? That you’re not just sitting there like checked out, waiting for your turn. You have to be listening and engaging. So it is this sort of interesting tension between the individual and the communal, which we can think of as being a characteristic of religious experience and a characteristics—\n \n\n25:16\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, absolutely.\n \n\n25:16\tHannah McGregor:\t–of collective mourning.\n \n\n25:18\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah. I mean, the guiding principle of this whole event seems to be attentiveness to the audience, right? And attentiveness to each other. You know, you know when you’re going to, when it’s your turn to read, when there’s a kind of a space and you arise and it’s very… He describes it in a very physical way, right? You arise, you get up on your own on your feet. Right? As though there would be any other, I mean, I suppose there would be maybe other ways of getting up, but in this case, it is you get up on your feet and you walk toward… There’s a real physicality of the description. I’m gonna bring it over to Amy again and I want to ask you about technology and how technology features in this tape. What moments do you hear technology making itself present? Yeah.\n \n\n26:06\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, so there’s this moment when Warren’s saying that there’s gonna be a tape and then there’s gonna be a reading and then there’s gonna be another interruption. And it’s very like sort of vague what that’s going to be. And by saying that it’s going to be an interruption it’s not really interrupting. And what we know also is that from our perspective there, the tape doesn’t actually surface at all on our version on the reel, which is interesting.\n \n\n26:41\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, absolutely. I mean, this is in some ways very characteristic of Tallman in general. He, you know, we have the tape, the event that’s being recorded, but then there’s also the indication that there’s going to be a recording within the recording or they, the playback of a recording within the recording. And then we also hear, we also hear the mic, right? Where someone isn’t able to hear from the audience. Technology makes itself present, yeah, I think throughout the tape.\n \n\n27:11\tEmily Murphy:\tWell, I wonder… So you’re right that we can, like, we sort of, we get an indication of the presence of the mic, but I feel like that is Tallman interpreting the reaction of the audience that way, not necessarily the audience actually experiencing those aspects of the technology or like he… Instead of “I’ve just thrown you a curve ball” it’s “Oh, you must not be able to hear what I’m saying.”\n \n\n27:35\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, yeah.\n \n\n27:37\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n27:37\tKaris Shearer:\tAbsolutely.\n \n\n27:38\tEmily Murphy:\tBut I think, I mean, this is something that happens with newer technologies all the time, is that once the newer technology is present, it gets to have the role of being technological. And then all of the other technologies that people are engaging with all the time are perceived as naturalized and non-technological. So even though he’s… Like, they’re reading from books in a room that has like probably quite specific acoustics in a language that is already an extension of human capacity, but it’s the tape that dominates the sort of technological landscape, whether or not it is in fact present. It’s the idea of taping us, in a way.\n \n\n28:18\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, taping us.\n \n\n28:19\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, taping usTM.\n \n\n28:22\tHannah McGregor:\tGood thing you TM’ed that—\n \n\n28:23\tEmily Murphy:\tI’m writing that down.\n \n\n28:23\tHannah McGregor:\t–’cause that was gonna be the title of my new book.\n \n\n28:24\tEmily Murphy:\tTaping us… I mean, I’ll take royalties.\n \n\n28:29\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd in fact that distrust of the microphone, that distrust of technology is actually something so common across recordings that Christine Mitchell, I think when she was a postdoc at Concordia, created a whole compilation—I think it’s about two minutes long—and it’s all the excerpts of that exact moment of distrust of the microphone. Can you, and it’s called “Can You Hear Me? And it’s a compilation of all, you know, readers across the Sir George Williams Reading Series saying things like, “Is this thing on? Can you hear me at the back? Can you hear me?” And so Warren, again, that particular distrust of the technology in the room, it’s both, you know, the microphone is both facilitating his connection with the audience, but it’s also the thing to be distrusted.\n \n\n29:17\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, you’re so right about that distrust, but I wonder then if we can put that in conversation with how we’ve been talking about authority. Because at the same time that it is expected to fail, right, expected to be the reason that people can’t hear him, it’s also like being… It’s a recording for posterity and I think you and I have talked in other ways about how Tallman is doing all of this recording at the same time as like law enforcement is using tapes—\n \n\n29:44\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n29:44\tEmily Murphy:\t–as like the new technology of catching criminals, right? They’re becoming this sort of incontrovertible version of evidence quite quickly.\n \n\n29:57\tKaris Shearer:\tSurveillance.\n \n\n29:57\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. And so, yeah, I don’t think that I have a “so what” about that relationship, then, between mistrust and authority. And I don’t think it’s as radical as I’m making it sound. Like it’s…\n \n\n30:08\tHannah McGregor:\tI mean, I think that there is something there about the way that technology’s become, are turned into via social processes are turned into forms of witness, forms of evidence, forms of authority that you get a really clear sense of the work that is being done around generating understandings of new technologies when you get these archival moments in which people, events for example, distrust. So like, it is helpful in terms of thinking about the very deliberate work that’s being done around transforming audio recording into evidence when you hear the context in which it is not.\n \n\n30:52\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, that’s nice. I’m going to go around with the group and just ask you, finally, what is your favourite part of this recording? And maybe it’s something we’ve already talked about, but favourite moment or favourite aspect of this? Emily, I’m going to start with you.\n \n\n31:10\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, it’s the murmurs in the room that you can kind of like, you can hear the walls almost, like the echoes off the walls. I love that.\n \n\n31:17\tKaris Shearer:\tHannah?\n \n\n31:18\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s gotta be like, it’s probably a tie for me between when he counts out loud and when he tells people to get up on their feet. Like it is these moments in which there is… I like the way you refer to it as being like overtly almost over-the-top pedagogical, like, “Get up, on your feet, and step forward.” Like, yeah, okay, I get it. Warren, we know how to get up.\n \n\n31:41\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy, what about you?\n \n\n31:43\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah and I have said this already, but my favourite part is when Warren says, “Is Robin here?” And it’s just, just unsure.\n \n\n31:50\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s also, you know, kind of quite a moment of anxiety, if that’s like… You’re, you know, you’re counting on Robin to open the more serious part of the occasion, like, it’d be really great if he were there. And you can hear this, you know, you can almost hear him scanning, right? Like where he’s, he’s looking around.\n \n\n32:10\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. At least if Robin didn’t show up, you’d still have the text of his reading.\n \n\n32:16\tKaris Shearer:\tBut that is true. That is… He reads from Revelations. John… I forget which is it.\n \n\n32:23\tAmy Thiessen:\tAnd I also like wonder if Robin knows he’s about to be called on first and like importantly out by name first and then nobody else is called by their name to come up and read.\n \n\n32:34\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n32:35\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah.\n \n\n32:36\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n32:36\tHannah McGregor:\tKaris, what’s your favourite part?\n \n\n32:39\tKaris Shearer:\tOh. [Exasperated Sigh] I love it when they turn it back on me. It’s the “you poets.” It just really… I was like, I realized at that moment, like I could imagine doing all the things, you know, that he does in terms of facilitation, but the moment where he says “you poets,” I was like trying to imagine myself doing that in a room of like my poet colleagues who I totally enjoy. I can’t imagine just being like, “All you poets!” and like what their reaction would be to that. It’s so, it’s so weird, but also I think really speaks to that relationship, like a very particular relationship that he has with them and probably nobody else does. And he’s emphatically not a poet, right? In that, in hailing them as “you poets” it’s also marking him as “not poet,” but he gets to do that because he has this special relationship and I think because of the work he’s done, because of the work he’s done over the past decade and more in really cultivating a literary community. Yeah.\n \n\n33:47\tEmily Murphy:\tI mean, we talked briefly about the sort of modernist landscape in this recording, especially because we have sort of like super traditional, like, readings from the Bible and then immediately the thing that follows that on the tape, which is not in the explicit recording, is like experimental sound poetry and how for a lot of the 20th century, like that mix of like deep investment in western canon and formal experimentation is actually a hallmark of poetic communities. And I think the other hallmark of the poetic, of poetic communities is the increasing role of the critic.\n \n\n34:24\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n34:24\tEmily Murphy:\tRight? And then that’s bringing us back to authority in a way as well. Like it is not being the producer or the artist that is the most authoritative position, but in being like a kind of critic or curator or even in other, like other artistic fields, like, people like Diaghilev who was like a ballet producer of a kind, but was not himself a dancer and not even a choreographer. Well, sometimes he was. Yeah. Anyway. That’s just, that’s up for debate. But.\n \n\n34:54\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I think, I mean, this recording in a lot of ways and Tallman’s presence across the recordings, invites us to look back at literary communities and think about the roles of folks who weren’t themselves writers, but the role that they played in establishing those communities and the labour that they performed to facilitate events, et cetera. Often gendered, often gendered.\n \n\n35:19\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, very gendered.\n \n\n35:22\tKaris Shearer:\tYep. Yep. This is around the time that we normally do a shout-out to an event, a book, a reading, something that you’d like to recognize. And so I’m going to start with Amy and ask you what would you like to shout-out?\n \n\n35:38\tAmy Thiessen:\tAm I allowed to shout-out myself?\n \n\n35:38\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you can! Go for it.\n \n\n35:38\tAmy Thiessen:\tBy the time this podcast comes out, you listeners could go view my honour’s project online if you’re interested in Canadian poetry or environmental writing or forest fires. We’ll put a link in the show notes to my digital exhibition.\n \n\n35:59\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd as your supervisor, I’m going to say it’s a very excellent project. Super cool. Hannah, what about you? Shout-out.\n \n\n36:08\tHannah McGregor:\tI’m gonna shout-out my favourite reading series in Vancouver, which is called the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, which was started during the Vancouver Olympics in response to the sort of Olympic-committee-sanctioned cultural programming. It was a series of readings that were meant to sort of… It was the literary community in Vancouver saying like, “No, actually, here’s what Vancouver literary community looks like.” It’s now been running for a decade, I believe, and it’s remarkable. I think it happens quarterly. And it’s a really remarkable reading series, both for the level of thoughtful curation that goes into the kinds of stuff that you get to see there, but also for the hosts Sean Cranberry and Dina Del Bucchia just do this amazing job of creating this environment where, like, there is more catcalling at this reading series than I have ever experienced at another literary event. And it has so much to do with the tone they create through hosting. And I was really thinking about the sort of work they do around the series when I was listening. So shout-out to the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series.\n \n\n37:13\tKaris Shearer:\tAwesome. Thank you. Emily, what about you? Shout-out?\n \n\n37:17\tEmily Murphy:\tMy shout-out is a bit of a cheat as well because I want a shout-out for Amy.\n \n\n37:23\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy is well-deserving of many shout-outs.\n \n\n37:26\tEmily Murphy:\tDefinitely, definitely. Amy is presenting on her honour’s thesis in the Tech Talk series at the AMP Lab here at UBCO campus on the 26th of March at 12:30 PM.\n \n\n37:38\tKaris Shearer:\tI don’t usually do a shout-out, but I’ll, I will do one. And actually I’m going to do one that we had from last time, but it’s coming up really soon. It’s the Sharon Thesen, Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent and it’s coming up on Thursday, March 19th, which is also gonna be passed by the time this comes out! I’m like just dropping it left and right here.\n \n\n38:03\tHannah McGregor:\tLove these weird audio archives.\n \n\n38:03\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. It’s like, “Wait a minute, time…passing…okay.” Well, I’m gonna wrap this up. Thank you so much, Hannah McGregor here from Vancouver. Hannah, do you want to say what you’re here for giving a workshop?\n \n\n38:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Well, I mean, that’s definitely gonna be in the past by the time people listen to this.\n \n\n38:21\tKaris Shearer:\tIt is definitely gonna be in the past. But—\n \n\n38:24\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n38:24\tKaris Shearer:\t–I feel like it deserves a…\n \n\n38:26\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Yeah, shout-out to podcasting, that’s what I’m giving a workshop about. You know what, in general, shout-out to maybe the other podcast that I host, which is the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n \n\n38:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah!\n \n\n38:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich this has been an episode of, SoundBox Signals has been an episode of, but more other things. I am actually the April episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is me. [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] Is me? So listen to that.\n \n\n38:50\tKaris Shearer:\tSee, ’cause we haven’t had one from you yet.\n \n\n38:51\tHannah McGregor:\tNo, you haven’t, so you’re gonna—\n \n\n38:53\tKaris Shearer:\tOh.\n \n\n38:53\tHannah McGregor:\t–get to hear what I do, which is…just complain about male poets.\n \n\n39:04\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer and I was joined in the studio [End Music: Ambient Instrumental] by Hannah McGregor, Amy Thiessen, and Emily Murphy. We recorded the episode back in early March when we were still able to get together in person. And I’m recording the outro right now in my new studio at home, which is a blanket fort. I can assure you that we will continue to bring you new episodes of SoundBox Signals over the summer. I want to thank the estate of Warren Tallman [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] for allowing us to use the recording, which you can find online on our website soundboxsignals.ok.ubc.ca. Please stay safe. [End Music: Ambient Instrumental].\n \n\n39:36\tMusic:\t[Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals]\n \n\n39:52\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab. [End Music: Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Emily Murphy for her contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n"],"score":5.7495356},{"id":"9617","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E4, SoundBox Signals Presents “Performing the Archive”, 3 January 2022, Shearer, Butchart and Sallam"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Megan Butchart","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Megan Butchart","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Megan Butchart\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/470425b9-3ec2-4306-83fc-49f6bc3a2b7d/audio/1c30fb73-bdd4-42e2-8a5b-6d70ff8f0b07/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e4-soundboxsignals-performingthearchive.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:59:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"57,301,830 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e4-soundboxsignals-performingthearchive\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-01-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"John Lent’s “A Matins Flywheel”: https://thistledownpress.com/product/a-matins-flywheel/\\n\\nDavid R. Loy’s “Nonduality in Buddhism and Beyond”: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Nonduality/David-R-Loy/9781614295242\\n\\nDaphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic: https://houseofanansi.com/products/ana-historic\\n\\nInspired Word Cafe: http://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/\\n\\nRead more about the AMP Lab’s events with Daphne Marlatt:\\n\\nShearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab Blog. 17 November 2019. http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/\\n\\nBuchart, Megan. “Poetry, Campus, Community: Tuum Est.” The AMP Lab Blog. 18 November 2019. http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/18/poetry-campus-community-tuum-est/ \\n\\nOddleifson, Shauna. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt.” In Featured Stories and Our Students, UBCO Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies. 11 September 2019. https://fccs.ok.ubc.ca/2019/09/11/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt/ \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549710962688,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Host Karis Shearer, guest curator Megan Butchart, and poet Daphne Marlatt have a conversation about Daphne Marlatt’s 1969 archival recording of leaf leaf/s and her experience of performing poetry with the archive in 2019. This episode was co-produced by Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam.\n\nProduced by the SpokenWeb team at AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what *listening* allows us to know about cultural history. Find out more at https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n\n00:05\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tDoes literature sound like? What stories, what we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds.\n \n\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history, and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. It can be both wonderful and surprising to notice the work of your favourite writer change over their years of inspiration and creation. The recorded literary events that we hold in collections across the SpokenWeb network give us a particular opportunity to reflect on the multiplicity of an artist: an opportunity to talk to living artists and writers about the recorded works and performances by their younger selves. Sound recordings can reveal layers of memory beyond a text. They can evoke embodied memories: What emotion can we hear in an author’s voice and tone? What can we hear of literary community in the sounds of the room, the staccato of laughter, and the bursts of cheers and applause? How do artists reflect on their own performances as they are carried across time in these recordings? Today we bring you an episode from our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals, that considers the poetry and practice of Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt across decades of writing and performance. In this episode, producers Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart record a thoughtful conversation with Marlatt. They use a 1969 archival recording of Marlatt reading from her book leaf leaf/s to reflect together on her readings from the collection 50 years apart. The SpokenWeb project uplifts the power of such work with living authors. This episode exists in conversation with others we’ve shared with you in our monthly episodes and ShortCuts minisodes. If you enjoy this episode, check out “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”, “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word”, “Talking about Talking”, “the Sounds of Trance Formation”, and “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return” for more conversations with artists about their recorded works. SoundBox Signals is produced by the AMP Lab at UBC-Okanagan, which holds recordings of Daphne Marlatt’s work in the SoundBox Collection. This episode was originally aired in February 2020, and we are delighted to bring it to you today on the SpokenWeb Podcast. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Here is Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart with “Performing the Archive.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n03:07\tSoundBox Signals Intro Music:\t[Start Music: SoundBox Signals Theme Music] I see you face to face. What is the voice? The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\n \n\n03:19\tSoundBox Signals Intro Music:\tWhere is this voice coming from?\n \n\n03:23\tSoundBox Signals Intro Music:\tI see you also face to face.\n \n\n03:27\tKaris Shearer:\tThis is SoundBox Signals, a podcast that brings archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close listening and conversation. Together we’ll consider how these literary recordings signify in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. Full-length versions of these recordings are available online in our SpokenWeb archive at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n \n\n03:52\tAudio recording, Clip of Warren Tallman reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:\tHow curious you are to me. [Tape Click]\n \n\n03:55\tKaris Shearer:\tHave you ever listened to a recording of yourself when you were younger and noticed how your voice has changed? On September 20th, 2019, Megan Butchart and I got together with Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt and talked with her about the experience of doing just that. In our SoundBox collection, we have a recording of Daphne from 1969 when she was just 26 years old talking with Warren Tallman about her second book leaf leaf/s. Yes, she had published two books by the time she was 26. Our conversation took place the day after contemporary Daphne had given a reading here in Kelowna with her younger self, or her archival recorded voice, as part of our “Performing the Archive” series. The event was co-hosted by Megan Butchart, Erin Scott, and Cole Mash, and took place at Milk Crate Records. It was sponsored by Tuum Est, SpokenWeb, City of Kelowna, and the Inspired Word Cafe. In this podcast episode, you’ll hear our conversation with Daphne Marlatt. But first, let’s rewind to July 1969 and hear Daphne read from leaf leaf/s  [Tape Click]\n \n\n05:01\tAudio Recording, Daphne Marlatt, 1969:\t“4pParts of morning for 714” i: that petals’ veins / rift blue  / pared with razor / edge / tired eyes against the / gold dust, daisies / in a jug dyes / slowly into water / seeping pink. ii: moon drops / early / roused rocks / dry already a / firefly / threats rain it / flickers / green light over / night / sink’s / rust.  iii: white hood of a white / pickup parked on / green / trucks can be / steam risers, lettered / white / hollyhocks / of sun a whirl, / Cézanne, in a / tall tree. / iv: like it / flowers hail / outside our / back door stars / saw as worm / clots trod / morning / glories in deeper / small shells. [Tape Click]\n \n\n06:13\tKaris Shearer:\tYou just heard “4 parts of morning for 714.” Now we’ll fast forward to our contemporary conversation. In the first half of it, you’ll hear us ask Daphne about her experience listening to and voicing poems at public readings. In the second half of our conversation, we will talk about the archival recording itself and the experience of performing poetry with it. [Music Interlude]\n \n\n06:37\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer.\n \n\n06:37\tDaphne Marlatt:\tMy name is Daphne Marlatt.\n \n\n06:41\tMegan Butchart:\tMy name is Megan Butchart.\n \n\n06:42\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd we are here podcasting, or preparing material for a podcast. So, we have nine questions in kind of three different areas. But we also have a lot of flexibility around adding more or, I encourage Daphne to also flip the questions back on us as well. So, it becomes kind of more of a conversation, if we would like to do that. So, there really is no firm structure, that’s for sure. The first questions though, have to do with poetry readings because you know, we are very interested in the poetry reading. And Megan, you have the first question. So, do you want to?\n \n\n07:19\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah. All right. So, Daphne –.\n \n\n07:21\tDaphne Marlatt:\tMm-hmm.\n \n\n07:21\tMegan Butchart:\tCan you recall the first time that you ever heard a poem read out loud?\n \n\n07:27\tDaphne Marlatt:\t I’m trying to remember, whether – well, the first poem that I ever saw that would have been a wonderful one to read out loud was on the wall of my grade 12 classroom at Delbrook High School in North Van and my English teacher had put up one of Allen Ginsberg’s poems, which was the first time I ever heard about Allen Ginsberg. I mean, we’d been reading much much further back. I don’t think we’d even got, we must have got to Dylan Thomas, but nothing like Ginsburg, and I can’t remember if Mr. Patterson, that was his name, actually read it aloud to us or not. It’s the kind of thing he could have done.\n \n\n08:20\tKaris Shearer:\tSo, building on that, can you, can you tell us about the first poetry reading you ever attended, and what kind of impact it had on you?\n \n\n08:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThe first poetry reading was probably at UBC. And Prism held poetry readings, it seems to me, and there was another student magazine that did too, Raven. The first one that I actually remember, because I was very nervous about it, was one that I had been asked to read in. And I suspect it was a Raven poetry reading. It wasn’t raven as in “R-A-V-I-N’,” it was raven as in the blackbird, the trickster. And I said I’m too nervous to read. I don’t think I can read my poem. And I can’t remember whether it was Frank or someone else who said, you know from the TISH group, who said “I’ll read it for you.” I have a feeling it might have been Frank. Anyway, he read it and I squirmed in my seat because he didn’t read it the way I thought it should be read and from then on, I vowed I would always read my own poems out loud to an audience. [Laughter]\n \n\n09:51\tMegan Butchart:\tAnd so, how do you prepare to deliver for a poetry reading then?\n \n\n09:56\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, that’s a very good question. [Laughs] Hmm, it’s really interesting because it has become more flexible as I age. I still start the same way, I look at the book and I look at what I feel like reading that day, and I look at maybe different kinds of line that I might do from poem to poem. Sometimes it turns out there is a kind of image motif that’s running through several poems. I think, well, maybe I’ll do that. Sometimes I look at a poem and I think, I don’t want to read this poem aloud. When I was younger, I would take the book and I would look at the book and I would say, “I don’t feel like reading any of these.” [Laughs]. And that was pure nervousness before a reading, but now I will sometimes get up and I think, no I want to read this other poem instead. I mean I prepare, I have a list of what I’m going to read. I even time it because everybody is so concerned about timing and if there are other readers, I don’t want to go over my allotted time. But sometimes, like last night, last night’s reading, I wasn’t going to read the “Beo” poem at all and I just thought, no, I really I think after hearing Kurt read his Caetani poem, which used a lot of the language origins of the Caetani family, I thought, yeah, I want to read “Beo,” because that brings up a little of it, and it certainly talks about the relationship that Sveva had with her mother. So, that felt more appropriate, I guess.\n \n\n12:09\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I was struck by that too, last night, how responsive you were to the audience and to the kind of moment and things that were going on. How you were kind of re-crafting the reading in the moment.\n \n\n12:19\tDaphne Marlatt:\tRight, Right. Yeah, now that I’m the ripe old age that I am [Laughs] I feel more comfortable in front of an audience, so it gives me more freedom to do that.\n \n\n12:34\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Can I connect that back to what you said about hearing Frank read your work and then deciding – that as an impulse to want to read your own work. Can you kind of draw us a line from that to kind of feeling much more comfortable and responsive and being flexible in that moment? Were there kind of key pieces along the way in readings?\n \n\n12:57\tDaphne Marlatt:\tNo. No, I can’t. I don’t think I can know how to respond to that. It’s more a sense of having grown into your own voice and you have a sense of what your own voice is. and it’s interesting to me that even then I was beginning to have a sense of my own voice and it was not the voice that was reading the poem.\n \n\n13:17\tKaris Shearer:\tNice. Yeah. Thank you.\n \n\n13:18\tMegan Butchart:\tDaphne, can you share some of your thoughts on the significance of the live poetry reading during the period of the 1960s?\n \n\n13:25\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, the live poetry reading was very important. It was a social glue, in a sense, that held all of us writers together. It was an occasion for being serious and being hilarious at the same time. No doubt there was room for a lot of grandstanding. But because, the group of writers that I knew met regularly, once a month, anyway, and sometimes more if we met at Warren’s house, to read to each other or to discuss. For instance, we had one evening where we had a long discussion of Olson’s essay on projective verse trying to figure out what he was saying and how that applied to any of us. So, there was a lot of push and pull, give-and-take, and I think the importance of those live readings was that it brought the language back into the body. The body was very present in the voicing, each person’s characteristic voicing of line, voicing of sound patterns, and so on. And I think that it clued us into that very quickly.\n \n\n15:03\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd you were doing that as students, right? I mean I’m talking about a time when you were undergrads at UBC.\n \n\n15:06\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yeah. Well, some of them were, I mean, several of them were older than me and they left in ’63 right after the ’63 conference and went on to graduate school. Whereas, I still had another year anyway as an undergraduate. Yeah, and I can’t figure out, I mean, some of them were doing student teaching too, I think so, I don’t know if they stayed an extra year or the Honours program required an extra year. I have no idea. I just don’t remember all of that.\n \n\n15:43\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd were you also that student group that’s kind of like the Writers Workshop group?\n \n\n15:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd the TISH group. Yeah.\n \n\n15:50\tKaris Shearer:\tWere you also going to see other visiting writers give –\n \n\n15:54\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, I remember Leonard Cohen coming to give a reading. Yes, a poetry reading from what was it, Spice Box of the Earth, his first book, and that was remarkable because, he started out, it was in a classroom in the Buchanan Building and he started out to read and he suddenly stopped in the middle of a line! And we all thought, what? what’s going on? And he said something like “no, that’s not right” and he started again. And I was very impressed by that, like he was being so true to his sense of the line and he wanted it to come across the way he wanted it to come across, and that was a moment of freedom. Freeing for me because I realized the importance of that. And then I heard Irving Layton read. I can’t remember maybe that was in the old Auditorium. Was odd. There was kind of a stage set up but it was lower than a proper theater stage. So, I don’t know where it was, which room, but there he was. He had two young women posed on this little stage on each side of him. [Laughs] Layton. And okay. Well, that’s okay. That’s Layton, that’s Irving Layton. It was a very different reading from Leonard Cohen’s. And then, of course, we had these arts festivals that began and they were starting to do that and they brought in incredible people like – all these names are going to escape me. At 77, memory begins to go. There’s a New York poet, I cannot remember his name, and he did these very, to us, astonishing readings, which were not readings, they were performances. And he assigned lines to a number of us to say as we walked around the auditorium. But that really stuck in my mind because it was the beginning of the language approach that the Language School of Writers in the U.S. and was a beginning of that, I think. Very different from the aesthetic that we had developed and grown up with through the San Francisco Poets coming up, especially Robert Duncan, but Jack Spicer too, and of course Robin Blaser. So, it was a bit of an eye-opener to me that you could do that kind of thing with language. And it was like doing in language what John Cage was doing in music.\n18:57\tKaris Shearer:\tCool.\n \n\n18:57\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah.\n \n\n18:57\tKaris Shearer:\tWho is organizing that festival? Is that Warren?\n \n\n18:59\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThere wasn’t. No, there was a group. There was a group of faculty people from, I think, theater people as well as music people and people from English. Literary people. It was great. It was wonderful. It brought the outside world to us in performance and it was very exciting.\n \n\n19:25\tKaris Shearer:\tSounds amazing.\n \n\n19:26\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah.\n \n\n19:27\tKaris Shearer:\tWere you there for the Jack Spicer reading in ’65? Was it ’65?\n \n\n19:31\tDaphne Marlatt:\tUh, no, I was not there. I was in Bloomington, Indiana.\n \n\n19:35\tKaris Shearer:\tRight. Okay.\n \n\n19:36\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah.\n \n\n19:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. That sounds like an incredible, I mean, just I always kind of think about myself, being back at, wanting to be back and that kind of moment of just kind of heady readings.\n19:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh yeah, well Robert Duncan, of course, was the big one for me and for a number of us. Because he himself was so dramatic. I can see him walking between the catalpa trees, striding between them in his black cape on the way to giving a reading in the Buchanan building. [Laughs]. I learned a lot from Robert Duncan, a lot about language and the music of language and how language carries breath and spirit.\n \n\n20:21\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Can I ask you, following on that – you would’ve read the Black Mountain Poets before they arrived in ’63, I mean, I guess they read at different times, some of them, at UBC.\n \n\n20:32\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, yeah.\n \n\n20:33\tKaris Shearer:\tBut prior to meeting them in person, had you formed ideas about them that maybe were changed by meeting them in person?\n \n\n20:44\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, I had no idea that Denise Levertov for instance was such a dynamic reader. That was a wonderful event. And she was so open to young women poets. I mean I had a coffee with her and chat about my imminent marriage and whether I could continue writing, and she was great. She was very supportive. Robert Duncan, we knew because he’d come up several times before ’63. Olson was a revelation, because he was such a large man and his work was so large in its scope and yet he was very open to talking to us. You know, one of the things he said to me in Warren and Ellen’s kitchen, was when I told him – he asked me where I’d grown up. And so I told him I spent my childhood in Penang and grew up North Van. And he said, you should write about Penang. And I’m only just doing this now in my late 70s. [Laughs]. But some things kind of stay with you, you know. You get gifts like that. And Creeley. We knew Creeley, and he had taught a wonderful Creative Writing course. I think it was the first Creative Writing course that the English Department had given and it was – I mean Edward Bernie was busy trying to get a Creative Writing Department going, but I took that one from Robert and Bob Creeley. Yeah, Bob didn’t teach it like a workshop, like we know Creative Writing workshops these days. What he did was he brought in a lot of ideas in the form of reading assignments and discussions of what we had read and how does that relate to what you’re writing? It was very opening for me. It was about at the level of the older TISH poets. So, I was floundering around a bit, but it set the tone for me. Set the bar high, intellectually. Yeah.\n \n\n23:22\tKaris Shearer:\tNice. Nice. Can I pick up on that and ask, I mean, some of the things that strike me about like your descriptions of the Creative Writing course or your experiences in English courses are so different from how courses are run these days, typically –.\n \n\n23:37\tDaphne Marlatt:\tI know. [Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n23:37\tKaris Shearer:\t– so that description and then what you said the other night about Warren teaching an English course, but having students do a lot of reading aloud.\n \n\n23:53\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, right.\n \n\n23:54\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you take us back to that for a second, just the role of reading aloud?\n \n\n23:54\tDaphne Marlatt:\tRight. Right. That was that course, we did a lot of Whitman in and it was a poetry reading. It was a course on poetry and it’s funny, I can’t remember who else we studied. But Whitman was an eye-opener because in a way it was a bit excruciating for the class. He didn’t want to talk about the content of the poem, several poems, he just had different students read aloud. He would point to someone say, “okay, you read this one.” Person would read and he’d say, “you read that! and you read that!”. And of course, we would hear all these different versions of the same poem and we would all be thinking, “okay, what is the version he’s looking for?” But what it did was, it opened us up to hearing the poetry, hearing how the words were moving together, musically, rhythmically, semantically\n \n\n25:03\tKaris Shearer:\tNice. So, we have another set of questions that have to do with this recording of leaf leaf/s in an interview that you did with Warren Tallman in July 21st, 22nd, 25th, 1969. [Marlatt Laughs] Warren is not really sure what day it was recorded. But I wanted to ask you about that recording in the next couple of questions, and whether you can recall how you came to do that recording, that interview?\n \n\n25:32\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWhich one month was it?\n \n\n25:34\tKaris Shearer:\tJuly 1969. Some recording of an interview with Warren’s Tallman about leaf leaf/s and you’ve heard a copy of this where you read the full book in two parts, and he asks you a series of questions about it.\n \n\n25:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tInteresting that date, because I had given birth to my son at the beginning of May. So, I was a young mother, my body had gone through a major experience. That was not the experience that I had had when I wrote those poems, so what was interesting to me hearing last night at the reading. There was so much, my voice was so much more present in those poems than I had remembered my voice being, and I think it’s because of the giving birth experience. You know, I mean we sat in the living room where he usually recorded and I was very happy that he wanted to record the whole book and then talk about it, but I think we had some slight – we had different approaches to my writing at that point because I had gone somewhere else. I had been in Bloomington and then I had been in the Napa Valley in California and in Bloomington. I belonged to – I joined a small writing group that Clayton Eshleman organized and D. Alexander was part of the deal. D. was a linguist. And we had a very significant conversation, significant for me, in one of the local student pubs. They don’t call them “pubs” down there, “bars,” in Bloomington, about language. And he pointed out to me that there was, there’s an elasticity, and a semantic associativeness and flexibility that I was not paying attention to because I wasn’t thinking of language just as a medium, as language. I was thinking of language referring to objects and actions in the world. And he said, I mean, this is Saussure, right? It’s basic Saussure. “No, you should read Saussure, for one thing, but language is a medium unto itself and it has all these currents in it that you could be hearing.” And that was a big eye-opener for me. So, leaf leaf/s was very much written out of learning that and trying to put that into practice. I find it a rather abstract book now, but it taught me a lot about writing because it taught me a lot about language.\n \n\n28:40\tMegan Butchart:\tAnd so, what does this recording mean to you now to listen back to it?\n \n\n28:44\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, as I said, I was surprised that my voice was so present in it, in the language. I was happy to hear that. I was still, I mean reading it in Warren’s living room was very familiar territory for me. So, it wasn’t like reading it aloud to an audience, which I still then found very nerve-wracking. But reading it to Warren –I can’t remember if other people were present or not. I know when he had me read frames of a brain, frames of a book, of a story…. Yeah, see, I can’t even remember the title of my first book! [Laughs]. Frames of a Story. He had me read that in his living room to a group of people when it first came out. I think it was – it might have been a fireplace. There might have been a fire burning in the fireplace. I felt very much at home there, and a lot of my friends were there in the living room and it was a big experience for me to read the whole, the whole of that book! “Warren, are you sure? really all of it?” “Yes. Yes. Yes.” [Laughs] So leaf leaf/s was after that. And it seems to me it was more, I don’t think there were many other people there, if any other people were there.\n \n\n30:13\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I didn’t get the sense listening to it that there were others.\n \n\n30:15\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, yeah. Yeah. I think Warren was trying to figure out what had happened to my language while I was away. I suspect that occasioned that.\n \n\n30:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, that transition from that kind of Black Mountain Poetics. It’s Duncan, Creeley, especially. He really wants to emphasize [inaudible], right?\n \n\n30:37\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right. Well he is very close to Creeley’s work. Yeah, yeah.\n \n\n30:41\tKaris Shearer:\tCan I take a little detour and ask about this concept of reading the entire book? Because that comes up in the Sir George Williams University recording as well where George Bowering says, back in Vancouver we would just – a reading, you would just read the whole book to your friends. Was that a common thing?\n \n\n31:00\tDaphne Marlatt:\tNot that I remember, no. I think Warren probably, I think, George was probably thinking about Warren, because I don’t remember that happening elsewhere, the whole book.\n \n\n31:13\tKaris Shearer:\tOkay. Yeah. I was just curious.\n \n\n31:16\tMegan Butchart:\tHow do you think that changes the reading experience though? To read just single poems versus reading something consecutive?\n \n\n31:24\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Well, for me, there’s always what you might call a kind of, it’s not a narrative in a book of poetry, necessarily, but narrative has always been of interest to me and that’s what Frames was. It told the narrative, but there’s a sense in a collection of poems some sort of line of a development through the book, and so you would only get that if you read the whole book.\n \n\n32:00\tKaris Shearer:\tAs a listener, I really love these moments where we get to attend a reading where someone reads the entire book because it feels like you’ve in advance made a commitment to staying for that kind of duration, it’s a significant duration –\n \n\n32:15\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right. That’s right. It is.\n \n\n32:16\tKaris Shearer:\t– and a kind of dedication to that person who’s going to read. They’re always –they’re very – and they also feel like a kind of communal dedication everybody in the room is there for the whole for the whole thing.\n \n\n32:25\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right. Yeah, yeah.\n \n\n32:28\tKaris Shearer:\tI long for those occasions, although one cannot have them all the time. [Laughs]\n \n\n32:32\tDaphne Marlatt:\tNo, but it was particularly nice to have an occasion like that in Warren’s living room. I should always say Warren and Ellen – because it was both of them – they were both such wonderful supporters of young writers. Really, I mean that whole phenomenon that’s become known as the TISH group wouldn’t have happened without them.\n \n\n32:59\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you talk a little bit about Ellen’s role in that? I know it was significant.\n \n\n33:02\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Ellen was very significant because not only did she help organize that 1963 conference, but she had the contacts because of growing up in Berkley and going to –I mean growing up in San Francisco and going to Berkeley. She had the contacts with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, and Robin Blazer, and she brought those with her when they moved to Vancouver. So, there was a clear line, a clear artery, if you like, for infusion. I knew Ellen not as a teacher. She became a teacher. She taught at UBC later. But when I knew her she was more, the one that everyone could talk to about their personal lives, their problems. She was remarkable. I’ve never known anyone who could cook a whole meal in the kitchen while talking to somebody about their deep emotional angst. [Laughs] She was a phenomenon in herself and I was really glad when she started writing in her later life about her experiences meeting all those people. And I wished, I mean, she had a very busy career as a therapist, and she was very, very supportive to a number of people in the AIDS community who it would have been very different for them without Ellen. And she didn’t have much room left in her life for writing. But the pieces that she did write were so good, and I kept encouraging her to try and find more time to write, but it was difficult. And she had her health problems as she aged to deal with. So, yeah.\n \n\n34:59\tKaris Shearer:\tI think of her very much, as you say, that social, as someone who had the kind of social connections to invite those writers up, but also who received them when they did come. And he talks on one of the recordings about choosing Robert Duncan’s poems and choosing the entire lineup for him and kind of orchestrating behind the scenes.\n \n\n35:24\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yep, yep. Yeah, she was –she was intelligent and I think a lot of people might not have known that in the early days. She was very intelligent. Yeah. And also, intuitive about people. Yeah.\n \n\n35:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. We need to talk more about that kind of work behind the writing. Because it’s so important.\n \n\n35:44\tDaphne Marlatt:\tIt is, and Gladys fulfilled that role too.\n \n\n35:48\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n35:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah Gladys Hindmarch, Maria.\n \n\n35:53\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, very much. So, I want to turn to, if you don’t mind, talking about last night’s reading, because it was a pretty marvelous, marvelous event in so many ways and I can’t stop thinking about it. Last night, you read with your former self [Marlatt Laughs], as we and sort of billed it –\n \n\n36:14\tDaphne Marlatt:\t[Laughs] That’s right.\n \n\n36:15\tKaris Shearer:\t–with your 26-year-old voice, from the archive as part of our “Performing the Archive” series. I know you’ve only had a short time to maybe think and reflect on that, but what was it like to collaborate with yourself?\n \n\n36:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, first of all, I was very very glad that Craig would key me in, because I didn’t want to read the poems as I heard them. I didn’t want to read them on the page. I wanted to hear them. And so, I couldn’t always remember when a poem would end. And so, I was always looking at him to clue me in to when to start reading in my current voice from that book. And we did this sandwiching thing, past and present, past and present, past and –so, it was interesting because it felt, well, it felt peculiar, in one sense, to hear my voice played back to me. And it wasn’t my voice as it is now. Bridget commented afterward that she noticed that there was still more English pronunciations, English-English pronunciations in it, which – and probably in the tone more than anything, I would think. And that voice was very clear about what it wanted, how it wanted the line to sound and exactly where the brakes went. It was a musical score, basically. The poems were kind of a musical score, and that voice was very keen on paying attention to that. And then when I read in my present voice, there was more focus on maybe image, and on the movement of a poem as a whole. Yeah, I don’t know what other people heard.\n \n\n38:20\tKaris Shearer:\tWell, actually, I’m going to turn to Megan and ask her. What did you hear in that kind of movement from the archival voice to the contemporary voice?\n \n\n38:31\tMegan Butchart:\tWell, it was interesting to me because you have two different contexts in which you’re reading. So, the 1969 voice is just you and Warren in the living room, which you would think would be the more intimate setting, whereas last night’s reading was in front of a crowd of I don’t even know how many –\n \n\n38:46\tKaris Shearer:\t70 people.\n \n\n38:46\tMegan Butchart:\t70 people.\n \n\n38:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\t70, huh?\n \n\n38:48\tMegan Butchart:\tAnd in that case, it seems like you would naturally want to perform more. And I actually found that the 1969 voice was more performative, in a sort of deliberate sense. Whereas, your reading last night was, like, I got musicality of the words together more –\n \n\n39:06\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, wonderful.\n \n\n39:08\tMegan Butchart:\t– I felt it was a softer reading, and I feel like everyone was so intent and so attentive, to your reading that there was sort of this silence around your speaking almost, it was incredible.\n \n\n39:21\tDaphne Marlatt:\tIt was a wonderful – well, it was a wonderful audience. And you know, we’d heard such diverse voices before I got up to read and that audience was open to every one of us. That was the astonishing thing.\n \n\n39:36\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah.\n \n\n39:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Erin Scott and Cole Mash have really crafted – I mean, that’s been a reading series over the past more than two years and every time I’ve been to it the audience is so generous and so warm.\n \n\n39:51\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell Cole really sets that up. He’s so spontaneous and himself. And no posing at all on stage.\n \n\n40:00\tKaris Shearer:\tListening to him afterwards, one of the things I love about the way he hosts is he manages to kind of move between the sort of different registers, like that comic register, this sort of open, outrageous comedy, but then very respectful, thoughtful attentiveness and seriousness as well. And he’s able to move through those registers back and forth in a way that is very energizing. But also, yeah, just really attentive to the audience.\n \n\n40:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd the space was really good for a reading because even though I’m surprised to hear there were 70 people there because it didn’t feel like that, I mean, there’s all the records at the back and the shirts, t-shirts hanging up in the back and so on, but on the in the front this peculiar platform of a stage with an Asian carpet spread out on it [Laughs] and…\n \n\n40:57\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd a Mickey Mouse table. [Laughs]\n \n\n40:59\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd a Mickey Mouse table, that’s right. It’s very – well, it reminded me of the 70s actually. So, I felt really at home there. And also, the way, it was announced that this was probably the last event there, because people were being evicted, had to move, and Richard, I mean the flowers for Richard, the owner, not owner, but manager of Milk Crate Records, I guess he’s the owner of Milk Crate Records, not the owner of the building, and how he got up and spoke so, with such determination about the future of the place and then the diversity of the poets, the three poets before, and then Sari reading. It did feel almost like being in somebody’s living room. Yeah.\n \n\n41:58\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah. I mean, even there’s a couch in the front row –\n \n\n42:01\tDaphne Marlatt:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n42:02\tMegan Butchart:\t– and everyone’s just hanging around.\n \n\n42:05\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWith footstools – with hassocks with footstools or, yeah.\n \n\n42:08\tKaris Shearer:\tOne of the things I’ve been reminded over the last couple of days from the events that we’ve been doing. Just the kind of diversity of audience for poetry that really, I find very invigorating. You know, we’ve had at the “curated close listening” event, first-year students and students who are coming with sometimes very little background in poetry itself or knowledge of a particular poet, and they’re coming for a variety of reasons and contributing amazing things to the conversation. Yeah, and that struck me too with Milk Crate, with the reading last night, we saw a variety of different performers, different styles.\n \n\n42:50\tDaphne Marlatt:\tRight. Very much so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a variety in the audience too.\n \n\n42:56\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, definitely.\n \n\n42:59\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, I hope they find a good place.\n \n\n43:01\tKaris Shearer:\tMe too.\n \n\n43:02\tDaphne Marlatt:\tAnd keep it going. Because it is, it does remind me of what the Vancouver poetry scene was like, and there were readings in folk music coffee shops [Laughs] and readings in bookshops. It wasn’t always this staged thing where you sold tickets or whatever.\n \n\n43:32\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, it reminds me too, I mean Milk Crate Records is a venue for music and has been so welcoming to poetry. And so, Sari’s response last night, to your question Megan, about what undergrad course had most influenced her. I mean our connection sometimes are very much outside of the literary classroom, if you will, or the poetry community proper, and I think that those other connections are often where it finds growth.\n \n\n44:00\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, poetry should never be just an academic subject. It was never meant to be that in the beginning. And in one of the things that, I feel, the commercialization of the literary industry in Canada’s done is make it much more ambitious, the whole award business for one thing, I mean I’ve been on one of those juries and it’s impossible to choose the best book for the year. It’s a matter of people’s tastes finally vying and you get some kind of compromise. But poetry comes out of life, it comes out of lived experience and it also reaches for something that I was thinking of this morning, as philosophy in the original sense ‘philos’’sofia’, the love of wisdom. It’s about how to live, how to be alive in this time with all that we’re facing, as a culture as a society, and going through one’s individual life journey as well, at the same time.\n \n\n45:31\tKaris Shearer:\tDefinitely. I mean in that sense it has to reach out beyond the poetry community, proper. Draw from and be responsive to.\n \n\n45:43\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yeah.\n \n\n45:46\tMegan Butchart:\tDo you think it could describe a little bit more, sort of, how you’re reading style has changed? I mean your voice has changed some, it has become less English, perhaps, but, like, your reading style.\n \n\n45:58\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, how did you hear it? How did you hear the difference?\n \n\n46:02\tMegan Butchart:\tI mean I heard the difference is being less deliberately performative, which is interesting. And maybe it was sort of the intimacy of having the mic right there instead of perhaps just, you know, a reel-to-reel machine in the room, right? So, there might have been a little bit.\n \n\n46:16\tDaphne Marlatt:\tSo, I didn’t have to project as much.\n \n\n46:18\tMegan Butchart:\tPerhaps not. Yeah. But I’m not sure. Karis, do you have any thoughts about that?\n \n\n46:22\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I mean, I think what I heard in the recording was a voice that was clipped and deliberate and for a long time, when I think about leaf leaf/s I think about that recording and that’s kind of in my head, the reference point for the sound of it. What struck me when you were reading last night was the way that you kind of opened up some of the vowels and it kind of lengthened and some of the vowels and it felt much more kind of flowy, and the turns more gentle. Then yeah, that particular – but I still hear echoes of the style, of course, across both.\n \n\n47:03\tDaphne Marlatt:\tOh, that’s good feedback for me. Yeah. Thank you.\n \n\n47:06\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n47:07\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, well, I’ve always had these two diverging interests in writing and one is narrative and one is the lyric. And the narrative also fights against the sense of sequence, that sequence doesn’t have to be narrative. And yet I’ve written narratives, I’ve written two novels, if not three, and I fought against, in each case, I fought against writing a traditional narrative [Laughs]. So, there’s an interesting conflict that feeds into the writing. And the lyric side of it has to do with my feeling that poetry is not about being declamatory. It’s about music. It’s what the music in the language, how it informs one, even sometimes unconsciously. Writing feels to me much more like improvisation than trying to get from A to B. So, there’s a funny kind of uneasy balance in my work between getting from A to B, as in a narrative, and the improvisatory.\n \n\n48:42\tSpeaker 5:\tWhen you were finishing with leaf leaf/s last night and transitioning to some of the other work, you mark that transition with a reference to the longer line, right? The very short lines of leaf leaf/s and the move into this like long the longer line of Steveson, for example. Can you talk a little bit about that?\n \n\n49:02\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Well it was wonderful for me to be able to stretch out into a longer line. And of course, I started trying to do that with the Vancouver poems. But even there they would come back to a short line here a short line there and so on, whereas with Steveston the writing was really informed by the flow of the Fraser River that ran underneath everything I wrote about Steveston. I wanted the flow of the river there, and the flow of history, which has a kind of, what’s the word I want? It has a kind of fatality to it, that is like the flow of the river out to sea, you can’t reverse it. You can’t reverse the tide. Not the tide, but the current in the river. It keeps on going out, and it keeps going out into this disappearance, into the oceanic. And I wanted to talk about the fatality of that awful moment in Canadian history when people who are born here as citizens, Japanese-Canadian citizens, were suddenly stripped of their citizenship and sent off, basically imprisoned and in camps in the Interior. And how fear it has a kind of fatality in it that grabs people so that they cannot see outside it. I wanted some of that to come through, and so there was this, you could call it a driving force, that was driving the line. But at the same time, it was aware of the music of the line because when a river flows it eddies around the banks and at eddies around whatever it encounters in the current and so there was this waylaying, musically, of that current driving forward. And I was really intrigued with a balance of that or trying to balance that in some way.\n \n\n51:31\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s also picked up on the, I mean, the spaciousness of the page as well, I think. Right?\n \n\n51:35\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Yeah, which is why I thought the books have those white pages. Yes. I ran into such trouble trying to submit poems from Steveston to anthologies or magazines. I mean sometimes anthologies would ask me for poems, and “please, don’t cut the line!”\n \n\n51:58\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd so, to pick up on that is the page a unit for you in that sense?\n \n\n52:04\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, the page is a kind of unit. And of course, then, poems will go over the page. And so that’s interesting. Where did they go? Over the page. How do they get over the page?\n \n\n52:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, and especially when you’re in when the work is anthologized, I mean if you’ve had control or input in the page as a compositional unit in the original publication that gets –.\n \n\n52:38\tDaphne Marlatt:\tCompletely undone, yeah.\n \n\n52:38\tKaris Shearer:\t–compromised unintentionally.\n \n\n52:38\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, that has been a cause of great aggravation.\n \n\n52:39\tKaris Shearer:\tI want to ask, Daphne, you, and Megan. We’ll start with Daphne. Is there anything you’re reading right now that you would recommend to the audience, the listeners?\n \n\n52:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah, there’s a book. I picked up at Mosaic Books here in Kelowna. That I was delighted to see — it’s John Lent’s new book. It’s called Matten Flywheel and they are remarkable poems because they’re written in the aftermath of a near-fatal heart attack and he, I would say those poems, they radiate that kind of ‘philosophia’ that I was talking about as what poetry reaches for. There’s a lot of it in there as well as the daily. But it always has to be. The daily always has to be there too. And the other book I’m reading that I’m very interested in is David R. Loy’s Nondual Thought.It’s a very exciting investigation of how the Buddhist notion of emptiness, which is very present in Chan and Zen Buddhism, and in Mahayana Buddhism. It has been presaged – there are connections with earlier Western philosophers, including Heidegger and Kant and he’s talking about the non-binary. And I think that is such an important concept. It’s one that I was first came in contact with through Rachel Blau Duplessis’s work and the work of feminist theorists generally and of course, Loy doesn’t talk about that, which he should do, but he doesn’t. He’s philosophical. And it’s a really interesting investigation of that, of those kinds of connections, and he’s now applying that to ecology and the environment. So, I’m going to be curious to hear what he has to say about that.\n \n\n55:04\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s great, Thank you very much. Megan, over to you, for final thoughts. What would you recommend?\n \n\n55:10\tMegan Butchart:\tI’m in class right now. So, I’m reading a lot of books for class. But I’ve also been re-reading Ana Historic. Kind of in anticipation of this visit. That’s a book that’s meant a lot to me, because of its topics with archival work and archival studies and trying to retrieve voices, often marginalized voices from the periphery that have been silenced. So yeah, just re-reading that and also thinking about the SpokenWeb project more broadly and the sort of work that it’s it’s hopefully doing, yeah.\n \n\n55:47\tDaphne Marlatt:\tGreat.\n \n\n55:48\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah.\n \n\n55:48\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWonderful.\n \n\n55:49\tKaris Shearer:\tThank you so much.\n \n\n55:49\tDaphne Marlatt:\tWell, the archival is very interesting. Of course, I’ve used archives a lot in my work. What was it Olive Senior said in her recent talk? At the Writers Union, their little magazine writing has a kind of synopsis of it, but she said something like “place is never fixed.” It’s not fixed in time. We affect place, place affects us too. And the archival is interesting because it gives us a sense of what was there before we encounter it. We tend to think what we encounter is all there is, it isn’t. And we need to have not only a sense of what was there before we encountered it, but where it’s all moving to now, especially with climate change. So, there’s, I don’t know what you’d call the opposite of the archival, but it has to leap forward from the archival, just as Indigenous knowledge, and what the elders teach moves from very very far back in what preceded us, now, here, and forward to seven generations, they affect seven generations down the line. That’s the kind of view we need in our culture.\n \n\n57:19\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n57:19\tMegan Butchart:\tYeah.\n \n\n57:20\tDaphne Marlatt:\tSorry to get a little [inaudible] –.\n \n\n57:21\tKaris Shearer:\tBut, a kind of a living archive that is not just passed on, but also co-created maybe?\n \n\n57:30\tDaphne Marlatt:\tYeah. Well the understanding of it has to be very much in the present, but it looks back and it looks forward and it should be a guide for action. [Start Music: SoundBox Signals Theme Music]\n \n\n57:47\tKaris Shearer:\tThat was episode two of SoundBox Signals. You were listening to a recording by Daphne Marlatt from our archive called the SoundBox Collection. I want to thank Daphne Marlatt for talking with us and for allowing us to share the recording online, and also to the Warren Tallman estate for the same permission. You can find full-length recordings online at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. I’m your host Karis Shearer and I will see you next time. [End Music: SoundBox Signals Theme Music]\n \n\n58:26\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. The episode we shared with you this month was produced by Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart for our sister podcast, SoundBox Signals, from UBC-Okanagan’s “Audio-Media-Poetry” Lab – a.k.a. – the AMP Lab. You can follow the work of the AMP Lab on Instagram @amplab_ubco. The SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. This episode was transcribed by Kelly Cubbon and Nour Sallam. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n\n"],"score":5.7495356}]