[{"id":"7955","cataloger_name":["Frances Grace,Fyfe"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"source_collection_label":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Ian Ferrier"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_id":[""],"persistent_url":[""],"item_title":["YAWP at The Rivoli #1"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["YAWP"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creators":["[]"],"contributors_names":["Ferrier, Ian","Anderson, Fortner","Brown, Jake"],"contributors_names_search":["Ferrier, Ian","Anderson, Fortner","Brown, Jake"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/91437046\",\"name\":\"Ferrier, Ian\",\"dates\":\"1954-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106026246\",\"name\":\"Anderson, Fortner\",\"dates\":\"1955-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Brown, Jake\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"performer_name":["Ferrier, Ian","Anderson, Fortner","Brown, Jake"],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"Uploads/7955/Ferrier_F085_SW7955_cassette.jpg\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/8 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"BASF\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"\",\"playing_speed\":\"\",\"sound_quality\":\"Poor\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Cassette\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Cassette"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:43:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/43.64941/-79.39528\",\"venue\":\"The Rivoli\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2\",\"latitude\":\"43.64941\",\"longitude\":\"-79.39528\"}]"],"Address":["334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2"],"Venue":["The Rivoli"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"contents":["Very hard to make out what is going on, only got pickup on L side. Someone welcomes the host, someone welcomes someone to stage who sounds like they might be speaking in Finnish(?), a surprise performer from Toronto named Dawn(?) performs spoken word poetry. Jake (Brown?) talks about teaching at Concordia, Ian Ferrier performs spoken word poetry, musical performance with woman vocalist and guitar. The MC introduces Fortner Anderson, who performs spoken word poetry."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549340815365,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":2.4478936},{"id":"7956","cataloger_name":["Frances Grace,Fyfe"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"source_collection_label":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Ian Ferrier"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_id":[""],"persistent_url":[""],"item_title":["YAWP at The Rivoli #2"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["YAWP"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creators":["[]"],"contributors_names":["Lynch, Barbara"],"contributors_names_search":["Lynch, Barbara"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lynch, Barbara\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Barbara Lynch is a musician/singer/songwriter from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her first album, Goodbye and Goodluck, was released by Duke Street Records in 1996. Lynch self-produced her second album, In the Nickelodeon. It was released in 2008 under GDA Records and then in 2009 become a part of the new Cowboy Junkies' record label, Latent Recordings, distributed by MapleMusic.\\n\\n\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"performer_name":["Lynch, Barbara"],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"B\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/8 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"BASF\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"\",\"playing_speed\":\"\",\"sound_quality\":\"Poor\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Cassette\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"},{\"side\":\"A\",\"image\":\"Uploads/7956/Ferrier_F085_SW7956_cassette.jpg\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/8 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"BASF\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"\",\"playing_speed\":\"\",\"sound_quality\":\"Poor\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Cassette\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Cassette","Cassette"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape","Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue","Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio","Audio"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:43:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"A side\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:43:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"B side\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/43.64941/-79.39528\",\"venue\":\"The Rivoli\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2\",\"latitude\":\"43.64941\",\"longitude\":\"-79.39528\"}]"],"Address":["334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2"],"Venue":["The Rivoli"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"contents":["Someone (a woman) can be heard introducing a poem called \"Chocolate Dip,\" performs spoken word poetry, MC introduces next artist, who sings and plays a song on guitar called \"Life Ain't Easy,\" MC introduces Barbara Lynch, who performs guitar. On B side, other women perform spoken word poetry and music. Sound is echoing."],"Note":["[{\"note\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"type\":\"Cataloguer\"}]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549340815366,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":2.4478936},{"id":"7957","cataloger_name":["Frances Grace,Fyfe"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"source_collection_label":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Ian Ferrier"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_id":[""],"persistent_url":[""],"item_title":["YAWP at The Rivoli #3"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["YAWP"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creators":["[]"],"contributors_names":["Wainwright, Martha"],"contributors_names_search":["Wainwright, Martha"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/76047794\",\"name\":\"Wainwright, Martha\",\"dates\":\"1976-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"performer_name":["Wainwright, Martha"],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"B\",\"image\":\"\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/8 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"BASF\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"\",\"playing_speed\":\"\",\"sound_quality\":\"Poor\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Cassette\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"},{\"side\":\"A\",\"image\":\"Uploads/7957/Ferrier_F085_SW7957_cassette.jpg\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/8 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"BASF\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"\",\"playing_speed\":\"\",\"sound_quality\":\"Poor\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Cassette\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Cassette","Cassette"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape","Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue","Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio","Audio"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:43:24\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"A side\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"},{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"00:27:42\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"B side\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/43.64941/-79.39528\",\"venue\":\"The Rivoli\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2\",\"latitude\":\"43.64941\",\"longitude\":\"-79.39528\"}]"],"Address":["334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2"],"Venue":["The Rivoli"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"contents":["Sound of a live band warming up, Andrew Sweeney sings, a woman performs spoken word poetry. On B side, a man performs spoken word poetry. Martha Wainwright performs music. A man (the MC?) rants about Immanuel Kant's incomprehensibility. A man from Alberta performs a piece of spoken word poetry. "],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549341863936,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":2.4478936},{"id":"7958","cataloger_name":["Frances Grace,Fyfe"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"source_collection_label":["Ian Ferrier fonds"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Ian Ferrier"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_id":[""],"persistent_url":[""],"item_title":["YAWP at The Rivoli - Lee Gotham"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["YAWP"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creators":["[]"],"contributors_names":["Gotham, Lee","Ferrier, Ian"],"contributors_names_search":["Gotham, Lee","Ferrier, Ian"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/106179112\",\"name\":\"Gotham, Lee\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/91437046\",\"name\":\"Ferrier, Ian\",\"dates\":\"1954-2023\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]}]"],"performer_name":["Gotham, Lee","Ferrier, Ian"],"material_description":["[{\"side\":\"\",\"image\":\"Uploads/7958/Ferrier_F085_SW7958_cassette.jpg\",\"other\":\"\",\"extent\":\"1/8 inch\",\"AV_types\":\"Audio\",\"tape_brand\":\"\",\"generations\":\"\",\"Conservation\":\"\",\"equalization\":\"\",\"playback_mode\":\"\",\"playing_speed\":\"\",\"sound_quality\":\"Good\",\"recording_type\":\"Analogue\",\"storage_capacity\":\"\",\"physical_condition\":\"\",\"track_configuration\":\"\",\"material_designation\":\"Cassette\",\"physical_composition\":\"Magnetic Tape\",\"accompanying_material\":\"\",\"other_physical_description\":\"\"}]"],"material_designations":["Cassette"],"physical_compositions":["Magnetic Tape"],"recording_type":["Analogue"],"AV_type":["Audio"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"48kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:08\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/43.64941/-79.39528\",\"venue\":\"The Rivoli\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2\",\"latitude\":\"43.64941\",\"longitude\":\"-79.39528\"}]"],"Address":["334 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2"],"Venue":["The Rivoli"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"contents":["A man (Lee Gotham?) thanks Jake for the introduction, begins reading a series of odes. Ian Ferrier performs spoken word poetry over a live band. Tape cuts to recorded music, \"Adios,\" by Glen Campbell."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549341863937,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":2.4478936},{"id":"9615","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E2, Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive, 1 November 2021, Polyck-O’Neill"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creator_names_search":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Julia Polyck-O’Neill\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3d1f947d-a26e-415a-9002-caeecdb1698e/audio/9aee09d9-16e3-4499-b25f-e666c04ae3a4/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,801,683 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/15396822\",\"venue\":\"York University Keele Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 \",\"latitude\":\"43.77417545\",\"longitude\":\"-79.50474900961275\"}]"],"Address":["4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 "],"Venue":["York University Keele Campus"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Duke University Press, 2003.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” No More Potlucks, 2018, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2019. \\n\\nMorra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2014.\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. “At the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, 1994: Launch of XEclogue on January 8, 1994.” PennSound, n.d., https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Robertson/Robertson-Lisa_Reading_Kootenay-School_Vancouver_01-%2008-1994.mp3. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum, 2018.\\n\\nTaylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549701525504,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, SpokenWeb contributor Julia Polyck-O’Neill shares an archived recording of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson with us and talks us through two interviews she recorded with Robertson. Polyck-O’Neill invites us to consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections in light of the relationships between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. In examining these conceptual, material and immaterial dimensions of the archive within Robertson’s personal narrative history of the Kootenay School of Writing, Polyck-O’Neill points to how creative and feminist approaches to the archive and to archival practice are exist within Robertson’s practice. Polyck-O’Neill shares with us how Robertson’s archives are influencing her research and the ways she approaches the topic of archives and intimacy in her work and her life more broadly.\n\nAddendum: Listening Notes\n\nNancy Shaw (1962-2007), a celebrated curator, poet, writer, and organizer, at times collaborated with Lisa Robertson and also wrote work in dialogue with Robertson’s poetry. Robertson wishes to mention how greatly the absence of her good friends Shaw, Stacy Doris (d. 2012), and Peter Culley (d. 2015) has affected her. Additionally,  XEclogue was, in fact, Robertson’s first book, although she published chapbooks prior; additionally, she does not think of her books as collections, as they are written as single, cohesive works. The new edition of R’s Boat is titled Boat and is being published by Coach House in Spring 2022.\n\n00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Creating an archive of literary lives and events can be a daunting task. Think about an author you admire – if you want to preserve their legacy in a box of materials, how would you do it? What would you save? How would these materials communicate the realities of the present to those living decades in the future? And how do sound recordings fit into – or even enhance -an archive? Archival collections or fragments of memory – a curated set of materials that has been gathered and preserved to encapsulate a moment, community, or person. Archives preserved at universities, museums, and other places contain all kinds of materials from mundane lists and notes to photographs, to sound recordings – our speciality here at Spoken Web.\n01:33\tHannah McGregor:\tIt might feel counterintuitive to think about the need for archiving today when so much of our lives are ceaselessly recorded. There are many digital outlets that people can use to collect and share moments from our lives and our literary present. But this abundance of material is also a call for curation and intentionality around what to protect and pass on. We can’t save everything and we probably don’t want to. So what should we choose to save? Today, our episode producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill leads us into one archival project: the archive of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Julia is caring for and studying part of Robertson’s archive as part of her postdoctoral work on the complexity of archiving the lives and works of interdisciplinary artists. In this episode, Julia shares a recording of Robertson from the archive and plays clips of Robertson discussing the challenges of forming her own archive. Julia uses these clips to reflect on creative and feminist approaches to archiving and on her personal connection to Robertson’s life and work. This episode is a fascinating and moving glimpse into the power of sonic archival material and the weight of memory, mortality, and trust in the archival process. Here is Julia Polyck-O’Neil with season three, episode two of the SpokenWeb Podcast, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:18\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Hello, thanks for listening. My name is Julia Polyck-O’Neill and I’m a post-doctoral researcher, theorizing interdisciplinary artists archives, according to feminist and digital epistemologies. This podcast episode, on which I’ve been working for quite some time has recently been re-imagined according to my private emotional responses to two long and surprisingly intimate conversations I recorded with Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, a feminist writer who was a member of the Kootney School of Writing in Vancouver in the 1990s and early 2000s.\n03:55\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI’m considering Robertson’s archive as part of my post-doctoral project. [End Music: Strings Instrumental] My conversations with Robertson and meditations on the connections between her body of work, biography, and her archive form the bridge between my recently completed dissertation work on Vancouver’s critical conceptualism in art and writing and my work re-examining and analyzing the complexity of the archival collections of interdisciplinary artists. Robertson’s work has figured into both projects in a formal way, but now, I wish to consider how her archives, and our collective thinking about her archives, is influencing my research and the ways I approach the topic of archives and intimacy in my work and my life more broadly. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Listening to our conversation months later invokes all kinds of feelings related to the relationship between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. Archives have an emotional weight – a kind of affective tenor that is challenging to describe accurately with language; objects begin to stand in for complex lives and relationships.\n05:05\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn this episode, I’m going to introduce you to Robertson’s poetry and my research. First, I will share a recording of Robertson reading in 1994. Then, I’ll share clips from an interview I conducted with Robertson earlier this year on Friday, April 16th, 2021, over Zoom with Robertson at home in France and me at my desk in downtown Toronto, months before Robertson’s 60th birthday (in July) and just before the announcement of the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award in fiction (for which her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal would be nominated on 4 May). Throughout this episode, I will be putting these recordings into the context of my thinking and research on her work.\n05:49\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections and the reflections she shared with me in light of a creative, conceptualist interest in the archive. I also propose these as aesthetic strategies related to histories of feminist material analysis that reconsider archival practices according to feminist ethical and effective methods, including feminist and affective approaches to audio recordings and the material (and immaterial) histories, they impart as Deanna Fong and Karen Scherer argue in their 2018 essay, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental]\n06:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI want to start this episode by listening together to this 20 minute recording of “Eclogue Eight ” at the January 8th, 1994 launch of Robertson’s book, XEclogue, which exemplifies important characteristics of her writing and her work with the Kootenay School of Writing. In this recording from the PennSound archive, you can hear the sounds of community participation. So central to the ethos of the Kootenay School. Of course, we might primarily focus on the poet’s own powerful voice, but I’m also drawn to the other voices we hear: the voices of other members acting as the “Roaring Boys,” an amateurish chorus, and the contributions of poet, artist, and organizer Nancy Shaw. But in this recording, in light of my interviews with Robertson, I’m most drawn to what we overhear in the background, the voices of audience members laughing and reacting in a way that suggests a deep, warm familiarity with the readers. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] The sounds of community. Part of an archive of community sounds. After we listen, I’ll talk about how this connects with my research, and I’ll share excerpts from my interviews with Robertson. [End Music: Strings Instrumental].\n \n\n07:46\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Eight: Romance. The Roaring Boys fan back.[Footsteps] [Audience Laughter] [Audience Chatter]\n08:01\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe March trees torch the prophetligate sky because I say so. [Audience Member Laughs] A tiny flopping boy with sullen fits drifts like a sheet of golden lust. In this empire of no-tense he bullies the dust. He lends the block street, a gleaming arch. He flaunts his hidden rope burn like defeat. So what about his consummate latinady? He has been moving in the pale night with the urgent authority of a meaning. The flicked fringe of his anger flatters mangled angels. And he weeps like a twin in the heat. The Greenwood never wanted him nor the puckered gully he calls thought. A seabird rises like an angel in the night and shrieks it’s brackish laughter at his dream. The Swains of justice pinch out the lights. A pronoun’s snout is gentle torture dressed in the dust of the jejune Northern sky. He scissored to that pilgrim’s grief. His marble whippets snap at piety; they’re pearly lust encrypted as confession. Under the empires, arches swooning flower chasers confuse scripted infamy with paradise.\n09:25\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey blindly submit to the loutish bonus of roaring boys’ dreams. As if the Greenwood were the room of philosophs. As if their yearning arms were half tree. They had been moving all this time towards a rose of dust in the street, calling it golden, calling it the sodden issue of their belief. They clasp their girlish secrets like tiny, glowing wreaths. In the tender platinum sky, a pronoun gallops, a pronoun shifts, a pronoun shifts. Hey, Venus kick in paradise, revolve outside March trees of piety. Gently the golden whippet snouts of gorgeousness lust in the tragic streets, touch supine forms of girlish hooligans. A bud will clasp its profligate secret rather than submit to gold stiff piety. And the pale jejune week unfolds through the lattice of confusion. Who is not a Pilgrim carrying grief like an image through the Northern sky? Already dressed as a boy, his dream of justice fucked.\n10:41\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tHe had been moving through this adult and gentle world of gentle laughter. Softly he flicks out his wings on the marble steps, the quiet of philosophs peaks in their rooms. Hey Nancy, what’s that colour falling in the heat, like a twin? Like a tiny flapping soft scissor and mistake. The fringe of his wings licks the dust like pearly fingers. Hey, Venus, get dressed in a better latinaty. Wear that salted harness beyond the need for abnegation. He quotes a crumbling dream and dares not say so. These boys are vicious as a burnt lip tongued [Audience Laughter]. The sleek swing of a silk fringe rewrites their project as a failure. One begins to sing. It is an anthem sprung with a quality of flung bits, withdrawn or chastened as rustling tongues and fluent scandal. Reigned with the amusing cruelty of Cupid birched. Caressed by an accent has rubbed for murmurs to the sneaking night sulking as a flipped skirt, cradled in the precise euphoria of a method held in reserve. Dirty per se.\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] [Intermittent Audience Laughter] Rear all you face and wave to the enormous night. Since love’s pure need lures [inaudible] credit through hungers creamy trap well suss a petty sight. Pass floral delight and sip at feeble kisses. Permit us a sip from that gaze quiet tremor. [inaudible] or crop that tricky verb. We’ll either sap or wet Nancy’s sultry transit. Sufficient ardor to us. [inaudible] This time of filming will quote Cupid’s vulgar luck to taste her silly statement. [Laughter and Applause]\n \n\n13:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tBut pathetic lays all that’s left of freedom in the cloistered night. Like a lock of Helen and the dangerous summer having bloomed from the silvered style of an anxious wrist who’s blunt syntax lackers opacity with greed. Yet crushing nothing more than the dampness that moves across the nyloned air with rancid gusts in an age of tawdry indolence that breeds such smear doubles for a calling, for a bruised structure, for a dupe sincerity that flaunts escape. The next pretty boy emerges like a rape from his crisis to find the concept does not need him. A slick whisper weaves across the commodities. Are you looking for fragrance? There is no sea and no forest and no boats passing. It’s eight o’clock. The glass world curves into history, leaving a bear pronoun to bask on the roof of a promise. Read them, audacity’s slim wrists cuffed in elegance, wandering fingers clipped to the pulsing sky by those bannal enchantments of antiquity and authority and consent.\n14:24\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tRead them as mere exitation, pooling products of neglect. Nancy straps the audible sulk of a method to her hips and presses bitter lips against an image. Let’s go down to the water’s edge. Who fished the ineffable from this slick tissue of an absence dripping it’s regret. She spends the loose coins from a lisped purse on important grammar that opens that goes on sheer, a girl-boy’d mirror, a compact Nancy pins them to the glass. Roaring Boy Number One is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of his mind as a great dusty silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he would exude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. He could be said to profoundly resent his inability to control his desire for an impenitent extrovert.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWhen he closes his eyes, he asks, “shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight?” He is skinny and pure as a calling. Roaring Boy Number Two ,boy with the volute heart of a girl names, the faithless toss of an abandoned guest’s exactitude. He gives his thought with the sinews rigor of a cut silk garment. Lives looking at the sky, waiting for the specificity of a pleasure whose deferral is underwritten by a constriction of memory. The violent stammering of a repressed structure. The plains of his face point to the exquisitely even surface of a late antique life. He has begun by setting aside holy dread. Deferral is his darling. Roaring Boy Number Three, rather than submitting to the trial of action, wants deeply to possess an opinion [Audience Laughter] than having to possess, to distribute it with maximum efficiency. Since the spectacle of luxury pleases him and others, he embarks on a gradual, to the point of imperceptibility, inflation of his own verbal style and a concurrent almost compensatory deflation of his person. He is both febrile and duckerish – decorish [Laughs]. [Audience Laughter] A foolish hooligan of sardonic emphasis.\n17:29\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Nine: History: Knowing memory only bruises the past, Lady M scans the face of a faint document whose ardent stammer she has already echoed than languidly rejected.\n \n\n17:47\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe cannot think tranquility a throne, yet time exceeds is barely tolerable pleasure.\n \n\n17:53\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIt is a crumb in our syntax.\n \n\n17:55\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe need not innure ourself to peace and luxury, but our privilege lies in understanding how the senses detect what is not servitude.\n \n\n18:03\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWho then would write the biography of their desires?\n \n\n18:07\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWe ourselves will claim the requisite authority.\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey wished for lips of red thread, like so many spies. They received through the veil of expression, a heart moved only by etiquette. They wished to experience thought as we would be compelled to remember it. It became a language impossibility. Their heart was lodged in an audible sentence. They wore nervousness on their spine and wrists. Their small soft edgy world was an intoxicant. The superb crumbling of the afternoon, so secret and so intense identified itself as history. The ground shelved gently to the water side, flowing from the flushed pulse of vulnerability under full, soft, hot light. It was a challenged mesh from which our presence had been washed.\n \n\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIf we were to imagine that contradiction as a landscape overwritten with vast exhausted melancholy quenched in mauvis tasseled wind, we would only perpetrate the vain in position of a hoax.\n \n\n19:17\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tYet the sea’s novice rhythm seems to reek of freeze. The Roaring Boys drift aimlessly, believing their thoughts imperius. A background ground of shimmering woods fetters our weary gaze. The black brow of a rock parches the trees. Sister of a lynx gert with quiver steps, cunningly and cheats the light. Recall the echoing crags a shore’s lip keeps happiness for itself. The woods breast is pierced with sight. Why may we not clasp the revolving night? The dusky grove bleeds virtue. For we saw two maids clashing with men whom the black storm had scattered. We saw one bear knee break the ghastly dark. We saw a strong hand raise the bow to slash the weird decrepitude time had wrought. Undone by our vision we began to move tirelessly among the wending dwindling paths. Though they appeared with grace, then faded into cruelity without apparent motivation. Slowly, we came to understand how the forest was fraught or thatched with use. Capital had tagged or lurid route. We asked ourselves, will this delicate world of deliquescent charms compel a future? Then answered ,the ground breeds sentiment, but what else is there to walk on? Sullenly we raised our glance, the coy foliage swung open to reveal this Moston scription.\n \n\n20:56\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] Shirk off the moderate little grace of vain Cupid and grease the silver and lascivious age as livid qualms dope our cool arrival. Rich poems sag like great nuns, arch cheeks, tongues, martyrs.\n \n\n21:14\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tFrom the lip of slavish shade, the guilty land reclines swollen in a thousand livid tents. All around us everything’s humming. In the low valley our futures writ on winking leaves. Texture Brit brushes, drenched texture in a glamorous frizane of wit. The cushioning ground urges us to remeasure our impatience. May we muster sufficient elegance to court this pangs mobility? Sunken moss we dream of the lustrous pitch of a truculent tissue. It means we are traders for we do not accept the idea of the present. We dream we are treading the sloping orthodox street etched with a scammed pride of hunger. It means memory has been defaced, implicated by the effects of poverty. We dream that their desires have become transparent to us so that we may suavely recite. What does Lady M want? To bask in unfathomably strange beauties. Political beauty, liberties, beauty, undeniably gorgeous beauty of a girl’s mind. A wrist’s quivering beauty. Beauty of the skin of boys’ backs. Beauty of burnished hoaxes deepen a clamoring taxi cabs. Appalled beauty of a scholar’s nervous heart. Cleft beauty invaded by splendid lucidity. We dreamed the night as far spent. Inexorable, thick lacquered, private. It means we have mistaken an invitation for permission. Yet still we feign this new erudition. Inappropriate and demeaning. With a movement of tearing we wake and cry out, we are not our own! Then find this freight’s scrap pinned to our sleeve.\n \n\n23:06\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tLopsided interpolations following a wrinkled blind eye. Oops.\n \n\n23:13\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe crooning leaves shut around a mercurial ankle. The stir and toss of the stroking breeze begs belief. Through the screen of grief, we glimpse an ear’s profane frill, luminous and insulting. These two have transformed us into what we are: green laurels that lose no leaf. What we call thought is cleft and afternoons olden freeze is cracked and lacking only verisimilitude. We wish to seize the real as a tissue. Leave the milieu of the curious and enter that radiantly tortured grove. Yet we are history’s minions. so again, we draw on the opulent glove of sleep. We dream. We have the will to think with the points of tiny scissors. It means luxury teaches us to dream of luxury. We dream of a barren, unbroken hunger blazing up in wild proportions that we taxi through a wet night on thrumming streets. That a city’s sumptuous edifice wanes like so many abandoned ghosts. That the shock of recognition twists like a blurred salvage, like a roped horizon, like a girl waiting in a car. We see the cradling flowers as taunting apostrophes. Through thick glass, the granular light slats among fronts, the shining mud sucks at thought, the leaves reek of rust. Girls whose memories caused the clamoring see in all names of ease. Quit tossing us such shoddy dreams. We dream we are dilations of banality. It means we are the willing captives of their metaphor. [Pause]\n24:58\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Aside to Audience] And I’ll just finish by reading the epilogue. [Returns to reading] I’m afraid I’ll be misunderstood. Asleep and sleeping in the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning like a dahlia or some other flower with the strong odor of clothing. I am reminded of my conceit by a row of pale scars on the ceiling whose shy origin I shouldn’t identify. Speech bites into my walls. Maybe for that I will never forget the bus. In my dream of an intersection we eat and hear as we relax. We felt this as the cabinet swung open, we felt a strong burst of vitality. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n25:59\tMusic Interlude:\t[String Instrumental]\n \n\n26:08\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Music Continues: String Instrumental] XEclogue was not Robertson’s first collection, but it is among her earliest published books and signals a formative moment, both for her and for the Kootenay School of Writing. The recording we just listened to captures aspects of her writing practice [End Music: String Instrumental] as it developed as a member of the Kooteny School of Writing in Vancouver: the sense of the formation of a feminist subject, and the development of a feminist ethics of care and leadership within the membership and community, which seems to come out in the ways Robertson includes community participation in her reading.\n26:43\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tWhen approaching the corpus of Robertson’s writing in relation to her archive, including these sound recordings, it might be useful to observe that although her writing career began in and was situated in Vancouver when she was in her early thirties, the writing she completed during her moves around North America and relocation to France still bear a solid connection to the physical and emotional site of these beginnings. Importantly, while Robertson’s environment and community in Vancouver influenced her engagement with and conception of the archive, her practice also demonstrates and maintains a personal engagement with feminist, conceptualist thought. Her poetic and artistic networks in the city framed archival practice as a form of creative and political institutional intervention, as well as a method for feminist self-realization and reflection. More pragmatically, the connections between cities and selves are maintained by her generative engagement with her own archive, both as an idea, premised in affective self-reflection, and as a studious method for a form of intuitive, meditative writing.\n27:51\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn many ways, Robertson takes an ongoing reflexive, relational approach to the institutional concept of the archive in her own fonds. She does so by means of the maintenance of different archives for different purposes: and official archive in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University; and two personal, unofficial, or what literary scholar Linda Morra has named “unarrested” archives. Robertson’s divided fonds demonstrate how her poetics actively engage with the theoretical-ideological, feminist legacies of the KSW and its institutional contexts, while also maintaining a certain emotional engagement not immediately present in the content of her formal writings as they’re published.\n28:38\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRobertson’s methods enact another manifestation of her relational approach to the archive, in the ways she implicates her archive in her work itself. She does so by incorporating regular readings of her personal archival collection, kept with her in her home in France. Doubles of some of these materials are held in her official fonds at SFU, while other more recent items she actively retains, mostly journals, as future contributions that aren’t currently too important to her ongoing work to send away. Yet another small collection is currently under my care – that which I have named her “maternal archive” –which she shared with me after our first interview in 2017 to help me with my early dissertation work. With her consent, I published an article in 2018 titled “Lisa Robertson’s Archive: The Feminist Archive, Singular and Collective,” in the academic journal, English Studies in Canada.\n29:37\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThese archives – that which is housed at SFU, her own, and that which was accumulated by her mother Lynette Mullen, and then passed along temporarily to me – demonstrate how archives, particularly when imagined holistically and beyond the conventional structures of the institution, are anything but static and are inherently distributed and dynamic, expanding and contracting across space and time.\n30:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t“It is a slightly weird thing when one thread of your life becomes an institutional topic,” Robertson said during our conversation in April, reflecting on how her lived and embodied experience differs from published narratives. The recent interview was noticeably more intimate than the first, probably because so much has happened since 2017, and possibly because we communicate from twin spaces of isolation during a global pandemic that unites everyone in indescribable melancholy. It has also possibly because I unwittingly have pulled Robertson into an exercise of thinking through her life by means of archival materials in different ways. When she read my article before submission, she commented on how important her mother’s collection of objects now seemed –admitting that she had felt uncomfortable passing along such an unwieldy unremarkable accumulation, which she may have referred to lightheartedly as “junk”.\n31:09\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIt is a global pandemic. For the first time, I realize, in a material way, that archives, “the archive,” is a concept entangled with notions of death and dying, and, intrinsic to these extremes survival and trauma. This is an essential, material component of the archive: birth, marriage, and death records, or vital statistics form the basis of national public archival collections. The immaterial memorial aspects of archives have been theorized in several different ways. Feminist theorist Ann Cvetkovich writes about the idea of an archive of feelings as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are included not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception”.\n32:06\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe archive, imagined broadly, brings to the fore not only recorded events, but also the lived experience, the rolling background of the lives that contain them. Critical of conventional archives, scholar Diana Taylor, in her book, The Archive and the Repertoire from 2003, explains that in arguing for the repertoire as an expansion beyond the archive, she “tried to put limit events into conversation with the daily noneventful enactments of embodied practice” in her study, foregrounding the importance of context within memory structures.\n32:46\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe feelings and emotions invoked by an archive, by one’s own archive, can be hard to isolate and express, much like an event might be challenging to extract from its lived contexts. In scholar, Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, her 2018 book of creative nonfiction, the narrator’s desire to archive what she describes as sensing “what [movement philosopher] Erin Manning calls the “anarchive,” that strange and stunning “something that catches us in our own becoming”. The narrator goes on to explain the ineffable quality of this realization: “This is the future archive. The archive of alterity. And like yours and mine, this is a body that has gone up in flame. A body that is an excess, that is another world and also this one.” For Taylor, the body is incompatible with the archive, and for Singh, it is inseparable from it.\n33:48\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tFor Robertson, the tensions between texts and embodied experience are embedded in her archive. In our conversation, we meander between themes in a way that draws out these relations Robertson. And I talk about the late Nancy Shaw, one of the original members of the collective in Vancouver who we heard in the previous recording, and Robertson begins to reflect on how so many of her formative relationships are contained in her archival collections, although they likely remain inaccessible, relegated to footnotes or snapshots. In so doing she meditates on the limits of narrative to capture lived reality and how key figures in her memory are omitted from many representations of her life. She observes how this is a fact of habit, of “how we receive and reiterate narratives.” Histories that are intertwined are separated, and textures are smoothed over, she explains, noting how patriarchal structures are internalized. “Feminist, queer, and Marxist working class circulations through KSW were extremely complex from the get go,” she says, and encourages me (again) to look more closely at Shaw in my research. “She was fucking brilliant…and she stood her own at the bar,” she emphasizes.\n35:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: String Instrumental] We talk about an envelope of photos from parties she recently sent to SFU, and how objects get imbued with new relational significance over time. Listen to Robertson describe her changing relationship to ephemera and her archive in our conversation last April.\n \n\n35:35\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Robertson, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n \n\n39:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRevisiting the archive can be integral to Robertson’s writing practice. She is currently revisiting and writing a companion piece for her 2010 book, R’s Boat, a book that evolved from her 2004 chapbook Rousseau’s Boat, and which will eventually be republished as a new edition by Coach House Press in Toronto. We discuss how she has been using her archives as a starting point for writing or rewriting this work, as what she calls “a programmatic method,” and she remarks that she finds it useful to track how the psychological experience and the emotional experience of gathering material is “putting pressure in a certain way on what is a very avant-garde, constraint driven composing technique without actually entering the poems as content.” For Robertson, this process shapes the poem. Now I’ll play a clip of my interview with Robertson where you’ll hear her describe her process in her own words.\n \n\n40:15\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Roberston, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n44:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tNoting her upcoming birthday Robertson observes how the process of reworking the material from her archives [End Music: String Instrumental] has a distinct relationship to reaching a certain point in her life. She explains, ” Language is emotional […] Subjectivity is linguistic. For me, you don’t need to directly refer to emotional content in order for it to be present.”\n44:36\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tAt first, I interpret these words at face value, thinking about the corpus of Robertson’s writing, but then I step back and apply it to the broader context of her archive. I think about the interconnections between her archival collections and her shifting relationship with these objects and records, and how these – the relationships, the objects, the records – are imbued with emotions: hers, and those of many others. I reflect on how these emotional resonances, whether foregrounded in conversation or completely silent in the background, are what have always drawn me to want to spend time wading into the archives as a site of lived history. [Start Music: String Instrumental]\n45:22\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tTo close this episode, I would like to consider how Julietta Singh opens No Archive Will Restore You with a passage that captures the tenor of my last conversation with Robertson and my ongoing relationship to her archives (especially now during the distressing and ongoing quietude of the pandemic). Singh describes the beginning of her graduate studies and her entry into the ambiguous, precarious, but intimidating environment of archival studies. She writes, “We were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect that few of us know what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.” But in contrast with the picture of the grasping desperate graduate students Singh presents in this chapter to give context to her eventual revelations, that archives are much more than the cold, institutional entities whe first encounters, I see the instability of this kind of mystery or unknowing as an invitation for engagement that tests the boundaries between academic and emotional selves. In the context of my conversations with Lisa Robertson, I can now better understand how relationships to the archive, and the collections that constitute archives themselves, can shift and evolve over time and across space. An archive that is in a constant state of transformation is a proposition for new kinds of thinking about relations between methods and modes of representation and lived, embodied experience. [End Music: String Instrumental]\n \n\n47:15\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb contributor, Julia Polyck-O’Neill. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And don’t forget to rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod:mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n"],"score":2.4478936},{"id":"9639","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E5, They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 1 April 2024, Hammond"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/voices-in-the-waste-land/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Adam Hammond"],"creator_names_search":["Adam Hammond"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/308766715\",\"name\":\"Adam Hammond\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/af327536-5076-40e0-83ef-a37528358ece/audio/636c6309-17a2-415c-855f-91d3f499cd9b/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-mix-sw-ep5-.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:41:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"39,878,229 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-mix-sw-ep5-\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/voices-in-the-waste-land/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-04-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23201562\",\"venue\":\"University of Toronto\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8\",\"latitude\":\"43.66773375\",\"longitude\":\"-79.40030507952156\"}]"],"Address":["170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8"],"Venue":["University of Toronto"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549748711424,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.\n\nIn this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Intro\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:17)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and —\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tFor many of us who have studied, taught, written, or simply enjoyed poetry, we know that some poets’s work comes alive in performance. I remember a professor in my undergraduate insisting that we read 17th century English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost aloud since that was how Milton wrote it. He was blind and composed it through dictation.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Adam Hammond, associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, makes the same argument for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” Elliot’s poem, he asserts, is written as a collection of voices thrown together, and it’s in the oral performance that these different voices can be heard depending, of course, on the performance decisions of the reader.\n(01:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tLuckily for us and for Hammond, a lot of people have read “The Wasteland” out loud, including Eliot himself. Even luckier new digital humanities tools, like “Drift” and “Gentle,” now add computational listening into the Modernist Scholars toolkit, allowing us to ask new questions about poetic performances, including the ones that frame this episode. Is Eliot’s reading as dry, monotonous and hopelessly formal as it might sound to a contemporary listener? Or can computational listening help us to hear it a little differently? Here is episode five of season five of the SpokenWeb Podcast: They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.\n(02:25)\tMusic\t[SpokenWeb theme song begins playing.]\n(02:35)\tAdam Hammond\tI will never forget the first time I heard T.S. Eliot’s voice, he was reading his poem “The Wasteland.”\n(02:41)\tBob Dylan, reading the first four lines of “The Waste Land” for his XM Radio show “Theme Time Radio Hour”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”\n(02:52)\tAdam Hammond\tOkay, I’m just messing with you. That’s not T.S. Eliot. That’s Bob Dylan. This is T.S. Eliot.\n(02:59)\tT.S. Eliot, reading the first few lines of “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”\n(03:14)\tAdam Hammond\tI remember the exact thought I had the first time I heard T.S. Eliot’s voice. I thought he was American. I remember the second thought I had as well. I thought he was young. And I remember the third. I thought he was cool. I was 19 in Christian Lloyd’s first year English class at Queen’s University’s International Study Center in Herstmonceux Castle in England. I was supposed to study engineering, but I was able to convince my parents to let me defer my acceptance to Waterloo when I got a scholarship to live in a castle in England for a year and study English. It’s what I wanted to do more than anything. I was there because I loved modernism. I had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell in high school. They all seemed so badass — so free and brave and defiant.\n(04:06)\tAdam Hammond\tI’d also read T. S. Eliot. I loved “Prufrock.” Even though it spoke about old men with trousers rolled, it seemed like a young person’s poem, about young people’s problems. Like having the courage to be yourself, or rather about not having the courage to be yourself — about “putting on a face to meet the faces that you meet.” I felt like I had taken Eliot’s implicit message in deciding to follow my heart and study English. Prufrock was an unreliable narrator. You were supposed to resist his old-mannish ways; rolled-up trousers were bad. .\n(04:44)\tAdam Hammond\tBut then I was in first year, and we were reading “The Wasteland,” and it seemed infinitely more badass than “Prufrock.” Younger and freer and braver and more defiant. And then my roommate and I found a recording of Eliot reading “The Wasteland,” and he sounded pathetic. He sounded old and lame with a terrible fake British accent.\n(05:04)\tAdam Hammond\tIt was worse than that. He was Prufrock’s dad. It took me years to recover from this.\n(05:14)\tAdam Hammond\tMy name is Adam Hammond. I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. I never went to Waterloo. I continued to scam my parents all the way through undergrad, saying I would go to law school, that English was the perfect pre-law degree, but that a Master’s was useful prep for all the research lawyers were expected to do. I don’t even remember what excuse I used to justify doing a Ph.D, but I did one.\n(05:39)\tAdam Hammond\tI wrote my dissertation on three writers, one of whom was T. S. Eliot. I did this because he fit the idea, not because I loved him. I still hadn’t recovered from that experience of hearing his voice. Then, in 2011, right as I was finishing my Ph.D., something wild happened. The venerable printing house Faber and Faber — the very place where Eliot himself worked as poetry editor, serving as modernism’s ultimate gatekeeper — collaborated with an app developer called “TouchPress” to make an iPad app version of “The Wasteland.”\n(06:12)\tAdam Hammond\tIt sounds like this would be a bad thing. But it wasn’t. It was amazing. It completely changed the way I saw the poem. It made it cool again. It had interviews with celebrities, and I mean celebrities had not only heard of “The Wasteland” but they liked it! It had notes you could make disappear. You could swipe right on the words of the poem, and like magic, the thing that’s typescript would appear, scratched to smithereens by Eliot’s pal Ezra Pound. But the real killer feature — the best thing about “The Wasteland” app by far — the clear single reason that I started loving “The Wasteland” again — was that fact that the app included readings of the poem. You touched a line, and you heard it.\n(06:58)\tAdam Hammond\tThere were a bunch of readings. They were by actual celebrities. One of them was by Viggo Mortensen. One of them was by Alec Guiness. Another was by Fiona Shaw. Jeremy Irons was on there. You could hear the entire Wasteland, all 433 lines of it, read to you by Aragorn, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Aunt Petunia Dursley, or Scar! And some of these voices, let me tell you: they were cool. Check this out.\n(07:29)\tViggo Mortensen, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”\n(07:47)\tAdam Hammond\tThat was exactly how I always wanted Eliot to sound. It was my fantasy of the poet’s voice. American, young, and tough. As I put it in an article I wrote for the Toronto Review of Books shortly after the app came out, Mortensen was the anti-Prufrock. It sounded like he was reading the poem from the seat of a Harley Davidson. There were reasons aplenty for nineteen-year-old me to get excited about “The Wasteland.” But there were also reasons for thirty-year-old me, as I then was, to be excited. I had just finished a dissertation about modernism and the phenomenon of dialogism. That was the word that Russian literary critic Mikhail’s Bakhtin used to describe literary texts made up of lots of genuinely competing voices. The characters in a dialogic novel — Bakhtin’s prime example being Dostoevsky — they got into real debates. They disagreed with one another. They disagreed with their author.\n(08:44)\tAdam Hammond\tThe outcome of their debates were totally unpredictable. It was like they were autonomous – independent of their creator. For Bakhtin, dialogic novels were little snow globe versions of healthy democracies — mini public squares. In my dissertation, I argued that modernist dialogism had a political edge: that in an era of rising authoritarianism and mass control, its purpose was to train its readers how to think for themselves, how to cut through all the bullshit, find their own voice in the maelstrom. .\n(09:17)\tAdam Hammond\tAlthough Bakhtin thought dialogism existed only in novels, one of my prime examples of a dialogic text was “The Wasteland.” I didn’t really see “The Wasteland” as a poem, you see. I saw it as a kind of novel without a narrator. It was an even more extreme form of dialogism than Dostoevsky. There were voices everywhere! But there weren’t even quotation marks. Everything was a voice, but unlike in a Dostoevskian novel, you couldn’t even say for sure where one voice stopped and where the other began.\n(09:47)\tAdam Hammond\tWhen one voice passed the mic to the other voice. This is what I wrote in my review for The Toronto Review of Books — the part where I was explaining why I was so excited about all the audio readings in “The Wasteland” app: “The focus on oral performance [in the app] works especially well with The Waste Land, because it is a poem that demands so emphatically to be read aloud—and indeed only really makes sense once you begin to consider it in the light of oral performance. As Eliot’s original title for the poem, He Do the Police in Different Voices, reminds us, the basic unit of The Waste Land is the voice. But though the poem is built from multiple distinct voices, it does not tell us where they begin or end, or what each is like, nor does it provide a dramatis personae or indicate its speakers. These voices thus only really become apparent in oral performance, where the reader must decide on their cast of characters, and give each one a recognizable personality. Every reading of the poem is thus an interpretation of some of its most fundamental questions.”\n(10:56)\tAdam Hammond\tYes, that’s right, Eliot’s working title for “The Wasteland” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices” — a reference to something someone says about a character in Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend,” who animates his reading of newspaper stories by giving the police men funny voices. And this is all more evidence — because it’s a very cool title — of Eliot’s fundamental and latent badassness. I’ll show you what I mean about the voices in the poem. This is Alex Guiness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, reading the opening of the poem. Listen carefully and you’ll hear him switching into the voice of “Marie.”\n(11:35)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(12:35)\tAdam Hammond\tNow listen to Fiona Shaw — aka Aunt Petunia Dursley — read the same part. She does the voice even more clearly.\n(12:44)\tFiona Shaw, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(13:38)\tAdam Hammond\tViggo Mortensen sure sounds cool, and I can’t help it if he’s still my favourite reader of the poem, but it’s pretty hard to tell if he’s doing a voice there.\n(13:45)\tViggo Mortensen\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(14:34)\tAdam Hammond\tBut hold on. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland.” He’s the one who called it “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” He knew all about the voices. So does he do them? For better or worse, that exact same recording that I heard way back when I was nineteen and living in a castle in southern England — it was on the app, too. So, does Eliot do Marie’s voice in the opening of the poem? I hate to do it to you, but let’s listen to it again.\n(15:04)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(15:59)\tAdam Hammond\tMy answer is: I don’t know, sorta. Like he wants to, but he’s too shy. Too bad at performing, too much of a poet, not enough of an actor.\n(16:12)\tAdam Hammond\tAround the time the app came out, I finished my PhD and became obsessed with the so-called “Digital Humanities.” I started a couple of digital projects for exploring multi-voicedness in “The Wasteland” around this time. I made a website called “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” of course, that presented the poem as a play. Working with a big class of undergraduates, we decided on one way of dividing the poem up into characters and then we created a digital edition with names and special fonts for all the different voices. I also did a computational text analysis project with two computational linguists, Julian Brooke and Graeme Hirst. We used a variety of natural language processing techniques to see where a computer might detect voice switches in the poem. All those moments where the computer thought the mic was being handed from one character to another.\n(17:01)\tAdam Hammond\tThe results of this were really interesting. Approaching the poem with the mind of a machine, the algorithm we developed found switches in places I hadn’t ever imagined them. And on reflection, a lot of these seemed really on point. For instance, I had always heard a switch at “winter kept us warm,” but the computer didn’t see one there. It thought there was a switch at “summer surprised us,” where I personally had never seen a switch. But then listening back to Alec Guiness, that’s exactly where he goes into the voice of “Marie.”\n(17:33)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain;”\n(17:39)\tAdam Hammond\tThe algorithm had opinions and I found these opinions worthwhile.\n(17:45)\tAdam Hammond\tIn a 2005 article on computational analysis of literature, Julia Flanders wrote that we shouldn’t look at computers for objective answers about literary interpretation. As she put it, computers shouldn’t be seen as “factual substantiator whose observations are different in kind from our own — because more trustworthy and objective — but rather computers should be seen as a device that extends the range of our perceptions to phenomena too minutely disseminated for our ordinary reading.”.\n(18:18)\tAdam Hammond\tThey’re not there to confirm our subjective readings of a poem as objectively true. They’re there to challenge our readings with their own readings, which are no more objective than ours, but are definitely different based on things we humans don’t even notice when reading. What I couldn’t do at that time was analyze the audio recordings from the app. I could only look at text, but I was definitely curious about analyzing these audio recordings. I had my own human feelings about which readings on the app were the most dynamic or the most polyvocal or just the coolest. In other words, I had feelings about which reader did the police in different voices better than the others. What I didn’t have was any computational voice to bounce these ideas off of.\n(19:10)\tAdam Hammond\tIn the decade that followed the tools that I dreamed of were developed, many of them by teams led by a poetry scholar named Marit MacArthur. Working with scientists, programmers, humanists and students, she led the development of a set of computational and theoretical tools to analyze audio recordings of performances of poetry. MacArthur’s method works from only two data points: pitch and timing. To get the timing information, we used a program called “Gentle,” designed in collaboration with MacArthur. Basically, we fed the program all of our recordings of all of the app’s performances of “The Wasteland,” and it told us exactly when each word in the poem was spoken and how long the gaps were between these words. My research assistant Jonathan Dick, manually corrected the output of each of these, which was a huge job. This timing data allowed us to calculate how quickly each reader reads in words per minute. Are they fast or are they slow? It calculates the average length of their pauses. So how long do they wait between words? It tells us how often they pause, and it also tells us what kind of rhythms their pauses create. Are they monotonous or do they change like, like, that.\n(20:40)\tAdam Hammond\tLike a William Shatner kind of a complexity of pauses. We used another program called “Drift,” also designed in collaboration with MacArthur, to get pitch information. “Drift” divides the recording into segments of 100th of a second long and gives the fundamental frequency in Hertz for each of these segments. This data can tell us the pitch range in octaves of a given performance. So this just tells you how [Adam deepens his voice] low does the reader go and how [Adam hightens his voice] high. It gives you the pitch speed also in octaves, so this would be like [Adam exemplifies the pitch speed]: if you go from low to high steadily, there’s a speed. And then pitch acceleration, which is like [Adam mimics an engine-like sound] when the pitch changes in these kind of quickly accelerating fashions. All of these can be used as measures of like how dynamic or dramatic a performance is. In a path-breaking 2018 article, “Beyond Poet Voice” in the journal Cultural Analytics, MacArthur and her collaborators Georgia Zellou and Lee M. Miller proposed four dimensions of poetic performance, and argued that these can be described quantitatively using only this timing and pitch data.\n(22:01)\tAdam Hammond\tSo one dimension they called “formal,” that’s readings with predictable rhythms and slower speech. So that’s all from the timing data. They also had a dimension called “conversational.” This is someone who reads with less predictable rhythms and faster speech. So again, you can get all of this from the timing data. They had a dimension called “expressive.” This is someone with a wide pitch range and highly contrasting pitch – up and down, high speed, high acceleration. The final dimension they called “dramatic,” which features long unpredictable pauses, again, timing related. With these tools and theories in place, we were equipped to dig into exciting research questions about the performances on “The Wasteland” app. And to get answers to these questions, both from human readers and machine readers. Our broad questions were: number one, where do readers of “The Wasteland” do voices? Where do these voice switches occur? Where does one voice pass the mic to the other? Number two: how do readers of “The Wasteland” do voices? What aspects of timing and pitch do they alter to indicate voice switches? Number three, this is a big question: Is dialogism or multi-voice a property of texts or performances? Is it inherent in the text or is it something that is only brought out, even created, in performance?\n(23:34)\tAdam Hammond\tFor the digital tools in particular, we had two questions. Number one: can analysis of pitch and timing information capture the way that different readers do voices or is there something other than just pitch and timing that you need to really understand this? Can this data tell us more about the way that readers do these voices than regular human listening can? Can the computational analysis reveal features that humans, more specifically literary scholars who know “The Wasteland” really, really well, can’t notice? Can they, for instance, shake my long held belief that T.S. Eliot is a terrible reader of his own poem? Here’s what we did. Me and my research assistant, Jonathan Dick, each listened to every reading on “The Wasteland” app and wrote up detailed answers to a series of questions about our subjective impressions. Number one: using subjective criteria, place the reader along the dimensions, formal, conversational, expressive, dramatic, including hybrids of these that are identified in the article beyond poet voice.\n(24:37)\tAdam Hammond\tNumber two: come up with two to three moments or passages that you feel best exemplify the above analysis. Number three: note any cases where the four dimensions or the explanation of these dimensions seem inadequate. Number four: briefly described how well, and just “how,” each reader does the voices in the poem. Number five: pick out a couple of passages where the reader clearly does a voice or conversely remarkably fails to do a voice. So that was our questionnaire. I’ll give you a couple of examples we agreed on using a passage from the poem that really brought out the differences. For instance, we both thought that Fiona Shaw was an expressive, dramatic reader, using a wide pitch range, highly contrastive pitch and incorporating a bunch of dramatic pauses. Have a listen,\n(25:28)\tFiona Shaw, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d.”\n(26:05)\tAdam Hammond\tWe also both thought that Viggo Mortensen was a formal inexpressive reader. He speaks slowly. His rhythms are steady and predictable, and he doesn’t do much with pitch.\n(26:16)\tViggo Mortensen, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. / Tereu”\n(26:46)\tAdama Hammond\tBy the way, as a kind of control, we also had the old MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” read the poem, and we analyzed his reading, too. Subjectively, we called it “formal-inexpressive,” just the same as Viggo.\n(27:02)\tMacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading “The Wasteland”\t\n“Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! / Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d.”\n(27:16)\tAdam Hammond\tThen it was time to run the numbers and see how it all shook out computationally. Jonathan and I, and the computer, in many ways weren’t far off in our interpretations of the performances. The computer agreed that Shaw was expressive-dramatic, hardly a surprise. But the computer thought Viggo’s rhythms were a bit more varied that we’d given him credit for: the computer agreed he was inexpressive but, based on his timing data, called him conversational rather than formal. Notably, the computer saw Fred the same way, as conversational and inexpressive. But there was one reader where Jonathan and I just couldn’t agree: Eliot. Have a listen to Eliot reading that same passage. Where would you place him?\n(28:06)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu”\n(28:43)\tAdam Hammond\tJonathan thought that Eliot was formal and inexpressive. In his notes he said, “Eliot is a formal speaker. His tone is neutral and slow. He is also less expressive since his pitch range is rather narrow and non-contrasting. Indeed one might describe him as monotonous.” Jonathan’s impressions agree with what a lot of critics have thought about Eliot over the years. For example, Jason Camlot, in his 2019 book “Phonopoetics” speaks of Eliot’s “calculatedly numb or mechanical delivery”; his delivery, Camlot says, “is robotically liturgical, or […] mechanically oracular”. Now that’s exactly how 19-year-old me felt about Eliot’s reading, and that’s exactly what I hated about it. And yet when I listened to Eliot again to put my subjective responses together, I couldn’t help but disagree with my younger self. In my notes I wrote, “He’s all over the map. There is a lot of formal, but I get the sense that this happens when he’s in ‘formal’ voices. I almost always have the sense that he’s trying to ‘do’ a voice. He is conversational in several voices. One failing he seems to have is varying his rhythms, which are generally monotonous. Definitely, he is expressive in parts, but I get the sense that he is more trying than succeeding.”\n(29:47)\tAdam Hammond\tNow, I wasn’t alone in hearing voices in Eliot’s reading of “The Wasteland,” or at least the attempt to do these voices. For instance, to go back a century, when Eliot read “The Wasteland” to his friend Virginia Woolf at her house in 1922, she wrote up some subjective impressions of her own in her diary. She wrote, “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity.” “One was left,” Woolf said, “with some strong emotion.” Virginia Woolf seems to have considered Eliot an expressive-dramatic reader.\n(30:51)\tAdam Hammond\tAlas, the computer disagreed with Virginia and I. Even Mortensen and Fred got to be formal and conversational. Eliot’s reading was the only one the computer saw as formal and inexpressive. But maybe I just wasn’t running the numbers right. For all of the results I’ve talked about so far, the computer was giving us results for the whole performance. On average, it would look at timing and pitch data for the full poem, all 20 to 30 minutes of it. It’s a long poem. And then give us data like average pause, length, rhythmic complexity of pauses on average, average pitch acceleration for the whole 20 to 30 minute performance. But maybe that wasn’t what was most interesting or useful in terms of calculating the numbers because the poem is made up of lots of different voices after all. What did I care about average numbers for the whole poem?\n(31:53)\tAdam Hammond\tThat would only make sense if there was only one voice for the whole poem. It would be like putting the Norton Anthology in a text analysis algorithm and getting it to tell me what the average style of a hundred different writers was like. Useless, right? You wanna look at the style for each of the individual writers. Now, what we needed to do was compare the way that the different readers did particular voices. How are they reading here and how does that compare to how they’re reading over here? Do they vary the voice from passage to passage? So for the next stage of our analysis, we identified three passages in the poem that are clearly in different voices. We started with a very formal conventionally poetic passage. We call it the “burnished throne “passage. Then a very informal passage, the famous bar scene, and then a passage made up of a wide variety of voices all stuck together, the “Madame Sosostris” passage. Now we would expect a good reader, a reader who really does the voices, to make a huge contrast between the “burnished throne” voice and the “bar scene” voice. If they really get the poem, they’ll do everything they can to make these voices sound different from one another.\n(33:14)\tAdam Hammond\tWell, can you believe it? Analyzing all the performances of these three passages with our pitch and timing tools and then comparing the numbers between passages, Eliot is actually the one who varies his reading the most. In terms of words per minute, pitch speed, pause rate, average pitch, his readings are right up there as the most contrasting. Whereas someone like Fiona Shaw is varying her voice all the time all over the place, Eliot is the one, or one of the ones, who varies his voice the most from passage to passage. So have a listen for yourself. Here is Eliot reading the conventionally poetic “burnished throne” passage.\n(34:01)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)”\n(34:19)\tAdam Hammond\tAnd here he is reading the colloquial “bar scene.”\n(34:23)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can’t. But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”\n(34:42)\tAdam Hammond\tOkay, he’s not the best actor, but you see he’s really trying to do a cockney accent in the bar scene. The computer also placed Elliot among the most dynamic readers for the Madame Sosostris passage. That’s one where there are a lot of voices and we expect a lot of internal variation. This is one where the overall numbers for the passage might actually be interesting. Indeed, although the computer saw Eliot’s performance as overall formal and inexpressive, it actually interpreted his performance of this passage as dramatic and expressive. Let’s listen first to Alec Guinness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, reading this passage and you can really hear the way he does the voices. There’s a difference between a kind of a neutral and narrator like voice. A prophetic voice that speaks the lines “Those are pearls that were his eyes!”, and the Eastern European-accented voice of Madame Sosostris herself.\n(35:39)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.”\n(36:39)\tAdam Hammond\tThe computer saw Guinness as the most dramatic and expressive of all readers in this scene. But guess who it saw as the second most dramatic and expressive? Our friend T.S. Eliot. And really, if you listen, you can see why. Eliot does all the same voices as Guinness. He does that narrator at the start. He does the prophetic voice for the “pearl’s eyes” line, and he does Madame Sosostriswith that same accent.\n(37:06)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.”\n(38:09)\tAdam Hammond\tI think I may hear another voice right at the end there, a Cockney man that Guinness doesn’t do.\n(38:16)\tAdam Hammond\tSo where does all this leave us? Well, for one thing, thanks to MacArthur and our collaborators, we now have accessible and powerful computational tools for analyzing poetic performances. The computational analysis of pitch and timing data, permitted by tools like “Gentle” and “Drift,” produce results that correspond well to human listeners’s subjective impressions. In other words, to tools work, which is important. These subjective impressions vary between individual listeners or even between the same listener over time. When I heard Eliot when I was 19, all I heard was a fake English accent and the worst example of a monotonous formal poet’s voice. Jonathan listening today heard something similar, but the me of today disagreed with both, hearing a genuine attempt, however clumsy, however awkward, to really do all the different voices in the poem.\n(39:09)\tAdam Hammond\tAnd I mean, he was a poet, after all. He was not a famous actor. When they were casting “Star Wars” and the “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter,” no one was knocking on Eliot’s door. Okay, he was long dead by then, but you get my point. Maybe we need to cut Eliot a little bit of slack.\n(39:28)\tAdam Hammond\tI think this whole experiment shows why some of us are so drawn to computational analysis of literature and literary performance. Whether you’re working with text or audio, computational tools provide different ways of attending to the work of art, different ways of listening and reading. Computers just notice things that humans don’t, and sometimes those differences can be really interesting. They give us another voice, another perspective to bounce our ideas off of. I still don’t think Elliot was a good reader of his own work, but I do think that he was trying to be a good reader of his own work and the computer seems to agree with me.\n(40:11)\tAdam Hammond\tThanks so much for listening, and if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, please feel free to draw me a line.\n(40:16)\tMusic\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n(40:28)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(40:40)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Adam Hammond. The Spoken Web podcasting team is: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n(40:58)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.4478936}]