[{"id":"9579","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E5, Revisiting Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal, 3 February 2020, Moffatt and Levy"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-feminist-noise-silence-and-refusal/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-feminist-noise-silence-and-refusal/\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-5-revisiting-feminist-noise_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:02:45\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,250,664 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-5-revisiting-feminist-noise_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-feminist-noise-silence-and-refusal/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-02-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708#map=19/49.282403/-123.108552\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\" 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C., Canada. V6B 5K3.\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":[" 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C., Canada. V6B 5K3."],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The program for the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 can be found HERE.\\n\\nThe program for the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound can be found HERE.\\n\\nArchival audio from the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 and the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019, Simon Fraser University.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549521170432,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, student contributor Kate Moffatt revisits “Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal” – a live panel from the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. With presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec (moderated by Hannah McGregor) the panel explores how we understand sound, noise, voice, silence, and voiceless-ness when they intersect with gender, feminism, and the expected, mandated, or performative aspects of speech. Including a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation, project and sonification, Episode 5: “Revisiting ‘Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal’” returns to the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium as Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.\n\nTo find out more about our next SpokenWeb Symposium in 2020 here. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada. Now this month we’re bringing you something a little bit different. In this episode of the Spoken Web Podcast student contributor, Kate Moffatt is revisiting a live panel from the 2019 Spoken Web symposium called Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. That panel happened right here at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia and it featured presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec and it was moderated by me.\nYou hear me introduce the panel and also laugh a little bit too loudly, a little bit too close to the microphone a couple of times. The panel was exploring how we understand sound and silence, voice and voicelessness where they intersect with gender, feminism and the expected mandated or performative aspects of speech. This episode also includes a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation as well as the larger project that it touched on and the project of sonification in general. And what I’d particularly like you to listen for in this episode is the way that it expands on the way we’ve been talking about archival sound in the Spoken Web Podcast so far. The reflections on noise and silence that you hear in these presentations as well as in Kate Moffatt’s discussion challenges us to ask how certain sounds end up in the archive and what gets left out or ends up being unarchivable. A project like this one, the Spoken Web project is in some ways limited by what’s there, by what’s been recorded by what we can find by what we’ve already found. But of course there’s a lot of power and politics that goes into what ends up in the archive in the first place. We tend to archive things that are remarkable that we mark as important, but that leaves out all kinds of banal background noise. What Brady Marks refers to as the acoustic weather. And when it comes to the challenge of archiving, how would we begin to think about archiving silence?\n\nIt’s particularly interesting hearing all of these different speakers on these ideas in the form of an episode where Kate has essentially created an archive of an event that might have otherwise passed by unremarked. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this episode grapples with the challenges of thinking about the relationship between feminism and noise. So without any further ado, here’s episode five Revisiting Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Taking us back to the 2019 Spoken Web Symposium. As Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.\n\n03:42\tKate Moffatt:\tIn May of 2019 two inaugural Spoken Web events took place in Burnaby and Vancouver, British Columbia, the Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 and the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound. This episode of the Spoken Web Podcast will be revisiting a particular panel from that symposium and talking to one of its presenters, Dr. Milena Droumeva. But first, let me introduce you to these two exciting events.\nThe Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 was a Spoken Web members’ event that took place at the Simon Fraser University Burnaby campus over May 28th and 29th. The Institute questions how we work with sound and with literary recordings in particular, recognizing the impact that Spoken Web, as a large scale and widespread project, can have on the future of literary sound studies. How do we interact with sound in the archive? How do we curate it? How do we manage mass amounts of files in ways that make them accessible? How do we name them? How do we store them? How do we make them archivable and resilient in the face of technological advancements?\n\nHow do we share what we’re learning, the scholarship that we’re creating, with a broader audience? With individuals both inside and outside of universities? The Institute not only endeavored to begin answering these questions by sharing current research projects and scholarship, putting on workshops on podcasting, copyright, oral history and data management, but it also brought together the geographically widespread members of the project to celebrate the first year of Spoken Web. The Institute was followed by the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound, which took place over May 30th and 31st at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.\n\nMany of the themes and topics taken up by the Institute were represented, questioned, illuminated and challenged by the Symposium, which was open to all scholars and creators and brought together students, teachers, authors, artists and scholars to share their work in the field of sound studies. The wide ranging presentations, which included everything from recreations of old radio broadcasts to analyses of the use of accent and audio books, took up the themes of performance, space, gender, politics and technology to name just a few. Today we will be revisiting one of the symposium panels, Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec made up this particular panel and their presentations explored how we understand sound, voice, silence and voicelessness when they intersect with gender, gender, politics and mandated expected or performative speech. First we have Dr. Lucia Lorenzi Introduced by Dr. Hannah McGregor, Dr. Lorenzi’s presentation questions, the rising expectations of speech from survivors of sexual violence and assault in an age of social media and reality and the potential effects that mandating that speech can have on our understanding of voice and silence and noise from activists and survivors.\n\n06:47\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome everyone to Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. I am Hannah McGregor. I’m an assistant professor of publishing here at SFU. Dr Lucia Lorenzi is an ambivalent scholar, but an excited thinker finishing up a postdoc and cultural studies at McMaster university.\n07:08\tLucia Lorenzi:\tMy dissertation was about silence and representations of sexualized and gendered violence in literature and the kinds of readings that I was doing felt very literary to me. I was looking for omissions or nonlinear forms of storytelling or particular types of narrative voice. But when I got into performance, namely theater, it became really impossible to avoid thinking through sound as a material experience. So for instance, when I was writing about Colleen Wagner’s play, The Monument, in the stage directions, there are silences and long silences and long, long, long silences.\nSo trying to think about reading a text and writing about a text that also exists in another world as a performance and as a sonic experience. But as I’ve done this work over the past decade or so, in addition to my work as an activist and an advocate around these issues, one of the main questions that I keep coming back to is this isn’t necessary to speak out about sexualized and gender violence? And to what extent has a particular configuration or understanding of sound, and not just voice, created, yes, feminist communities, but also pressures and expectations around the category or the identity of survivor. So perhaps more simply, what I’m trying to think through is how we challenge the binary of speech and silence that characterizes a lot of understandings and representations of violence.\n\nSo put another way, is there a third option to this formulation proposed by Arundhati Roy who in their now famous remarks at the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize stated, “We know there’s no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” I wonder if there is such a thing ,and here I’m going to invoke Sara Ahmed’s ideas around willfulness, could there be something like the willfully silent? And what might those silences, or what I’m calling sonic refusals, look like in an era of digital mediation? The performances I’m looking at are several, but I want to talk about one in particular that stands out to me that I’m still really trying to understand from a sound studies perspective.\n\nEmma Sulkowicz is a queer nonbinary Asian American artist who’s best known for their 2014/2015 endurance performance piece entitled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) And they carry around this standard size dorm room mattress everywhere they went on the campus of Columbia University until either they graduated or their rapist was expelled. They graduated and you see them carrying it with friends across the stage. Their art went viral in part because this work emerged at the height of the student activist movement around campus sexual assault in the United States. Sulkowicz was featured on the cover of New York Magazine and their work was really seen as I think emblematic of the campus movement, antiviolence movement more generally. Much of their work in the intervening years has not received the same level of public attention, but it’s received a great deal of positive critical attention in the art world, and several of their pieces have worked to think through the experience with being a very public survivor of sexual assault including the kinds of discursive pressures, ways of speaking that have been placed on them. Their 2016 performance, Self Portrait (Performance with Object) takes place on two, I guess technically four, pedestals in a gallery space. So on the one pedestal Sulkowicz stands ready to engage in conversation with audience members who are free to ask them about anything.\n\nNow if they want to know about stuff that, Sulkowicz has frequently asked very invasive questions, they are directed to address Emmatron. And Emmatron is a likeness of Sulkowicz who speaks via an iPad that is loaded with preset questions and answers you can scroll through. As Matt Stromberg describes in review for Artbound quote “Answers recorded by Sulkowicz play from Emmatron’s unmoving lips. On the afternoon I visited these responses were barely audible, unintentionally highlighting the primacy of the interaction with the living breathing artist in the room.” So in the next few minutes, I want to think through how Sulkowicz selective speech and this digital mediation of sound pose both material and discursive or philosophical challenges to how sound and speech have of course been used by survivors, but they’ve also been weaponized against them. I think that their art provides a departure point thinking about the antiviolence movement as a sonic community and an archive, but to unpack how the production of ‘survivor’ as a political identity is deeply bound up in particular kinds of sonic production in public space. In his essay collection, Silence: Lectures and Writings, American avant-garde composer, John Cage stated, all caps, “I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT.” So Cage, obviously his broader arguments work to destabilize the binaries around sound and silence, but I think what he says when he says, I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it, is talking about one of the most difficult things I think about silence. Because it’s so often risks being misunderstood, it often still requires a narrative apparatus that circles it. Cage speaks in order to give his reasons for not speaking, which is that he has nothing to say, and I’ve been thinking about Cage’s having nothing to say and saying it just because voice, literal voice and mouths are so important to the imagery of antiviolence movements. The importance of breaking the silence, which suggests a sort of sonic power that is powerful enough to really deliberately destabilize objects perhaps, also exist in relationships to other political movements.\nWhile broadly used across antiviolence work of all kinds, the slogan of ‘breaking the silence’ and imagery such as a person with a hand or tape over their mouth, has to become also iconic and representative of the ways in which voice, a particular kind of voice, a particular use of that voice, perhaps a particular intonation has been linked to a particular kind of identity politics. Because a survivor as opposed to a victim isn’t just someone who speaks but they break or shatter silences, which calls up this very material instantiation of sound, so shouting or chanting at rallies using a megaphone. And these forms of sonic production are deeply related to feminist practice, we amplify voices, we pass the mic.\n\nNow I’m still struggling with the ways that silence seems to be a kind of counter intuitive mechanism, because I’m aware of the deep history and the weight politics and oppression that mean that people are silenced or that they are unheard. But I’m also trying to connect this to rich traditions of silence as a means of political disruption. In describing the political strategies employed by American suffragists in the early 20th century, Mary Chapman notes that a key strategy of the suffrage movement was the use of voiceless speech. So obviously that the historical context surrounding these activists, and I’m thinking particularly about, queer, trans, racialized activists in the 21st century, could not be in some ways more different, but I think that contemporary activists are still grappling with some of the same difficulties. So to what extent can survivors participate in public spheres of discourse? Where can they use their voice? What are the political risks, including risks to physical safety? Knowing the myriad ways in which survivors continue to be silenced, how can survivors, and I’m going to quote Chapman here, quote, “creatively rework the cultural significance of their political silence, changing it from a sign of powerless citizenship to an example of creative forms of participation in the modern public sphere.”\n\nSo Sulkowicz’s piece helped me think about these creative forms and participation, and I want to make a few suggestions, however preliminary, about how I’m reading how it uses sound and silence. So the first thing that I think of is this divide in terms of, this sort of divide, this little physical divide in terms of how audience members can interact. So Emmatron I had is still voiced by Sulkowicz, but the voice is predefined and limited. And I wonder if that also then resists manipulation, it has boundaries around it, it cannot be altered. I’m thinking about the use of audio recording and the ubiquity of access to voice recording technology, and also the alleging democratization. Listening to Sulkowicz’s recorded voice isn’t a private experience, which sort of seems, you know, my experience of gallery spaces often with sound art, unless it’s an exhibition that’s sort of, you know, is curated in particular ways, is that you listened to it in headphones, you’re listening to it privately. But as audience members have observed, there’s this sort of dual listening where you’re trying to listen to the iPad and you’re also trying to listen in on what’s going on with the fact that you don’t get to have that private experience. Sulkowicz’s voice is, this is really interesting to me, described by many reviewers as pleasant and joyful and warm like as if it’s a surprise. And I think that comments on the ways in which survivors literal voice is also a point of suspicion. A comment on a YouTube video which provides a little bit of documentation of this piece, one of the commenters says “She laughs a lot. Not sure what’s so funny.”\n\nI’ve been thinking about reading this laughter alongside the laughter of other performance regarding sexual assault, namely survivors who use stand up comedy to talk about their experiences and who in that interaction is able to laugh and why, who is laughing at who. And then scrolling through the iPad and thinking about where it is that we now most frequently encounter the voices of survivors and where that archive lives. Cause I’m trying to think about the archiving of, you know, the Women’s March or other kinds of marches and then the ways that that’s hard to access, versus you can go through and you can literally pick any hashtag that you want. And it’s really easy to be able to sort of go through that archive and sort of make notes of the kinds of stories that are being told there.\n\nSo in an article from the early nineties, maybe 1994 perhaps, or ’91, I can’t remember, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, they sort of read Foucault talk about, you know, is survivor speech transgressive, right? So it’s almost 30 years ago and I feel like those questions are coming up, but they’re coming up differently because of the technologies and the types of public assembly and the way that public assembly is archived or not archived have changed. They say, quote, “when breaking the silence is taken up as the necessary route to recovery as or as a privileged political tactic, it becomes a coercive imperative on survivors to confess, to recount their assaults, to give details, and even to do so publicly.” This is justly deserving of the critique Foucault offers of the way in which the demand to speak involves dominating power. So freedom through speech or voice then is no longer one of a series of possibilities, I worry about the way in which it becomes mandated. And Tarana Burke echoed this recently in an interview with the Washington Post where she mentioned her frustrations with the goals of the MeToo movement. She says, “culture shift doesn’t happen in the accusation and it doesn’t happen in the disclosure, culture shift happens in the public grappling with these questions because nobody has firm, definitive, or perfect answers.” What I wonder, then, is if we’re shifting away from disclosure or ‘the speaking,’ maybe what we’re trying to articulate is a different politics or a different strategies for eliciting that seems to be what Burke is calling for. And I also think that’s what Sulkowicz’s piece asks of audience members.\n\n19:56\nKate Moffatt:\tDr. Lorenzi’s presentation recognizes the complicated history around silence, speech and activists’ sonic actions. And her suggestions that sound can exist both as a material experience and a sonic one, and that it can change or impact our understanding of the identity of survivors and the identity of those who do or do not choose to speak, is a theme that can be traced through the following two presentations of this panel, Dr. Milena Droumeva and Brady Marks’ presentation questions how social media data, such as tweetsm can exist as a soundscape. In particular, what do the hashtag MeToo movement tweets sound like when reinterpreted as sound and what effect emotional or otherwise does sonifying those tweets have on the listener?\n20:39\tHannah McGregor:\tOur next speakers are Milena Droumeva and Brady Marks. Dr. Milena Droumeva is a sound studies professor here at SFU in the school of communication. She does work in critical approaches to urban soundscapes and gender and the game sound. And Brady Ciel Marks is a computational artist who is concerned with our technological entanglement and so creates soundscapes that demystify, transgress, and reinterpret our potentially free relationship to tech and framing. What a beautiful bio. And other things, it says and other things.\n21:17\tBrady Marks:\tSo we’re going to talk a little bit about a sonification that we’ve created together, and do a demonstration. So what does is a sonficiation? Let’s start there. For me, a sonification is a reinterpretation of a dataset into sound. And the dataset that we are interested in exploring is the MeToo phenomenon as represented through tweets. Turning this into sound has a number of different ways to do that, it’s very flexible cause obviously those tweets don’t make sound in and of themselves.\n22:01\tMilena Droumeva:\tJust to refresh everyone’s memory just in case you don’t remember what #MeToo is all about or what happened because our social media memories, you know, are three seconds long.\n22:13\tBrady Marks:\tThis is the virtual phenomenon, global phenomenon, reacting to sexual intimidation and sexual violence that happened at the end of 2017 and we’ll be seeing today how it’s still happening online through sonification after the live demo.\n22:37\tMilena Droumeva:\tWe want to ask you some questions about, you know, what this type of, representation of information, I don’t want to call it data because it’s so cold, it’s not really data, but it also is, it’s accessible as data. But whether, you know, we can think of it as an archive or memorial or other things.\n23:03\tBrady Marks:\tI was very inspired by soundscapes as this idea of something that we listen to and we sort of embody or incorporate into our everyday activities. I always come back to the same example, which is like, you hear the wet tires of a car on the streets in the morning and you know Oh, I should get my umbrella. It’s like it’s background, this thing that becomes foreground because it’s relevant to you. But something that you live with and that becomes sort of acoustic, whether the you react to it.\n23:41\tMilena Droumeva:\tI love that. Wait wait, I just wanted to say about the choice of sonification because I do realize that that is new for a lot of folks and unfamiliar. I’ve been doing work in sonification for a long time. But typically when you go to, especially an audio conference or a sonification conference, sonification sounds something like woo woooo. That is what they sound like. They’re literally a kind of a pitch shifting, following a line graph. So a lot of them don’t go like a lot further than that, and we wanted to go like a lot further than that with this kind of sonification because I really got to the point where I wanted to explore what would it mean to create a sonification not only sonifying something boring in an interesting way, but sonifying something really interesting in an interesting way. And what would it mean to sonify social data? It’s tweets, you can download a dataset, but it really, it’s people’s lives and people’s truths that are being shared, it’s kind of a voice, but it’s silent. So there’s a soundscape of that silence in there and we want to give it voice in a way. Now, what voice would you ask that we give it? Well, here’s where, just to have fun, because another part of my work has to do with, that I’ve been chipping away at, has to do with the rather sexist sonic representation of women in video games. If you play any video games or if you’ve heard about video games, you probably see fighting ladies like these and you’ve heard about, you know, the conversations around well maybe they should be wearing some more clothes or, you know, they shouldn’t be fighting in a bikini, that kind of thing. Not a lot of talk really about how they sound, but it is very interesting.\n25:55\tVideo Game Audio:\tPlease stop! Please don’t! What? No! Help! This is wrong!\n26:06\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo these are actual, battle cries, these are actual clips from actual characters from actual games. So I’ve been doing that other work and I really wanted to bring it in and somehow co-opt it and subvert it and see how it can actually, because what it does is it makes one feel really uncomfortable. It’s pornographic, it’s sort of really fragile, it’s excessive, it’s hyper feminized in a negative way. But I wanted to kind of bring in that discomfort that it creates and use it to sonify the phenomenon of #MeToo and see what that would sound like.\n26:58\tBrady Marks:\tWe took these battle cries and we mapped them one to one where each tweet becomes one simple sound. And so with the soundscape paradigm we’re not trying to make music, we’re not trying to make notes, we don’t, we’re not using pitch relationships. Every tweet you’ll hear is a battle cry. Retweets then become these echoes of that same battle cry, so those are those splurging out. And they’re the same cry echoed at slightly lower volumes. So again, we wanted to do the counterpoint. We were like these tweets, we don’t want to say that every single one represents someone declaring an event of sexual abuse, which they often are. There was also a strong backlash, right? We wanted to get this counterpoint. We wanted to get the trolls voice and we failed at that point. We looked into sentiment analysis, I did try, I looked into a few different methodologies, haven’t got that part sorted yet. Another aspect of MeToo that we wanted to represent the society of the zeitgeist of a reach. The fact that all tweets are not exactly equal. There are movers and shakers, people with large followings, and we thought that would correspond to the reach. If someone retweets or tweets and they have a large following.\n28:31\tMilena Droumeva:\tLike Alyssa Milano, if you remember, there was a big spike in October because Alyssa Milano came forward with her story about Harvey Weinstein and she has, I mean anytime she tweets something she’s got millions of people, right? So that was a big event. And that will be different than, you know, me tweeting something, and I know you’re now dying to hear what this thing sounds like. So, drumroll.\n28:56\tBrady Marks:\tI’m going to just hit our live one, which is real time tweets, so they’re tweets that are happening right now, they’re delayed by 15 seconds just so I can get the timing so they don’t bunch up too much. And then our person with the historical data sets, we’ve got one day at 60 times speed and then we can maybe try the one month, which should get 1500 times a week. So this is the site. So there were four, so that’s a week’s reach. It was busier during lunch, it was very quiet last night. Silence is loud. Silence is…\n30:13\tMilena Droumeva:\tWe’ve been reflecting a lot on the silences\n30:18\tBrady Marks:\tIt’s particularly quiet, actually.\n30:32\tMilena Droumeva:\tYeah, I’ve never heard it so quiet. But it’s one of the, one of the things that we did want to create, and I, and I want to connect this with your talks, is the, to experience like the folding of this in time, and just the kind of like, we’re literally waiting for a tweet right now, of somebody sharing, possibly sharing a story, responding, commenting.\n31:11\tBrady Marks:\tThis is January 10th.\n31:20\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo this is, you know, when you compress time. This is just one day. [sonification starts in background]\n32:21\tBrady Marks:\tSo that’s one day of tweets during that intense time. And so every single sound you hear is a tweet, using those vocalizations is a tweet or retweet. Let’s slow it down. That was 150 times speed.\n32:44\tMilena Droumeva:\tJust 30 seconds and we’ll be done with this. Just to conclude, I wanted to see, this is obviously and somewhat deliberately under-theorized at the moment, because it’s, well I really wanted to prioritize this experiential engagement and see like what it sounds like, how we feel, what happens. And it’s very much a ongoing work in progress and I’m very interested in everybody’s thoughts and suggestions both in terms of practical and reactions but also like ways of theorizing that would seem intuitive or natural, synergies and so on. So thank you\n34:12\tKate Moffatt:\tMilena Droumeva and Brady Marks’ presentation indicates in an uncomfortable, discomforting, thought provoking manner, the facelessness of social media data and the fact that reinterpretations as Dr. Droumeva pointed out, tell a story. This particular re-interpretation reminds us all that each contributor to that mass amount of data for the #MeToo movement is an individual, is their experiences, or a contribution to their story because others are engaging with it. Both Dr. Lorenzi’s questions about silence and sonic refusal and Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks’ questions about how silence, noise, and performance can affect our perception or emotional understanding is found, also, in the last presentation of this panel. Blake Nemec’s presentation questions how the voices of unprotected workers, and even the sounds pitches and intonations that these voices make rather than simply their words, differ from protected workers. Nemec questions, how sonic performances, how silence, noise, and unexpected disruption, can communicate the emotional and political circumstances of these individuals.\n35:15\tHannah McGregor:\tAll right. Our third speaker is Blake Nemec. Blake Nemec is obsessed with language justice as it intersects with sonic intimacies. He teaches ESL film and creative writing in Chicago. It’s all yours.\n35:32\tBlake Nemec:\tI feel like my heart is racing a little bit. Sorry. No, it’s interesting, you’ll see that I do similar things with noise, so. Okay. Sonic Intimacies of Unprotected Dialogues: the MolyBDenim Project as Syncopation, Noise, or Silence. This analysis, queers missive United States and informal trade worker dialogues and their syncopation noise or silence by reflecting on the MolyBDenim sound project that I created. Even as this discussion hones in on sex worker conversations and intentionally troubles the boundaries of this trade to include how other care industry workers who are criminalized, such as domestic workers, talk to each other or do not, or how their sonic interactions differ from those of protected workers. This analysis understands informal trade, unprotected, system D workers as labourers who do not have legal protections while at work. Syncopations and heats, massage workers. I’d like to start with how I experienced sonic intimacies with unprotected worker dialogues. Like this clip, beats and rhythms from phonemes and truncated dialogue easily form into song. After I began doing sex work, I found myself repeating clip phrases that I shared with my coworkers. There were regular intonations and I liked cycling the sound parts in my mouth, whether it was a little hot or juicy, didn’t matter, the content did not hold my connection to the sounds. It was the kind of rhythms, repetitions or intonations of the phrases that I liked repeating. What enliven me and what was animate. In Foucauldian in terms, a deeper relationship to the elements of the language can occur below the level of identities and differences, where the foundation provided by continuities, resemblances, repetitions and natural criss-crossings are found.\nThe MolyBDenim sound project’s creative process was also often syncopated. In 2016, after finishing a manuscript that would become my hybrid book Sharing Plastic, I reached out to sound artist friends of mine, who had also done informal trade work, to create a collaborative sound project named MolyBDenim. As the collaborators were spread across the United States, we met online to rehearse and created a lot of video conference chatter about the music we could manifest, how our collaborations could grow, or how to make our performances interactive. Then the video conference would pixelate, or drop one of us from the call. Our online rehearsals, uncontrollable and truncated, mirrored elements of the informal trade work we were using as source material. The rhythms had feedback or echo, the beats from one piece of equipment would eclipse another, truncating words allows for rapid dialog and fast talk creates energy.\n\nYugoslavian born experimental fiction writer Dubravka Ugrešić speaks about the verbal steam of the communal bath in her book Lend Me Your Character. This postmodern book of short stories portrays dialogue as heat by including everyday conversations between women as communal bath and verbal steam. Listeners don’t need to imagine steam or water particles to consider dialogue as animate. Musicology shows us how sentient beings hold emotional connections to sound waves. The idea of language as steam simply assists us in acknowledging and sound wave particles as matter. The difference between the verbal scene of protected chatter and unprotected worker conversations, however, exists in the underlying temporality of unprotected worker positions, while making observations when starting during or departing work, cognisance about safety, the time, the customer, or the work landscape can be signaled by the intonations within ‘hello,’ within the tone of ‘okay,’ within the pitches of ‘oh, I see.’ Workers who have no job security do not speak to each other like nine to five workers. In my experiences with other unprotected labor, informal work may only have predictable tools their job uses and coworkers may converse about those tools while sonically implying other information. We may be ‘uh-huh’ or ‘mhm’. We can only vocalize interests or critiques through volume, intonation, or tone because more explicitly it could cost us arrest, incarceration, or deportation. Coworker chatter in United States secure employment, however, is centered on and validated by what coworkers think of each other’s lives in a shared understanding that they will see each other again. The unprotected worker is legally and socially accepted as toxic because the voices are not consistently heard.\n\nMutable is deemed suspicious. The utterances as unprotected workers are less centered on a person’s past as I know it and a person’s future as I can predict it today. I or we may only have the sound of their voice, their accent, or the intonation as an element of who they are. I may only have their volume as a sense of their opinions. This is further reason for poetry and music to amplify such dialogues and the elements of them. These art forms can portray the energy or volition of the conversations. They can portray heat, vibration, pulses, and auditory sensations. MolyBDenim tracks start with dialogue. The songs or tracks are different every time because they’re created live, surrendering control. Utterances between temporary workers are also unpredictable. Mechanical, geographical and scheduling challenges, parallel stylistic and contextual elements in the MolyBDenim sound project.\nOur equipment compelled us to be ready to change a track mid performance because the loop pedal, if not press softly, would erase all our layered songs. This loop pedal and the unlimited amount of repetitions of dialogue sounds temporarily recording to two beats was the core of our sound art. As you heard, we would start with truncated dialogues, then loop phonemes into rhythms or melodies. We knew the looping pedal could erase all the loops during the performance, so prepared for that switch. When it happened during our performances, we had to shift, start over, going to accidental openings, re-imagine the track or recenter our sound. Unprotected workers are similarly ready for change, reframing and recentering their identities, thus their voices. Every system D worker voice has a frequency, a speed pattern of which they move through the world, and MolyB’s speed also had a great range that moved from brilliant to chesty in short amounts of time. Silence. Within MolyBDenim syncopations and delicious switches are equally paralleled by deafening silences. The loop pedal switch could be started after it cut out. First, however, was the silence. Disenfranchised workers talk to each other, they also consistently do not. Silence between workers reflects the reality of the many workers cannot communicate because of their worker residency or criminal status. Therefore, some of the poems or tracks have negative spaces or silence to reflect the losses.\n\nThe lofty idea that workers in conversation are energized is met with portrayals where worker dynamics are iced. Is in these tense worker moments, the vulnerable truths of cyclical violence, for example, can emerge. Marginalized or oppressed groups of people, in this case informal trade workers, don’t have access to the right privileges. In MolyBDenim we simply allowed the pedal cuts to be. To give silence before starting up again. Mel Chen discusses toxic animosities, environmental sensitivity and how a person articulates how vulnerable bodies navigate pollutants, able bodied people, and syntax. They ask which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and un-interuptability. Noise. I began this discussion with my personal one-on-one dialogues with other workers.\n\nA further impetus for excavating sonic intimacies or animosities of informal trade worker dialogues in MolyBDenim came from Days in April, a 2008 grassroots response to the depoliticization of United States mayday. Several meetings were organized for informal workers to gather and speak about their experiences, and these conversations between and among sex workers, domestic workers, farm workers, and hotel workers resulted in alliance building and a room full of transformative noise. This discussion troubles the idea of good worker versus bad worker. It amplifies, remixes, unprotected worker dialogues to extremes. It requests listeners to hear cacophony screams, loud sirens as sonic landscapes the informal worker navigates partly to explore ideas of toxicity. Conditions informal trade workers experience are toxic and my sound projects use metaphoric toxicities such as uttered frustrations then loop and layer such emotionally angry phrases until they evolve into noise. Sound art and poetry remain a vehicle to amplify syncopations, transport and silent volitions of vulnerable workers to validate and demand respect by the unprotected. Languages and semantic innovations are occurring amid neofascist efforts of language and sound solemnisation, both working to silence the unprotected. But sound is more than this.\n\n48:11\tKate Moffatt:\tThis panel took place almost eight months ago, but I was able to catch up with Dr. Milena Droumeva recently to talk with her about her symposium presentation. Our discussion, which revisited both the making of the project itself and the presentation of it at the panel that day with Brady Marks, evolved into a discussion about how the impact of sound projects such as hers, particularly because it is based on social media data, can be affected by the means or the frames in which we encounter them. The #MeToo movement happened more than two years ago, but by using sonification and using the battle cries of female video game characters to represent tweets, Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks both troubled and explored the affective or emotional capabilities that interpretations of data sets can carry, even when the term data itself tends to suggest affective or emotional distance. When asked if she had done any further work with the project Dr. Droumeva answered with a simple\n49:01\tMilena Droumeva:\tNo.\n49:01\tKate Moffatt:\tBut as our conversation continued, she shared,\n49:04\tMilena Droumeva:\tI want to think through it. I don’t want to just push it out somehow in somewhere. I don’t want it to be an art installation project, I haven’t pursued that avenue. How exactly, like how to put it out there in what form and how to reach a wider audience? I would need partnership for that. I would need funding. And this is not particularly recognized as a form of publication, as you know, the whole project of Spoken Web and podcasting as academic publishing is something that Hannah McGregor is working on, but it’s pretty new.\n49:41\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as it turns out, the technology currently available does not really support projects like the #MeToo project that Dr. Droumeva and Brady Marks presented at the symposium.\n49:49\tMilena Droumeva:\tSo part of the idea was to, I hate to bore you with this technical details, but the program that we use, which is Max MSP, does not have, does not integrate with any browsers. And browsers typically do not do a great job of embedding audio and of embedding audio software of any kind. So we simply don’t have a way of doing that, like technologically, so it’s not, it wasn’t, that part wasn’t even a matter of funding. It’s like we don’t, we can’t. The very technological framework of web browsers does not invite these kinds of audio forms, these kinds of interactive audio forms. So that’s something to consider about technology that it doesn’t really allow this kind of sonic exploration\n50:40\tKatie Moffatt:\tThat web browsers and applications are so well suited to written work, but not to live or exploratory audio work, is particularly interesting to me, especially given the different impacts that can be had via different forms of interacting with something like the #MeToo movement. Dr. Droumeva mentioned during her presentation that our social media memories can be about three seconds long. So I asked her if she thought that projects like this one could help create a more lasting impact for movements such as #MeToo.\n51:06\tMilena Droumeva:\tMy answer is no, I don’t think it can contribute to anything more lasting. I think that’s just the nature of social media it’s just growing, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, clicking, clicking, moving onto the next thing. And this could be another thing in somebody’s feed. Now what I think it can do is I think it can create a different sort of affective relationship, like a different emotional connection to the data because it’s a really different form than the one that we’re used to seeing.\n51:39\tKate Moffatt:\tDr. Droumeva’s response was surprising to me as I’ve been thinking about the project and the presentation since I first heard the recording of it. The female battle cries are discomforting to listen to on their own, and the combination of those battle cries with #MeToo tweets was very intriguing and very powerful. And I told Dr. Droumeva so.\n51:58\tMilena Droumeva:\tI’m honestly surprised to hear that it’s kind of lasting in your mind. So maybe I was wrong and this can be something a little bit more longer-lasting. I hope I’m wrong, I just, yeah, you’re catching me on a day when I feel very bleak about social media culture an, the kinds of engagement and disengagement that it produces and the kind of numbing to impact, the numbing effect that it has on anything emotional. So I think one of the reasons why I haven’t, I mean, in addition to things like funding, one of the reasons why I haven’t moved forward with it is because it’s not very clear to me how to intercept that. Like how to interrupt that social media situation and how to most effectively put it out there. So that’s honestly, again, still not clear to me in full honesty.\n52:59\tKate Moffatt:\tI asked Dr. Droumeva if hearing the tweets, if listening to the #MeToo movement has the potential to change our perception of it.\n53:07\tMilena Droumeva:\tYeah, I mean that’s the idea. Does it, is it more impactful? I don’t know. That was the idea, I mean, I’ve been doing sonification work for a really long time and only more recently I’ve been thinking about it as a, in terms of its emotional impact. Let me tell you about the very first time that I felt emotionally impacted by a sonification. It was a sonification that I heard many years ago at a conference and it was, it was pretty simple, kind of abstract tones, not melodic tones more like almost stochastic kind of rhythmic tones. But it was a sonification of brain EKGs and this was a researcher who was working to sonify brainwaves and particularly working with epilepsy patients. So he played like the sound of a healthy brain and then he played the sound of somebody having like going into a seizure. And it was really like minimalist and abstract, but it was all of a sudden I had goosebumps because it was like hearing somebody going into an epileptic seizure. And it was very simple but very, like the lack of it, the lack of other things, the lack of pictures, the lack of texts, the lack of anything else, just kind of sitting alone with the sound, even though we were in an audience, was really, really emotionally impactful.\nAnd so years later when I started thinking about the emotional impact of sound or the possibility of emotional impact of sound, a lot of people have written, a lot of sound scholars write about the, you know, sound being a special modality and having a special relationship to our interior world and creating a special kind of intimacy, so I don’t know though, there’s a lot of factors, right? There’s, there’s that and, but there’s also the fact that you heard it as part of a conference podcast as opposed to came across it in your Facebook feed. Would it have been different if you came across this in your social media feed as opposed to in a conference? And people had a big reaction in the conference, but again they were there as captive audience, they were there for a certain, with a certain intentionality, you know? And a certain open mind. So I’m really fascinated by this idea of what can create impact, especially about things as important as the NeToo movement and any other subsequent movements that are unfolding on social media. But really they’re not about the virality of social media, they’re about real people having experienced harassment and assault and making that public and joining their stories together into a big weave of, you know, evidence.\n\n56:19\tKate Moffatt:\tI asked Dr. Droumeva to speak further about her use of the female battlecries to each tweet, each experience as that’s something that I’ve been trying to theorize since first hearing her presentation,\n56:29\tMilena Droumeva:\tIf I’m understanding correctly, and I, that’s what it makes me think of is that it kind of individuates each tweet and makes you remember that each tweet is an individual who is kinda crying out into the void in whatever way. Because when we think about the #MeToo movement, we even call it a movement, and as soon as you call it a movement, it’s like this faceless mass of, you know, it’s a event, you know, in the world. It’s not individual people with individual stories. Now this is also not really fair to say that each tweet is an individual with an individual story. That was true in the very beginning of MeToo. But so much of the subsequent activity, at least on social media, is actually a lot of retweets and a lot of meta communication, it’s a lot of meta conversations right now, it’s a lot of people saying something about the MeToo movement, not necessarily sharing a story, but it’s still part of the conversation. And I mean any sort of data visualization is a story. And I think what, I wasn’t thinking about this, but now that I heard you describe it in that way, I think what sound helps to do is kind of disentangle individuals and pull them apart from the, you know, the big mass of representation of data.\n57:59\tKate Moffatt:\tThat was an element of the sheer overwhelm that one feels when they hear the highest period of activity for the #MeToo tweets. Instead of hearing a singular movement, we hear more voices than we can perceive at once. It’s an incredibly powerful experience and it gives context to Brady Marks’ comment that at first the sonification sounded too pretty, which I mentioned to Dr. Droumeva.\n58:20\tMilena Droumeva:\tHuh, yeah, I do remember that. I mean Brady is a sound artist and I’m more of a social scientist really, so it was really interesting working together because we had slight, I mean we had different conceptions of aesthetics through our conversations. I think she, she started feeling like a different aesthetic, like an anti-aesthetic that was important. You know, we wanted a certain kind of assault on the ear, but not to such a degree that it was in comprehensible and mutually conflicting. And I think we’re different, we were definitely pushing the envelope a little bit in terms of sound density because we had, obviously every battle cry, every like battle cry file was triggered by the instance of the hashtag. But then we have echoes on it, which were the number of retweets. And then we had a kind of swelling and receding background drone which represented the reach, the reach of each tweet judged by the number of followers that that particular person has. And that’s, you know, really the maximum that I think I wanted to cram into, in terms of information, and it still wouldn’t be perceivable on the first listen, right? On the first listen you just kind of get hit with this emotional reaction and you get it on a very holistic sort of way. Like, wow, that’s a lot of MeToo tweets, like you get that there’s a lot.\n59:57\tKate Moffatt:\tHearing the #MeToo tweets is a very different experience than seeing it represented in visualizations of other kinds such as line or bar graphs, which amalgamate data in very particular ways. It was an important element of the project for Dr. Droumeva that the data she used be interpreted not as numbers, as data and its traditional connotations, but as individuals.\n1:00:17\tMilena Droumeva:\tEvery visualization, every transformation of data from numbers to something else is a form of storytelling. Even when we don’t want to believe so, and oftentimes visualizations don’t say, you know, they say this is data. They don’t say this is a story about data, but what it is, it’s a story about data because it always is missing certain elements and it’s highlighting other elements. And with more new media forms and more unconventional forms of data representation such as sound, it’s more, you can’t really get away with saying this is data. You’re kind of more on the spot to acknowledge that this is a story about data. But I really, I don’t want it to shy away from that at all. The idea was not at all to create some sort of dry scientific representation, right? The whole point was like, yes, this is a story about data, like all the stories about data that are out there. And, you know, let’s make this a really interesting story. A really impactful one.\n1:01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tSpoken Web is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken Web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Kate Moffatt and Michelle Levy of Simon Fraser University. And our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. Thanks to Milena Droumeva, Lucia Lorenzi, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec for their candid discussions presented here. This episode features archival audio from the Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 and the Spoken Web Symposium 2019 at Simon Fraser University. Special thanks. Go out to Michelle Levy and the entire SFU Spoken Web team. To find out more about Spoken Web and our next symposium in 2020 visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the Spoken Web Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @spokenwebcanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the Spoken Web Podcast. Stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":2.4464734},{"id":"9584","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E7, The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive, 6 April 2020, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/901581e1-fcf7-454a-80ff-e03417153c28/spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:35:53\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"34,524,308 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-episode-7-macewen-w-call_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-04-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Simon+Fraser+University+Vancouver&zoom=15&minlon=-119.42087173461915&minlat=49.934207031480234&maxlon=-119.37726974487306&maxlat=49.950170586872346#map=19/49.282403/-123.108551\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.282403\",\"longitude\":\"-123.108550\"}]"],"Address":["515 W Hastings St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bennett, andrea. Excerpt from “The People’s Poetry.” The essay appears in the book\\nLike a Boy But Not A Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary\\nto be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, fall 2019.\\n\\nCamlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. “SGW Poetry Remix” MP3 file, 12 Dec 2018.\\n\\nMacEwen (a performance).” Resurfacing: Women Writing across Canada in the 1970s. Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 26-28 April 2018.\\n\\n— “Performing the Archive: A Remix.” Performed with Jason Camlot. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Montreal, 5 May 2019.\\n\\nMacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.”\\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc\\n \\n\\n—  Reading with Phyllis Webb at Sir George Williams University, Nov 18 1966.\\nhttps://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gwendolyn-macewen-at-sgwu-1966/\\n \\n\\n— “Past and Future Ghosts.” Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose.” Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Eds. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talon, 2006). 89-104.\\n\\n— “An Archival Remix” Performance by Katherine McLeod and Emily Murphy. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association, 18 Oct 2019.\\n\\n— “Making Shadows with Recorded Sound: Dance as Criticism, in response to Gwendolyn\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549528510464,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["Poet Gwendolyn MacEwen, perhaps best known for winning the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection\nThe Shadow Maker\nand the 1987 GG, posthumously, for\nAfterworlds\n, is perhaps one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died, and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars, even as her work’s deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, SpokenWeb podcast host Hannah McGregor reflects on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt so many of us, alongside authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett, and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod. \n\n00:00\tStacey Copeland:\tOh hi, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager Stacey Copeland here. How are you? [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] I wanted to take a moment to let you know we are looking for contributors from across the SpokenWeb network to pitch and produce episodes with us for the 2020 season. All SpokenWeb team and network affiliates can submit episodes, no podcasting or audio experience necessary. Do you have a great archival find or current project you’d like to showcase? Ever wanted to interview a fellow colleague or Canadian poet? Our team is here to support you every step of the way from episode idea to editing to final production. So send us your pitch and get in touch at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. That’s spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]\n01:02\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n01:13\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. You might know poet Gwendolyn MacEwen as the winner of the 1969 Governor General’s Award for her collection The Shadow-Maker or the 1987 Governor General, posthumously, for Afterworlds. She’s also maybe one of the most significant Canadian poets whose work is entirely out of print. MacEwen was only 46 when she died and her tragic life combined with the mysticism of her poetic voice has made her a figure of enduring fascination for other poets and scholars. At the same time, her works’ deviation from popular narratives of Canadian literature has often led to her being dropped from our literary histories. In this episode, I’m inviting you to join me as well as authors Jen Sookfong Lee and andrea bennett and SpokenWeb researcher Katherine McLeod as we reflect on why MacEwen’s voice continues to haunt us. Here is, again, me, Hannah McGregor, with “The Voice Is Intact.” [Theme Music]\n02:47\tHannah McGregor:\tHave you ever heard her read?\n02:48\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tNo, I’ve never heard her voice.\n02:49\tHannah McGregor:\tOh my God, do you want to?\n02:49\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tYeah!\n02:50\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor and Jen Sookfong Lee’s commentary] A fugitive from all those truths, which are too true, the great clawing ones and the fire-breathers,–\n03:00\tJen Sookfong Lee:\t[Gasps]\n03:00\tAudio Recording:\t–the ones that rake the flesh–\n03:01\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo much nicer with her voice!\n03:01\tAudio Recording:\t–like Pyramus,  and those that crush the bones to chalk and those that bear their red teeth in the nights.\n03:09\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo melodious, her voice.\n03:10\tAudio Recording:\tMy mind emulates,–\n03:12\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI’ve never used the word melodious.\n03:14\tAudio Recording:\t–dragon, fish, and snake and shoots fire to melt the Arctic night–\n03:18\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tSo ASMR, though.\n03:20\tAudio Recording:\t–or chews off the edges of continents or wraps itself around the ribs of the world,–\n03:23\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI knew it, I knew it, she had to have a voice like that. She couldn’t write these poems without that voice.\n03:26\tAudio Recording:\t–squeezes…\n03:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tSomething that will come up often when presenting about MacEwen, and certainly in conference sorts of settings, where people really wanna hear her voice. And if you talk about MacEwen and don’t play her voice, then people are really aware, like, “Wait, we want to hear her voice.” But then to also think about the layers of mediation and copyright and all the things that also are distancing us from her voice and being aware of that, too.\n03:54\tHannah McGregor:\tThe voices you’re hearing belong to academic Katherine McLeod–\n03:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tI am Katherine McLeod and I’m an affiliate researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia University.\n04:04\tHannah McGregor:\t–and author Jen Sookfong Lee.\n04:06\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI have been trolling Margaret Atwood since 1997, big props to me.\n04:11\tHannah McGregor:\tYou might recognize Katherine from earlier episodes of the SpokenWeb Podcast. She’s a Montreal-based scholar of Canadian literature with a focus on sound, performance, and archives and the co-editor of the new book CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. She’s also the curator of SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Week series. Jen Sookfong Lee is a Vancouver-based writer, radio broadcaster, and podcaster. She’s the author of The Conjoined, the co-editor of Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life after Sexual Assault and the co-host of the podcast Can’t Lit.\n04:44\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwen recording, overlapping with Hannah McGregor’s commentary] …once the monster’s jaws unfolded fire–\n04:48\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that third voice you’re hearing is Gwendolyn MacEwen reading on November 18th, 1966 as part of the Sir George Williams poetry series held between 1965 and 1974 at what was then the Sir George Williams University and is now Concordia University. The audio recordings of this reading series are at the heart of the SpokenWeb partnership and form a rich and exciting digital archive that has already inspired significant scholarship on the history of the poetry reading. But I’m not interested in this reading series. I’m interested in MacEwen.\n05:22\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tThe first time I discovered Gwendolyn MacEwen, it was probably reading “Dark Pines Under Water” in an anthology. And I think it was, it was a green, it was Oxford University Press, edited by Margaret Atwood, of course. Because back then everything was edited by Margaret Atwood. Yeah, and it was “Dark Pines Under Water” and I think it was only one poem that was anthologized in there. And I read it, I must’ve been 17 or 18–\n05:46\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwan reading the first lines of “Dark Pines Under Water”] This land like a mirror turns you inward / And you become a forest in a furtive lake.\n05:52\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tAnd that poem, which people say is about Canada, right? Like I think you and I were just discussing this before we turned these mikes on, but the… They say it’s about Canada, but I read it as being this like fear of the internal and sort of the fear of the Gothic-ness that lives inside us that we only see in reflection. Upon reflection, in reflection.\n06:10\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading “Dark Pines Under Water”] The dark pines of your mind reach downward, / You dream in the green of your time, / Your memory is a row of sinking pines.\n06:20\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tAnd there was enough in that poem for me to want to read more of her work.\n06:26\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of Gwendolyn MacEwan reading “Dark Pines Under Water”] Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for / Although it is good here, and green.\n06:33\tKatherine McLeod:\tActually when you mentioned your master’s, that was the first time I learned of MacEwen, was during my master’s degree out at UBC, out west in Vancouver. And I was in a course with Sherrill Grace and it was a CanLit graduate course and we were thinking about autobiography. And we read the play by Linda Griffiths Alien Creature: A Visitation by [sic: should read “from“] Gwendolyn MacEwen. And in the play, Linda Griffiths uses MacEwen’s words to conjure the presence of MacEwen as this magical poet and really to think about kind of really the reflection of the self through a poet’s words and a poet’s presence. And so I actually ended up writing about that play and that was my first academic publication, was about Linda Griffiths’s play about Gwendolyn MacEwen, sort of the presence of the voice in the play and as a remediation of MacEwen in that way. But it was, it was back in my master’s, too. So it’s sort of this long… MacEwen has always been.\n07:36\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tYou know, and I took these books off my bookshelf. There’s, you know, pictures of her on it and she had these huge, like, sad eyes, big, sad… You know, like that movie Big Eyes, it’s like that kind of thing. And I realized that like every poem I’ve ever read of hers, her eyes are there. Like they’re there somewhere. There’s a lot of looking, a lot of vision, a lot of dark vision, you know?\n07:56\tKatherine McLeod:\tIt really was the voice of her poetry, the sound of her poetry, the way she’s able to conjure up a presence through the words themselves. And I think a lot of her poetry actually has to do with, it has to do with haunting. There’s this sort of this continuation that’s really evoked in her poetry and a real, a strengthened voice that you can hear from the words on the page, I would argue. Even though it’s fascinating then to think that what often captures people is hearing MacEwen herself read the poems and then whenever someone’s able to listen to MacEwen, reading her poetry–\n08:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, continuation of the first Gwendolyn MacEwen recording] …but mark now how harmless are the claws…\n08:32\tKatherine McLeod:\t–is something that just captures one’s attention and she’s able to create a real strong sense of voice in her poetry and then, when it’s read out loud, it’s even more powerful.\n08:42\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Guitar And Drums]\n08:42\tHannah McGregor:\tI can’t remember the first time I heard Gwendolyn MacEwen’s voice, but I remember that I first heard her work read out loud by a friend. And I know that I was excited enough about her 1982 poetry collection, The T.E. Lawrence Poems, that I initially planned on writing about it in my dissertation before the practicalities of putting together a research project led me elsewhere. Actually, despite the fact that MacEwen was one of the authors who led me to the study of Canadian literature, I’ve never written about her formally. This podcast episode is the closest I’ve come. MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 and rose to fame quickly and young. She published her first collection of poetry in 1961 and won the Governor General’s Award for her fourth, The Shadow-Maker, in 1969 when she was not yet 30 years old. She died young, too, at 46, and the combination of her fascination with mysticism and the almost mythically tragic shape of her own life have turned her into a somewhat mythic figure in her own right.\n09:46\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tNo, she was deeply social and she was as famous as poets get, really, in Canada, ever. Like, she was a bit of a rock star, like she started doing things like having like a signature black eyeliner situation and like signature clothing, like loose silky things. I mean, come on, man, I wish I had like a signature look,\n10:05\tHannah McGregor:\tBut this iconic status was no accident. MacEwen came into her own as a poet in a historical moment when it was possible to be both a poet and a celebrity. And her poetic persona was very much tied to the culture of poetry readings in the 1960s, perhaps most notably at the Bohemian Embassy, an alternative club in Toronto where she would meet poets like Jay MacPherson, Margaret Avison, Phyllis Webb, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and Milton Acorn.\n10:32\tKatherine McLeod:\tWell, I’ll start again. Like thinking about MacEwen also allows you to think about spaces for performances of poetry. Thinking about, say, the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, you know, it’s talked about how MacEwen would show up to the Bohemian Embassy and there would be the sounds of like the coffee maker in the background and all these poets maybe reading with these like loud, bombastic voices or however, however poetry, you know, the poet’s voice was thought of. And then this woman’s coming up to the microphone and she’s often talked about as appearing very quiet and suddenly just absolutely captivating the audience. And I was so drawn to the fact that somebody very sort of unassuming could have such an impact and just call everyone’s attention. And it also, then it allows you to think about what it meant to be performing as a poet, a particularly very young female poet, at the time that MacEwen started doing her readings and being up there with a young Margaret Atwood and all the rest of the 1960s poets. Just how, how she held her own on that stage, too.\n11:32\tHannah McGregor:\tIn fact, it’s impossible for me to think about the historical context that shaped MacEwen’s work without thinking about that poetry scene of the 1960s and how central it was to the invention of that thing we now think of as CanLit. And when I think of MacEwen and the poet she would become, the poet who would write The T.E. Lawrence Poems and Afterworlds, collections that have haunted me as long as I can remember, I keep coming back to those years in the early ’60s to what happened to her then. And I’m not the only one.\n12:03\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Piano]\n12:06\tKatherine McLeod:\tI also think about the way that she was so determined to be a poet and there’s something about that, again, thinking of, you know, what models did she have to look to, to be a female poet in Canada at the time? Really she had to sort of forge her path of what that looked like and what that sounded like and trying to sort of find her place and her voice, the space for her voice, in that world. She was in the circles with so many of the very loudest male poets at the time and still managed, you know, she managed to be known for the strength of her voice, but it sounded incredibly difficult, too. And I was very interested in how she managed that and what she had to fight against in order for her voice to be heard. You know, who was this person Gwendolyn MacEwen? What kind of work could she have produced if she was in a more sustainable environment for her writing? You know, can we learn something from that now or are we still struggling against the very same things?\n13:04\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI often wonder sometimes when… ‘Cause she wrote a lot of her work after this was done, like most, the the bulk of her work after that marriage was over. And like there’s a part of me that sometimes thinks those things that she’s trying to access is maybe that marriage. Like I wonder sometimes, right? ‘Cause like when you get married or you’re in a relationship when you’re really young. Like, I got married really young, I got married, I met my ex-husband at 21, I was married at 24. By no means was that like an imbalanced marriage, I would never say that. But it defines you, I think. Like in your twenties, you’re exploring things, you don’t know who you are, your identity is so malleable. So what did Milton Acorn, what did he try to shape her into and what did she end up taking on and what did she end up rejecting would be my question. And I don’t think any of us will ever know this answer. But then looking at her poetry, I sometimes wonder if that darkness is there and that, and the way she would sort of like, as we were saying, she was not ever writing in the voices of men who were like loud, big, you know, masculine men. Always the opposite. And to me that’s kind of a gentle pushback against that Milton Acorn angry bear.\n14:07\tHannah McGregor:\tAs I was working on this episode, I reached out online for someone who could help me better understand MacEwen’s relationship with the poet Milton Acorn and how it might’ve shaped her work. My answer came serendipitously in the form of an essay by writer andrea bennett from their new book Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary, which is available for pre-order now from Arsenal Pulp Press. With their permission, here’s an excerpt from the essay\n14:36\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low String Instruments]\n14:43\tHannah McGregor:\tIn the early 1960s, a part-bar, part-coffee shop, part-venue space opened on St. Nicholas Street, a few blocks up from Yonge and Wellesley in Toronto. Soon after it opened, poet Milton Acorn, then in his late thirties, began to hold court there. The Embassy held poetry readings on Thursday nights, when Acorn would read, generally overstaying his welcome on the stage. Afterwards, Acorn would find himself surrounded by younger poets, many of them students from the University of Toronto. Margaret Atwood, then a student at the University of Toronto, read at the Embassy; a little later, a teenage Gwendolyn MacEwen found the spot, the community—Acorn.\n15:23\tHannah McGregor:\tAcorn was bombastic, drank a lot, often had a fat cigar sticking out from the side of his mouth. MacEwen was slight and half his age but had a compelling voice of her own. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she wasn’t at university. She was self-taught, had had a tumultuous—occasionally violent, marked by alcoholism and mental illness—home life. Many of the books that chronicle Acorn and MacEwen’s relationship come close to saying that Acorn was something of a father figure for the younger poets gathered at the Embassy—dispensing poetic advice, maybe acting more like a big brother. Acorn started off as MacEwen’s “poetic mentor,” but their relationship soon morphed and they began to date. Eventually, they married. This was something Acorn wanted and MacEwen initially did not; he’d proposed in December 1960 when she was nineteen and he was thirty-seven, and she’d said no, writing, “Milt, my love is not the same as yours… I feel no need to find myself physically, sensually, emotionally in another person… I’m still getting acquainted with life, with myself.” However, she agreed to his proposal a little later; he was in Prince Edward Island for the winter, and she was missing him while he was away.\n16:39\tHannah McGregor:\tAcorn and MacEwen’s friends speculated about why they had gotten together at all. Chris Gudgeon’s biography of Milton Acorn, Out of this World, says people referred to them as Beauty and the Beast. It was easy to see why Acorn was drawn to MacEwen—she was young, beautiful, talented, and insecure. MacEwen, Gudgeon writes, quote, “fed Milt’s lopsided vision of himself as a heroic poet-knight, battling the dragons of injustice, and leaving the fair maidens swooning.” End quote. (Another Acorn biographer, Richard Lemm, is more explicit, quote: “He had a constant companion who would listen to his political discourses. A sexually experienced man, he could teach and savour his less experienced lover.”) End quote. Although it was less clear what had drawn MacEwen, one friend from the Embassy pointed out that when they met, in contrast to later on, Acorn seemed confident, strong, clean-shaven, eccentric but put-together. Acorn and MacEwen had friends who guessed that part of the reason she’d been attracted to him was career-related—she was “ambitious” and saw him as “established,” a way to further her writing and publishing goals; Al Purdy thought, quote, “Gwen was with Milton because Milton was ‘getting attention.’” End quote.\n17:53\tHannah McGregor:\tRosemary Sullivan, MacEwen’s biographer, writes that it’s important to be careful about the way we think about MacEwen and Acorn’s relationship in retrospect. There was a power imbalance, and the relationship seemed doomed from the start, and Acorn was persistent, but there’s no evidence that he was abusive, either physically or emotionally. At least, not until the relationship crumbled. MacEwen took a solo trip to Israel a few months after her wedding; when she returned, the distance and solitude had given her a new perspective on Toronto, and her relationship. As Sullivan puts it in Shadow Maker, quote, “Almost as soon as she had married, Gwendolyn recognized that she had made a terrible mistake.” End quote. MacEwen wanted a marriage of equals, and Acorn wanted a wife. Acorn was “deeply conservative” at heart, homophobic, anti-abortion (he wrote at least one terrible poem about it), and he wanted to see “supper on the table every night.”\n18:50\tHannah McGregor:\tMacEwen and Acorn had an open marriage; he’d taken advantage of this when she was away, and she began a side relationship with a painter when she returned from Israel. Acorn gave her an ultimatum—him or the painter—and, not even a year into their marriage, she chose to leave. It was a choice that Acorn could not brook. He fell apart. He drank; he showed up on friends’ doorsteps in the middle of the night, distraught and drunk; he wrote MacEwen angry, bitter letters. Quote, (“One letter from that time begins with ‘You Dirty Bitch’ and ends up asking ‘WHERE IN THE WORLD DID YOU LEARN TO BE SUCH A LOUSE?’” End quote. Writes Gudgeon; another, quoted in Shadow Maker, sent after MacEwen told Acorn of her intentions to divorce him, quote, “accus[es] her of being ‘the Great North American Castrator.’”) End quote. MacEwen wrote back, at least at the beginning, explaining herself, trying to make him understand. Reading their biographies, the snippets of his letters that make it through, it appears as though Acorn’s life had fallen apart, and he’d set the blame squarely on the shoulders of his much younger ex, who simply wanted space, freedom, and an amicable divorce. When Acorn refused to give her a divorce—in the era before no-fault divorces—MacEwen was forced to travel across the country, to Vancouver, to gather evidence of his marital infidelity in order to petition the courts. Purdy, who’d been Acorn’s best man at the wedding, reluctantly acted as a witness to Acorn’s adultery so that MacEwen could finally break free of the marriage.\n20:21\tHannah McGregor:\tIn 1969, years later, MacEwen and Acorn were both announced finalists, alongside George Bowering, for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry or Drama. Acorn was still a mess—outstaying his welcome at friends’ houses, drinking, not bathing, suicidal, hospitalized for depression, still half hoping MacEwen might come back and blaming her for everything that was wrong in his life. When MacEwen found out her book The Shadow-Maker was shortlisted alongside Acorn’s I’ve Tasted My Blood, Nick Mount writes in his book Arrival: The Story of CanLit, quote, “She was afraid enough of him to write to the judges that if there was any change of her having to share the award with Acorn, she would rather withdraw her book from consideration.” End quote. But she and Bowering won, and Acorn didn’t.\n21:10\tHannah McGregor:\tCanLit did not graciously accept MacEwen and Bowering’s wins. Instead, poets Irving Layton and Eli Mandel co-authored an open letter protesting Acorn’s loss. The letter was in part a call for money, to be raised and, quote, “presented to Milton Acorn as the Canadian Poets Award.” End quote. Another public plea for Acorn, this time an editorial by poets Seymour Mayne and Ken Hertz in a now-defunct Montreal literary magazine, reads, quote, “Either because of literary politics or a gross ignorance of Canadian poetry on the part of the Canada Council jury, Milton Acorn has been denied the Governor General’s Award that he truly has earned.” End quote. Acorn’s supporters generally focused their ire at Bowering. One of the three jurors who’d chosen MacEwen’s and Bowering’s books over Acorn’s was Warren Tallman, an American who’d been hired to teach English at the University of British Columbia; the thinking went that Bowering’s style, which was influenced by US poets, was emblematic of a type of cultural imperialism that needed to be studiously avoided if CanLit was to be its own proper national cultural project.\n22:17\tHannah McGregor:\tFive days after MacEwen and Bowering were fêted at their awards ceremony in Ottawa, a broad swathe of CanLit, including Layton, Purdy, and Atwood, showed up at Grossman’s Tavern, on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, to witness Acorn receive a cheque for $1,000 and a medallion naming him the People’s Poet. When I think of this night—Acorn got so drunk he lost the medallion twice; his friends let him read for forty minutes; he was roundly celebrated—I immediately picture MacEwen and wonder how she felt, if she was at home in her small apartment that night, if there was anyone with her. And I wonder if anyone at Grossman’s thought about MacEwen. Did they wonder, celebrating Acorn, if they were enacting a deeper injustice by attempting to address a perceived one?\n23:06\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low String Instruments And Whistling]\n23:12\tHannah McGregor:\tIf MacEwen wasn’t quite part of that new CanLit scene represented at the People’s Poetry party at Grossman’s Tavern, maybe it was because she also wasn’t part of the project of building a thing that looked recognizably like CanLit,\n23:25\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tBut that white male sort of masculine sort of like, yeah, like the, it’s the Milton Acorn narrative. She just didn’t care. She just was like, “I don’t care. You guys go fight it out in your huts with your potatoes and axes. I’m going to go, I gotta to go to Egypt, get some bomb black eyeliner, see you later.”\n23:43\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd perhaps it’s something about her poetic rejection of accepted nationalist narratives, those “potatoes and axes” that Jen alludes to, that make her appeal to those who are a little skeptical about essentialist stories about what it means to be a Canadian or for literature to be Canadian.\n23:59\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI think there’s a lot of pressure for authenticity and I think it’s a marketing thing in many ways. I think that in my experiences writing for both big publishers and small presses, that the big publishers understand that a certain amount of authenticity sells, it doesn’t even really matter if you’re writing fiction. Like if you’re somebody, like, who looks like me and you’re writing a family story about a Chinese Canadian family, then the authenticity is easy to sell. It’s easy to sell. It’s like, “Well, Jen’s real grandfather was also a barber” or whatever. You know? It’s very much a merging of self, brand, and book.\n24:32\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd her lack of investment in those narratives can help to pry open the spaces to think about alternative ways of organizing our literary history.\n24:40\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tIn the history of Canada, for me anyway, like, I’m not a historian by any stretch. The only history of Canada that I’m familiar with, like, in any deep way is the history of Chinese Canadians. And for most of that time that there were white settlers on this, on this land, there were also Chinese Canadian, usually indentured, labourers. And I don’t think the garrison mentality, how many times can I say that on this recording?\n25:04\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, garrison mentality, for those who don’t know, is a term that was coined by literary critic Northrop Frye and kind of popularized by Margaret Atwood’s literary critical writing, which essentially argues that one of the major themes in Canadian literature is anxiety about the dangers and emptiness and threats of the Canadian landscape.\n25:25\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tI don’t, it doesn’t suit their experiences of let’s just say being chased off a gold claim, doing laundry for the railway workers, being a railway worker, being abandoned by the railway and not having passage home, scouring the woods for the remains of your friends so you can send them back home for a proper burial. Where’s garrison mentality in that? It’s not the land that has destroyed them, it’s the white people. So like there’s an alternative there and I think that any sort of marginalized group who has, you know, been alongside the white settlers all this time could very well choose their own anthology that would support that narrative. And wouldn’t that be interesting?\n26:06\tHannah McGregor:\tThis isn’t to say there’s nothing CanLit-esque about MacEwen’s poetry career. In fact, MacEwen had a strong, if often largely functional, tie to the CBC. As Katherine McLeod explains, it began with a prize.\n26:18\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Low Strings]\n26:23\tKatherine McLeod:\tGwendolyn MacEwen won the CBC Poetry Prize in 1965 and at that point she was very young, very young poet. And through winning the prize, she got the attention of Robert Weaver who was then the producer and editor of the program Anthology, which was a CBC literary program that, you know, ran from the mid ’50s up until 1985, so very long standing literary program. And Robert Weaver became a really strong supporter of Gwendolyn’s work. So he had her on to read on Anthology shortly after winning the CBC Prize. And she then read on Anthology numerous times, but also started to write radio plays. So the one that she’s most well-known for is the play Terror and Erebus that is all about the Franklin expedition and the Northwest Passage. And she also, she wrote two more but, which aren’t as well-known, but that, the play Terror and Erebus, was broadcast in the mid ’60s and re-broadcast. And both by writing the plays and also reading for CBC, she was able to make a bit of money, which the reading on CBC and writing for CBC ended up being a way that she was able to support herself. Again, continuing that sense of wanting to really be a poet and be self-sustaining in that way.\n27:51\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo one of the programs that I uncovered that I thought was one of the most fascinating when I was listening to MacEwen’s readings on CBC in the ’60s was a program that she produced and created for Anthology that was broadcast in 1969 and it was called Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how this program, Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces from 1969, is an opportunity for her to talk about other poets and other works that she’s interested in. So it was this moment of listening in the archives and expecting that, okay, maybe this is going to be another reading by MacEwen, which are fantastic and captivating, but in this case she was talking about other poets. It was actually a four-part series and that’s where, the last episode of that four-part series, I was most surprised by because that’s where she started to talk about flamenco.\n28:46\tMusic:\t[Instrumental Flamenco: Guitar And Clapping]\n28:53\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd that is where I nearly fell out of my seat because I was so thrilled and amazed that here I was in the CBC archives, listening to MacEwen, who I was fascinated by and working on, and at the same time I have been cultivating my own dance practice and flamenco throughout my academic work for the past 15 years. And here I was listening to MacEwen talk about flamenco and in this past year with Dr. Emily Murphy, who’s an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan, we’ve started a research creation project that lets me perform some of these recordings back from this 1969 piece and bring in the flamenco side, too.\n29:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tSo Gwendolyn MacEwen’s interest in flamenco, there’s all kinds of connections between MacEwen and music and especially the sort of the Toronto world music in the ’60s and artists that were passing through, this continues into the ’70s and is a whole other story of MacEwen and her partner in the ’70s opening the Trojan Horse cafe and connections to musicians passing through and performing there. But back to the ’60s, I’m trying to figure out where she would have heard it or how she would have first been drawn to flamenco, but it makes a lot of sense because there’s something undescribable about the sound of her voice and this feeling almost like the duende of flamenco, which is a word that refers to this undescribable sense that when you’re just really moved by something. And MacEwen’s program, part four of Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces, is all focused on the duende. And she’s interested in thinking about the duende as it’s theorized in Spanish poetry and then in flamenco as this undescribable feeling of the depths of your soul and true feeling and emotion. She’s interested in how we can understand that in poetry. And she’s thinking about poetry outside of Canada, but then she starts to sort of reflect a little bit more on Canadian poetry and she asks the question, where is the duende in Canadian poetry? Which I just find fascinating because where she turns, I think, goes back to her trying to figure out where her voice sits in Canadian poetry because the person she turns to as an example is Irving Layton. And it’s so, when we’re thinking about what kind of models or what is she thinking about when she’s thinking about Canadian poetry that is moving, on the one hand, yes, I see why she talks about Layton’s poetry, but I found it fascinating that she didn’t give her own poetry as the example because I would argue that her poetry has the duende. Her poetry is the poetry that moves you and the poetry that has that undescribable feeling. So in listening to the piece, it was really interesting to hear her theorize all of this, but also not see herself in that. And then I, that’s when I started to think, okay, as a critic, how can I argue that MacEwen has the duende? And one of the ways that I feel like is most successful in arguing this is, in fact, to dance her poetry.\n32:11\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Reading, Overlapped With Soft Flamenco] I should have predicted the death of this city. I could have predicted it if only there had been no such pretty flowers. No such squares filled with horses and their golden riders.\n32:26\tHannah McGregor:\tKatherine’s work on Canadian poetry and flamenco and Jen’s imaginative alternative anthologies that reject the garrison mentality’s settler-colonial meta-narratives of Canadian writing both point in different ways to how MacEwen’s poetics can lead us away from perceived notions of what Canadian poetry is or can be. And as I think about ways that those of us who care for her work can keep MacEwen’s contributions alive, I come back to her voice, so powerful that it feels fully present as I listen to it.\n32:59\tJen Sookfong Lee:\tThis, this one really affected me when I was like 19: “I don’t trust you for a single second, but / My bones turned gold in your hands’ warm holding / in the dark or in the bright heart of the morning. / And suddenly the days are longer than anything, / Longer than Tolstoy, longer than Proust, longer / Than anything. / But the days are also diving into nights, and / I told you our end lay in our beginning / So we drink to our end, always remembering / that at the bottom of the goblets of Pompeii / Was the skull; we crawl / Out of the night utterly broken, bruises / All over our souls, / But this pain returns me to the world. / Even in the end your perfidy serves me, so / The cry we made when we came, love, / Will sound the same and is the same / As the cry we will make when we go.” She knew she was gonna die young, I think. I think I’ll love her forever. And I think she never, she never disappoints. Every time you go back you’re still like, “Wow.” There’s always something else there because whatever is happening in our world or the things that we’re most consumed with, there will always be an element of that in her poem. So it’s the kind of poems that she wrote.\n33:58\tKatherine McLeod:\tThey were everything and everywhere. Playing a recording of her reading, it sounds so live and sounds so present. She’s still in motion. She’s still, she’s still alive. She’s not in the archive. She’s not in a box. She’s, she’s still here in very present. Thinking of the lines from “Past and Future Ghosts”: “Look out, you who inhabit those rooms of my future. I’m coming after you. I’m starting to haunt you. I’m starting right now.”\n34:25\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio, Gwendolyn MacEwen Speaking] So listen, I had a great idea that if our voices gave out, we were just going to open up the record and bring a recorder up on stage and place the needle in the proper groove and then just let the record speak for itself. However, I guess the voice is intact.\n34:43\tMusic:\t[Intense Echoing Instrumental]\n34:53\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. I was the producer this month. Thanks so much to Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb Podcast project manager and producer extraordinaire, for all her help. A special thank you to Jen Sookfong Lee, Katherine McLeod, and andrea bennett for their generous contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":2.4464734},{"id":"9622","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E7, ‘The archive is messy and so are we’: Decoding the Women and Words Collection, 4 April 2022, Mofatt and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-archive-is-messy-and-so-are-we-decoding-the-women-and-words-collection/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/67ec6133-5296-49c5-9c61-bdd8872657fb/audio/f4d8cb13-a39c-4b77-8445-413a9cfcbfe5/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e7-archiveismessy.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:14\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,464,214 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Mp3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e7-archiveismessy\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-archive-is-messy-and-so-are-we-decoding-the-women-and-words-collection/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-04-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind-the-scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.\n\nSpecial thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU’s Special Collections and Rare Books.\n\nImage Gallery\nPage 2 of the Women and Words Conference from 1983, containing a note from the organizers. Photo credit: courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nFirst page of a timeline outlining WestWord retreat organization, application, and admittance processes. Photo credit: taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPress release for WestWord III from February 1987. Photo credit: taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for the WestWord III public events, readings, and panels, including a reading by Sharon Thesen. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nThe tape holding the Sharon Thesen reading from August 18, 1987 (MsC23-85). Photo credit: courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for WestWord V public events, readings, and panels. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for WestWord VI public events and readings. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.\\n\\n“Castor Wheel Pivot.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713\\n\\n“Dust Digger.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.\\n\\n“Flipping through a book.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/\\n\\nHeavenly choir singing sound, “Ahhh.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/\\n\\n“Palms Down.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905\\n\\n“Record Scratch.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022.  https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/\\n\\nRooney, Frances. “activist; Gloria Greenfield.” Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549718302720,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.4464734},{"id":"9627","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E10, “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam, 4 July 2022, Collis"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/starry-and-full-of-glory-phyllis-webb-in-memoriam/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Stephen Collis"],"creator_names_search":["Stephen Collis"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61873157\",\"name\":\"Stephen Collis\",\"dates\":\"1965\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/616261ad-c0b6-4d7d-8634-17bbd4d166e8/audio/af1aede3-b3a7-4498-8c72-a223ddb811b8/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e10-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:26\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"71,197,047 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e10-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/starry-and-full-of-glory-phyllis-webb-in-memoriam/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-07-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1961.\\n\\nDuncan, Robert. Quoted in Thom Gunn, “Adventurous Song: Robert Duncan as Romantic Modernist.” The Three Penny Opera no. 47 (Autumn 1991): 9-13.\\n\\nKeats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters\\n\\nLibrary and Archives Canada. Item: Webb, Phyllis – Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)\\n\\n“The Coast is Only a Line: Phyllis Webb reading at the SFU Art Gallery on July 9, 1981.” Audio recording (cassette) in Reading in BC Collection, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\nRobinson, Erin. Wet Dream. Kingston: Brick Books, 2022.\\n\\nWebb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb. Ed. John Hulccop. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014.\\n\\n—. Talking. Quadrant Editions, 1982.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549727739904,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This episode is a commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). Drawing upon archival recordings of Webb’s readings, poet Stephen Collis, a friend of Webb’s, charts a path through the poet’s work by following the “stars” frequently referred to in her poetry—from the 1950s through the 1980s. Included in the podcast are two interviews, discussing specific poems, with former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah, and poet Isabella Wang, with whom Collis discusses a recorded reading of an unpublished, uncollected poem.\n\nSpecial thanks to Kate Moffatt for her production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books and Library and Archives Canada for the archival recordings featured.\n\n00:19\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\nMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. “She was someone I needed to know, someone who made the writing of my own poetry possible.” That is one of the ways that SFU English professor Stephen Collis remembers Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Webb passed away on November 11th, 2021. Steve has created this episode as a site of thinking through and thinking with Webb’s poetry and her long and acclaimed career as her friend and her literary executor. This is another podcast episode that shows us how ideas and literary learning communities can be cultivated by preserving and caring for archival recordings. Those recorded writers continue to be vocal teachers. Phyllis Webb’s voice resounds through this episode. We hear her in the archival recordings of her beautiful and deliberate poetry readings. We hear her work flowing through Steve’s memories, analysis, and reflections. And we hear her animating the conversations that Steve records with poet Isabella Wang and former Canadian parliamentary poet laureate Fred Wah to discuss their memories and interpretations of her life and work. This episode allows you to engage with the presence and power of Webb’s legacy in these audible scenes of remembering. Steve invites us to participate in the constellations of ideas and people that are connected through Webb’s life and poetry.\n\n \n\nStephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, a memoir of his friendship with Webb. He created this episode with production support from Kate Moffatt and with additional audio courtesy of Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada. Here is Episode 10 of Season Three of the Spoken Webb podcast, ‘Starry and full of Glory’: Phyllis Webb, In Memoriam. [Musical Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n\n \n\n03:08\tStephen Collis:\t[Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] When Phyllis Webb, Canadian poet and former broadcaster, passed away last year, it felt like a cosmic event. She died on November 11 2021—remembrance day—just as a massive storm—an atmospheric river, in fact—arrived out of the Pacific, flooding farmland, overwhelming river banks, and sending hillsides, weakened by the summer’s forest fires, rushing down into gorges, washing out bridges and sweeping away homes on the floodplain. It has been a wet and grey winter. Whenever I can, I look for the stars’ rare appearance in the nighttime sky. “Passed away” is such a strange expression. Into the stars, we sometimes have imagined—that’s where the dead go, “starry and full of glory,” as Phyllis wrote.\n \n\nWhere to begin? Phyllis Webb began in Victoria, in 1927, where she was raised by her mother, later attending the University of British Columbia, studying literature and philosophy; was the youngest person, at 22 years old, to run for elected office in Canada, as a candidate for the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, lost, began to write poetry, publishing many volumes in the decades ahead, worked for the CBC, co-founding the long-running radio program Ideas, stopped writing when words “abandoned her”, as she said, in her sixties, began to make collages and to paint, carrying this practice into her 80s. That’s the one-sentence biography.\n\n \n\nBut, that’s not where I want to begin either.\n\n“There Are the Poems,” Phyllis Webb titled one of her poems, offering an answer to my question. Start with the poems. I leafed through the almost 500 pages of Peacock Blue, her Collected Poems, published by Vancouver’s Talonbooks in 2014. I felt like I was star-gazing—just looking in wonder at the familiar and fixed, constellations of words that had long guided me. I visited Phyllis at her Salt Spring Island home, three or four times a year, for the last two decades of her life. I don’t know that I can call her a mentor. That word is both too large and too small. She was someone I needed to know and enjoyed knowing, someone who made the writing of my own poetry possible—just by being there. Just by existing—and being reachable, by letter, phone, or ferry. In returning to her poems after her death, I wasn’t sure what might rise to the surface this time. The atmospheric river passed on, the night skies cleared. I saw—stars\n\n06:15\tArchival Recording, Phyllis Webb, 1964:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking In] It’s called “The Glass Castle”. The glass castle is my image for the mind that if out motive has its public beauty, it can contain both talisman and leaf and private action, homely disbelief. And I have lived there as you must and scratched with diamond and gathered diamond dust have signed the castle tents and fragile glass and heard the antique cause and stoned Cassandras call me and I answered in the one voice I knew: I am here. I do not know, but move the symbols and polished up the view. For who can refrain from action. There is always a princely kiss for the sleeping beauty. When even to put out the light takes a steady hand for the rewarded darkness in the glass castle is starry and full of glory. I do not mean I shall not crack the pain. I merely make a statement judicious and polite that in this poise of crystal space I balance and I claim the five gods of reality to bless and keep me sane. [Sound Effect: Tape Finishing, Clicking Out]\n07:49\tStephen Collis:\tThe stars were everywhere in Phyllis’s work, it turned out. If one polished the mind, however fragile it might be, however likely to increase the darkness surrounding thought, the reward was starry and glorious. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] Stars often spangle the darkest passages of Webb’s poetry—they are there in the closing lines of her poem of existential crisis, “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide,” where she invokes “the bright crustaceans of the oversky.” Poetry, for this poet, is a crucial mode of thought—and living. Her “consideration” of suicide here is related to French philosopher Albert Camus’s claim that whether to end or continue one’s life was the “only” philosophical question. Luckily Webb also had other questions to ask of her stars.\n \n\nThey are connectors, bridges, means of relating the above and below, the distant and the near—the unfathomably long reaches of spacetime that cosmic light crosses and the immediacies of the days and nights of humble human lives. So “the star in the cold, staring sky” (this is from an early poem called “Double Entendre”) is also “the star reflected in the human eye.” In a poem written over three decades later, Webb is in a more playful mood, willing to “tangle with invisible / superstrings” as she entertains quantum theory “while the planets burn” (this from the poem “A Model of the Universe,” from her final, 1990 collection, Hanging Fire). Poetry, despite being, as Webb writes, quote, “cloaked in sheer / profundities of otherness,” is about the reach over and towards that otherness. I think Webb would have agreed with the contemporary American poet Tongo Eisen-Martin, who describes poets as, quote, “the healers of the continuum.” Stars provide healing light. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n\n10:04\tStephen Collis:\tNot long ago, Simon Fraser University student Isabella Wang brought an unpublished, and to me previously unknown poem of Webb’s to my attention. That poem was under the influence of the stars too. Isabella is a fine poet in her own right, author of the wonderful debut collection Pebble Swing, which contains a sequence of poems written in response to Webb’s Ghazals from her book Water and Light. I spoke to Isabella in my office at SFU, where we also listened to the poem, “Here I Am, Reading at the Planetarium.”\n \n\n10:40\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tIsabella, how did you find this poem?\n10:42\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tSo I was working as an RA for SpokenWeb in my first or second year. And so I was introduced to the BC Readings Archive of over 5,000 tapes in the Special Collections vault. And of course, the first tapes that I gravitated towards, that I searched for were tapes of Phyllis Webb. And, this was a poet whom I had studied significantly in classes and stuff and heard so much about through other poets’ stories. And for someone I had never met and someone who doesn’t do live readings anymore, who doesn’t publish anymore, it was just surreal. And it was astounding. I couldn’t believe it when I put it into a type player [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking] and her voice came up and her readings came up of poems I had actually read. It was just amazing.\n11:42\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, at  SFU Art Gallery, 9 July 1981:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] Here I am reading at the planetarium. The planet – arium. Arium. The planet I have just discovered in downtown Toronto. Stars, stars, stars, stars. Give me poets a handfull of dust before the skies fall down. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]\n12:15\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\n[Music Interlude: Atmospheric Tones] And so later on, I had the idea to make recordings, 30 minute long recordings of her readings at past events, into individual playlist of poems so that each poem would be titled and be cut into their own kind of playlist. So that instead of going into the 30 minute long recording not knowing what to look for they could just look up any poem they wanted to listen to.\n12:44\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tNice.\n12:44\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nSo I had the idea of doing that. So “Here I Am, [Reading] at the Planetarium” was the first poem that came up for the first recording that I worked with, cuz I was cutting the poems in order. And this was the first one that she came up and of course it makes sense cuz she read this as a preface to her reading.\n13:07\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYeah.\n13:08\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nBut when I heard it, I was like, [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] I don’t ever remember reading it in the Collected Poems. And then I looked back and I couldn’t find the title anywhere in the table of contents. So of course I wrote to you and I was like, “Do you remember this poem? Have you ever read it anywhere?” And at first you thought you had read it somewhere. But then when we tried to look for it on paper, we just couldn’t find it.\n13:34\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. So my suspicion was that maybe I’d read it in the archive once in Ottawa, but I can’t be sure. And we don’t have a paper copy and don’t have access to that archive right now. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]So we’re in this position of having to reconstruct a poem on paper that we’ve never seen if we wanna create a written copy. So how do you think we go about figuring out things like line breaks or layout or anything like that with the poem?\n13:55\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. So we had the cool and fun idea of just listening to this poem separately and then coming up with our own version or two of this transliterated poem on paper and then comparing it with each other. So it’s kind of like a surprise and reveal. And we had, we ended up with really different versions of what the poem might look like, but we kind of had similar approaches. We looked, we listened to the recording, we looked at the metadata of the tape. So we knew when this reading took place. And then in that recording, Phyllis did mention that she wrote this poem for another reading that happened recently, quote, “recently”. So we knew it kind of happened between, I think The Sea is also a Garden and her book Wilson’s Bow. So we knew kind of the forms that she was working with, her styles and her line breaks her kind of, her voice. And the flow of her voice at the time. And that was one approach that we took.\n15:11\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tLike I think we had similar line breaks didn’t we?\n15:13\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tWe did have similar line breaks.\n15:14\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tDifferent layouts, but similar, like she reads with such emphasis, you could sort of hear where a line break would go.\n15:20\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. So the way I structured my version was more like in the traditional stanzas. Everything is aligned to the left. We – it had traditional line breaks. And I just worked with where her voice kind of emphasized and paused and all that. You had the idea of transcribing it in a version that kind of flows a bit more kind of in terms of the form as well. And kind of moves across the page to almost like a painting it’s more free flowing. And that was really cool because this poem actually precedes her poem. What was it? Snowflakes?\n16:03\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tSnow crystals…What is it? Field Guide to Snow Crystals.\n16:05\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nField Guide to Snow Crystals.\n \n\nYeah. So in the reading, she read this as a preface. And the right after she read that poem. [Start Music: Chimes Instrumental] And the thing is, we do have a transcription of this poem published in her book Talking. And the way Field Guide to Snow Crystals. is structured is also in that similar free flowing form, you know, lines kind of move kind of organically across the page. And so we were able to go on that a bit and see, okay, where did she emphasize and pause while reading “Snow Crystals” poem and then yeah. And so we ultimately worked with and decided to go with your version more. [End Music: Chimes Instrumental]\n\n16:53\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tI win. [Laughs].\n16:54\tIsabella Wang, Interview,3 Feb 2022:\tYes. You win.\n16:55\tStephen Collis, Interview,3 Feb 2022:\tWell, you know what, the other thing I find interesting is in snow crystals, it’s kind of one of those sciencey poems.\n17:01\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYes.\n17:01\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nShe uses scientific language and has this flow all over the page, like she’s thinking her way through these complicated sounds and words. There’s other poems like that too. I think whenever she’s dealing with scientific kind of things. The form becomes more fluid and less, you know, traditionally poetic and more exploratory maybe. And so that’s kind of what I was thinking. And I think you agreed that with this poem that might make sense.\n \n\nAnd just, just finally, what do you like about this poem? What attracts you to it? Or what do you find interesting in it?\n\n17:28\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nFirst of all, it’s such a concise poem. It’s one of her shorter poems and yet it packs so much, it just, those last lines just grabs at me The sense that this was a poem she had composed for a festival at the planetarium. Yeah. And just that alone. Right. Poets gathered to read it none other than the planetarium feels so dreamy. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n17:54\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tUnder the stars. [Laughs]\n17:55\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tExactly. I wish we had that all the time here.\n17:59\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\t[Laughs] Right.\n18:00\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nAnd then, so, and in some ways she captures that exact feeling, not only of kind of the stariness of the planetarium itself, but also the feeling of being held and supported and connected with poets, other poets kind of like a community of constellations, individual poets. And then that line, right. “Give me poets a handful of dust before the skies fall down.” It lands with that community. It lands in that burning moment.\n18:35\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYeah. And that feeling of danger and the need for each other and a fragile world. Yeah it’s Lovely.\n18:42\tIsabella Wang, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\n \n\nYeah. For me, it’s like that –the planetary of it, it’s supposed to be such a big space, but maybe it’s because it’s a short poem it just feels really small. It feels compact.\n18:51\tStephen Collis, Interview, 3 Feb 2022:\tYeah. I love that. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n \n\n19:04\tStephen Collis:\tI like Isabella’s description of the way words, in the Planetarium poem, “flow across the page” irregularly, as she said, like a painting [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] (that is, like paint on a painting—the surface of the page or canvas taken as a spatial field where the elements can be arranged relationally). I suggested this was “exploratory”—a way of using the poem, perhaps, to discover something—and then, in a brilliant turn of phrase, suggested you could see this in Webb’s “sciency poems.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental] That’s a technical, literary term—“sciency.” [Clears Throat]\n \n\nLet’s have a listen to one of those “sciency” poems, one Isabella mentioned too—“Field Guide to Snow Crystals,” which Webb included in her 1982 collection of essays and radio commentary, Talking.\n\n19:58\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb,  SFU Art Gallery, 9 July 1981:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] Field Guide to Snow Crystals. Stellar rime,/ star crystals. In a sunfield / of snow. No/ two crystals exactly alike, like / me and the double I’ve never known / or the four-leaf clover./ A down drifting / of snow. Spatial dendrites,/ irregular germs,/ snow grows, scales, skeletons fernlike extensions,/ needles, scrolls / and sheathes, branches./ Lightly or heavily/ rimed / Stars on cold ground shining./ Ice lattice! For the field guides me/my / flutterhand to a fistful of/ plates, clusters, minute columns./ Graupel-like snow of lump type/ solid and hollow bullets / cup / Cupped in my hand / thrown across a fiel / “or… a series of fields folded.” A ball, star (“tiny columns and plates fallen from very cold air”)/ a quick curve into/ sky/my / surprised/ winterbreath/ a snowflake / caught midway in your throat. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]\n21:49\tStephen Collis:\t[Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] I suggest that poetic thinking—relational thinking—thinking by intuitive leaps and links—lateral connections and sudden shifts of scale, position and voice—allows not logic nor rational argument but embodied and felt movement over and through and in and along the contours of language. Webb, like many poets, works under the assumption that there is a valid pursuit of knowing that is lateral, oblique, latent, and relational and that is the work of poetry. I like how poet Erin Robinsong phrases this in her forthcoming book, Wet Dream:“we must work across realms / and poetry will be how.” In her “sciency” poems, Webb is doing just this: working across realms. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n \n\nWebb’s “Field Guide” poem takes its title, and quotes liberally throughout, from a book of the same title published by Edward Lachapelle in 1969. The use of source material this way—a kind of repurposing of found material—is such a common poetic practice that is hardly bears mentioning, although it’s clear this particular book was a rich resource, as Webb [Start Music: Chime Instrumental], in an almost painterly way, applies the unique lexicon to her page. If stars are to be my guide through Webb’s work in this podcast, the stars, here, are playing a game of as above / so below—a chemical transformation where falling or fallen snow crystals and the stars above “rime,” as she writes several times in the poem. This is an expanded sense of “rime,” which Webb adapts from poet Robert Duncan: things that look alike, or mean alike, as well as things that sound alike, can “rime.” There’s also the play on r-i-m-e rime—the accumulation of ice tufts on frozen surfaces. [End Music: Chime Instrumental] Okay—I could get carried away with a close reading of this poem; let me just draw attention to its gorgeous concluding lines—where the speaker’s “surprised / winterbreath” (all one word—winterbreath) is likened to “a snowflake / caught midway in your throat.” [Start Music: Chime Instrumental] And that’s it, the poem leaving us there, with its words in our throat, melting like a snowflake on the tongue—or a star fading out as the sun begins to blue the morning sky. [End Music: Chime Instrumental] ]\n\n \n\nI asked poet Fred Wah if he’d be willing to talk about Phyllis’s work with me for this podcast, and he immediately said yes, and that he wanted to talk about one poem and one poem only. It’s called “Leaning,” from Webb’s book of Ghazal’s, Water and Light. The ghazal or [pronounces] ghazal is a Persian form—a poem written in couplets, but in its traditional practice, following numerous other rules, including subject matter (they are usually about love). Webb’s poems are, as she often called them, “anti-ghazals.” “Leaning” is perhaps the most anti- of all the poems in Webb’s book—especially in terms of subject matter\n\n25:13\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb,  ibrary and Archives Canada:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, In] I am halfway up the stairs/ of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. // Don’t go down. You are in this/ with me too.// I am leaning out of the Leaning/ Tower heading into the middle distance// where a fur-blue star contracts, becomes/ the ice-pond Brueghel’s figures are skating on.// North Magnetic pulls me like a flower/ out of the perpendicular// angles me into outer space/ an inch at a time, the slouch// of the ground, do you hear that? /the hiccup of the sludge about the stone.// (Rodin in Paris, his amanuensis, a torso …)/ I must change my life or crunch over// in vertigo, hands/ bloodying the inside tower walls// lichen and dirt under the fingernails/ Parsifal vocalizing in the crazy night// my sick head on the table where I write/slumped one degree from the horizontal // the whole culture leaning…// the phalloi of Mies, Columbus returning/ stars all short out – //And now this. Smelly tourist/ shuffling around my ears// climbing into the curvature. /They have paid good lira to get in here. //So have I. So did Einstein and Bohr./ Why should we ever come down, ever?// And you, are you still here // tilting in this stranded ark/ blind and seeing in the dark. [Sound Effect: Tape Clicking, Out]\n27:21\tStephen Collis:\tFred calls it “one of the best poems in Canadian literature.” And I think he should know. Fred Wah—he will cringe at me saying this—is a treasure of Canadian letters. He has had a huge influence on me and many other poets, writers and artists of the past few generations. A founding member of the TISH group of student poets at UBC at the beginning of the 1960s, Fred has gone on to a distinguished teaching career, writing dozens of books of poetry and prose. He has been recognized with a Governor General’s Award for poetry, and served a term as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Fred and I have visited Phyllis together several times, and it feels like we are deep into a many-years long conversation about her life and work. We spoke at Fred’s Strathcona home in East Vancouver.\n \n\n28:10\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tOne of the things I’m realizing about, you know, when you said you wanted to talk about the poem. And you start thinking more and more about it, you and you can’t – I can’t stop thinking about it. It just goes on and on. How aware Phyllis [Laughs] I keep thinking of SpokenWeb, spoken Webb. Webb.\n28:29\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t[Shared Laughter] Exactly.\n28:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut, Phyllis was so compositionally aware of what she was doing. That her kind of composition mentality, if you like, her cognitive ability to just putting things together. So, you know, the book at the poem “Leaning” is just, it’s part of the section middle distance.\n \n\nSo the proposition is, if you start looking at like, and Pauline in her book on Webb, she did a lot of, she did some research on this from a particular point of view. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] But, you find that Phyllis has really been thinking about this in a larger context. This is an – this’t just an incidental poem. This is a poem that fits into a kind of discourse that she’s sort of in, in a large scale thing, over years.\n\n29:28\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s right. I totally agree.\n29:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd it starts fitting into all kinds of other things. And I hadn’t, I mean, I didn’t realize, Pauline mentioned this to me that Virginia Woolf’s essay “Leaning”. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n29:45\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\tOh my gosh. I didn’t think of that either.\n29:46\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYou know? And it’s an incredible thing. I know this is Paula doing research, but…\n29:52\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\t[Laughs] Presumably, so.\n29:54\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t“The Leaning Tower” was a paper that Woolf presented to the Workers Educational association. Brighton May, 1940.\n30:01\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAmazing.\n30:01\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tShe describes the privileged socioeconomic position of contemporary British writers as a leaning tower, quote, “trapped by their education, pinned down by their capital. They remained on top of their leaning tower and their state of mind as we see it reflected in their poems and plays and novels is full of discord and bitterness, full of confusion and of compromise.” And further that “they are trapped on a leaning tower from which they cannot descend.”\n30:28\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s amazing. That’s perfect.\n30:29\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tSo this is, I’m sure Phyllis would be very aware of this, right? Yeah. Okay. This is an address to that whole patriarchal construct. And there are more feminist links in there. But the fact that she’s, this is a whole thing, like it’s whole, it’s a, there’s kind of a whole cloth here. So although I love the poem “Leaning” because of its poem-ness –\n31:03\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\t[Shared Laughter] Right, right.\n31:04\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– it’s such a great, it’s so well written. And I can read it without even paying any attention to the – or much attention to the references. Cuz the poem is constructed so musically so beautifully that I’m just – I don’t really need to pay attention to the reference. I know they’re there. Of course, once you get into the references, the thing just like [Vocalizes Expanding Sounds] – goes on and on and on.\n31:29\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\tWell they’re all men. Right. And which goes with, maybe Pauline’s reading here in this kind of patriarchal context for that leaning. Right. Cause you’ve got, I mean, what we’ve got, we’ve got, Rodin, [Start Music: Low String Tones] we’ve got Brueghel. We’ve got, you’ve got Rilke, I think hiding behind Rodan. Because Rilke was Rodin’s secretary and Phyllis loved Rilke and there’s that “I must change my life” line in the poem. It sounds – that’s pretty much Rilke right there. But then also Columbus, Mies van der Rohe, the architect and on and on. Right. Einstein. Bohr. It’s all men that we mention the poem. Yeah. I love that idea of yours and I totally agree. But you can read the poem without noticing or thinking about its references. You can read it for its poem-ness.\n32:15\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. And just, you can just say, well, oh, they’re all men. This is just this sort of, yeah. She’s kind of hitting these guys for different things, but it’s all very particular. But then as we can discover, Pauline pulled this up, in an interview with Ann Mutton, Webb explains the link between “Leaning” and “Following”,  another poem –\n32:41\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing!\n32:41\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– that isn’t – that she kept out of middle distance. She says, the leaning tower is a phallic image and once I wrote that poem, a similar image kept flashing and that was a woman from Botticelli. I then wrote a poem called “Leaning”, dealing with Botticelli and the women. However, Webb adds that it’s not a very good poem. It doesn’t have the weight. It may be fatal for me to give up this male oppression on my psyche.\n33:06\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t[Shared Laughter] Right. You need your demons sometimes like again, going back to Rilke, Rilke famously a friend said, “Hey, I can get you a session with Freud.” Cuz he was having all sorts of depressive issues and Rilke said, “No, I don’t wanna be cured. This is how I write poetry.” [Shared Laughter]\n33:25\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tWell, I think Webb is very aware of this – is playing around and that this is really a middle distance for her –\n33:31\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. Yeah. Let’s come back to that.\n33:34\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– in so many ways, and there, I mean there is this of course the feminist thing. And she does write to –it is – there’s a correspondence with Daphne. And the poem, “Leaning” is dedicated to Daphne.\n33:48\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s right.\n33:48\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tSo, there’s that. But there’s also a whole bunch of other –the way I take it, the way I played with it was through Negative Capability.\n \n\n33:59\tStephen Collis:\tNegative Capability was poet John Keats term for, as he wrote in a letter to his brothers in 1817, the creative state of [Start Music: String Instrumental] “being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, it is the ability to reside in between doubt and certainty, to carry on thinking about a problem that you don’t know the answer to. Poet Robert Duncan had something similar in mind when he spoke of poetry as “the intellectual adventure of not knowing.” [End Music: String Instrumental]\nPerhaps Fred and I get a little carried away here—we had a lot to say about this poem. In the second part of this interview we discuss what Fred calls the “germ of thought we’re still trying to unravel” which lies at the heart of Webb’s poem—“all these binaries,” as Fred says, going on to discuss the possibly dialectical space of the between—here’s Negative Capability again—and the idea that “betweenness is a place to be”—maybe the place to be.\n\n \n\n35:06\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd I’m attracted to “Leaning” because of it’s playing around with this, between-ness.\n35:13\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tI was gonna say – the space between. Yeah, exactly.\n35:15\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut there are so many other ways to play with this poem too. There’s that feminist thing which is very obvious once you start realizing that yes, these are guys, they’re all guys here. But then because we’re now in a kind of –we’re trying to address the entropy of our social climate. And I’m thinking of all the [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] sort of microrisal structures, the networks, the plants and the fungus, the mycellial networks –\n35:58\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022::\tThat’s in there too.\n35:59\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– and all of this requires, as the ecologists tell us, we have to learn how to balance these things, balance these contradictions. And so the poem is right in bed– and this is what, 1982, she’s writing this poem I think?\n36:15\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah, yeah. About that.\n36:18\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tShe’s right in this. She’s got a sense of that germ of thought. That we’ve now come to where we’re still trying to unravel this, all these contradictions, all these binaries.\n36:37\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAbsolutely.\n36:38\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd we keep – the poet, I think, is reminding us of this. I don’t think she’s finding, she’s not offering a solution. She’s just reminding us that it’s very imbalanced. And am I gonna have to remain under this patriarchal mindset just to keep going…or?\n37:01\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tIt’s even right there in that mentioning Einstein and Bohr, which I don’t think accidental that those two have a big argument in the early 20th century about basically reality essentially. Quantum physics and Einstein was a holdout, not loving the conclusions of quantum mechanics and Bohr was the advocate and they were not in agreement and this whole spiraling leaning tower, you know, it seems so cosmological in some ways.\n37:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut also Bohr on the atomic thing, like entropy is–\n37:34\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tEntropy. Exactly.\n37:34\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– is the basis of the atomic physics. And so, [Laughs] …\n37:41\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd it’s even here as a colonial process that entropy and that apocalyptic Columbus returning, stars all shot out. [Shared Laughter] He’s blown that cosmology away in sense. So, and we should come back to your “fur-blue stars” [Start Music: Chime Instrumental] and the “middle distance”. I think we’re in a realm of aesthetics. That’s one interpretation of middle distance, right. Is that it’s an aesthetic painterly term. If you’re looking at a painting what’s in the foreground, there might be figures in the foreground, there’s a background, you know, Renaissance painting, you’ll see maybe mountains or towers or a town in the far away, but there’s a middle distance, or who knows what it could be like animals in a field portrayed or something.\n \n\nBut the art historians will talk about and use those terms. So middle distance is also an art historical term, an aesthetic term for interpreting a painting. So I think right after, is it right after it’s first mentioned that we get…? Yeah. The next line after the mention of middle distance, is “the fur blue star” and Brueghel. And I wonder if that’s a description of a painted star, right. That might look fur blue might look, I mean, think even Van Gogh – those kind of crazy fuzzy, blurry looking stars.\n\n38:53\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. It could be. I mean, I still, as I said earlier, I don’t still don’t know what fur blue star, if it’s a particular reference in the sky. You know, if there is a fur blue star that’s in some story.\n39:10\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver ,8 March 2022:\tOr in Brueghel’s painting [Laughs].\n39:11\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut that becomes – the fact that it becomes the ice pond Brueghel’s figures are skating on. In other words, that all of these perceptions are all this the sky and the earth. Another binary. Earth and sky.\n39:28\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYes. Yes.\n39:30\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tTrying to find that. “A north magnetic pulls me…” So it’s a – there’s a directional thing, a geometric or a geo thing here.\n39:40\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tThat’s right.\nSo part of what I see you describing here Fred, is that you constantly transform [Start Music: String Instrumental] from one reference to the next couplet. Couplet by couplet. This constant movement and shaping in the poem going on. Constant shifting and moving to different locations, but always working with kinds of binaries. And when you get to Rodin it’s Rodin and his “amanuensis”.\n\n40:01\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tRight. Right. [Shared Laughter]\n40:02\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. So you constantly got these, this pairing or binary working through of things.\n40:08\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. Yeah. And she’s – I think she’s realizing that this middle distance is, the dynamics of this middle distance is rife just with all these binaries [End Music: String Instrumental] and the equivocation that we find ourselves in trying to deal with the binary aspect of our world.\n40:31\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah.\n40:31\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tSo this, like the ground, the here, this it’s “angles me into outer space an inch at a time”, “the slouch of the ground, do you hear that?”, “the hiccup of the sludge about the stone”.\n40:44\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t[Shared Laughter] To that the hardness of that phallic tower and the wooshing of the ground or something, another binary.\n40:55\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd at the back of mine, mine is [ostranenie?]. The stone makes the stone, the stone stoney. [Laughs]\n41:05\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah, yeah. Right. Oh amazing! [Laughs] I love that.\n41:05\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tI don’t know. [Laughs]\n41:12\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut there’s even a binary or a relationality, I guess we could say too, and then focus on the idea of the, of the middle or the, between, and that relational space. But in between the speaker of the poem and the reader, right. You, this directedness right. Are in this with me too. And at the end, and you, are you still here? That’s another really interesting betweeness.\n41:32\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tMm-hmm <affirmative>. Yes.\n41:33\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAddresser and addressee or something.\n41:36\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tBut it’s also that – it’s the one and the many.\n41:39\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYes!\n41:41\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tOkay. It’s the paradox. Well, not so much a paradox. I think she’s trying to – she doesn’t pose it as a paradox. She’s just posing it as a condition of this “I” and “you”. The local, the universal. The sky, the earth, the… [Laughs] –\n41:58\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tExactly.\n41:59\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\t– all these oppositions. And so even these – I guess what you’re suggesting is perhaps even all these men are part of this. They’re both, they’re both part of it. They’re also part of that accusation from Virginia Woolf that they’re caught in this leaning tower.\n42:18\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYes. Yeah, absolutely.\n42:19\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tAnd they can’t come down. [Laughs]\n42:20\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah, exactly. Yeah. Does the – is the speaker gonna walk away at the end? [Laughs]\n42:25\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tWell, so I guess, in a sense, this sort of goes to buttress up my notion that between this is a place to be. Right. And that we’re actually – there are that, we’re kind of – like my metaphor of it is the cafe door.\n42:47\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tExactly.\n42:47\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tCaught in the doorway. And I’ve always been interested in trying to, or for a long time, I’ve been interested in trying to describe, or trying to figure out the character or the dynamics of where you are when you’re caught in the doorway, you’re standing the doorway. The advantage is you can see both rooms at the same time, so you see a larger view. The disadvantage is, is that you’re in the way! [Laughs]\n43:12\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tRight, right. [Laughs]\n43:13\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tGet outta the way!\nSo there’s lots of – there’s both. There’s both, once again, you’re in a middle place. Yeah. So there’s both things going on. Yeah. And trying to negotiate. So how to negotiate between this. And I’m not so sure – I don’t know if she’s coming up, thinks she’s coming up with an answer to her. I don’t think so. But that “And you, are you still here/tilting in this stranded ark /blind and seeing in the dark.” Well, the ark is, that is what the collectivity, it’s the kind of humanity all collected together. Everything’s together. But it’s stranded. [Laughs]\n\n43:56\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tNot getting anywhere, not getting outta the flood. [Shared Laughter]\n44:00\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tEven that. That “I” and “you” that becomes “we” is still stranded. So it’s in that sense, I suppose one could say it’s perhaps, not a negative statement, but she’s not coming up with an answer to this problem of balancing the binaries. I think she’s simply pointing out that there are binaries there. And we have to find some, or we’re in it. That’s what we’re in. It’s not –there is no, you know, polar black and white. [Laughs]\n44:41\tStephen Collis, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tRight. Well, I dunno if it’s anyone’s job to decide this, but I certainly don’t think it’s the poet’s job to decide that right. The poet’s job is to be in, well, I always think these days of entanglement. The post job is to identify and illuminate our entanglements. [Start Music: Atmospheric Tones] Here’s where we are. Here’s where, we’re what we’re all bound up and what we can’t get out of.\n44:58\tFred Wah, Interview, East Vancouver, 8 March 2022:\tYeah. And reacting to it with language.\n45:09\tStephen Collis:\tThere’s something of the very essence of poetry, for me, in this matter of the stars in Webb’s work—something of the supercharged task of grasping at the ungraspable—of rendering in words—what tries to escape words. To “see in the dark,” as the speaker is doing at the end of “Leaning,” is perhaps to see by starlight—faintly, but gloriously, luminously. And while the coldness of that starlight might sometimes read as isolating, I was glad to see both Isabella and Fred take up the image of the constellation in their comments—the constellation of poets in the planetarium, as Isabella had it, making vast cosmic space smaller, more intimate, and Fred’s sense of Webb’s “compositional awareness,” as he called it, of how everything in the poem fits together seamlessly, and how the poem itself fits into larger “constellations” through its wide field of references.\nBut what about that “fur blue star”? Well, for one thing, it’s an image of “betweenness” once again—of something touching both furry animals and burning cosmic bodies in their deep space orbits—that which is above, and that which lies below—and the strangeness of being human, with our capacity to partake of both the furry world and starry contemplation, shuttling between with our poems and stories.\n\nBut I’m also tempted to connect the “fur blue star” from “Leaning” with the “starry rime” (r-i-m-e) from “Field Guide to Snow Crystals.” If stars seem fuzzy to the human eye—if they radiate blurry halos in certain atmospheres—why not furry? Why not blue? Or, at the end of the day, why not … just not know, for sure, and let the image’s Negative Capability pulse on in thought and undecidability?\n\nI think, I will always be in media res, in a state of betweenness, when it comes to Phyllis Webb and her poetry. If this podcast is a tribute to her, it necessarily takes the form of an in-progress thinking through and thinking with the example of her life and work—and with other poets similarly caught midway in their thinking through her life and work. That’s the thing—despite often cutting the image of an isolato, alone on her island for all those years, Phyllis Webb was always forming constellations of poets, always a part of important poetic constellations, and always allowing new poets into her orbit. That was her star power. Thanks for listening. [End Music: Atmospheric Tones]\n\n48:15\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is Stephen Collis English professor at Simon Fraser University.\n \n\nOur podcast project manager and supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. And our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and thanks to Judith Burr for hanging around and continuing to help us out. A special thanks to Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University and Library and Archives Canada.\n\n \n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know, rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada, stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with Katherine McLeod, many stories about how literature sounds.\n"],"score":2.4464734},{"id":"9628","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S3E11, The WPHP Monthly Mercury Presents “Collected, Catalogued, Counted”, 1 August 2022, Moffatt and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-wphp-monthly-mercury-presents-collected-catalogued-counted/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 3"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/6080ec77-e13a-430d-a98b-4ceca70315bb/audio/e49a4567-fbbc-4581-9c84-c312cadf060f/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e11-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:23:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"80,203,485 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e11-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-wphp-monthly-mercury-presents-collected-catalogued-counted/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-08-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast we are excited to share an episode from The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosted by Kandice Sharren and our very own podcast supervising producer, Kate Moffatt. First aired on July 21, 2021, this episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury features an interview with Dr. Kirstyn Leuner, director and editor-in-chief of The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing. You can read more about the episode, and about Dr. Leuner’s project, on the Women’s Print History Project website.\n\nThe WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of the Women’s Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, The WPHP Monthly Mercury investigates women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.\n\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music by Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/bard.jpg, and played by Kandice Sharren\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited:\\n\\n“Francis Stainforth.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Stainforth, accessed 21 July 2021.\\n\\nLeuner, Kirstyn. “Restoring Authority for Women Writers: Name Authority Records as Digital Recovery Scholarship” in Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 13–26.\\n\\nLeuner, Kirstyn. “Dynamic Cross Reference Links in Catalog Browsing.” The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, February 2020, https://stainforth.scu.edu/dynamic-cross-reference-links-in-catalog-browsing/. Accessed 21 July 2021.\\n\\nThe Monument of Matrones. Compiled by Thomas Bentley. London: Henry Denham, 1582.\\n\\nMoss, Celia and Marion. Early Efforts. A Volume of Poems by the Misses Moss, of the Hebrew Nation. Aged 18 and 16. London: 1839.\\n\\nCatalogue of the Extraordinary Library, Unique of its Kind, Formed by the Late Rev. F. J. Stainforth. London: Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, printed by J. Davy and Sons, 1867. Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogues_of_Items_for_Auction_by_Messr/3T5bAAAAQAAJ/.\\n\\nWalker, Cheryl. American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Rutgers UP, 1992.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549730885632,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.4464734},{"id":"9638","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E4, “Two girls recording literature”: Re-listening to Caedmon recordings, 4 March 2024, Levy and Shwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/two-girls-recording-literature-re-listening-to-caedmon-recordings/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"url: http://viaf.org/viaf/5331160310460458300001\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/21077709-c3ab-4c7d-967f-cfb748bd1868/audio/140742fe-4320-4020-89fd-d0e6e88378a0/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"two-girls-final-mix.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:02:57\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,447,255 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"two-girls-final-mix\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/two-girls-recording-literature-re-listening-to-caedmon-recordings/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-03-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Featured graphic credit: photographs by Phillip A. Harrington, courtesy of Evan Harrington\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nOnion, Charlie. “Caedmon Spoken-Word Recordings go Digital.” Wag: a magazine for decadent readers,\\n\\nJune 2002, http://www.thewag.net/books/caedmon.htm. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration.” NPR, December 2002,\\n\\nhttps://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration.\\n\\nAccessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon.” HarperCollins.com. https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/caedmon. Accessed 14\\n\\nNov. 2023.\\n\\n“Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading: Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings,\\n\\nMarianne Moore, William Empson, Stephen Spender, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur reading #604.” n.d. Sound recording. MSC199 #604.. Simon Fraser University Sound Recordings Collection, Simon Fraser University Archives, Burnaby, B.C. November, 2023.\\n\\n“Mattiwilda Dobbs – Bizet: FAIR MAIDEN OF PERTH, HIgh F, 1956 ” Youtube, uploaded by\\n\\nsongbirdwatcher, June 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxZZtxM8ykam-Rml9Q7ij4J2OIWLrx3lUB.\\n\\nEtude 8 Dimitri by <a href=”https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/227639″>Blue Dot Sessions</a>\\n\\nFrost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking.” Poetry Foundation,\\n\\nhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking. Accessed 30 January 2024.\\n\\n“File:Mattiwilda Dobbs 1957.JPEG.” Wikipedia,\\n\\nhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mattiwilda_Dobbs_1957.JPG. Accessed 14 February 2024.\\n\\nHarrington, Philip A. “[Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen of Caedmon Publishing Company pushing a\\n\\nwheelbarrow full of boxes of their recordings of modern literature in New York City]”. December, 1953.\\n\\n“How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers.”\\n\\nWriters and Company. CBC, July, 2023.\\n\\nhttps://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-two-young-women-captured-the-voices-of-literary-greats-1.6912133. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.\\n\\n“January 20, 1961 – Poet Robert Frost Reads Poem at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration.” Youtube,\\n\\nuploaded by Helmer Reenberg, January 15, 2021,\\n\\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILGO3gVlTU.\\n\\n“Oread.” H.D. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48186/oread. Accessed 30\\n\\nJanuary 2024.\\n\\n“The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading 2LP Caedmon TC 2006 Vinyl Record.” Boundless\\n\\nGoodz,\\n\\nhttps://www.ebay.com/itm/374791681072?itmmeta=01HPJMRA2M8G311HNSS83Q5Z2G&has\\n\\nh=item5743533430:g:ESgAAOSwdLVkomcL&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8OcrOX8GrjGcCK\\n\\nd73gETrLCg9HgtTomQcdBFQsfuKIbZJCerwOPQAP8v95zLuLDTLfzKCEpHr6ciRZXXlKA1iJ\\n\\nKJQIZBNBP68Ru6LBfSoa%2FfPEP7%2Fa%2BIRslUZ5i2RDM4SZwOC2l6XlwBx5qb9ihywjJ\\n\\nIDK71WKdGDo8mhOnddK0NPBgnn26N5JH6N9DSuSkFkjy7BoQeE7hzXcLV76vAmN2Q6IK\\n\\nkpjLN5l%2B4M36eDSYpXhiFfxsmyok%2Bn1aYfEds46k8%2FfPX0doDJv7qXPKwVi5g99nrS\\n\\nnyZ95AdrCWpR3Tj3%2FkxYp0wlrb2dQ%2F%2FuEaktQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBMwqHh1\\n\\nLRj. Accessed 14 February 2024.\\n\\nWilliams, Williams Carlos. “The Seafarer.” University of Washington,\\n\\nhttp://www.visions05.washington.edu/poetry/details.jsp?id=18. Accessed 30 January, 2024.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549744517120,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In February 1952, Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, two recent graduates of Hunter college, founded Caedmon records, the first label devoted to recording spoken word. In this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon records. They pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957 from and now held in SFU’s Special Collections. Michelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson, of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis, of SFU’s English department, about William Carlos Williams’ reading of “The Seafarer.” As they listen to the poems together, they debate what it means to listen to as opposed to read these poems, with the recordings providing what Holdridge described as a “third-dimensional depth, that a two-dimensional book lacked.”\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb theme music fades]\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and –\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod. Each month, we’ll bring you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists across Canada.\n(00:50)\tKatherine McLeod\tCaedmon Records. Did you know that Caedmon Records was the first label to sell recordings of poetry? Well, you might have known that, but did you know that it was started by two women? I didn’t know that before listening to this episode.\nIn this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon by listening to an interview with its founders, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, an interview that was conducted by Eleanor Wachtel for CBC Radio.\nIn listening to this episode, I was struck by how we are hearing the history of this formative record label for recording spoken word, hearing it as a story being told out loud on the radio.\n(00:01:35)\tKatherine McLeod\tMichelle and Maya then pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell’s legacy by listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957. They listen to two experts and talk about what they heard.\nMichelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple-Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis of SFU‘s English department about William Carlos Williams’s reading of the “Seafarer.”\nAll of the archival audio in this episode is held in SFU‘s archives and special collections. But this Caedman record that these poems were recorded on, Caedman Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, was a popular one. And as I listened, I went over to my bookshelf and pulled it out. Yes, I happened to have a copy of this very same record. I take it out of its cover, I put it on, lowering the needle –\n(00:02:35)\tAudio\t[Static audio starts playing]\n(00:02:42)\tUnknown\tIf I told him, would he like it? Would he like it if I told him? Would he –\n(00:02:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tHere is episode four of season five of the SpokenWeb Podcast. “Two Girls recording literature: Re-listening to Caedmon Recordings.”\n(00:02:56)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice]\n(00:03:06)\tMichelle Levy\tIf you have ever rummaged through a box of cassettes in a library, or secondhand bookshop, or flipped through LPs in a thrift store, you will probably stumble across a Caedmon recording. These feature poets, playwrights, and fiction writers reading from the work originally released on vinyl and later on cassette.\nCaedmon is a record label founded by two women, Barbara Cohen Holdridge and Marianne Roney Mantell, in 1952. Recent graduates of Hunter College, Holdridge was working in book publishing, Mantell in the music recording industry when they heard that Dylan Thomas was reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. They attended this reading and finally prevailed upon him to record with them. And the rest, as they say, is history. The creation of the first business to capture audio literature for a mass audience.\n[Soft piano begins to play in the background] In this episode, we want to bring to the surface the critical role that Holdridge and Mantell played in this early history of spoken word recordings.\n(00:04:14)\tMaya Schwartz\tThis episode begins with a brief overview of Holdridge and Mantell’s founding of Caedmon. The women told their story in a marvellous interview with Eleanor Wachtel. Given now over 20 years ago, in 2002, to celebrate Caedmon’s 50th anniversary and recently rereleased to celebrate Wachtel’s incredible 33-year run as host of the CBC’s Writers and Company.\nWe draw from this interview to allow us to hear Holdridge and Mantell telling their story in their own voices.\n(00:04:46)\tMichelle Levy\tIn the second and longest part of this episode, we pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from one of their recordings, held in SFU’s special collections, The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, an anthology first released in 1957.\nMaya and I each selected a few poems from this collection that we enjoyed listening to and asked two colleagues, both of whom were scholars of poetry, as well as poets themselves, to share their thoughts on the recordings. I discussed Robert Frost’s reading of “After Apple-Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University. Maya chatted with Steve Collis of our English department at SFU about William Carlos Williams’ reading of the “Seafarer.”\nWe talked about what it meant to listen as opposed to reading these poems on the page. What elements of the poet’s performance surprised us, as well as a range of other details, from the pronunciation of certain words to the speed at which they read? We notice, for example, how Frost ignores line breaks in his reading, whereas Williams gives great emphasis to them. These elements of the poem’s delivery provide what Barbara Holdridge described to Wachtel as third-dimensional depth.\n(00:06:04)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth that a two-dimensional book lacked.\n(00:06:19)\tMichelle Levy\tIf you look at a Caedmon recording, you’ll find little contextual information. In the treasury held at SFU, we no longer have the original LP or cassette. It apparently has been discarded and re-copied onto a new cassette. Further, we have only half of the treasury, the third and fourth sides of the LP, as it was first released. The first and second sides, which included Dylan Thomas’ “Christmas in Wales,” do not make it into our collection.\nIn the Writers & Company interview with Holdridge and Mantell, however, we learn crucial details about their motivations for recording poets.\n(00:06:55)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI came to this concept as a result of attending too many classes in literary criticism. I had a strong sense that what I was hearing and what I was reading had to do with the critic and not with the poet or the author. And here was an opportunity to create, or to find another original firsthand source: what the poet or author heard in his or her mind.\n(00:07:26)\tMichelle Levy\tHere, Mantell explains how they’ve worked with authors prior to recording.\n(00:07:32)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI think also we didn’t just take them and sit them in front of a microphone. We spent a lot of time beforehand with the author in an effort to shake off that sense of tightness, uptightness, and fear that one gets in front of a microphone, particularly an author who says, “Oh, I’m not a performer. I’m…” It’s okay, we’re here. Just talk to us.\n(00:08:01)\tMaya Schwartz\tIn addition to meeting and recording authors, Holdridge and Mantell were also running a business. Here’s what they had to say about that experience.\n(00:08:11)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tIt was wonderful. Men were not hostile. They were very accepting. We found a young banker, a vice president, who eventually lent us money. We used to trundle our little cart named “MattiWilda” from our offices on 31st Street to the RCA plant on 24th Street and bring it back, loaded with heavy boxes of records, long-playing records, and along the way, dozens of men would spring to our sides to help us up the curb and down –\n(00:08:47)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\t[Overlapping] We couldn’t have done it by ourselves.\n(00:08:49)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\tYou named your cart?\n(00:08:49)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tMattiwilda.\n(00:08:51)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tWell, why not? Why not?\n(00:08:52)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\t[Laughs]\n(00:08:53)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tShe was named after Mattiwilda Dobbs, who was a reigning soprano of the time.\n(00:08:58)\tInterviewer, Eleanor Wachtel\tI see.\n(00:08:59)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\t[Inaudible: I would go that woman, but one better.] I think we probably succeeded where men would’ve failed because we were women. On the one hand, men were chivalrous. On the other hand, when they attempted to put us down because we were two girls, etcetera, etcetera, we outwitted them, we outsmarted them, and, occasionally, we drank them onto the table. [Interviewer laughs] So I think, in a major way, we were successful precisely because we were women.\n(00:09:32)\tMichelle Levy\tIn their recordings. Mantell and Holdridge create a rich archive that survives for our exploration today. Maya and I listened to the recordings. I found a few poems that intrigued me, including Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” a poem that seems so deceptively prosaic, like a lot of Frost’s poetry. I settled on it, however, after finding that Susan Wolfson, a fellow Romanticist, had recently written an article on Frost, including a discussion of this poem and agreed to discuss it with me.\n(00:10:03)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah. I’m Susan Wolfson. I teach at Princeton University in the Department of English.\n(00:10:10)\tMichelle Levy\tThank you for coming. A question for you just before we get to this specific recording: Do you recall if you had heard Frost reciting his poems before in other recordings?\n(00:10:23)\tSusan Wolfson\tNo. I mean, Frost gave readings his entire life. I remember his reading at Kennedy’s inauguration with great difficulty ’cause the sun was in his face,\n(00:10:37)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping, Robert Frost at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy]\nThe no order of the [inaudible] –\n(00:10:38)\tSusan Wolfson\tSo he couldn’t read the poem that he wrote for the occasion but just sort of pulled-\n(00:10:42)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping] I can’t stand the sun.\n(00:10:45)\tSusan Wolfson\tThe problem gift outright.\n(00:10:45)\tRobert Frost, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 1961\t[Overlapping] New Order of the ages that got –\n(00:10:49)\tSusan Wolfson\tBut I was in high school when that happened.\n(00:10:53)\tMichelle Levy\tWe begin with listening to Frost reading “After Apple-Picking.”\n(00:10:58)\tRobert Frost, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tMy long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take. / Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear. / My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder round.\n(00:12:01)\tRobert Frost, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tI feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired. / There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. / For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth. / One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Where he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, / Or just some human sleep.\n(00:12:51)\tMichelle Levy\tSo there we go. What comes to mind listening to that for you?\n(00:12:56)\tSusan Wolfson\tYou know, one surprise to me was his reading against every edition of the poem that I found to say, “cherish in hand, let down, and not let fall.” I’m wondering if in reading it, whether he, I don’t know, whether he was, he had this in memory, but in memory, he may have just decided to revise that line, or he may have misremembered it on the cue of the repetition.\nAs I said, I was a little struck by the monotone and the rapidity with which he read. And for a formalist such as Frost, who famously said things like “poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net” or that “you have to have a metrical pattern for the rhythm to ruffle against.” I mean, he’s not a formalist, but he’s certainly very form conscious and form attentive.\n(00:13:54)\tSusan Wolfson\tI was struck by how often he didn’t pause at the end of lines. In some cases, the enjambment was quite dramatic, “a load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much,” I mean makes that almost continuous, goes past the period. But this is a poem that is remarkable for varying its line lengths between 12 syllables and two syllables, with all being the shortest, one and the longest, one being the first. And that kind of wavering and the way that interplays with the surreal temporalities where you think you’re in a past tense, then you’re in a kind of present tense of remembering a past moment, and then you’re in a kind of dreamscape where those temporalities overlay, it would seem that poetic form is very much involved in those evocations too.\n(00:15:00)\tSusan Wolfson\tBut Frost reads this at such a pace that it almost sounds like prose. I know that he is committed to the kind of vernacular of poetry rather than poetic diction, which is fine. I mean, it makes his poetry sound authentic, genuine, and accessible. But I didn’t expect it to sound like prose. So that was my take.\nBut that sense that words still have a kind of constitutive magic [Music starts playing in the background] they create and produce an experience; they don’t just refer to it or represent it. And the presence of Frost is just a kind of magical enactment of that.\n(00:15:49)\tMichelle Levy\tWe then discussed how Frost recorded his poem in a studio, and we wondered whether the lack of an audience contributed to the monotone, with the result, when listening, that you lose the line breaks as well as the rhymes.\n(00:16:02)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah, those are lost. And the rhymes that really are the kind of line-end punctuation, whether this is not like the verse, it is metrically various.\nAnd, that’s part of its astonishment, that the way in which these lines seem organic with thinking and yet, use, avail themselves of the resources of poetic form to give a kind of pulse and poetic charge to the language. That is part of its sensuous appeal.\n(00:16:45)\tMichelle Levy\tWe then address the deceptive simplicity and accessibility of Frost’s poems, how they contain elements of recognition but also surprising depth.\n(00:16:55)\tSusan Wolfson\tIt’s a kind of ruffling of the surface that you can take these poems on. That’s why they’re so teachable: there’s immediate access to it. And then, you kind of show the students that the ground they think they’re standing on is less stable than they’d like. The joke about the road not taken is that it’s identical to the road taken. So this epic portentousness has made all the difference. It is sort of Frost’s own joke about wanting to have those allegorical moments landmarked, signposted, in your life. He’s got a great comment that what’s in front of you brings up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew. Putting this and that together, that click, that’s the poetry. And sort of almost against these sort of portentous alls that almost is just a really interesting Frost mode. That it teases, it tiptoes, it borders on, but it doesn’t insist.\n(00:18:04)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music begins to play.]\n(00:18:10)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd there’s that line that you quoted in your essay from Frost as a teacher who said that “the role of poetry is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize.” And I love that idea; it’s very Emersonian, too, but what do you think about this poem that we recognize, and is there something in particular that we recognize when listening that we don’t necessarily when reading, although that’s another layer we don’t have to get to, but in terms of this poem, what do you think some of those deeper truths are that the reader or the listener might recognize?\n(00:18:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tThe meditation is part of the every day. It’s not just something that poets do, and poets do in extraordinary moments, but that there there is a way in which this poem, which is really just about something as quotidian as apple-picking, is already possessed with a kind of mental landscape, or mental landscaping of it that takes possession, that you can find yourself thinking about just quotidian events that stay with you. That wonderful sort of memory as he’s drowsing off, before he is imagining the source of sorcerers apprentice explosion of apple after apple that I am drowsing off. I mean, there’s another present tense, right, that he is – “I didn’t fill” and then suddenly, “but I am done with apple picking now.”\n(00:20:00)\tSusan Wolfson\t“Now” is so weird because it just means that he’s not done. It’s just this moment. So does that “now” mean existentially, now I am never gonna pick another apple again, I’ve had it with apples? Or is it just for the day? And as he’s thinking about that, and the scent of apples, which is so immediate, “I am drowsing off.” So you think, okay, well, that’s a departure from apple picking. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take.” Has nothing to do with apple picking.\n(00:20:58)\tSusan Wolfson\tHe is on his way to the orchard, and it’s a moment of whimsy and optical illusion that he indulges in, a different way of looking at the world just for a moment. And that’s what he’s dreaming of. And as he’s sort of recollecting that, it dissolves back into his dream, “what form my dreaming was about to take.” And then the form that his dream is about to take is apple-picking with a vengeance. I mean, this is partly a Wordsworthian spot of time that is captured in poetry and reproduced in the composition of the poetry itself. It comes back as an event of apple-picking in the poetry. Keats is interesting because it’s hard not to think about autumn without thinking of Keats, but Keats is not a labourer; he’s an observer.\n(00:21:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tSo when he’s looking at the boughs that load and bless, you know, they’re loaded, blessed with fruit. I mean, he’s real; his work is poetic labour, but he’s not on a ladder. Doing apple picking. Frost has a different relationship with that. This is much more Wordsworthian say in which the kind of physical events of stealing eggs from a nest high on the crags where the wind is blowing you sideways or feeling the oars tremble in your hands as your joyride in a boosted boat suddenly possesses you with a certain kind of tremor, of guilt or possible punishment if you’re busted. That’s a kind of visceral memory that Wordsworth has that he turns to poetry to reproduce because it’s so thrilling in just that, even to remember it, that he feels it all over again as he’s writing about it.\n(00:22:53)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd this is a kind of immersive, at the moment, but the moment is everywhere in Frost. It is both the day’s labour, but then after apple-picking and trying to go to sleep and not yet being asleep, but the day replaying and in surreal dimensions, in that kind of half space of mind between sleeping and waking, which, of course,, is a space of poetry. That’s what the poetic composition fills up and overfills. Even that funny little thing about the woodchuck at the end, “one can see what will trouble the sleep of mine.” That “what will trouble” whatever sleep it is, which is to say that maybe it’s not sleep at all, but it’s gonna be this sort of possession of one’s mind by the day’s labour. “One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Were he not gone,”\n(00:23:49)\tSusan Wolfson\t“The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe it’s coming on, / Or just some human sleep.” Of all the animals to pick, I mean, woodchuck, a creature defined by its labour, right? I mean, that’s the eponym. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? I mean, that’s, you know, he knows that he knows that riddle. And yet, even the woodchuck gets to hibernate. I mean, really, to get as close to death as you can. And just as a way of getting through the winter. Whether it’s like his “long sleep,” and that plays against “my long two-pointed ladder,” right? That brings that word back, but now it’s sleep rather than labour. His “long sleep, as I describe it coming on,” and what a great piece of ambiguous syntax.\nWilliam Emison would chew on this line, right? Because the “as” is both comparative and temporal at the same time, in that his long sleep at the moment that I am describing it is coming on, and as a comparison that I can’t quite make, or just some human sleep. And human sleep, the joke of this poem, is not quite sleep. It’s, you know, psychic rehearsal over and over again.\n(00:25:19)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd, to go back to that idea of recognition, there is something about the physical exhaustion that launches him into this more mystical semi-sleep, un-sleep space, which I find interesting too because it’s almost like he’s, you know, I think about like an over-exhausted to toddler, right? Who can’t settle for themselves?\n(00:25:43)\tSusan Wolfson\tHe’s done it all day, and of course, this is every day. You don’t just have one day when you pick apples, right? This is a seasonal chore.\n“And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now.”\nThat does sound like an existential proclamation. And yet there’s this sense that there is just too much and that he is in default, that he has broken a contract to get every damn apple. Even those prepositions, “after apple-picking,” that it almost, by the time you’re at the end of the poem, “after” has this sense of going after, I mean, of, in other words, of pursuing almost as a poetic subject. It’s the poetic sequel as well as the temporal sequel. But after apple-picking, with apple-picking, I’ve had too much of apple-picking. When a phrase gets repeated three times, it’s, it’s not done with, it’s –\n(00:27:02)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd I’m thinking through your discussion and listening to you recite some lines that are very different from Keatsian’s wonder at the kind of bounty of the harvest, right? There’s a kind of exhaustion. He’s overwhelmed.\n(00:27:19)\tSusan Wolfson\tKeats is not labouring. He’s not part of the labour. Yeah. He’s not part of the harvest force. So until then until, what is it? I don’t have it. Oh, I should have it memorized. This is sort of a moment that just is for Keats; the joke is you think it’s gonna go on forever.\nSo, “To bend with apples the moss cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; / To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”\nIt’s Keats’ joke about this moment that seems infinite but isn’t. He’s looking at a world that is just still burgeoning and producing life. That’s a very different kind of autumn genre from the labour genre. The other thing about companies being fruitful and multiply is that you have now entered into a world of hard daily labour, which will never be over. That’s the penalty of having lost Eden because of an apple. So, that sort of patched into this too. Not with the world of sin but this is the world of labour.\n(00:28:41)\tMusic\t[Intrumental music begins to play in the background.]\n(00:28:59)\tMichelle Levy\tSo I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to end with you asking you to read the poem, and then maybe we can just pick up any threads that come out of that reading. Anything that we haven’t discussed. But it would be lovely to hear your recitation.\n(00:29:17)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah, part of it is that the slow time of reading and of immersion in the labour is something I would kind of want to bring to this, in comparison to, say, Frost’s seeming interest to get from the beginning to the end as efficiently as he can. So I’ll read it and see what you think.\n(00:29:44)\tSusan Wolfson, reading “After Apple-Picking”\tAfter Apple-Picking.\n“My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Besides it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass.”\n(00:30:31)\tSusan Wolfson\t“It melted, and I let it fall and break. / But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take. / Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear. / My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder round. / I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. / And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in. / For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired. / There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. / For all / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth. / One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. / Where he not gone, / The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his / Long sleep, as I describe it’s coming on, / Or just some human sleep.”\n(00:32:11)\tMichelle Levy\tI heard the rhymes [laughs] in a way that I didn’t hear before. “Bough,” “now,” “all in all,” I mean, they really are punctuated.\n(00:32:21)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd the repetitions that roll up with the rhymes, too. Yeah, I think that those are part of it. That’s the kind of pulsing or rhythm of the mind of a poet in composition, is that you are picking up words as words for their sensuous value, as words.\nAnd rhyme and meter are one way to bring that value to language. That’s even the sort of the particular local knowledge of knowing the difference between stem end and blossom end. Now that’s a good case of something. If you think about it, you realize that’s exactly why you can tell that difference. It’s a stem, oh yeah, therefore the flower was there, and the fruit grows up behind the flower.\nBut that’s a sort of casual local speak that may not be the literacy of every reader, and you kind of have to meet Frost halfway just to have the mind of Frost, that you know that difference. So that’s the sort almost, that’s one of those cases where you almost know, and then, you know, as soon as someone says it to you,\n(00:33:41)\tMichelle Levy\tYeah, it’s a beautiful description, and you get that repetition within the line that echoes. There are so many apples, but yet there’s this particularity about each apple. Each apple has this pattern of the two different ends, but each apple is different.\n(00:34:00)\tSusan Wolfson\tAnd “every fleck of russet showing clear.” That’s the language of someone who’s looking at the apple, the way he looked at that pane of glass. Each apple is a sort of event for him.\n(00:34:13)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd you did a lovely job of slowing, really slowing down at the end, to really linger over those last couple of lines.\n(00:34:22)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah,\n(00:34:23)\tSusan Wolfson\tWell, there’s a sort of point of sleep where language begins to come minimal. But I still think that comparison to the woodchuck is just a hilarious piece of wit. It’s almost tonally inappropriate that he could have just said the woodland bear or something like that. There’s something he could fit in two other syllables of the brown bear. But, the idea that this creature of labour, whose very name comes from his labour is, I just think, hilarious, that he gets to sleep,\n(00:35:05)\tMichelle Levy\tAnd as you said, there’s a slight touch that even though we have the ladder pointing towards heaven, and you have this invocation of the fall, as you say, he doesn’t quite take us there. It’s, he’s –\n(00:35:20)\tSusan Wolfson\tYeah [overlapping]\n(00:35:20)\tMichelle Lee-ve\tHe’s provoking us. He’s suggesting it, but ultimately, is that what the poem’s about? Or is it –\n(00:35:26)\tSusan Wolfson\tKicking an apple, a ladder pointing towards heaven, which means the sky. But there’s a whiff of the metaphysical there. That is part of the kind of dream world, too, that the one thing the ladder isn’t doing is it’s not Jacob’s ladder. You’re not going up that ladder to heaven. So it’s almost like a joke that this ladder is part of the instruments, part of the tool shed of labour.\nAnd you know, it does come with a slight default or transgression, a barrel I didn’t fill. But that’s not on the level of sin. If anything, if you’re trying to work this out on the map of Eden, you’re in trouble of picking more apples as your salvation. It’s almost a joke about that too.\n(00:36:18)\tSusan Wolfson\tI just kind of like this poem for the way in which ordinary language becomes a kind of record of memory, of dreaming, of labour, of self-ironizing and existential self-reckoning in relation to poetry that is embedded in multiple traditions from Genesis to Keats, to romanticism, to poems of labour, and yet doesn’t insist that you do the math. When you add this up, all those aspects of human language and human poetic tradition kind of impinge or press on your sense of how to read this poem, how to understand this poem. And then part of reading a poem like this, that’s loaded with temp, station for you to do that kind of work, is to feel the temptation and then feel that that’s not really what’s going on. That this isn’t an allegory of a fall of man.\n(00:37:29)\tSusan Wolfson\tI mean, the New England word for autumn, Keat’s poem is too autumn, not too full, but the New England word, the American word for that is fall. And so that also sort of comes in as a kind of tacit understanding that we don’t have a fall without the fall. But it’s not about that. It’s just about the kind of every day, kind of mulling that can make magnified apples appear and disappear. It can be magnified. It takes possession of your mind. It’s surreal, it’s real. It’s a dream; it’s waking. It’s just great. It’s just a great sort of experience going from word to word and line to line.\n(00:38:13)\tMichelle Levy\tThank you so much. It’s been a wonderful conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time to work through the poem so thoughtfully with me.\n(00:38:25)\tSusan Wolfson\tWell, it was so much fun.\n(00:38:25)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing]\n(00:38:41)\tMaya Schwartz\tHi there. It’s Maya, your co-host for today’s episode. For part two, I interviewed my professor, Stephen Collis.\n(00:38:49)\tStephen Collis\tI’m Stephen Collis, a poet, and I teach poetry at Simon Fraser University.\n(00:38:53)\tMaya Schwartz\tWe sat down in his office at SFU to chat about the poem “Seafarer” by William Carlos Williams. I began our conversation by asking Steve why he chose this poem. But first, here’s the Caedmon recording of Williams reading the “Seafarer.”\n(00:39:12)\tWilliam Carlos, recording for Caedmon, part of the “The Poets of Anglo-Saxon England” collection, 1955\t“The sea will wash in / but the rocks – jagged ribs / riding the cloth of foam / or a knob or pinnacles / with gannets- / are the stubborn man. / He invites the storm; he / lives by it! / instinct with fears that are not fears / but prickles of ecstasy, / a secret liquor, a fire / that inflames his blood to / coldness so that the rocks / seem rather to leap / at the sea than the sea / to envelope them. They strain / forward to grasp ships / or even the sky itself that / bends down to be torn / upon them. To which he says, / It is I! I am the rocks! / Without me, nothing laughs.”\n(00:40:15)\tMaya Schwartz\tWhy did you choose this poem? I sort of gave you two to choose from. Have you read it before? What, sort of initially struck you?\n(00:40:23)\tStephen Collis\tI don’t remember having read it before. So that may be part of the attraction. Again, that a poet I’m reasonably familiar with, if not, have studied exhaustively. So it was just one I don’t really know of. And, but it’s everything that attracted me to it is in the reading of it. In the way he reads it, which is extraordinary. I don’t know. Should I just jump right into why that is because that’s for the next question? Because it’s the quality of his voice, which I knew it had that quality from maybe other recordings, I guess, and it’s kind of a known thing, if people know about that kind of poetry, they know that he had a funny voice, i.e. it’s relatively high pitched. It’s kind of fragmented and rough and ragged, and we have recordings of him as an old man, right?\n(00:41:08)\tStephen Collis\tBecause this is the 1940s or fifties or something like that, so he’s probably in his seventies. But I think he always sounded that way, [laughs]. He, as a younger person, kind of sounds like some sort of grandmother or, I mean, doesn’t he? So I kinda like that. I like that there’s a contrast in it between the kind of vaguely male-ish sexuality that’s in it, which he’s sort of known for, too, I guess. And this crackly grandma voice, which is kind of funny, [laughs].\nSo one, that’s one thing, the quality of his voice being so fragile and kind of unattractive, right? You don’t wanna listen. So, nonetheless, in that kind of ugliness of his voice, seeming fragility and vulnerability, I’m kind of attracted to that aspect of it.\nThen the other thing is the excessive pausing, which is, I love when a poet reads their line breaks or leans into their line breaks in such a way that he really does here. That first line, you just, you get the first line, you feel like you wait forever for the second line. Hang in there [inaudible], and I know there’s more, buddy. What’s it gonna be? What’s, what’s coming here? That’s fascinating to me, too.\n(00:42:18)\tMaya Schwartz\tThe pauses line up with the line breaks.\n(00:42:20)\tStephen Collis\tFor the most part. They don’t completely, and I think poets, there are poets who never read their line breaks, right? That’s not the point. They scoot right through them. Maybe that’s because there’s a narrative element, or whatever, or it’s just the lines aren’t enjambed. There isn’t a natural kind of pausing, a phrase that the line breaks.\nThen there are poets who, whether or not it’s enjambed, they like to hang on the line break. And I tend to like that. I tend to like the kind of pressure it puts on the voice and the reading when you have that tension there; it kind of goes back to that thing like what T.S. Eliot said about, was it T.S. Eliot? No. Who was it? Robert Frost says that writing poetry without rhymes is like playing tennis without a net or something like that.\n(00:43:08)\tStephen Collis\tA rhyme meter is like playing tennis without a net. And there’s just some, I get what he means. Like, I think it’s, I definitely don’t write rhyme and metered poetry myself, but, and I tend to prefer poetry that isn’t rhymed and metered, but unless I get what he’s saying, he’s saying is, you need this sort of abstract tension framework to work against.\nAnd that’s what line breaks are providing here. Just there’s this frame of the short lines going down the page, and the poet is pushing against them every time. So, a couple of times, he does push right through them and runs under the next line or two pretty quickly, but it’s rare in this poem. And he mostly pushes right up hard against those line breaks, and you really feel him pushing them.\n(00:43:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tDid you notice anything else about the way that Williams read this poem? Like his accent or inflection tone, speed, or emphasis?\n(00:43:56)\tStephen Collis\tTotally. There’s something in the accent, too, which, for us sitting here in Canada, maybe is just generically American about it. But then there’s a wonderful emphasis on certain words. There are the words he just draws out, right?\nLike he, obviously the first line, but individual words like “instinct,” right? “He invites the storm; he / lives by it! / Instinct,” and he kinda says it like that; he just pulls on that word, which is fascinating. And no real reason for it, I don’t think. It’s not like, it’s like a heavy syllable, a weirdly metered kind of word. But he really leans in; he does that a couple of times, “ecstasy,” maybe a little bit, and “liquor,” right? “A secret liquor,” basically really getting the “K” sounds. So he’s playing to the score he’s written for himself.\nHe’s really leaning into those notes you can really play hard and draw out in the reading of it, and it does build toward the ends, right? You get that exclamation mark near there, the end, but he’s, or get too near the end. But his voice does start to rise in volume, released at the end as he tries to bring it to this dramatic moment where the rocks speak. You know? “It is I!” [Laughs]\n(00:45:14)\tMaya Schwartz\tThat’s a hilarious reading.\n(00:45:16)\tStephen Collis\t[Laughs] I know. It really is.\n(00:45:17)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd then it settles back down again, “Nothing laughs.”\n(00:45:20)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Which is such a weird last line in the poem, right? Like, “nothing laughs,” I don’t get the, I walk by thinking I don’t get the joke. Was I supposed to laugh?\n(00:45:29)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah.\n(00:45:29)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing in the background]\n(00:45:35)\tMaya Schwartz\tDo these sorts of different emphases change the way that you interpret the poem?\n(00:45:40)\tStephen Collis\tYeah, that’s a good question. To some extent, I think they do. And a lot of that, to me, rides on those two words at the end of a line. It’s probably the longest line on the page, but it’s, they strain, are the words, I would say.\nAnd, this definitely draws our attention to the straining, the tension in the poem, like literally physical tension that he’s playing with, really heavily emphasizing those line breaks, really drawing out the pauses at the end of his lines, or leaning into a word like “instinct,” which just draws out into this much larger space than it should be on the page. That those words they strain really leap out at me as marking this, or reminding me that this is a poem about this kind of tensions that the writer seems to be really interested in. I mean, they’re elemental, you know, it’s sea and land, but they’re encapsulated in his voice and how he reads the poem.\n(00:46:40)\tStephen Collis\tDo you think that listening to the voice of the poet brings us closer to Williams himself?\n(00:46:46)\tMaya Schwartz\tWell, that is pretty wonderful. I love poetry readings. I know a lot of people will say this, it still feels like it’s a necessary part of poetry, that it’s being read aloud by the author. And you always notice something. If you’re familiar with a poem on a page and you have not yet heard the author read it, then you hear them read it. There’s always something revelatory to that. Sometimes disappointing, ii’s like “really? You’d read it like that?” And I don’t, I wouldn’t do that, or that interests me less now that you’ve done that to it.\nBut it is, there’s a quality of, well, it’s got to do with body, embodiment, I think. And poetry to me is very embodied language. And you need to be in the body that felt, heard, breezed, spoke it the way they felt they should or needed to, or would on that occasion. I think that’s significant. So there is, you’re getting a sense of William’s body there, of his breath and his attention and his voice. And, again, that’s what all those heavy line breaks do too. They reemphasize that straining of the voice to get outta the body and take up that oral space of the room around it.\n(00:48:00)\tMaya Schwartz\tThe founders of Caedmon have said that their goal was to capture as much as possible what the poets heard in their heads as they wrote.\n(00:48:08)\tStephen Collis\tNice.\n(00:48:09)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd I think that, yeah, you did a good job of signing up what we gained from knowing what it sounded like to them. And there’s also sort of a challenge, or like a, there’s also a benefit to not knowing, I think so, too. Is there anything that you think is particular to this poem that makes it well suited for that recording? And it might explain why Williams would choose to read it and have it be recorded?\n(00:48:36)\tStephen Collis\tSo it might have been a poem that, he just liked how this one played when he read it a lot. He is like, I like how I get to play with the tensions and line breaks here, but he works in his ear or in his body, and, then there’s the, does this poem ring or chime off of, or evoke those other seafarer poems in some way? And then maybe he was enjoying that.\n(00:48:58)\tMaya Schwartz\tI asked Steve to say more about how he thought Williams might be evoking earlier seafarer poems.\n(00:49:05)\tStephen Collis\tWell, there’s such an interesting tradition there, because there’s the old English, Anglo-Saxon, really early poem, “The Seafarer” that is anonymous. We don’t know who composed it, but we have it.\nAnd Ezra Pound did a translation of it in the very early 20th century at some point there. And Pound’s translation is interesting for a couple of reasons. Like he sort of trimmed off any Christian references in it and sort of made it more of a, I don’t know, kinda like a pagan poem, I guess.\nBut he really, really did work so hard to get that kind of Anglo-Saxon field poem via word choice and via alliteration, and really making sure it was like a chewy, deep resonant poem in the mouth as it were. But I was thinking that the Williams poem maybe has more to do with H.D. than Pound. The three of those people, they knew each other since they were children, right?\n(00:49:58)\tStephen Collis\tThose three poets, they all went to school in Pennsylvania together, and maybe vaguely, they all – Pound dated H.D. for a tiny while. Maybe Williams dated her for a tiny bit too. So it’s, this whole kind of weird sort of high school romance thing behind their poetries’ love triangle. I know, it’s pretty hilarious. And they remain kind of frenemies their whole lives, right? And were very aware of each other their whole lives. So H.D. becomes famous as the quintessential imagist in that era, the poems are these really paired down small, compressed, refined visual entities.\nBut, so if, can I read you H.D.’s, like five or six lines long? This is the one I think of when I think of Williams’ “Seafairer”, I don’t hear Pound’s so much. I hear this poem, called “Oread,” which is like a sea nymph or a sea spirit of some kind. “Whirl up, sea— / whirl your pointed pines, / splash your great pines / on our rocks, / hurl your green over us, / cover us with your pools of fir.” This exact same scene as it were, where Williams poems is set where the sea and the land meet. But they’re also similarly kind of interpenetrating and taking on each other’s qualities. So in the H.D. poem, it’s really clear that the sea has land-like qualities. The sea has pines, the sea has rocks, right? So there’s this really kind of meshing of those, these supposed opposites. They do a bit of that in the Williams’ poem too.\n(00:51:33)\tMaya Schwartz\tThey both seem to have this, almost like they’re talking to the other thing in the poem, like a conversational —\n(00:51:38)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, , I think, I love that word, “ganet.” [Laughs]\nWilliam asking there, he kind of sounds like a ganet. I don’t know what a ganet sounds like for sure. But Williams kind sounds like a seabird. So there’s a little bit of that, but I think they’re both interested in this kind of, dare I say, kinda like a dialectical tension between these opposites sea and land. I think Williams is keyed more into a gendered opposition too.\nHe, in the “Seafairer,” he doesn’t refer to the sea as feminine, although that’s a, maybe, a traditional trope. But he definitely refers to the rocks as masculine. The rocks are a “he,” and they are given his voice to pronounce things at the end. And that feels to me kind of like, a Rejoinder Williams would have for H.D. I’m responding to your sea-ish poems and picking up that same imagery and tropes, but I’m kind of reasserting a kind of maleness. He’s less interested in, let’s say.\n(00:52:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah. Let’s talk about the, the last line. Yeah. how do you interpret that? “Without me nothing laughs.”\n(00:52:56)\tStephen Collis\tI mean, there’s this a this is where I was, I guess I’m getting with the gendered thing. There’s this kind of authority the rocks are claiming over the sea.\nThere it is. I, I who I’m the rocks without me, nothing laughs, you know, laughing is such an instinctual and again, embodied thing that we often don’t have a lot of control over. [Laughs] [Maya agrees]\nIt’s something that just ripples and bubbles up like the sea perhaps might be going too far here [laughs]\nBut the voice, the speaker of this poem is asserting this control. But it’s a weird thing to focus on, you know, to go from this, the awesome power of the sea to like, you know, no giggling. Yeah, you dare giggle in front of me until I tell you it’s okay to giggle here. Yeah. It’s, it’s, yeah. I don’t know. It’s, do, do you have a sense, do you have a take on that last line?\n(00:53:46)\tMaya Schwartz\tI don’t know. I feel like especially listening to him say it, but it sort of seems like it knows that things laugh without him.\n(00:53:58)\tStephen Collis\tYeah. Right behind his back.\n(00:53:59)\tMaya Schwartz\tYeah. It’s sort of like a –\n(00:54:02)\tStephen Collis\tYeah.\n(00:54:02)\tMaya Schwartz\tLike he has to say it, but it is still got this sort of like awareness.\n(00:54:07)\tStephen Collis\tI mean, it’s not a punchline as a word. But  I wonder if there is just a tiny little wink and nudge and irony there.\nJust laughter, you know? We’re talking about here. It’s not, it’s not this huge elemental, godsend storms and powers that are being invoked. Just a little self-control. Because it does have a nice book ending to the poem in general. Like, so you, especially the way he reads it, right. The sea will wash in and you get this infinite seeming pause before you get, but the rocks is a, there’s a real hard turn in the poem there to rocks. And we come back to it is, I  own the rocks at the end, but again, laughter’s not what you’re expecting at this point. No, it isn’t. It’s either a super assertion of power, but like, I even demand control of your you know, inadvertent muscle reflexes, or is it just, and maybe it’s both probably often in poetry, it’s a little bit of both.\n(00:55:10)\tStephen Collis\tThis sort of pathetic drop into just, eh, it’s just, you know, just don’t laugh at this. Just don’t take this as a joke. Right. Even though we all know it’s kind of a joke that I’m, that I’m striking a big pose here. Yeah. And my outrageous exaggerated pauses and jam is all part of that, you know, weirdness. That’s nothing about reading line breaks. What’s weird about leading rhyme breaks is, you know, sure, we hesitate and stumble when we speak, but to do it in this kind of almost rigid sense to always be pausing in your speech is drawing us an incredible attention to the performance of speaking words.\nSo there is a little bit of laughing at that, at the end, isn’t this ridiculous? And I wonder what that relationship would’ve been like in terms of like, did they just go, “oh, William Carl Williams is gonna read at nine/six, let’s go ask, see if we can record it”.\n[Soft music starts playing in the background]\nIs that, or I wonder what’s going on there? What are the relationships?\n(00:56:09)\tMaya Schwartz\tThey had both just graduated from Hunter College. And they had degrees in Greek Uhhuh, and they heard that Dylan Thomas was going to read Of course. And they were like, “it’d be sick to record ’em.”\nI don’t know where they got that idea from. And they went to, they didn’t record him at the “Y,” they tried to get in contact with him, and it was like a series of passing notes.\nAnd then they tracked him down to the Chelsea Hotel, [Stephen says “Oh my God.”] and they sort of used his drinking to, I think one of them called, they couldn’t get in touch with him, and one of them called him at like 4:30 in the morning when he was just coming back from [Stephen: Get out] a night out and, and [Stephen: drunk as hell] he agreed. And then he missed all there.\n(00:56:47)\tMaya Schwartz\tFinally he showed up and he was, they were drinking “madame” in a bar. And he agreed to, for them to record some of his poems, and he gave them a list and it wasn’t enough. They wanted something for the B-side. And he was like, “oh, I have this story: child’s Christmas in Wales.”\n(00:57:07)\tStephen Collis\tOh, that’s what it is.\n(00:57:08)\tMaya Schwartz\tAnd it was the popularity of that story. [Overlapping, Stephen: Yeah.] Which never would’ve been what it is without them recording it. And I guess it was a selling factor, and they were from having him able to get other people. I think they got Lawrence Olivier to read.\n(00:57:22)\tStephen Collis\tCool. It’s got a great history of that project, doesn’t it?\n(00:57:26)\tMaya Schwartz\tMm-Hmm.\n(00:57:26)\tMusic\t[Instrumental music starts playing in the background]\n(00:57:31)\tMaya Schwartz\tIn the interview with Wachtel, Mantelle and Holdridge strongly resist the notion that they discovered spoken word poetry. But they do acknowledge the role that Ceadmon played in not only creating an industry for recorded literature, but also in changing the way that poetry is written.\n(00:57:48)\tMarianne Mantell, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tI think that when we began in February of 1952 with Dylan Thomas, we were not creating the notion of spoken poetry, obviously poetry, and its, its reading anate the discovery of writing, or the invention of writing, I should say, by a long time.\nIt was poetry that people used to remember their history or to recreate their history as it were. Homer wasn’t written, Homer was spoken or sung. But I think that over the generations, with the particularly, with the invention of type, and the profusion of published books, the kind of disappearance of the sound began to take over.\nAnd although there was a movement towards poetry readings, which Dylan was part of, it was perhaps a symbiotic relationship. The market was there for our records, and the records created the market. And I do believe that once Caedmon became part of the mainstream, certainly of literary life, I think the writing of poetry changed.\nI don’t think that poets from the late fifties wrote in the same way they were too much aware of the prevalence of, of recorded, or at least of spoken poetry.\n(00:59:21)\tBarbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tReally, at least two generations have grown up knowing Caedmon records. They, strangers come up to me all the time and tell me what an impact those recordings made in their lives. And this was really the beginning of the spoken word revolution. This multimillion-dollar audio industry that we have now, owes its inception to two girls recording literature who felt that it was a contribution to understanding.\n(00:59:52)\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n(01:01:50)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Low electronic music plays] The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThis month’s episode was produced by Maya Schwartz and Michelle Levy. The SpokenWeb podcast team is made up of supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber,Yara Ajeeb, and Co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine MacLeod.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins in background] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n \n\n \n"],"score":2.4464734},{"id":"9647","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast, S1 Trailer, Welcome to SpokenWeb, 18 September 2019, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2019],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/e7410595-5a7c-4602-9105-dfab11d89b95/spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:05\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,043,270 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb_teaser_draft_2_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2019-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["(0:03)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\tCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n(00:16)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like?\n(00:19)\tRoy Kiyooka\tThose possibilities of utterance that is more than parochial.\n(00:25)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\n(00:28)\tG. McEwen\tPlace the needle in the proper groove and then just let the\nthe record speaks for itself.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tThis is SpokenWeb, a podcast about how literature sounds. I’m Hannah McGregor and every month I’ll be bringing you stories from across Canada that take us into the archives of our literary history.\n(00:50)\tDorothy Livesay\tMostly, I like to sort of go back over the years and trace the\ndifferent, uh, things.\n(00:56)\tHannah McGregor\tI hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca or wherever you get your\npodcasts.\n "],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549762342912,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.4464734},{"id":"9588","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E9, Producing Queer Media, 1 June 2020, Mcgregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/producing-queer-media/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah Mcgregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/f5b242ab-5995-4284-8650-19a92cd3d654/sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:42:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"41,006,437 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep9-producing-queer-media_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/producing-queer-media/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-06-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/49.282403/-123.108550\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.108550\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Constellations Audio. https://www.constellationsaudio.com/ \\n\\nGlass, Ira. “Freedom Fries.” This American Life 23 January 2015. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps/act-two \\n\\n“The Lesbian Show.” Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony. https://alotarchives.org/collection/lesbian-show . **Stacey also wished to issue the correction that The Lesbian Show episode discussed not baseball but track and field.\\n\\nMermaid Palace. https://mermaidpalace.org/ \\n\\nNoor, Poppy. “What is ‘sexy baby voice’? We spoke to a sociologist to find out more.” The Guardian 26 Feb 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/26/what-is-sexy-baby-voice-sociologist \\n\\nThe Queer Public Podcast. https://www.queerpublic.org/ \\n\\nEpisode banner image courtesy of the City of Vancouver Archives / BC Lesbian and Gay Archives. Item : 2018-020.4643 – International Women’s Day [The Lesbian Show ‘Dykes on Mykes’ banner]. https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/international-womens-day-the-lesbian-show-dykes-on-mykes-banner\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549772828672,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, there’s a name you might be familiar with — it’s mentioned every episode — that has so far been almost entirely off-mic. We’re talking about Stacey Copeland, SpokenWeb’s podcast project manager and supervising producer. Stacey helps to make this podcast possible, collaborating with SpokenWeb contributors from across the network to help conceptualize, produce, edit, publish, and promote each episode. But she’s also a scholar of sound in her own right, working on a PhD at Simon Fraser University. This month, SpokenWeb host Hannah McGregor sits down with Stacey to talk about what queer media sounds like, the feminist history of radio and podcast production, and how archival audio can help to build intergenerational intimacies.\n\nThis episode was a special cross-over between the SpokenWeb Podcast and\nSecret Feminist Agenda.\n\n00:00\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, there’s a name you might be familiar with—I mention it every episode—that has so far been almost entirely off-mic. I’m talking about Stacey Copeland, our podcast project manager and supervising producer. Stacey is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver. During her Master’s work in Communication and Culture, she co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto-based feminist community radio collective. And of course she helps us make this podcast every month. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, I sat down with Stacey—well, we Zoomed—to talk about what queer media sounds, the feminist history of radio and podcast production, and how archival audio can help to build intergenerational intimacies. Here’s me and Stacey with episode 9 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Producing Queer Media.” [Theme Music]\n \n\n01:55\tHannah McGregor:\tWhy don’t we start at the beginning with how you ended up being a person who researches radio and podcasts and sound?\n \n\n02:06\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. Well, I was born. No, I’m kidding.\n \n\n02:09\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n02:10\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, the way that I kind of look back on the start of everything was just the amount of media consumption I did as a teenager was a big start of it.\n \n\n02:21\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n02:22\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I was actually a YouTuber for awhile when I was a teenager, [Laughs] which got me into doing covers, like posting covers of me playing guitar online. And then eventually joining a couple of LGBTQ queer teen collaboration groups. So we’d have like, you know, I was Wednesday, and my friend Daniel was on Tuesdays, and we’d have like Micah on Fridays, and those kind of classic YouTube community forums. So–\n \n\n02:57\tHannah McGregor:\tSo as you say classic–\n \n\n02:58\tStacey Copeland:\tClassic. [Laughs]\n \n\n02:58\tHannah McGregor:\tI am, I am too, too old to know any of these things.\n \n\n03:01\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n03:02\tHannah McGregor:\t“Oh, is that how it works? Great.”\n \n\n03:04\tStacey Copeland:\tSo yeah, back when YouTube was more community-based and less lots of very high production videos, there was a lot of these like collab channels that people were part of and so that’s what really got me into being more creative with sound and with video. And then I actually wanted to go to university to make music videos, originally. I was way more a visual person than I was a sound person.\n \n\n03:29\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay.\n \n\n03:30\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd so I applied to the RTA School of Media, which is a four-year undergraduate program at Ryerson University in Toronto. And it kind of gives you a great background… Used to be called Radio and Television Arts now is Media Production because who would wanna only learn about radio and television these days.\n \n\n03:49\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n03:51\tHannah McGregor:\tThis is old-timey media for hipsters.\n \n\n03:53\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! [Laughs]\n \n\n03:53\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s what they teach you.\n \n\n03:55\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I joined that program and in the first year you actually take audio production courses as your first courses, rather than video. And so that kind of gave me a taste for radio production in particular, and I definitely caught the bug. And so from that point, I started taking all of the audio production courses, got an internship at Indie88, which is a radio station in Toronto in my fourth year, and started doing contract production with them for a couple of years ’cause they’re great. And then… It also brought in like my music interests and my–\n \n\n04:32\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n04:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–hipster identity at the time.\n \n\n04:35\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Do you have, do you have a sense of why it is the audio production ended up appealing to you so much when you had been so focused on the visual to start?\n \n\n04:45\tStacey Copeland:\tI think at that point it was just because it brought in my interest in music in ways that I found more intimate and more relatable and I got to work much more closely with bands and with artists than you get to as part of a much larger video production team. You really get to be one-on-one and close up in person with the people that you’re working with in a different way. And it’s kind of like this family when you’re working in a group of people on a, on an audio production, a very tight knit family. And so from that, I ended up working as a lab assistant and production staff at Ryerson for, for awhile, for about a year after my undergrad and that gave me the teaching bug. And so I applied for grad school ’cause I said, “Well, how can I do this forever?”\n \n\n05:33\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n05:34\tHannah McGregor:\tThat is how so many of us get here.\n \n\n05:36\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! So that’s what really brought me into doing my Master’s at Ryerson York in ComCult–\n \n\n05:42\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n05:43\tStacey Copeland:\t–which brought in the teaching–\n \n\n05:45\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat’s ComCult?\n \n\n05:46\tStacey Copeland:\tComCult, right. Communication and culture.\n \n\n05:49\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay. [Laughs]\n \n\n05:50\tStacey Copeland:\tThat program was great. It really introduced me more to theory and awoke my inner feminist a lot more–\n \n\n05:57\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n05:58\tStacey Copeland:\t–in thinking about my audio production and my approach to it. And so that’s why I ended up deep diving into feminist theory and sound and how they relate and how we can think about it. And–\n \n\n06:10\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:11\tStacey Copeland:\t–what does… What is the experience that women are having with their voices in audio production? So that’s what I ended up doing for my MA and then of course, PhD work now is just the next–\n \n\n06:21\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:21\tStacey Copeland:\t–chapter.\n \n\n06:22\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Ahaha…literally and figuratively.\n \n\n06:24\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah.\n \n\n06:25\tHannah McGregor:\tI… It’s so interesting to me the ways that people stumble across feminist theory for the first time, including those of us who, who might have sort of, looking back, been like, “Ah, I was a latent feminist that whole time, but didn’t have the language to articulate myself as such” or didn’t have any particular sense of what feminism meant beyond, like, “I am a woman and think I should be allowed to do things.”\n \n\n06:47\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n06:48\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is, you know, a legitimate standpoint for feminism. My first encounter with feminist theory came through a theology course–\n \n\n06:56\tStacey Copeland:\tInteresting.\n \n\n06:57\tHannah McGregor:\t–I took at the University of Edinburgh and I read Judith Butler for the first time, like, against the Gospel of Mark. So it was just this real, like, like it was this weird way that I sort of entered into this theory, but then it’s like, it gets ahold of you and you’re like… I don’t know. I remember after reading Gender Trouble for the first time that it was the first theory book that I had been desperate to tell everybody about.\n \n\n07:21\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n07:22\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, that it broken open my brain so entirely that I just wanted to grab everybody and be like, “Did you hear?! Gender’s a performance!”\n \n\n07:29\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:30\tHannah McGregor:\t“I had no idea! But I’m so excited by that!” So, let’s talk a little bit more about gender and voice.\n \n\n07:36\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah.\n \n\n07:37\tHannah McGregor:\tLike what, what does… I mean, I know, but I’m going to go ahead and ask–\n \n\n07:40\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:40\tHannah McGregor:\t–the naive question: what did the gender and voice have to do with each other?\n \n\n07:44\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. So… [Nervous Laugh]\n \n\n07:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:48\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s a casual question.\n \n\n07:50\tHannah McGregor:\tAren’t we all just people? Maybe?\n \n\n07:52\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n07:53\tHannah McGregor:\tAt the end of the day?\n \n\n07:53\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I mean, Judith Butler is a great, a great place to start. That was definitely one of my foundational texts, too. And one that got me real riled up… Because Butler doesn’t talk a ton about the voice or–\n \n\n08:06\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n08:07\tStacey Copeland:\t–about sound as part of our construction of gender. Which is fair, that was not very in fashion at the time, you might say.\n \n\n08:15\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n08:15\tStacey Copeland:\tI know my supervisor Milena Droumeva says this often that we’ve really hit this sonic turn–\n \n\n08:20\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n08:21\tStacey Copeland:\t–in the academy and in humanities–\n \n\n08:23\tHannah McGregor:\tMmm.\n \n\n08:23\tStacey Copeland:\t–and social sciences. And what that means is we’re really getting awoken to this idea of how our voices carry so much of our identity and our experience. And it’s often… If people aren’t seeing us in person for the first time, it’s the first thing they notice about us. And if they’re meeting us in person for the first time, it’s the second thing they notice about us. So it’s something that really changes people’s perceptions. And when you start to think about what your voice says about you, it also kind of opens up these questions of the different voices that we have in different contexts as well, and how gendered–\n \n\n09:08\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n09:08\tStacey Copeland:\t–that can often be. So part of my MA work was looking at particularly women’s experiences with their own voices in radio, in Toronto, and how they felt about it. Did they think it was high-pitched? Did they think it was low-pitched? Did they feel like they had a radio voice? What is a radio voice anyways? And what I found was for the most part, women working in the radio industry do have lower or what would be considered almost androgynous registers and pitches in their voices.\n \n\n09:43\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n09:44\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd they may not necessarily present their voice that way in person, but they do when they’re on the microphone. And I mean, even as scholars or as speakers, we often do that, too. We have a different vocal presentation that often–\n \n\n09:57\tHannah McGregor:\t100 percent.\n \n\n09:58\tStacey Copeland:\t–skews lower, which also translates to skewing as more masculine presenting, at least in Western culture.\n \n\n10:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n10:06\tStacey Copeland:\tSo even just there–\n \n\n10:07\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n10:07\tStacey Copeland:\t–we can think about some of the gendered aspects of voice.\n \n\n10:10\tHannah McGregor:\tOne of the many terrible jobs that I had as an undergraduate was working for a Rogers call centre.\n \n\n10:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMm!\n \n\n10:18\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I was maybe six months into that job before I noticed that when I was on calls with men, I pitched my voice a full half octave higher. [Pitches Voice Higher] Like, it just went right up here, like, “Hi, my name is Hannah and I’m calling from Rogers Wireless.”\n \n\n10:32\tStacey Copeland:\tYep.\n \n\n10:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I just like… I, it was, it was deeply unconscious and my voice has pitched lower, I think both naturally and through training as I’ve aged.\n \n\n10:42\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n10:43\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s fairly common. In singing, we learn this, that our voices don’t sort of fully settle into their lifelong register until our thirties. And I started off singing much… Like I was a soprano when I was a kid and I sing bass now. But I will never forget a feminist mentor of mine telling me that I would have less difficulty in the classroom than other women my age because I had a naturally lower voice.\n \n\n11:06\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n11:06\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that it’s like both as simple and as complicated as that, that when your voice is lower, it registers as more masculine, which is synonymous with more authoritative. And so it will be easier to make people listen to you and take you seriously because your voice is lower.\n \n\n11:19\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah! And this is a common experience. Like–\n \n\n11:22\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n11:22\tStacey Copeland:\t–when you have these conversations with women, it’s often something that they have experienced in one way or another or have talked to another friend about having this experience.\n \n\n11:32\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n11:32\tStacey Copeland:\tSo we can think of… I know a lot of people probably watched Love Is Blind recently [Laughs] on Netflix. [Laughs]\n \n\n11:39\tHannah McGregor:\tI did not, but continue your point.\n \n\n11:40\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh.\n \n\n11:42\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n11:42\tStacey Copeland:\tAs a, as a nerdy, like, gender and voice scholar, I was like, “Whoa!”\n \n\n11:46\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, oh…\n \n\n11:47\tStacey Copeland:\t“A show where they meet and they don’t see each other in person? They just have to fall in love with their voice??”\n \n\n11:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Okay, yep. I see why this would have interested you.\n \n\n11:56\tStacey Copeland:\tBut there’s this one character and there’s a great article online when the show first came out by Anne Karpf who’s also a feminist voice and radio scholar and critic [sic: the article was by Poppy Noor, in which she interviewed Anne Karpf]. And it was talking about how this one particular character on the show actually has this sort of baby voice that she puts on whenever she’s–\n \n\n12:16\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n12:16\tStacey Copeland:\t–speaking to the person that she’s dating. And it actually pitches more baby and higher when they’re in person, rather than when she’s behind the screen. So…\n \n\n12:29\tHannah McGregor:\tHuh!\n \n\n12:30\tStacey Copeland:\tRight there’s like this very fascinating demonstration for everyone watching Love Is Blind in the way that we change our vocal performance and interaction depending on who we’re talking to because she wasn’t doing this to her voice when she was just talking to the other women in the social off time that they had, it was only in these particular situations. And so it brought up these really great conversations online around baby voice–\n \n\n12:58\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n12:59\tStacey Copeland:\t–and the long history of that voice. We think of characters like Marilyn Monroe.\n \n\n13:03\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:04\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd why do we think that’s sexy? Why does anyone think baby voice is sexy, right?\n \n\n13:08\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n13:10\tStacey Copeland:\tSo it brings up these really interesting conversations around how we identify what’s sexy, what’s masculine, what’s feminine.\n \n\n13:18\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:19\tStacey Copeland:\tIs it a way to be more submissive in having this kind of youthful sounding voice? And, and it comes–\n \n\n13:26\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:26\tStacey Copeland:\t–into biology, like you said. As we age, we tend to have lower voice. And that also translates to–\n \n\n13:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–our understanding of what voices have authority, as well, both men–\n \n\n13:39\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:39\tStacey Copeland:\t–and people who are older. And so we then hit this like youth demo using baby voice to be sexy because it’s a little submissive. And then also having vocal fry, which I know I have a ton of–\n \n\n13:51\tHannah McGregor:\t[Exasperated Sigh in Agreement]\n \n\n13:51\tStacey Copeland:\t–because we’re, our voices–\n \n\n13:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Exasperated Sigh]\n \n\n13:53\tStacey Copeland:\t–are trying to hit those lower registers to seem authoritative.\n \n\n13:57\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm!\n \n\n13:58\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n13:58\tHannah McGregor:\tI…could scream about vocal fry until the cats come home.\n \n\n14:01\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n14:01\tHannah McGregor:\tOne of my early sort of personal encounters with how much I was gonna fixate on gendered voices in podcasting was Marcelle my co-, the co-host of Witch, Please and I were invited onto CBC Edmonton AM–\n \n\n14:18\tStacey Copeland:\tOkay.\n \n\n14:19\tHannah McGregor:\t–to talk about gender and podcasting. In particular, to talk about why there are so many fewer women in podcasting than men. Though, that has change–… I mean, this was like a good five or six years ago.\n \n\n14:29\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n14:29\tHannah McGregor:\tThat demographic is shifting decisively.\n \n\n14:32\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, hot conversation in like 2014.\n \n\n14:34\tHannah McGregor:\tYes.\n \n\n14:35\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n14:35\tHannah McGregor:\tSo it was a hot conversation at the time. It was like, podcasting is 75% men, what’s going on, what are the barriers to access? And so we came on this radio show to talk about this. And we were talking about how one of the barriers to access for women is the policing of women’s voices.\n \n\n14:49\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n14:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThe way that women talk is always wrong. And that… We were talking about that iconic This American Life story, “If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say, SAY IT ALL IN CAPS,” [sic: should read “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS”] where they talk about how the top form of hate mail they get is about the voices of their young women producers.\n \n\n15:04\tStacey Copeland:\t[Sadly] Yeah.\n \n\n15:04\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, nothing makes their listeners as mad as the sound of a young woman with vocal fry.\n \n\n15:08\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:08\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, just makes them lose their fucking minds. And we were talking about how there’s sort of this pseudoscientific concern-trolling attached to it.\n \n\n15:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n15:17\tHannah McGregor:\tLike, “Oh, well, it’s bad for your voice. And that’s why you need to stop. Vocal fry wrecks your voice. We’re really just worried about you.” Which every woman has experienced somebody using this kind of like pseudomedical concern-trolling to–\n \n\n15:31\tStacey Copeland:\tGaslighting. [Laughs]\n \n\n15:32\tHannah McGregor:\t–to control us. Ga- precisely. It is absolutely gaslighting with a thin veneer of the medical on top of it.\n \n\n15:37\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:39\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd the host was like, “Oh, well actually vocal fry is extremely bad for your voice, though.” And then just launched into like, mansplaining vocal fry to us. We like lost our goddamn minds. [Laughs] What is happening here?? Anyway, all of our listeners listened to the segment and then were really mean to him on Twitter all day.\n \n\n15:57\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n15:58\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd it was very satisfying.\n \n\n16:00\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. I mean, vocal fry is really fascinating that way. And you have to ask the question well, who is being, you know, bothered by vocal fry? What’s the demographic behind that? Because it’s very unlikely that it’s younger women who also have vocal fry. There is–\n \n\n16:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, we’re not mad. [Laughs]\n \n\n16:19\tStacey Copeland:\t–the argument that it is a millennial and Gen Y, just, vocalization the same way that we had Valley Girl as a kind of slang and vocalization in generations before us. So, there’s… Part of what I found in my MA work was that a lot of younger women actually really enjoy the sound of vocal fry–\n \n\n16:40\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n16:40\tStacey Copeland:\t–because to them, it sounds like them. It’s, it’s more–\n \n\n16:43\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n16:43\tStacey Copeland:\t–like having a conversation with a friend, rather than a, a formal radio broadcast presenter, you know?\n \n\n16:50\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. And I wonder if the embrace of things like vocal fry is one of the sonic differences between radio and podcasting, that podcasting has sort of emerged as a space where in fact, because there’s a younger demographic who are hosting sometimes, and because there’s a sort of casualness behind a lot of the recording settings, that you are more likely to hear vocal fry on a podcast than on the radio and that becomes part of what makes it feel like a cozier medium.\n \n\n17:14\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm. Yeah, and it’s easier for vocal fry to come across, too, because there’s not as much high compression on the voice. You’re maybe listening or most likely listening on headphones versus on a blasting car stereo.\n \n\n17:28\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n17:29\tStacey Copeland:\tSo even when you maybe have a vocal fry voice—I’ve had this experience—and are doing a radio broadcast, it doesn’t necessarily come through because it’s smoothed out and compressed, versus on a podcast where we kind of let things breathe a little bit more because it is more conversational.\n \n\n17:46\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:47\tStacey Copeland:\tSo I think podcasting, yeah, it’s definitely more conversational, but it’s also produced differently. There’s a different–\n \n\n17:54\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:54\tStacey Copeland:\t–logic behind it often.\n \n\n17:56\tHannah McGregor:\tUgh, I love that. Okay, let’s fast forward now to that, to that next chapter. Tell me about what your research is about now.\n \n\n18:04\tStacey Copeland:\tOh, gosh. So I just presented my, and defended my, proposal a couple weeks ago. So…it’s fairly fresh in my mind.\n \n\n18:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n18:13\tStacey Copeland:\tBut– [Laughs]\n \n\n18:13\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd still in, in that pure form before you’ve actually started trying to write it.\n \n\n18:17\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, exactly.\n \n\n18:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhen it’s just a, just a perfect idea.\n \n\n18:19\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I’m in the ethics stage now and quickly realizing how much work I have ahead of me in the next year.\n \n\n18:27\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n18:27\tStacey Copeland:\tBut it’s exciting. So, basically, the, the one-liner or the elevator pitch version is–\n \n\n18:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n18:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–I’m, I’m looking to ask the question, how is gender and sexuality communicated through audio media?\n \n\n18:41\tHannah McGregor:\tMm!\n \n\n18:41\tStacey Copeland:\tSpecifically asking that question in relation to audio produced by queer women in different decades. So the two kind of foundational shows that I’m looking at are The Lesbian Show, which was on Vancouver’s co-op radio in the 1970s, 1979, all the way into the early 2000s. So quite a few decades on air.\n \n\n19:07\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n19:08\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd then Dykes on Mykes, which is a community radio show out of Montreal, CKUT. And these are kind of my foundational shows of thinking about the production of audio and radio by queer women for queer women talking about queer identity. And from these shows, the goal is to create an intergenerational analysis where I interview these, these particular producers and then make linkages to contemporary podcasts that are making content either connected to or influenced by or reflecting back to these, these foundational shows. So for instance, I’m sure a lot of people, if they’re into queer podcasting or just like more intimate feminist podcasting, have listened to The Heart.\n \n\n20:00\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n20:01\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s a great podcast. But what a lot of people don’t know unless they dig deeper is that podcast, The Heart, was actually a community radio show audio smut on CKUT at the same–\n \n\n20:13\tHannah McGregor:\tHuh!\n \n\n20:14\tStacey Copeland:\t–community radio station as Dykes on Mykes. So making these kind of linkages to where are we finding these groups of feminist and queer community who are making audio either in the same spaces or together or are influencing each other and how does that transition from historical understandings of community radio, and how that was produced,–\n \n\n20:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n20:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–into podcasting today? So with shows like The Heart… There’s another great one, Asking For It, by the same collective, which is Mermaid Palace. And… There’s quite a few out there there’s, there’s Queer Public, which is another great podcast out there, also someone from Montreal CKUT-background who’s producing that. So making these kind of connections early on made me wonder what the intergenerational overlap is in–\n \n\n21:04\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–the experience and underlying desires in producing queer media as queer women.\n \n\n21:11\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:11\tStacey Copeland:\tWho is it for? What’s the intention behind it? What does it sound like?\n \n\n21:16\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n21:17\tStacey Copeland:\tWhat’s queer media anyways? And what, what is that when you’re doing it on the radio, when both queer politics and feminist movements have this very long history of visual metaphors, of visibility, of coming out, right? What does it mean when that’s being done only through sound?\n \n\n21:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n21:36\tStacey Copeland:\tSo that’s what I’m really interested in exploring over the next year, anyways.\n \n\n21:40\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n21:40\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. I love this focus on the intergenerational, which is such a necessary and often fraught conversation when we are talking about, I think, both feminist and queer, intergenerational solidarity and divisions.\n \n\n21:54\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm!\n \n\n21:55\tHannah McGregor:\tI’ve been talking a lot with other queer and feminist friends about this feeling sometimes that, I think because we are so invested in a constant movement towards greater liberation, that there is a tendency to, as I usually put it, eat our mothers.\n \n\n22:17\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. That’s, that’s a great way to say it.\n \n\n22:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is to say that in order to articulate our greater liberation, it often involves a kind of disavowal of those who came before us. And we’re seeing that playing out in Vancouver in all kinds of complex ways, especially around the surprisingly [Laughs] vocal TERF movement in this city and the way that a trans inclusive queerness and a trans inclusive feminism feels this need to break with what is not necessarily, but it’s often seen as, a generational divide. I think that’s important to, to distinguish: that it isn’t necessarily a generational divide, but that’s often how we understand it as a like, “Oh, those are like… Lesbians from the ’70s hated trans women. And so we distinguish ourselves from that generation.” And the figuring out ways to find forms of continuity and to build dialogue, like, intergenerational dialogue feels like really vital work…right now to try to sort of, I don’t know, figure out how we can find different ways to relate to the generations who came before us that are not a sort of burn it down, build something new out of the ashes. [Laughs]\n \n\n23:27\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm! I mean, that’s a big part of the issue with the waves metaphor in feminism, that–\n \n\n23:33\tHannah McGregor:\tMm!\n \n\n23:33\tStacey Copeland:\t–everything comes in waves, but we have this first, second, and third, and fourth, and arguably fifth, [Laughs] at this point in the way that we’re micro-breaking it down into almost standpoints or initiatives. So…\n \n\n23:46\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n23:47\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, part of what I’m really fascinating in, in doing is taking a step back and asking, “Well, we can’t just simply dismiss all of the work that lesbian feminists in particular did in the ’70s.” Yes, there are awful stories, there are dark histories, but we need to open those up and see what else was going on. Well, why was this happening at that time? What are the other stories? What were some of the wins that were coming out of that? And how, how was that politics influencing everyone who came in the decade or wave after, and then now, as well, when we start to see this rising of queer feminist work and people taking up even lesbian feminist and lesbian separatist identities—which I found very fascinating—or using the term “sapphist” for instance.\n \n\n24:39\tHannah McGregor:\tHaha!\n \n\n24:40\tStacey Copeland:\tRight?\n \n\n24:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThat I’ve never come across.\n \n\n24:41\tStacey Copeland:\tOh.\n \n\n24:41\tHannah McGregor:\tBut…\n \n\n24:41\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s new. If you go on Tumblr…\n \n\n24:42\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Ah, Tumblr. Fucking Tumblr. Everything I know about gender and sexuality, I definitely learned from Tumblr use.\n \n\n24:50\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] Yeah, so the term sapphist, it’s there. And it’s making a comeback, which is fascinating to me. So there is this kind of desire I think people have of looking back, of trying to understand where these movements came from and reconnecting to feminists who maybe are from older demographics. And this… You know, it’s not unheard of. When we think of the way that we interact with our grandparents or elders in our lives, this should also be happening within queer and feminist communities–\n \n\n25:24\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n25:24\tStacey Copeland:\t–so that we can understand what people went through and what people experienced before we got to the point we’re at now.\n \n\n25:32\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n25:32\tStacey Copeland:\tHow did we come to a moment where we have, you know, queer same sex marriage in Canada when we have something like the Me Too movement that didn’t just spring up overnight?\n \n\n25:43\tHannah McGregor:\tNo. Okay, I want to talk more about what queer production sounds like, but just a brief aside about intergenerational and queer ancestors: have you watched A Secret Love yet?\n \n\n25:55\tStacey Copeland:\tNoo, it’s on my, it’s on my, my list on Netflix.\n \n\n25:58\tHannah McGregor:\t[Emotional Exhalations] Hoo, whoa. I mean, I strongly recommend it and I also cried so much.\n \n\n26:06\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah!\n \n\n26:07\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s…\n \n\n26:08\tStacey Copeland:\tMy social media feed is full of people talking about how emotional it is. And I’m like, I need to be in a space where I’m prepared to watch this.\n \n\n26:13\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, you gotta be ready. I was not ready. I thought it was just going to be like fun, like, “Ooh, A League of Their Own.”\n \n\n26:20\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n26:20\tHannah McGregor:\t“Like, look at this, old-timey lesbians!” But it was a full on like five Kleenex situation.\n \n\n26:24\tStacey Copeland:\tMm.\n \n\n26:25\tHannah McGregor:\tIt was, it was intense. But also really exciting to get even this micro history told through a queer lens. I was chatting with a friend—a friend of the show—Cynara Geissler about it afterwards. And she was like, “Isn’t it interesting that the two women being described met in Moose Jaw and moved to Chicago in the ’40s because it was safer.” And she was like, “What narratives do we hear about Chicago in the ’40s? It’s never that it is a safe place to be.” It’s always articulated as this like, den of iniquity, this wildly dangerous city. But all of our definitions of like what makes a city safe are really, really different when you’re like…a couple of lesbians in the ’40s–\n \n\n27:10\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n27:10\tHannah McGregor:\t–doing something that is literally illegal. You know, all of a sudden the big city becomes safe for you in a different way. And it was just like, even in that small register, the way that we understand reality, historically, becomes so, so different when we’re offered different lenses on it. Anyway.\n \n\n27:27\tStacey Copeland:\tNo, completely. So I–\n \n\n27:28\tHannah McGregor:\tRec-, recommend.\n \n\n27:29\tStacey Copeland:\t–I’ve listened to quite a bit of The Lesbian Show so far. There’s a big collection of it as part of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, which is an initiative by Elise Chenier here at Simon Fraser. And then there’s a new big collection at the Vancouver Archives, which I’m very excited about. But listening back to these shows, there is so much fascinating history and interesting, very queer sound moments like sexual innuendo commentary over a lesbian baseball game [sic: should read “track and field”] at the Gay Games, you know?\n \n\n28:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n28:06\tStacey Copeland:\tOr a tap dancing competition on air. [Laughs] And then like…\n \n\n28:12\tHannah McGregor:\tSo many of the lesbians I know love tap dancing. [Jokingly] Can you explain that to me?\n \n\n28:16\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I don’t know.\n \n\n28:17\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n28:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMaybe it’s connected to this ’70s and ’80s fad.\n \n\n28:21\tHannah McGregor:\tOkay, great.\n \n\n28:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI don’t know, right? And then other moments like Valentine’s call-in shows where women could call in anonymously and the host would read out a love letter to the person that they were having a crush on if they wanted to stay anonymous. And so we get all of these kinds of historical points and we also get a lot of discussions around like working class lesbians and Black feminist lesbianism. And they also do discussions on global issues and transgender issues and solidarities, as well, throughout the LGBTQ community and the poor community, because they were also rooted in community radio stations.\n \n\n29:03\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n29:04\tStacey Copeland:\tSo making those kind of connections and hearing those stories really does question and rewrite the histories that we understand.\n \n\n29:11\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s so exciting. History’s great, right? What a fun discipline.\n \n\n29:15\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n29:15\tHannah McGregor:\tMedia history is the best. So, you mentioned that you’re interested in, like, what does queer media sound like?\n \n\n29:21\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n29:21\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does queer production sound like? And that was like… It really struck me even when you were describing like how podcasting and radio sound differently because they’re produced differently.\n \n\n29:31\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n29:32\tHannah McGregor:\tSo have you started to hypothesize what queer production sounds like?\n \n\n29:37\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, it’s tough, but there’s already some examples that have come out of my kind of initial research into the subject. And some of them are when you’re looking back at community radio, those moments where you can imagine someone flipping through the dial and then all of a sudden they’re hearing two lesbians talk very sexually about another woman playing baseball [sic: should read “track and field”]. That kind of a moment is really, very queer, very queer–\n \n\n30:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n30:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that–\n \n\n30:05\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n30:05\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that isn’t the same as podcasting because podcasting, in contrast, someone’s going to be choosing to listen to that show.\n \n\n30:12\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n30:13\tStacey Copeland:\tSo then how are those produced in a more… To create a more queer audio experience? And I think shows like Asking For It that Kaitlin Prest and the collective at Mermaid Palace are, are making–\n \n\n30:25\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n30:26\tStacey Copeland:\t–are great example of some of the queer feminist work that we’re going to see moving forward where we have lesbian, queer, and feminist protagonists–\n \n\n30:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n30:36\tStacey Copeland:\t–and taking on more difficult subjects, like same-sex relationship abuse and domestic abuse, but in ways that really bring us into the spaces in new ways. So it’s not just voice-over conversation or a journalistic style of production. It’s actually taking us into those rooms with the couple…\n \n\n30:58\tHannah McGregor:\tMm.\n \n\n30:59\tStacey Copeland:\tHearing both sounds of violence but also sounds of intimacy and sex in a podcast between two women, right?\n \n\n31:10\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n31:10\tStacey Copeland:\tCreates these very queer audio experiences that we aren’t used to hearing. And really, podcasting is perfect for creating that kind of experience in contrast to radio, because little coos from a woman, for instance, or soft crying is something that’s much harder to communicate because of the compression and way that radio is broadcasted in contrast to a podcast.\n \n\n31:36\tHannah McGregor:\tOh, that’s, that’s super interesting. I just finished listening to the second season of Within the Wires.\n \n\n31:42\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm, yeah!\n \n\n31:43\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is also–\n \n\n31:43\tStacey Copeland:\tI’ve started listening to that. It’s so good!\n \n\n31:45\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s, it’s really good. And the second season has all of these examples of both crying and also intentional silences where the narrator is supposed to be recording these audio guides to art that was created by her former lover. And she begins to cry and then just stops talking for lengths of time. And as I was, was walking around and listening and I was like, “Oh, this is impossible in any other medium.” Because you can’t… There’s an intentionality to listening and a kind of duration to listening with podcasting where like, I will sit here and listen to a solid minute of silence because I understand you have put it here intentionally.\n \n\n32:27\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n32:27\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd that will register to me. Whereas if you’re flipping… [Laughs] I mean, I imagine if you’re flipping through the radio, ’cause when have I flipped through the radio in my adult life? The answer is zero times.\n \n\n32:36\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n32:37\tHannah McGregor:\tBut I imagine if you’re flipping through the radio and come across a station where there is a minute of silence, you will assume it’s just not a station and keep going.\n \n\n32:44\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, exactly. You’ll assume something’s going wrong and go somewhere else.\n \n\n32:47\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, Yeah.\n \n\n32:49\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah. Yeah, moments like that. And there’s also work with groups like Constellations. I don’t know if you’ve heard of, of Constellations, but it was originally an installation—sound art installation—in Toronto and then it was put online as a series of podcasts. And it’s really sound artists and podcasts and audio producers making these pieces that kind of push the boundaries in the way that we understand radio and podcast production and asking–\n \n\n33:20\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n33:20\tStacey Copeland:\t–really intimate questions. So one of the episodes, for instance, takes us into a session where the audio producer is learning how to sing and voc-…and vocalize. But it takes us into these very intimate spaces in a way that sounds quite different because we’re hearing the room, we’re hearing overlap of time, so I think that’s another way that we can think about it: a queering of audio and queering of media is playing with our sense of time and space–\n \n\n33:50\tHannah McGregor:\tMm, mhm.\n \n\n33:51\tStacey Copeland:\t–in a way that we don’t necessarily hear in traditional, linear, radio formats, right? It’s ’cause–\n \n\n33:57\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n33:57\tStacey Copeland:\t–radio is traditionally produced as very linear: you tune in at six o’clock, it’s going to be the six o’clock news. You tune in at five, we’ve got the traffic, right?\n \n\n34:08\tHannah McGregor:\tYep!\n \n\n34:09\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd it’s cyclical as well. So it’s always pre-produced and cyclical every day. Versus podcasting can really play with those senses of time and space in a new way.\n \n\n34:18\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. So this… Listening to you talk about production in this way… I mean, you are a great example of a scholar who comes into their work with a kind of experiential knowledge because of your background in audio production.\n \n\n34:33\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n34:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd I imagine your knowledge of audio production heightens your ability to understand what you’re hearing and the kinds of deliberate choices that people are making when they are producing radio or podcasts. But I wonder if sort of before SpokenWeb and the other work we’re doing together, if you had been thinking about, you know, sharing some of your research as a podcast, like, is that an impulse that you have given that you both work on and think about sound and are also a producer yourself?\n \n\n35:05\tStacey Copeland:\tYeah, and it’s hard. [Laughs] So…\n \n\n35:07\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n35:09\tStacey Copeland:\tIt’s very, very… It’s a very different experience ’cause when you’re writing academic work, you’re writing with an academic audience in mind versus when–\n \n\n35:17\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:17\tStacey Copeland:\t–you’re creating something like a podcast or a radio documentary, you really want to make it as accessible as possible. And that can often be difficult to do–\n \n\n35:26\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:27\tStacey Copeland:\t–as you know, from making this–\n \n\n35:28\tHannah McGregor:\tUh-huh\n \n\n35:28\tStacey Copeland:\t–show and working with SpokenWeb. So I actually… I attempted to do that for a first time during my MA. So I made a three-piece radio documentary that went with my MA work. I think the first part is really good and I think then I got too heady and it’s really still–\n \n\n35:46\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n35:46\tStacey Copeland:\t–for an academic audience in the second–\n \n\n35:48\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n35:48\tStacey Copeland:\t–and third part. But my, my goal is to try and do that again with my PhD work.\n \n\n35:53\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n35:53\tStacey Copeland:\tSo radio documentary, audio documentary is part of the process that I’m going through. So I’ll be keeping an audio diary as a feminist reflexive method–\n \n\n36:04\tHannah McGregor:\tYes.\n \n\n36:04\tStacey Copeland:\t–throughout my research process. So after each interview, I’ll sit down with my microphone and kind of detox and have a bit of a–\n \n\n36:11\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n36:12\tStacey Copeland:\t–confessional moment and work through my material that way. And so I am trying to think through, and I think working with SpokenWeb and thinking about the way that we can translate academic work into something that’s more publicly accessible and just more enjoyable, to be honest. Sometimes reading–\n \n\n36:30\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm!\n \n\n36:31\tStacey Copeland:\t–a lot of large manuscripts and articles can, can be a lot if you want to grasp a subject. I know I’m more of an oral learner. So thinking about the ways that we can use some of these production techniques, and especially when you’re thinking about sound and in something intimate, like queer experience and queer identity, how can I marry these two things together in a way that really makes it useful and enjoyable and also informative, right?\n \n\n36:59\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n36:59\tStacey Copeland:\tAt the end of the day, getting those ideas across is a big part of it.\n \n\n37:02\tHannah McGregor:\tYep.\n \n\n37:02\tStacey Copeland:\tAnd so I do think SpokenWeb is doing some interesting work that way.\n \n\n37:06\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd it’s also interesting, as part of working on this project, to see the places that are challenges and the places that come more easily and maybe whose work lends itself to that kind of translation or mobilization more readily, right? Because there are, there are different kinds and levels of translation that are required for different kinds of fields. And there is… I, I’ve been finding myself… I’m trying to relearn how to write right now–\n \n\n37:37\tStacey Copeland:\tMm.\n \n\n37:38\tHannah McGregor:\t–because I was rigorously trained how to write over a decade of education in a very particular way with a very narrow audience in mind and have come to the conclusion that I personally don’t particularly want to write to that audience. I mean, I don’t want to exclude that audience either, but I don’t want that to be my primary audience. But the ease with which I produce scholarly prose at this point is such that it is like physically difficult [Laughs] to produce anything else. But I have to stop myself and be like, “Nope, okay, nobody understands any of these words and also that sentence was 14 lines long. Why are you doing this?”\n \n\n38:18\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n38:19\tHannah McGregor:\tA friend of mine once said, “I write as though I’m challenging myself to fit every preposition into every sentence.”\n \n\n38:25\tHannah and Stacey:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n38:26\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich was rude, but true. And podcasting for me, especially sort of over these different projects, has been a way to try to find a different voice as a scholar. That rather than starting with the work and then trying to translate it, by actually doing the thinking through this medium I’m finding the ability to, to articulate a different kind of scholarly voice with a different audience and a different conversation in mind. So I love that idea of like keeping the audio journal as you go, of, of building sound into the process itself so that it’s not a sort of “once all the research is done and I’ve written all of the papers and I know everything and exactly how I want it to sound, then I will translate it.” It’s like, how do I actually think when I think out loud?\n \n\n39:17\tStacey Copeland:\tMhm.\n \n\n39:17\tHannah McGregor:\tBecause we think differently, don’t we, when we think out loud?\n \n\n39:21\tStacey Copeland:\tI mean, I know I do. Yeah. And sound does bring this entirely new element into it. Part of the other sound element that I’m bringing into my process is actually playing archival clips for my interviewees to kind of evoke–\n \n\n39:35\tHannah McGregor:\tMm…\n \n\n39:35\tStacey Copeland:\t–some of those memories and experiences back. And I think that’s part of what excited me about the SpokenWeb project, too, is thinking about how can we use sound archives in new ways? How can we take all of these fascinating stories and voices out of places that are usually exclusively for researchers and librarians and archivists and bring them to the public, take them out of the dusty box and into–\n \n\n40:02\tHannah McGregor:\t[Laughs]\n \n\n40:02\tStacey Copeland:\t–the digital space, right, and create this kind of time overlap. So there is some, some relationship between maybe me listening to a lesbian’s experience in 1982 when I’m listening in 2020. And I think–\n \n\n40:18\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n40:19\tStacey Copeland:\t–we have, you know, this very long history of sound recordings, not being archived properly, not being given the same value, but we’re seeing a huge change in the last couple years and it’s definitely exciting times for sound scholars.\n \n\n40:33\tHannah McGregor:\tDo you think that there’s anything behind this, this sonic turn in the humanities? Why are we suddenly taking sound seriously?\n \n\n40:39\tStacey Copeland:\t[Laughs] I mean, this is a great question. There’s a couple theories behind it, one of them being that we’re finally really used to the visual, we’re bombarded with it every day, the novelty’s kind of wearing off. And so we’re actually finding ourselves retreating into sound in new ways that we never had before. We’re wearing headphones as we commute to curate our own spaces, to listen–\n \n\n41:04\tHannah McGregor:\tMhm.\n \n\n41:05\tStacey Copeland:\t–and create these experiences for ourselves in ways that we never had before. Listening used to be very communal, now it’s very personal. So it’s creating new connections and new relationships to sound that we didn’t necessarily have before, which I think, I think gives more value or at least perceptive value to some of these recordings from the past. [Theme Music]\n \n\n42:44\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. This episode was a special cross-over with Secret Feminist Agenda. To learn more about that podcast, check out secretfeministagenda.com. Our producers this month were me, Hannah McGregor, and of course our podcast project manager Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Stacey for taking the time to talk with me. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":2.4464734}]