[{"id":"9582","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E6, SoundBox Signals presents “Is That Me?”, 2 March 2020, Sallam and Shearer"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-that-me/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Nour Sallam","Karis Shearer"],"creator_names_search":["Nour Sallam","Karis Shearer"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3ccdbdb9-0f96-49d2-b089-cea33234e046/sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:07\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"24,186,088 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-6-is-that-me_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-that-me/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-03-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.937244975827596\",\"longitude\":\"-119.3903559234036\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"bill bissett’s Breth (Talonbooks):\\n\\nhttps://talonbooks.com/books/breth\\n\\nbill bissett on PennSound:\\n\\nhttps://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/bissett.php\\n\\nCut and Run Podcast by Brady Marks:\\n\\nhttp://furiousgreencloud.com/wordpress/blog/author/furiousgreencloud/\\n\\nSarah Tolmie’s The Art of Dying (MQUP):\\n\\nhttps://www.mqup.ca/art-of-dying–the-products-9780773552715.php\\n\\nIan Ferrier at the Inspired Word Cafe:\\n\\nhttp://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/\"},{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549524316160,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a new podcast in the SpokenWeb family – SoundBox Signals – inviting us to listen in close to UBCO’s SoundBox Collection. In this episode, Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin and guests Lauren St. Clair and Nour Sallam invite us into a “close listening” of a previously unpublished poem from Canadian poet bill bissett. You can find the full-length recording of the bill bissett clip and more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.\n\nSoundBox Signals is a podcast that brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode features a conversation with a curator and two special guests. Together they’ll listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history.\n\nSoundBox Signals Artwork by Myron Campbell.\n\n00:06\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:06\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. When we listen to recorded poetry, taking the time to attend closely to the recording, to tune into the rhythm, the cadence, the sense of space and place, new connections and intimacies emerge. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we’re excited to share with you the new SoundBox Signals Podcast, inviting us to listen in close to UBC Okanagan’s SoundBox collection. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close reading and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and two special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider what a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer, curator Mathieu Aubin, and guests invite us into a close listening of bill bissett’s previously unpublished poem from around 1966. Here is Karis Shearer with “Is That Me?” episode one of SoundBox Signals. [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:30\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Melodic Instrumentals Overlapping Voices] I see you. [Inaudible] What is the [inaudible] Where is this voice? Coming! [inaudible] How curious you are to me…[Click]\n \n\n02:45\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today at UBC Okanagan [UBCO] by guest curator Mathieu Aubin, who recently finished his PhD with a dissertation entitled “Here and Queer in Vancouver,” which touches on the work of bill bissett. Also joined by Lauren St. Clair, who is a Computer Science major, Data Science minor and is the president of the Quantitative Science Course Union here at UBCO. Also joined by our podcast producer extraordinaire Nour Sallam, who is pursuing her honours English degree here at UBCO. Welcome everybody.\n \n\n03:20\tVarious Voices:\t[Overlapping] Hello. Hi. Hi.\n \n\n03:20\tKaris Shearer:\tWe are here today to listen to a clip by bill bissett. So we’re going to rewind to 1966 and listen to that recording, which is part of our SoundBox collection here at UBCO.\n \n\n03:48\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Audio, bill bissett recording] This. Well. Palpitation jelly gold. Were saying [inaudible] tomato. You got that should be enough. Look like needles and what just fires. Enter greenly splotch us belly holes and ice and stitches and wrestle them water in hay wires. Is that blood on my pillow? Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle in their sitting room? Is that me on the windowsill in worm slice. Oooze. How did she do it at feet radiators. And [inaudible] unslow on my, you know. Keep wishing we were in his 40 cent bed. This is the second we left Istanbul, which is Mediterranean. [Click]\n \n\n05:00\tKaris Shearer:\tSo what you just heard is a clip from a longer recording made on magnetic tape. It’s on reel-to-reel, probably made by Warren Tallman. It was part of his collection and is by poet bill bissett. Mathieu, do you want to give us a little bit more context of this recording?\n \n\n05:19\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, of course. So in this recording, what we have is — if it is in fact from 1966 as the material, the tape, indicates — bill bissett is likely around 26 or 27 years old. It is one of the earliest recordings that we have of bill bissett reading his work and what he’s reading in the, in the recording as a whole beyond this clip is some poems that have been published later on in some format in we sleep inside each othr all, which was published by Ganglia Press in Toronto in 1966. And one of the exciting things about this clip in particular is that this poem was never published. As bill bissett indicates, lines of this poem were published in other poems such as “Veronica,” which have been, or which were previously published, now published in his new [inaudible] books called breth. But otherwise, this is an unpublished poem and what we have access to is a really raw bill bissett and a very youthful bill bissett, which you can tell by his voice. And what’s really exciting about this as well is we don’t really know where it took place necessarily. Based on bill, it possibly was recorded with Warren Tallman, but also perhaps with Doug Geissman who he recorded with a lot. And we don’t have access to any sense of audience, which is a little odd for people who are often used to going to his readings and hearing the audience banter back with him. There’s mostly silence between the poems, which gives it a different feeling.\n \n\n06:46\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, yeah, it sure does. It’s, it was an exciting recording to discover in the sense that I think the performance is quite different from bill’s typical performances today.\n \n\n07:00\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n07:00\tKaris Shearer:\tLauren, you were one of the early listeners to this recording, you helped digitize it. And it’s a strange and fascinating style of reading to encounter, isn’t it?\n \n\n07:11\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n07:11\tKaris Shearer:\tCan you talk a little bit about, like, your impressions of it, what it reminds you of in terms of style?\n \n\n07:17\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah, like it sounds almost robotic and it definitely is not based in sounding robotic because it’s from the ’60s. But, to me, when I first listened to it, it almost sounded like a literal voice translation of like sticking the poem into a machine and having it be played out. Like when he speaks, it sounds almost spliced together and not like he’s speaking in the actual moment. Like it’s kind of like a collage–\n \n\n07:49\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm!\n07:49\tLauren St. Clair:\t–of words in a way. Like if you took a bunch of words from a magazine and kind of just stuck them together and read it out, that’s kind of the impression it gave me when I first heard it.\n07:58\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, it has a kind of very chopped version of it. Nour, you were thinking about some of how the way in which the style is connected to the content of the poem and that kind of fragmentation that we’re hearing both stylistically, but then also within kind of the body of the poem. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that fragmentation’s playing out here?\n \n\n08:20\tNour Sallam:\tYeah, it’s a lot like what Lauren was saying. It’s very spliced and it does give off the feeling that it’s a little bit like a collage, which I find really interesting because the fragmentation kind of gives you that feeling of isolation that he is experiencing from the body. Like when he says, “Is that me splurged there becoming a puddle? Is it me on the windowsill? Is that my body?”, you really get that sense of fragmentation and isolation, especially in the way he reads it and the way he sounds out the words and pauses between them.\n \n\n09:02\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n09:02\tKaris Shearer:\tThere’s kind of an alienation almost from the body, isn’t there?\n \n\n09:06\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:06\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n09:06\tNour Sallam:\tYeah, an alienation from the body. I picked up on it specifically through the way he sounds out and pauses between all the words or pieces them together in a way that if you, if he was just saying them and if he was just speaking in a non-performative way, maybe you wouldn’t have picked up on that.\n \n\n09:28\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, ’cause we’re getting like, we’re getting a lot of like the blood, “Is that blood on my pillow?” Right? That’s part of him. But he’s also seeing it, right? So there’s, you know,–\n \n\n09:36\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:36\tKaris Shearer:\t–there’s the speaker looking at pieces of himself. He’s a puddle. He’s, you know, there’s blood on the pillow.\n09:44\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n09:44\tKaris Shearer:\tSo that contributing–\n \n\n09:45\tNour Sallam:\tAnd the form of questioning, too. He, it’s, it almost gives you the sense that he’s unsure. Is it me? Is it someone else? Like what, what am I looking at?\n \n\n09:56\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s a great observation. That’s, that kind of like uncertainty around–\n \n\n10:00\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n10:00\tKaris Shearer:\t–what he’s perceiving.\n \n\n10:01\tNour Sallam:\tYes, exactly.\n10:03\tKaris Shearer:\tSounds wonderful. Matt, I’m going to come over to you and ask you a little bit about this, you know, continuing on this question of style–\n \n\n10:10\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:10\tKaris Shearer:\t–of reading. Can you talk a little bit about how this style that we’re hearing here–\n \n\n10:14\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:14\tKaris Shearer:\t–that Nour and Lauren just talked about in terms of its fragmentation, the kind of almost computerized voice, which is so curious, you know, 1966. It’s not modeled after anything that we would necessarily, that we’re familiar with now.\n \n\n10:33\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n10:33\tKaris Shearer:\tHow does the style that we’re hearing here differ from bissett’s contemporary performance style?\n \n\n10:40\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. There’s so many great threads that you’ve been bringing up so far. I mean, the sense of the technology perhaps or technological voice in some sense and bill is, bill bissett’s very much interested in that idea of like, well he’s using the typewriter to write most of his poems and like that idea of like what is a tape recorder, perhaps, to bring to it too, what does it mean to become maybe like a robot in that sense? But the question of collage too is essential to his art practice. He’s often thinking about intersplicing different lines of poems in his oral performance of the poetry. And even on the page he’s really thinking about putting things together and collaging them literally, so I really liked that observation, that in sense of like what you’re hearing, which also carries over to the page.\n \n\n11:22\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat we have here in this recording is a really young bill bissett. And what surprised me when I first heard this last spring was that youthfulness. And having been to many of his readings in past few years, what surprised me was some of the elements that were perhaps different or maybe missing that I was expecting. And perhaps it’s because of it being maybe an early recording or the fact that it’s in a private context, but there’s something to be said about the private versus the public. When he’s reading in the public context, there’s an audience very much knowing his work and are able to respond to him and he’s very humourous in his performance. You still hear that a bit in this recording. However, the humour depends on obviously an audience responding to it and that’s not as present in this recording.\n \n\n12:09\tMathieu Aubin:\tThe other thing, too, that I’m surprised is there is no instrument that’s being played in this and he’s known for having maracas on stage very often, and chanting with it. And there’s no “hummina hummina”, you know, the ways of bringing different lines together. And what doesn’t surprise me though is when I found out that this is a poem that was of course never published, but has lines that have been published in other poems, is this improvisational aspect of it. And part of his performance today is still that idea of improvising and working with things. And I was rewatching some of his performances on YouTube the other day and I thought it was really interesting that he’d often start with philosophical questions, those kinds of questions that Nour is bringing up are in this poem, but of course are being asked differently. So I think there are a lot of similarities, but there’s of course a development around that idea of the public audience listening that isn’t in here.\n \n\n13:00\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I like that. So you’re seeing a kind of, or hearing a through line from this early work through to his performance now–\n \n\n13:08\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:08\tKaris Shearer:\t–but also seeing some of the differences, particularly around the live audience, right?\n \n\n13:11\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n \n\n13:11\tKaris Shearer:\tThe improvisation, the responding to the audience. We hear that a lot in his contemporary work.\n \n\n13:16\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:18\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m gonna come back to Nour and I want to ask you about, again, the question of listening. We’re hearing a lot of onomatopoeia and like real sound play here around words. We hear words like, “Oooze”–\n \n\n13:31\tNour Sallam:\tMhm.\n \n\n13:31\tKaris Shearer:\t–that are really, that really play out in a way that point to or signify the concept that they represent. Can you point to a couple other moments where we’re hearing that sound play?\n \n\n13:44\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. Specifically in the beginning of the recording that we heard, there’s a theme of liquids–\n \n\n13:52\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm!\n13:52\tNour Sallam:\t–going on and you can hear that a lot in the specific words like “oooze” and like “palpitation jelly” that he splices or stresses and so on. And “splurged” and words like that where he is really emphasizing that the idea of liquids, but also like the theme of fluidity, which is really interesting to me because of the fragmentation of the poem.\n \n\n14:20\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. It’s kind of a tension between like the chopping up of words, right? “Palpitation.”\n \n\n14:24\tNour Sallam:\tYeah!\n14:24\tKaris Shearer:\tWhich is about poking, right?\n \n\n14:25\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. And the “oooze”-ing.\n \n\n14:27\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, the elongation of those sounds to signify liquid or fluidity.\n \n\n14:33\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. It truly is, it’s a very masterful reading, I think, of what he’s, he’s trying to portray.\n \n\n14:40\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah, that’s nice. Matt, do you wanna say, I mean we’re hearing there’s so many, there’s so much sound play–\n \n\n14:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n14:47\tKaris Shearer:\t–in this particular performance, particular poem. Can you comment a little bit about what we’re not hearing in this particular recording?\n \n\n14:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, so again, I think the, of course we have those sounds and like the vocalization and the polyvocality and then we were talking about hearing the playing with that. But again, to return to my earlier point about what I don’t hear in the recording, is one, an audience, which surprises me because I know that based on what he shared with me, bill is not reading alone in this room. What would the person be responding to? Were they responding at all? Are they maybe having a cigarette, let’s say, or what were they doing? Were they just casually listening? If not, if there is no audience or no response from the audience because they’re likely is an audience, what does it mean for him to just be reading it this way? And it is a work in process or progress or whatever you want to call it. But he’s reciting this and I am thinking back to this close listening that we did last summer at Congress and Jason Camlot, talked about the idea of, it sounds like almost like a recitation of the poem. And knowing a bit more context about the poem, it sounds about right in that it is just him working through the poem that never ended up being published.\n \n\n16:05\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut the other part that I’m surprised that I don’t hear is, you know, the musicality and almost like a sense of, a lack of banter, which is so essential to his practice today. There’s just banter and he’ll stop and say something hilarious in the middle of the poem and then go on to read the poem. Here what you have is someone who is just reading the poem and of course emphasizing certain words like “splurge!”, but he’s also like very much going through the poem. And something that we might not hear, too, is what is the context? Are we in a living room? We kind of hear the hum in the background of the digital, not the digital, the analog technology and in the recording, but we have zero idea of where this takes place. We’re assuming that this is in Vancouver if it is in fact with Warren Tallman, but we don’t hear that. And then the other thing, too, is often when you see him on stage, he’s opening up a water bottle or all those other kinds of sounds. But this is such a crisp recording that makes you think, “Okay, what, is he just sitting here at a table reading his poem?” And in other parts of the recording, though, you hear him turn a page and that poem is from we sleep inside of each othr all and what’s interesting is the poem has even been changed.\n \n\n17:23\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo looking at the archival material, my partner Emma Middleton was thinking about like, “Okay, well, is that exactly how it sounds in the recording?” And it’s not. So what are the pages? How is he, how is he going through this? So we know at least that we can hear the page, so he has that, but we have very limited context about that.\n \n\n17:41\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. So in the body of recordings that we have of bill bissett or that are available online for listening, PennSound, for example–\n \n\n17:48\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n17:48\tKaris Shearer:\t–this becomes quite an unusual–\n \n\n17:49\tMathieu Aubin:\tYes.\n17:50\tKaris Shearer:\t–example because of that kind of studio quality, if you will. Quite uncharacteristic of bill bissett. So it strikes me that one of the research questions that a person could pursue would be to map the arc of the recordings. And so maybe to kind of point out where we start to see some of the contemporary style that we have. Lauren, I’m going to go over to you and I want to ask you this kind of question around the difference between the studio recording and the live recording. You are a real music fan, I know. And so my question for you is, like, what is for you the difference between the studio recording and listening to, I mean, not necessarily experiencing the live show but hearing the live recording–\n \n\n18:32\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n18:32\tKaris Shearer:\t–of something. Do you have a preference and what are you listening for in those contexts and what makes those different for you?\n \n\n18:39\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah, I guess it really depends on what you’re listening for and more of like the technical way you might be listening for the studio recording, for like how the sound is balanced or whatnot between the live version. But if you’re listening to it for more of, like, the piece itself, you might be listening to the live because it feels more intimate. You might be hearing like banter that you wouldn’t be hearing otherwise.\n \n\n19:05\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n19:05\tLauren St. Clair:\tYou hear those intimate moments shared between the musician or the performer having with the audience that you wouldn’t have captured otherwise or is only shared in that specific recorded moment.\n \n\n19:17\tKaris Shearer:\tExactly, yeah. They’re event-based, aren’t they?\n \n\n19:19\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah!\n19:19\tKaris Shearer:\tSo you have that, you know, unique interaction–\n \n\n19:22\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n19:22\tKaris Shearer:\t–of that particular concert or that particular event.\n \n\n19:26\tLauren St. Clair:\tYeah.\n19:26\tKaris Shearer:\tWhich we don’t have here in this recording because of that lack of play with the audience or even as, you know, someone who recorded a lot of material, Warren Tallman doesn’t on this recording introduce it or tell us, you know, exactly what date it’s recorded or where, which was fairly typical that he, he often did do that. So even in our collection, it becomes an unusual example. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]\n \n\n19:53\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m gonna fast forward now to contemporary, we’re gonna take us out of 1966 to the contemporary moment. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] I wanna ask you about any shout-outs that you have to poetry sound events that are happening, any digital archives you want to mention that are maybe inspired by or related to this archive. I’m going to start with Matt.\n \n\n20:18\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah, so as I mentioned, the book breth recently published by Talon Books is a collection from basically the whole of bill bissett, including works that have never been published. So if you pick up that book, what will be great to see, too, is parts of this clip that we just listened to, some lines will be found in different poems in that book. And he’s also been celebrating his 80th birthday and tons of events in the whole greater Toronto area, including St. Catharines, Ontario, and that are just really, I guess, commemorating his career and the amount of publications that he has done. So it’s really exciting. So really make sure to check out that book.\n \n\n20:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd one thing I want to mention, too, is that idea of PennSound and another recording just 13 years later, is making sure that like there are other places that you can also access this and compare that if you’re really interested in doing that.\n \n\n21:07\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Thanks so much. Lauren, I’m gonna go over to you, a kind of event or thing you want to mention.\n \n\n21:14\tLauren St. Clair:\tCool. Yeah, I wanna give a shout-out to the podcast Cut & Run, which is run by Brady Marks, who is a computational sound artist based in Vancouver. And she also has the handle furiousgreencloud if you’re interested in following her on social media or checking out her website where you can go check out her computational art that’s usually based in sound. It’s very cool. And the Cut & Run podcast is a focus on music and specifically like experimental music usually.\n \n\n21:45\tKaris Shearer:\tCool.\n21:45\tMathieu Aubin:\tMhm.\n21:45\tKaris Shearer:\tThat is very cool. Nour, I’m gonna go over to you, wanna give a shout-out?\n \n\n21:51\tNour Sallam:\tYeah. I’d like to give a shout-out to the Canadian poet in the contemporary setting, her name’s Sarah Tolmie. I recently came across her poetry because I picked up a copy of the Griffin 2019 Poetry Prize and she was one of the shortlisted winners. And her poetry is really, is really beautiful to the contemporary settings specifically in like contemporary issues. And yeah, she’s super cool.\n \n\n22:18\tKaris Shearer:\tAwesome. Sarah Tolmie.\n \n\n22:20\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n22:20\tKaris Shearer:\tGreat.\n22:20\tNour Sallam:\tHer book is The Art of Dying.\n \n\n22:21\tKaris Shearer:\tThe Art of Dying.\n \n\n22:23\tNour Sallam:\tYeah.\n22:23\tKaris Shearer:\tFantastic. Thank you–\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tSounds optimistic.\n \n\n22:24\tKaris Shearer:\t–so much. And I’m gonna give a shout-out to close. Ian Ferrier of SpokenWeb and much other fame is going to be here in Kelowna on January 23rd. He’s reading with Samuel Archibald at 7:00 PM at Cool Arts studio on Cawston as part of the Inspired Word Cafe series. So that should be a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to welcoming Ian to Kelowna.\n \n\n22:52\tKaris Shearer:\tI want to thank all of you for being here today and giving some really great insights into this particular recording, doing your curated close-listening and listening and talking. That’s what this is all about. I also want to thank bill bissett for giving us permission to use this particular clip and host it on our website and to the estate of Warren Tallman for their permission as well. [Begin Music: Calming Instrumental]\n \n\n23:23\tKaris Shearer:\tThat was episode one of SoundBox Signals. You were listening to a recording by bill bissett from our archive called the SoundBox Collection, which is housed in the UBCO AMP Lab. You can find full-length versions of our recordings online at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. I’m your host Karis Shearer and I’ll see you next time.\n \n\n23:54\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab. [End Music: Calming Instrumental] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab, that’s A M P  L A B, .ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Nour Sallam, and Lauren St. Clair for their candid discussion and contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n\n"],"score":5.1176014},{"id":"9609","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S1E10, SoundBox Signals presents “Is Robin Here?\", 6 July 2020, Shearer and Sallam  "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-robin-here/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_subseries_description":["The first season of the SpokenWeb Podcast."],"item_subseries_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creator_names_search":["Karis Shearer","Nour Sallam"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/61365463\",\"name\":\"Karis Shearer\",\"dates\":\"1980-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nour Sallam\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/3c9851a8-a26b-4ce2-a34d-55fd66f7201c/sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:40:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"39,404,818 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-10-is-robin-here_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"http://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-is-robin-here/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-07-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94219\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39907\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The SoundBox Collection: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\\n\\nAmy Thiessen’s Honours Project / Digitial Exhibition on Sharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net\\n\\nThe Real Vancouver Writers’ Series: https://realvancouver.org/\\n\\nEpisode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast featuring Hannah McGregor: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/\\n\\nSecret Feminist Agenda podcast: https://secretfeministagenda.com/category/podcast/   \\n\\nChristine Mitchell’s “Can You Hear Me?”:  https://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/ \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549691039744,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Spokenweb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor and Emily Murphy to question what we can uncover about the dynamics of a space through listening. Together they invite us into a ‘close listening’ of Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church (Vancouver) March 14, 1970. Recorded on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Listen to find out if “Robin” is here.\n\nProduced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what *listening* allows us to know about cultural history. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/\n\n00:18\tTheme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:26\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I’ll bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast SoundBox Signals. We’ll hear some new voices to the podcast, as well as some that might sound a little bit more familiar, like mine. Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of curated close-listening and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together, they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. In this episode, SpokenWeb’s Karis Shearer is joined by curator Amy Thiessen and special guests Hannah McGregor—that’s me—and Emily Murphy. Together, we discuss Warren Tallman’s introduction to the “‘Charles Olson Memorial Reading” recorded at St. Anselm’s Church in Vancouver on March 14th, 1970 on the occasion of a memorial reading for American poet Charles Olson. This episode touches on mourning, levity, spontaneity, religiosity, relationality, poetry, and pedagogy. Here is Karis Shearer and SoundBox Signals asking: “Is Robin Here?” [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:36\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Begin Music: Gentle Ambient Instrumentals] [Various Recorded Voices] I see you face to face. What is the voice? Certainty of others for life, love, sight, hearing of others. Where is this voice…coming from? I see you also face to face.\n \n\n02:45\tKaris Shearer:\tI’m Karis Shearer and I’m joined today in the studio at UBC Okanagan by guest curator Amy Thiessen, who is the SpokenWeb RA and our very own project manager and she’s also completing a honour’s thesis on the work of Sharon Thesen. I’m also joined by Emily Murphy, who is a professor of digital humanities and assistant director of the AMP Lab. And today we have from Vancouver Hannah McGregor, who’s assistant professor in publishing at Simon Fraser University and host of the Secret Feminist Agenda. Welcome everybody, thanks for joining us.\n \n\n03:22\tHannah McGregor:\tThank you, I’m delighted to be here.\n \n\n03:23\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, I too am delighted.\n \n\n03:26\tHannah McGregor:\tAmy, are you also delighted?\n \n\n03:28\tAmy Thiessen:\tSuper.\n \n\n03:31\tKaris Shearer:\tFantastic. We’re here to talk about a really special recording, a weird recording. So we’re gonna rewind to March 14th, 1970 and have a listen to Warren Tallman introducing an event that is called the Charles Olson Memorial. So here we go.\n \n\n03:51\tAudio Recording:\t[Click] [Audio, Warren Tallman] Some people who were planning this, that we would have all the poets lined up in front on a sheet of paper so that it could be read off one, two, three, four, five. It didn’t work out. So all you poets are in the audience. And so it’s going to have to be when it gets around to that point at which you would like to read for this reading, it is, it’s going to have to be kind of Quaker, you know, or what I assume is Quaker that you stand up on your feet and walk forward in some calm or pause that has taken place. And…yes? [Someone Asks A Question] Yeah. You can’t hear? [Person Speaks More, Inaudible] Oh, I– yeah. I’m supposed to make an announcement about how long to read. It’s always impressed me as rather ridiculous to tell a poet how long to read, but I will tell all of you poets this, that if there’s a rhythm that’s going, which makes for three or four or five minutes, if you break it by reading for 40 minutes, everybody in the audience will hate you. [Laughs] So I would say three or four or five minutes, although you understand that’s not an instruction to impede on the freedom of any poet to read. [Crashing Sound] [Laughter] I– I am, I am, I’m being deliberately rather facetious and frivolous, so that we can have that to work on, to move into an actually more serious occasion. And since we do not have any listing of the poets, you must choose your own occasion as it occurs to you. But first, I would like to have Robin. Is Robin here? Okay. Well, Robin Blaser is going to start this with a reading. It is going to be interrupted with a tape and there’ll be an interruption after the tape of about three or two minutes or so. And then the poets will read whatever has occurred to them to read on the occasion of this memorial for Charles Olson. [Click]\n \n\n06:43\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy, you chose this recording. Can you tell us a little bit about what we know about it?\n \n\n06:48\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. So this recording, as Karis said earlier, was recorded on March 14th, 1970. We know that they are gathered at St. Anslem’s church on the UBC Vancouver campus and that it was recorded on reel-to-reel.\n \n\n07:04\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And it’s about, it’s an excerpt, it’s the very beginning of a whole recording. It’s about an hour long. It also features a number of different poets. Robin Blaser, obviously, is mentioned. Judith Copithorne, Peter Quartermain, Lionel Kearns, Richard Sommer from Montreal, Maxine Gadd, and quite a few other poets. It’s a weird introduction to a poetry reading. Hannah, I’m going to turn that over to you. You’ve been to a lot of record–, poetry readings. What, what’s weird about this?\n \n\n07:38\tHannah McGregor:\tI mean, so one of the, one of the major jobs when I think about what hosts at poetry readings are trying to do, one of the major things that they are doing, is sort of set tone and norms for what’s about to proceed. And a lot of that, a lot of the work at literary readings has to do with establishing how long people are allowed to read for. Because in my experience, without that, people will read for a wild amount of time. And even with the norms, people will read for a wild amount of time. And so what really… The first listen through to this, what really struck me was that invitation to a Quaker-like sort of self-electing process in which poets will get up, “you poets” will just get up, and read when they feel moved to do so and are sort of given this like, you know, read for four to five minutes or whatever feels right. Probably not 40. Which is… There’s a lot of lateral movement in that four to 40 minutes.\n \n\n08:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you bet. It’s, I mean, there’s a sort of sense of spontaneity, but Emily, it’s kind of, it’s, it is controlled, right? I mean, he is setting up some boundaries. What are the boundaries that you’re hearing in this?\n08:48\tEmily Murphy:\tSuper controlled. I mean, I think that one of the major boundaries is this idea that social pressure will help keep boundaries around the poets, which many of us know probably wouldn’t work. But one of the things that I did find really interesting about this is that buried in this desire for spontaneity is kind of like a series of conventions about what’s going to count as it. Like, even down to instructions for movement, right? Like some kind of Quaker ceremony where you, like you stand up in a moment of silence and walk towards the front of the room. There’s already like a really embodied physical dimension being made explicit in his instructions, which indicates to me then that there are actually like quite clear boundaries for what counts as spontaneity and probably what counts as improvisation of a sort in this room that, I mean, we often think of improvisation as a thing that just kind of springs from you internally. But there are, there’s plenty of research that is calling for a kind of richer understanding of what the conventions of improvisation are or kind of conventions that signal this sort of authentic, spontaneous contribution.\n \n\n09:59\tHannah McGregor:\tI was just thinking even in that “be totally spontaneous, but four to five minutes” suggests that this really interesting tension between the desire to establish an environment of spontaneity and sort of free responsiveness to what’s happening alongside the need to state and establish norms. And that tension is really interesting and also leads me to wonder, you know, historically, at what point do we start establishing norms of five-minute readings of 10-minute readings? Like, when you hear about readings that last 45 minutes, how and when and why are we starting to arrive at a sense of what is supposed to be, apparently, kind of innate or kind of intuitive or kind of felt the sense of how long is an appropriate length to read?\n \n\n10:53\tEmily Murphy:\tMy– I mean, my hunch is that that history is probably a religious one, right? That we probably start seeing shorter readings while, when more people are literate, essentially. I mean, my own, any of my knowledge, which is limited, about how people would read in public is about kind of belletristic traditions, right? Where you would read letters because you weren’t reading to a literate population and you would read verses and sermons that were timed to like the bells that would go off in a public square. And so that’s like, that’s a really religious background to public readings. And here we have an extensively secular event that’s held in a church and that—can I give a spoiler about the first reading?\n \n\n11:42\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you sure can.\n \n\n11:42\tEmily Murphy:\tThe first reading is from Revelations. So it’s like shot through with these religious contexts.\n \n\n11:50\tKaris Shearer:\tIn addition to the invocation of the Quaker-ness, right? There’s actually—\n \n\n11:53\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n11:53\tKaris Shearer:\t–quite a lot of religiosity evoked in this. One of the questions we ask on the podcast is like, what does listening allow us to know about cultural history? And I’m going to turn this over to Amy to ask you what kind of information do we hear in this podcast, do we gather through listening in terms of like space or numbers of people? I mean, we have a list of poets, but what kind of sense do we get of the setting here?\n \n\n12:21\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. Quite a few times, and even just this short bit of the recording, we can hear the audience like laughing or talking, or there’s that point at the beginning when Warren’s not sure what the, I think woman at the back is saying, and there’s a moment that doesn’t turn out to be the technical difficulty that “Oh, you can’t hear?” But that’s something that… You can tell that technology is present in that room and it’s, we can hear it through the tape and we can tell that Warren is miked and that there’s sort of that… He’s in front of people and there’s a crowd there. And yeah.\n \n\n12:57\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I mean, there’s also one more point, at least one more point, in the tape too where we get a sense of like how many people are… Like Warren’s perception of how many people are in the audience. What is, it’s actually one of your favourite parts if I remember. What is that moment?\n \n\n13:14\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, we get the moment when Warren, isn’t sure if Robin is there. You can sort of sense that he’s looking around and maybe doesn’t see him right away. Yeah, is unsure. It’s not like there’s a crowd of 15 people and you can see him, right?\n \n\n13:28\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah, “Is Robin here?” And he’s looking in the crowd. Somebody has also suggested that this recording that it’s possible that the lights are turned down and he’s not able to actually see into the audience. And I’m not sure. You know, obviously there’s limits to what we can know through listening.\n \n\n13:47\tHannah McGregor:\tThere is that feeling though, right? Like, including the way that he addresses the audience as “you poets.” And sort of doesn’t like, “Oh, sorry, you can’t–” Like he, you know, he doesn’t call people by name. And if you’re sort of thinking, like you’re familiar with the people who are here, then you would say somebody’s name when they are talking to you. So there’s certainly the sense that he can’t necessarily see them. And that question of is it because there’s a huge crowd or is it because it’s dark or is it because I’ve never been in this space? Like, what is this venue like? Is it full of weird pillars that hide people? I don’t know.\n \n\n14:21\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And I guess one, I mean, certainly one of the research questions are the things that we’ll do when we’re pursuing research on this type is actually go to St. Anselm’s Church and have a sense, have a look at its architecture. I want to pick up on something that you’ve kind of moved us towards, which is that relationship between Warren Tallman and the audience. He’s an English professor. He’s not himself a poet. But he certainly had a good relationship with poets and was, through the facilitation of events like this, through his teaching of poetry. What do we hear in terms of his relationship with the audience? And I’m gonna go to you Hannah first and then I’m gonna go over to Emily.\n \n\n15:00\tHannah McGregor:\tWell, like, I keep mentioning it, Karis, because you pointed it out to me and now I really hear it whenever I listen, is his addressing the audience as “you poets.”\n \n\n15:09\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I can’t get over that.\n \n\n15:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich is very funny. It has this kind of… This familiarity and also this sort of joking disdain. Like, “You know what you poets are like, just gives a vibe of the sort of… When you are familiar enough with a group to make fun of them. Which suggests a sort of an intimacy of environment, right? That you don’t make fun of an audience unless they are your friends. Which sets up this sort of warmth. Like you don’t get the feeling that this is a random public reading. The audience are the speakers, it’s a community gathering, and you can feel that in the way that he is addressing an audience that is at once the sort of participants and the listeners for the event.\n \n\n15:53\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Emily, what about you? What do you hear in terms of that relationship between Tallman and the audience and maybe that kind of question of authority?\n \n\n16:02\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, question of authority. I mean, I don’t want to be the person who keeps bringing it back to religion, but I guess—\n \n\n16:10\tKaris Shearer:\tGo for it.\n \n\n16:10\tEmily Murphy:\t–that’s my role. I just, like, I always hear this tape in terms of like the situation of mourning. And it always sounds to me like a wake. And as a bit of background to that, I’m born in Ireland and my entire family is Irish. We are not the kind of Irish people who have wakes. That’s actually like quite specific. But it’s still this sort of community gathering among friends where you’ll tell jokes and sing songs and maybe read from Revelations. But there is a sort of bondedness and a kind of joy in the mourning. And so I think like, I mean, what’s an authority figure in Irish culture if not a priest, right? And he is sort of like in a way, like literally speaking to a flock, right?\n \n\n17:01\tKaris Shearer:\tMhm.\n \n\n17:01\tEmily Murphy:\tAnd that’s also interesting in terms of the relationship of the professor to students, professor to poets who he is actively engaged in making the, like the canonical poetic community of his age. Yeah.\n \n\n17:23\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. We were talking a little bit about that professorial feel, right? Like, it does not surprise me to hear that this person is a professor because I hear in the way that he is addressing the audience, the gathering, something that sounds a lot to me like how I talk to my students, that sort of facetious and sort of like self-undermining, like making fun of yourself a little bit, which sets a very particular tone of like, “Okay, I’m in charge here, but like, not that in charge. So, you know, here’s some structure, but also I really want you to feel free to take over and for this to be your space to do with as you want. But you also…” Like Emily was saying, you know, total freedom, total improvisation is sort of impossible without structure. So you need somebody taking that role and saying like, “I am going to be the guiding hand here,” but how do I guide people into a feeling of openness and spontaneity and participation and sort of some level of safety, ’cause what you’re asking people to do, step forward and just begin to read, does require some level of comfort. So, you know, how you establish that tone. I hear in that humour some of that work happening.\n \n\n18:35\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, definitely. Amy, what, like, what are you hear in terms of like picking up on what Hannah was saying about shared authority and sort of self-deprecating humour? He’s getting prompts from the audience and I guess maybe that’s what I’m asking about. Like those moments where the audience is prompting him around certain things that he’s meant to say up at the front.\n \n\n18:56\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, there’s the moment in the tape when you can’t hear the person speaking, but he’s like, “Oh, I’ve been, I’m supposed to tell you that you can only read for this amount of time.” And there’s other points of interaction, I guess. And one thing that I sort of notice is that it seems to me that he’s not necessarily taking cues from the audience as to like his tone or like his approach to what he’s saying. Like he’s being sort of like goofy and funny in the first bit, but in a way that I would imagine someone else, they say something funny, the audience laughs, “Oh, I’m going to say something else funny now.” But I think he’s just genuinely being… It sounds like he’s just genuinely being himself and speaking sorta without that intent to get a laugh.\n \n\n19:45\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. I mean, and you’ve listened to a lot of recordings with Warren, you know, where Warren Tallman is, he’s giving a lecture to a class or I think you’ve got a really good feel for him as a person and this is very much very Warren Tallman-esque, if you will. I think a little bit more about mourning, right? He changes register partway through this tape from being what he calls deliberately facetious and he’s being a little self-reflexive about that. And the register changes from being funny to serious. Emily, I wanna come over to you and ask you about a little bit more about mourning. What kind of space is being created for mourning here and what is the role of humour, seriousness, the kind of gravity?\n \n\n20:32\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. Yeah, I think that’s a great question. One of the things that I love about this tape is I feel like there’s this kind of subvocal like landscape of the emotion in the room in a way. Like probably the most explicit way that you can hear it is something that Hannah has pointed out to me, which is the sort of the murmur that goes through the crowd when Warren Tallman says, “We’re not going to have five people! Instead, you’ll just do whatever!”\n \n\n21:03\tHannah McGregor:\tHe counts them, like, “Oh, he’s going to have you numbered up at the front, like one, two, three, four, five.” It’s like, thanks, Warren, I forgot how numbers work.\n \n\n21:15\tKaris Shearer:\tWell, and then as you pointed out, like everyone starts going like, excuse me, what?\n \n\n21:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, yeah. You hear it. Like, it kind of sounds like this is the first they’re hearing of it. Right?\n \n\n21:23\tKaris Shearer:\tOh, for sure.\n \n\n21:23\tHannah McGregor:\tThat they also were led to believe that they would have an order and that they are now finding out that no, in fact, Quaker-style, you will be self-electing.\n \n\n21:34\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd it’s kind of like this weird, this rejection of like the pedagogical, right? Like that one, two, three, four, five, right? Like he’s counting, he’s physically counting them, but that’s, that’s not what’s gonna happen, right? So he performs the thing that’s not going to happen in this really kind of, you know, it becomes almost, it is almost humourous, right? It’s like very… There’s a kind of physicality to it, of an establishing of space on the stage. And it is like making the, you know, creating for us the thing that will not happen, which is like overly pedagogical, overly constructed. And it is the thing to be rejected in favour of this more spontaneous… Yeah, spontaneous form that is more appropriate for mourning? To when we make a connection, Emily, between–?\n \n\n22:20\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. I mean, he makes this rhetorical move, right, where he says, like, “I’m being deliberately facetious and frivolous” on what is actually like quite a, that you say, solemn occasion, maybe? And so there’s sort of like, there’s more than one switch, right? Like there’s the like… Or maybe not more than one switch, but the switch does, has two roles, right? That we have the like humour as the lead-in, as a setup for a solemn occasion that will entail reading verses from the Bible. But humour as also a kind of, a kind of marking of occasion, right.? And a kind of framing of the mourning and of the solemnness. And I still, like, I feel like so much of the, like the evidence that I gather from this tape is just like a feeling in the room, like a kind of warmth that’s, it’s difficult to point to like any one thing that you might be able to hear from the audience, but it feels like maybe the, like maybe the echoes in the room are like are letting you know that people might be like kind of chatting to their neighbour while he’s making jokes at the front of the room or that they’re like laughing and chuckling to themselves, right? So there is a kind of like a… It’s not like, it’s not quite joy, but it is sort of fellow feeling and warmth. Which indicates to me that like there is a really nice acknowledgement of the social role of mourning, right. And the social embeddedness of that kind of loss.\n \n\n23:57\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. ‘Cause I mean, they’ve gathered on the occasion of the death of a major American poet.\n \n\n24:02\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n24:02\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd the way that they’re gonna celebrate that or mark that occasion is through the act of reading. And I think, you know, again, like make–, you know, making space for different types of… Like, that mourning is individual and therefore the space needed to read or mark that occasion is also individual, whether it’s short, three to four minutes or, well, not, not 40 minutes.\n \n\n24:30\tEmily Murphy:\tWell, like it’s so individual, but it’s so communal as well, right? Because I mean, if mourning is so individual, stay in your own house and read for 40 minutes to yourself. Right? But instead there’s this nice tension between not infringing on the freedom of any poet to read. Um, and don’t read for 40 minutes, everyone will think you’re a jerk.\n \n\n24:51\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd the expectation, right? So feeling the pause in which—\n \n\n24:55\tEmily Murphy:\tYep.\n \n\n24:55\tHannah McGregor:\t–you stand up and read means attentive listening, right? That you’re not just sitting there like checked out, waiting for your turn. You have to be listening and engaging. So it is this sort of interesting tension between the individual and the communal, which we can think of as being a characteristic of religious experience and a characteristics—\n \n\n25:16\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, absolutely.\n \n\n25:16\tHannah McGregor:\t–of collective mourning.\n \n\n25:18\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. Yeah. I mean, the guiding principle of this whole event seems to be attentiveness to the audience, right? And attentiveness to each other. You know, you know when you’re going to, when it’s your turn to read, when there’s a kind of a space and you arise and it’s very… He describes it in a very physical way, right? You arise, you get up on your own on your feet. Right? As though there would be any other, I mean, I suppose there would be maybe other ways of getting up, but in this case, it is you get up on your feet and you walk toward… There’s a real physicality of the description. I’m gonna bring it over to Amy again and I want to ask you about technology and how technology features in this tape. What moments do you hear technology making itself present? Yeah.\n \n\n26:06\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah, so there’s this moment when Warren’s saying that there’s gonna be a tape and then there’s gonna be a reading and then there’s gonna be another interruption. And it’s very like sort of vague what that’s going to be. And by saying that it’s going to be an interruption it’s not really interrupting. And what we know also is that from our perspective there, the tape doesn’t actually surface at all on our version on the reel, which is interesting.\n \n\n26:41\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, absolutely. I mean, this is in some ways very characteristic of Tallman in general. He, you know, we have the tape, the event that’s being recorded, but then there’s also the indication that there’s going to be a recording within the recording or they, the playback of a recording within the recording. And then we also hear, we also hear the mic, right? Where someone isn’t able to hear from the audience. Technology makes itself present, yeah, I think throughout the tape.\n \n\n27:11\tEmily Murphy:\tWell, I wonder… So you’re right that we can, like, we sort of, we get an indication of the presence of the mic, but I feel like that is Tallman interpreting the reaction of the audience that way, not necessarily the audience actually experiencing those aspects of the technology or like he… Instead of “I’ve just thrown you a curve ball” it’s “Oh, you must not be able to hear what I’m saying.”\n \n\n27:35\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, yeah.\n \n\n27:37\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah.\n \n\n27:37\tKaris Shearer:\tAbsolutely.\n \n\n27:38\tEmily Murphy:\tBut I think, I mean, this is something that happens with newer technologies all the time, is that once the newer technology is present, it gets to have the role of being technological. And then all of the other technologies that people are engaging with all the time are perceived as naturalized and non-technological. So even though he’s… Like, they’re reading from books in a room that has like probably quite specific acoustics in a language that is already an extension of human capacity, but it’s the tape that dominates the sort of technological landscape, whether or not it is in fact present. It’s the idea of taping us, in a way.\n \n\n28:18\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, taping us.\n \n\n28:19\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, taping usTM.\n \n\n28:22\tHannah McGregor:\tGood thing you TM’ed that—\n \n\n28:23\tEmily Murphy:\tI’m writing that down.\n \n\n28:23\tHannah McGregor:\t–’cause that was gonna be the title of my new book.\n \n\n28:24\tEmily Murphy:\tTaping us… I mean, I’ll take royalties.\n \n\n28:29\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd in fact that distrust of the microphone, that distrust of technology is actually something so common across recordings that Christine Mitchell, I think when she was a postdoc at Concordia, created a whole compilation—I think it’s about two minutes long—and it’s all the excerpts of that exact moment of distrust of the microphone. Can you, and it’s called “Can You Hear Me? And it’s a compilation of all, you know, readers across the Sir George Williams Reading Series saying things like, “Is this thing on? Can you hear me at the back? Can you hear me?” And so Warren, again, that particular distrust of the technology in the room, it’s both, you know, the microphone is both facilitating his connection with the audience, but it’s also the thing to be distrusted.\n \n\n29:17\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, you’re so right about that distrust, but I wonder then if we can put that in conversation with how we’ve been talking about authority. Because at the same time that it is expected to fail, right, expected to be the reason that people can’t hear him, it’s also like being… It’s a recording for posterity and I think you and I have talked in other ways about how Tallman is doing all of this recording at the same time as like law enforcement is using tapes—\n \n\n29:44\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n29:44\tEmily Murphy:\t–as like the new technology of catching criminals, right? They’re becoming this sort of incontrovertible version of evidence quite quickly.\n \n\n29:57\tKaris Shearer:\tSurveillance.\n \n\n29:57\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah. And so, yeah, I don’t think that I have a “so what” about that relationship, then, between mistrust and authority. And I don’t think it’s as radical as I’m making it sound. Like it’s…\n \n\n30:08\tHannah McGregor:\tI mean, I think that there is something there about the way that technology’s become, are turned into via social processes are turned into forms of witness, forms of evidence, forms of authority that you get a really clear sense of the work that is being done around generating understandings of new technologies when you get these archival moments in which people, events for example, distrust. So like, it is helpful in terms of thinking about the very deliberate work that’s being done around transforming audio recording into evidence when you hear the context in which it is not.\n \n\n30:52\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, that’s nice. I’m going to go around with the group and just ask you, finally, what is your favourite part of this recording? And maybe it’s something we’ve already talked about, but favourite moment or favourite aspect of this? Emily, I’m going to start with you.\n \n\n31:10\tEmily Murphy:\tYeah, it’s the murmurs in the room that you can kind of like, you can hear the walls almost, like the echoes off the walls. I love that.\n \n\n31:17\tKaris Shearer:\tHannah?\n \n\n31:18\tHannah McGregor:\tIt’s gotta be like, it’s probably a tie for me between when he counts out loud and when he tells people to get up on their feet. Like it is these moments in which there is… I like the way you refer to it as being like overtly almost over-the-top pedagogical, like, “Get up, on your feet, and step forward.” Like, yeah, okay, I get it. Warren, we know how to get up.\n \n\n31:41\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy, what about you?\n \n\n31:43\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah and I have said this already, but my favourite part is when Warren says, “Is Robin here?” And it’s just, just unsure.\n \n\n31:50\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s also, you know, kind of quite a moment of anxiety, if that’s like… You’re, you know, you’re counting on Robin to open the more serious part of the occasion, like, it’d be really great if he were there. And you can hear this, you know, you can almost hear him scanning, right? Like where he’s, he’s looking around.\n \n\n32:10\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah. At least if Robin didn’t show up, you’d still have the text of his reading.\n \n\n32:16\tKaris Shearer:\tBut that is true. That is… He reads from Revelations. John… I forget which is it.\n \n\n32:23\tAmy Thiessen:\tAnd I also like wonder if Robin knows he’s about to be called on first and like importantly out by name first and then nobody else is called by their name to come up and read.\n \n\n32:34\tKaris Shearer:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n32:35\tAmy Thiessen:\tYeah.\n \n\n32:36\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n32:36\tHannah McGregor:\tKaris, what’s your favourite part?\n \n\n32:39\tKaris Shearer:\tOh. [Exasperated Sigh] I love it when they turn it back on me. It’s the “you poets.” It just really… I was like, I realized at that moment, like I could imagine doing all the things, you know, that he does in terms of facilitation, but the moment where he says “you poets,” I was like trying to imagine myself doing that in a room of like my poet colleagues who I totally enjoy. I can’t imagine just being like, “All you poets!” and like what their reaction would be to that. It’s so, it’s so weird, but also I think really speaks to that relationship, like a very particular relationship that he has with them and probably nobody else does. And he’s emphatically not a poet, right? In that, in hailing them as “you poets” it’s also marking him as “not poet,” but he gets to do that because he has this special relationship and I think because of the work he’s done, because of the work he’s done over the past decade and more in really cultivating a literary community. Yeah.\n \n\n33:47\tEmily Murphy:\tI mean, we talked briefly about the sort of modernist landscape in this recording, especially because we have sort of like super traditional, like, readings from the Bible and then immediately the thing that follows that on the tape, which is not in the explicit recording, is like experimental sound poetry and how for a lot of the 20th century, like that mix of like deep investment in western canon and formal experimentation is actually a hallmark of poetic communities. And I think the other hallmark of the poetic, of poetic communities is the increasing role of the critic.\n \n\n34:24\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah.\n \n\n34:24\tEmily Murphy:\tRight? And then that’s bringing us back to authority in a way as well. Like it is not being the producer or the artist that is the most authoritative position, but in being like a kind of critic or curator or even in other, like other artistic fields, like, people like Diaghilev who was like a ballet producer of a kind, but was not himself a dancer and not even a choreographer. Well, sometimes he was. Yeah. Anyway. That’s just, that’s up for debate. But.\n \n\n34:54\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, I think, I mean, this recording in a lot of ways and Tallman’s presence across the recordings, invites us to look back at literary communities and think about the roles of folks who weren’t themselves writers, but the role that they played in establishing those communities and the labour that they performed to facilitate events, et cetera. Often gendered, often gendered.\n \n\n35:19\tEmily Murphy:\tOh, very gendered.\n \n\n35:22\tKaris Shearer:\tYep. Yep. This is around the time that we normally do a shout-out to an event, a book, a reading, something that you’d like to recognize. And so I’m going to start with Amy and ask you what would you like to shout-out?\n \n\n35:38\tAmy Thiessen:\tAm I allowed to shout-out myself?\n \n\n35:38\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah, you can! Go for it.\n \n\n35:38\tAmy Thiessen:\tBy the time this podcast comes out, you listeners could go view my honour’s project online if you’re interested in Canadian poetry or environmental writing or forest fires. We’ll put a link in the show notes to my digital exhibition.\n \n\n35:59\tKaris Shearer:\tAnd as your supervisor, I’m going to say it’s a very excellent project. Super cool. Hannah, what about you? Shout-out.\n \n\n36:08\tHannah McGregor:\tI’m gonna shout-out my favourite reading series in Vancouver, which is called the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, which was started during the Vancouver Olympics in response to the sort of Olympic-committee-sanctioned cultural programming. It was a series of readings that were meant to sort of… It was the literary community in Vancouver saying like, “No, actually, here’s what Vancouver literary community looks like.” It’s now been running for a decade, I believe, and it’s remarkable. I think it happens quarterly. And it’s a really remarkable reading series, both for the level of thoughtful curation that goes into the kinds of stuff that you get to see there, but also for the hosts Sean Cranberry and Dina Del Bucchia just do this amazing job of creating this environment where, like, there is more catcalling at this reading series than I have ever experienced at another literary event. And it has so much to do with the tone they create through hosting. And I was really thinking about the sort of work they do around the series when I was listening. So shout-out to the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series.\n \n\n37:13\tKaris Shearer:\tAwesome. Thank you. Emily, what about you? Shout-out?\n \n\n37:17\tEmily Murphy:\tMy shout-out is a bit of a cheat as well because I want a shout-out for Amy.\n \n\n37:23\tKaris Shearer:\tAmy is well-deserving of many shout-outs.\n \n\n37:26\tEmily Murphy:\tDefinitely, definitely. Amy is presenting on her honour’s thesis in the Tech Talk series at the AMP Lab here at UBCO campus on the 26th of March at 12:30 PM.\n \n\n37:38\tKaris Shearer:\tI don’t usually do a shout-out, but I’ll, I will do one. And actually I’m going to do one that we had from last time, but it’s coming up really soon. It’s the Sharon Thesen, Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent and it’s coming up on Thursday, March 19th, which is also gonna be passed by the time this comes out! I’m like just dropping it left and right here.\n \n\n38:03\tHannah McGregor:\tLove these weird audio archives.\n \n\n38:03\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah. It’s like, “Wait a minute, time…passing…okay.” Well, I’m gonna wrap this up. Thank you so much, Hannah McGregor here from Vancouver. Hannah, do you want to say what you’re here for giving a workshop?\n \n\n38:19\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Well, I mean, that’s definitely gonna be in the past by the time people listen to this.\n \n\n38:21\tKaris Shearer:\tIt is definitely gonna be in the past. But—\n \n\n38:24\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah.\n \n\n38:24\tKaris Shearer:\t–I feel like it deserves a…\n \n\n38:26\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Yeah, shout-out to podcasting, that’s what I’m giving a workshop about. You know what, in general, shout-out to maybe the other podcast that I host, which is the SpokenWeb Podcast.\n \n\n38:37\tKaris Shearer:\tYeah!\n \n\n38:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWhich this has been an episode of, SoundBox Signals has been an episode of, but more other things. I am actually the April episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast is me. [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] Is me? So listen to that.\n \n\n38:50\tKaris Shearer:\tSee, ’cause we haven’t had one from you yet.\n \n\n38:51\tHannah McGregor:\tNo, you haven’t, so you’re gonna—\n \n\n38:53\tKaris Shearer:\tOh.\n \n\n38:53\tHannah McGregor:\t–get to hear what I do, which is…just complain about male poets.\n \n\n39:04\tKaris Shearer:\tMy name is Karis Shearer and I was joined in the studio [End Music: Ambient Instrumental] by Hannah McGregor, Amy Thiessen, and Emily Murphy. We recorded the episode back in early March when we were still able to get together in person. And I’m recording the outro right now in my new studio at home, which is a blanket fort. I can assure you that we will continue to bring you new episodes of SoundBox Signals over the summer. I want to thank the estate of Warren Tallman [Begin Music: Ambient Instrumental] for allowing us to use the recording, which you can find online on our website soundboxsignals.ok.ubc.ca. Please stay safe. [End Music: Ambient Instrumental].\n \n\n39:36\tMusic:\t[Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals]\n \n\n39:52\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam, members of the SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab. [End Music: Drum And Electronic Beat Instrumentals] Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca and subscribe to the SoundBox Signals Podcast for more close listening with the AMP Lab team. A special thank you to Emily Murphy for her contributions to this episode. [Theme Music] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. We’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n"],"score":5.1176014}]