[{"id":"9632","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 S5E1, As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem, 2 October 2023, Comeau"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/as-it-is-or-as-it-was-translating-the-ruin-poem/"],"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":["Ghislaine Comeau"],"creator_names_search":["Ghislaine Comeau"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ghislaine Comeau\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/b3eeed87-76b0-426d-8b43-f1015d7c6472/audio/2f7aa8f6-7124-4ab7-a8ea-2bcb81f7cec3/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-ep-1-master-v1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:49:31\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\" 47,542,347 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-ep-1-master-v1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/as-it-is-or-as-it-was-translating-the-ruin-poem/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-10-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Creed, Robert Payson. “The Ruin (Modern English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSWnfuyzyM .\\n\\nCronan, Dennis. “Cædmon’s Audience.” Studies in Philology, vol. 109, no. 4, 2012, p 336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2012.0028.\\n\\nThe Fyrdsman. “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading).” YouTube, uploaded by thefyrdsman9590, 9 Nov. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRny7oyLg&t=318s .\\n\\nHammill, Peter. “Imperial Walls (2006 Digital Remaster).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Universal Music Group, 24 Aug. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0KW9CMFC_E .\\n\\nMagennis, Hugh. “Chapter 1 Approaching Anglo-Saxon Literature.” The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1-35.\\n\\nRaffel, Burton. “The Ruin (Old English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-dtP_73WTs&t=110s .\\n\\nSmith, Mark M. “Echo.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke UP, 2015, pp. 55-64.\\n\\nSilence is Leaden. “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem.” YouTube, uploaded by silenceisleaden188, 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D68n9F8Yozc&t=25s .\\n\\nStaniforth, Daniel (aka Luna Trick). “The Ruin.” YouTube, uploaded by lunatrick7098, 28 Jun. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IIoZfOR5MQ .\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549731934208,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts?\n\nIn this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature, brings us along on her quest to translate the “The Ruin” – a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter Book. In conversation with medievalists Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read and/or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed.\n\nQuest fulfilled! The episode concludes with Ghislaine’s reading of her own translation of “The Ruin.”\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(0:18)\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 ends] My name is Hannah McGregor–\n(0:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(0:50)\tHannah McGregor\tHow do we represent textually and perform orally the missing pieces from damaged medieval manuscripts? What is the role of the translator to create a historically accurate representation of how a poem sounded in its original contexts? Is such a thing even possible?\n(01:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode, Ghislaine Comeau, Concordia PhD student studying early medieval literature brings us along on her quest to translate “The Ruin,” a famously ruined Old English poem from the 10th century manuscript known as the Exeter book.\n(01:09)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn conversation with Medievalists, Dr. Stephen Yeager and Dr. Stephen Powell, she discusses sounds in Old English texts, exploring how these may have been read or performed and how they may now be translated, represented, and performed again. Now here is Episode 1 of Season 5 of the SpokenWeb podcast: As It Is or As It Was: Translating “The Ruin” Poem.[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme music plays briefly and ends]\n(02:31)\tThe Competent Mouth\t[Sound effects of two people walking down a stone pathway. A door with rusted hinges opens. One set of footsteps continues, more muffled than before. The sound of keys jingling can be heard. Someone unlocks a cabinet and takes out a large book. The book’s spine cracks as it’s opened and the sound of pages turning can be heard]\n(02:31)\tThe Competent Mouth\tSo. Here is the Exeter book. I’ve opened it to the specific pages that you asked to see: “The Ruin Poem,” – famously ruined itself. As you probably already know, the manuscript dates from the 10th century, and the damage, though we can’t be sure, suggests that throughout its centuries the book might have been used as a cutting board, a glue stand, and a gold and silver leaf press. As you see here, fire, possibly caused by a fallen brand, has also significantly damaged these last pages rendering some lines unreadable and making it impossible for us to know what this poem says exactly.\nWhere the words are lost, all we readers and translators can do is speculate or be silent. Well, I’ll leave you to it. You have one hour. I’ll be right outside.[Sound effect of a person walking away, opening the same rusty door and closing it behind them]\n(03:32)\tGhislaine Comeau (inner monologue)\t[Soft electronic music plays and then ends] I wonder…[Soft plucked string music begins to play] Do we always need to speculate or be silent in the face of damage? Should we? To speculate, I suppose, if we are aiming to recreate the past… but it’s a past lost to us and virtually impossible to verify. To be silent then… but isn’t keeping silent contributing to a loss of a part of the text’s past? [Music ends] What about accepting, representing, and hearing the damaged text as it exists to us now – without the weight of the impossibility of the recreation of an ultimately opaque past.\n(4:18)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Sound effect of someone turning the pages of a book] In the chapter Echo from Keywords and Sound, Mark Smith begins with “[a]n echo is nothing, if not historical to varying degrees. [Soft electronic music begins to play] It is a faded facsimile of an original sound, a reflection of time past.” The slightly alliterative and poetic air of this passage was immediately appealing to me, and it piqued my interest. I read on, sufficiently curious in wondering where this sound chapter would go. [Soft electronic music ends] And when I, Ghislaine Comeau, student of early medieval literature, read it, I couldn’t help but think of early medieval texts, [soft drumming music begins to play] their translations, and their performances as degrees of echoes growing fainter and fainter from their original. Smith continues: “To what extent the echo can, does, or should have fidelity to the original sound is a question preoccupying historians of any period.” Indeed. I, though not a historian, do find myself so preoccupied – this preoccupation fueled by my recent fixation with the old English poem, “The Ruin” housed in the Exeter Book, a damaged 10th century manuscript, with many of its lines burned. Thinking of “The Ruin” and its ruined state, I wondered then about this idea of fidelity to an original sound that Smith speaks of. I thought about the transcriptions and translations of “The Ruin” that use ellipses or dashes or other visible punctuation to represent the physical damage and lost words, lost sounds. I asked myself, how, then, are those ellipses and dashes translated when read? For that answer, I did what any other millennial graduate student would do: I checked on YouTube. [Drumming ends] [Sound effect of someone typing on a keyboard] There I found various amateur translators, readers, and performers. The translations and sounds varied from what one commenter called “quite an awful translation” accompanied by sci-fi sounds.\n(6:28)\tYouTube audio (Daniel Staniforth (aka Luna Trick), “The Ruin”)\t[Ominous electronic music plays in the background]…Snapped, roof trees, and towers fallen, the work of giants…. [Music fades]\n(6:40)\tGhislaine Comeau\tAnother chose a dramatic piano background for his translation.\n(6:45)\tYouTube audio (Silence is Leaden, “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem”)\t[Piano music plays]…The beams are bereaved, the mortars… [Music ends]\n(6:47)\tGhislaine Comeau\t…which a commenter hailed as harrowing for the native tribes of Britain who are today ruled by foreigners. The video creator liked this comment. Both of them seemingly missing entirely that this poem laments the ruin of a Roman city. And a third chose a Gregorian type humming as the background to an aggressive reading of R.M. Liuzza’s translation, which according to the video creator “manages to capture the zeitgeist of the poem very well.”\n(7:17)\tYouTube audio (The Fyrdsman, “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading)”)\t[Gregorian chant plays quietly]…Holds the builders, rotten, forgotten, the hard grip of the ground until a hundred generations of men are gone. This wall, rust stained and moss covered…[Gregorian chant ends]\n(7:29)\tGhislaine Comeau\tNone of these three addressed the manuscript’s damage specifically with their use of sounds. And the last two either agree with or themselves assert some type of privileged understanding of the poem’s context and meaning, which they then appear to attempt to express in their performance.\n(7:29)\tGhislaine Comeau\tA more scholarly example, The Smithsonian, also has recordings of “The Ruin” in both the original Old English and Modern English translation on YouTube. In the Old English version, the reader chooses a dramatic reading and represents the missing damaged text by an elongated silence.\n(8:10)\tYouTube audio, Burton Raffel, “The Ruin (Old English)”\t[Man recites text in Old English. He pauses to indicated a section of damaged text before starting again]\n(8:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIn the Modern English version, the reader does not indicate any silences in his reading and simply reads through the poem’s translation as if it were one whole piece.\n(8:43)\tYouTube audio, (Robert Payson Creed, “The Ruin (Modern English)”)\t…Sank to a heap of tumbled stones, where once cheerful strutting warriors flocked, golden armor, gleaming giddy with wine. Here was wealth, silver gems, cattle, land, in the crowning city of a far-flung kingdom. There were buildings of stone where steaming currents threw up surging heat, a wall encircled that brightness…\n(9:08)\tGhislaine Comeau\tComing back to Smith, he writes: “The lines of disagreement among historians are fairly well delimited. On one side, there is a very tenuous claim that we can recapture and re-experience the sounds of the past. […] The alternative argument maintains that efforts along these lines are deeply misleading and insists that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual desiccation.”\n(9:08)\tGhislaine Comeau\tHe then goes on to say: “The line of inquiry also makes the case either explicitly or implicitly for the power of text to capture with fidelity and authenticity, the meaning of sounds to the people who were doing the listening at the time of their production.”\n[Drumming music begins to play]\nHow then can these translators and readers assume to know the “zeitgeist” of the ruin poem as one mentioned, or the tone with which we should read, or how the damage should be read, seeing that we have no way of knowing what was there before the damage? I needed, then, in my journey with “The Ruin” to first decide if I wanted to represent the poem as it is –  damaged, incomplete, ruined, or as it was – despite the impossibility of that.\n[Music ends of abruptly] [record scratch sound effect plays]\nBut I get ahead of myself. Before starting my translation journey, I needed to consult with the experts. I needed to know more about the place and role of sound in old English literature. So I sat down with Professors Yeager and Powell to ask them some questions.\n(10:49)\tStephen Yeager\tSteven Yeager, chair of the Department of English at Concordia University. My research specialization is Old and Middle English literature.\n(10:57)\tStephen Powell\tSteve Powell, associate professor of English at Concordia University, and I study Old and Middle English literature\n(11:05)\tGhislaine Comeau\tIn their studies, students of early medieval literature will often come across terms like “oral-formulaic theory,” and in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Hugh Magennis writes how it is thought that most surviving Old English poetic texts are literate compositions, but that they still make use of the same kind of oral derived poetic art. My question, then, is what do we mean when we talk about “oral derived poetic art”, “orality”, and “oral-formulaic theory”?\n(11:40)\tStephen Yeager\t[Soft choral music plays briefly and then ends] Oral formulaic theory goes back to the turn of the 20th century when there’s, a scholar named Milman Parry who’s looking at the question of Homer, and, you know, whether, as the joke goes, either Homer or the poet by the same name who wrote The Iliad or the Odyssey, and who this person was. Milman Parry noted the existence of many formulae that recur throughout the poem.\nStephen Yeager\tSo, for example, a rosy fingered dawn, or much enduring divine Odysseus. These kind of little phrases that appear to be the building blocks of the lines of the poem that are sort of used continuously throughout. Parry went to study Serbo-Croat oral poets and discovered that they too used these formulae and sort of posited therefore, that Homer was a poet who had essentially, extemporaneously, working out of this poetic tradition, composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were then sort of written down as more or less a transcription of what had been originally an oral performance.And that idea then really gets enshrined by his student, Albert Lorde, who wrote a book in 1960, that really kind of makes this idea mainstream. And then one of the main places actually where it really kind of gets spread is through the University of Toronto where scholars like Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and especially Walter Ong, he extrapolates from this a whole idea of oral man [soft harp music begins to play] and literate man where oral traditions and literate traditions create fundamentally different human experiences of cognition. And so that’s kind of the big version then of how oral-formulaic theory kind of really takes off and what’s kind of at stake in the study of it in literature.\nStephen Yeager\tIn old English, you have a scholar named F.P. Magoon. He essentially argued that old English poetry is similarly transcribed from oral performances. And what’s really at stake for him is that in the formulaic quality of old English verse, you have remnants of culture before the arrival of Christianity, brought with it the technology of writing and the book. So in these oral-formulae that’s how you sort of get back to the Pagan pre-Christian past.\n(13:47)\tGhislaine Comeau\tAnd what place then does oral formulaic theory have in Old English literary studies today?\n(13:56)\tStephen Yeager\tThe current consensus revolves around Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, especially as in her book, Visible Song, and, uh, A.N. Doane also talks about this concept of scribal performance. One of the things that Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe points out is that we have very few manuscripts where there are more than one witnesses of the same old English poem. And every time we do, there are significant differences between the two texts.\nStephen Yeager\tSo it seems that the act of a scribe writing something down is kind of something like Milman Parry’s oral poet, insofar as it wasn’t about reproducing an exact text, it was about kind of reproducing a kind of feeling in accordance with a kind of set of rules which, you know, allow for some improvisation. So that is, I guess my own version of what I hear in Magennis’s point is that you know, to a certain extent that division of oral and literate isn’t an entirely useful one because really kinda what we’re talking about are the rules for how texts get created, how performances take place.\n(14:55)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Soft electronic pensive music begins to play] Thinking about Professor Yeager’s comment – that the division of oral and literate is not entirely useful – [Music ends] I am reminded of Dennis Cronan’s article “Caedmon’s Audience” [Sound effect of someone flipping through pages in a book]- where he similarly explains the oral-formulaic nature of Old English poetry, noting that “surviving Old English poems are, to a greater or lesser extent, transitional texts, written compositions that utilize the meter, phraseology (including formulae and formulaic systems), and vocabulary of the native oral tradition.” Keeping this transitional nature in mind, I asked Professors Powell and Yeager “what more can we say or what more do we know about early English storytellers, oral storytelling, and performances?”\n(15:49)\tStephen Powell\t[Soft drumming music begins to play] Well, I think the literary evidence is probably the best evidence we have, or written down records or renditions of people telling stories. So that was something that was often recorded within literary texts and historical texts from the old English period. And you’ll see for example, in Beowulf repeated interpolations of other stories. And the circumstances of the telling of those stories is, highlighted so frequently in a social setting, often in a celebratory mode or at a feast or a big communal meal, you’ll have this tradition of what we call the scop who tell stories, of the past, of the culture.\n(16:41)\tGhislaine Comeau\tThe scop, in other words, poets and Bards who would perform poems and pales.\n(16:49)\tStephen Powell\tThe literary texts themselves encode this kind of performance, that, whether those are the stories that actually got written down. Then once it came to putting things into manuscripts, there’s really not much evidence of that directly.\n(17:04)\tStephen Powell\tAnother key one, as you know, is the legend of Caedmon’s Hymn. But as you also know, there’s a lot of reasons to doubt whether that’s a direct anthropological description of an event that actually happened. There’s two old English poems that are from the perspective of poets. There’s one called Widsith, where it’s basically like that Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He describes everywhere that he’s been in all of the different courts that he’s served in. [“I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash plays briefly and then fades]\nStephen Powell\tFar more extensive than any single human ever could have actually attended. There’s the old English poem, “Deor”, where a guy goes through a bunch of terrible things that have happened from folklore, and then he says, “another terrible thing that happened is I lost my job as a poet and I’m looking for a new one.” Again, you know, very, very scanty evidence. It’s a lot of work to reconstruct. I mean, there’s not much anthropological, or excuse me, archeological evidence that I’m aware of beyond like lyres that existed or what have you, [Sound effect of harp music begins] but who knows how those actually figure it in the context of a performance.\nStephen Powell\tThere’s a lot of conjecture there. I think there’s some information from the north sagas a bit more of these narrative sources. But you know, those are written hundreds of years later, quite a long distance away. And so who knows how useful they’re,\n(18:20)\tStephen Powell\tI think all the literary evidence actually does point pretty clearly to a tradition of oral storytelling. [Music ends] I don’t think that you have the story of Caedmon in which Caedmon famously leaves the banquet because he’s not gonna be able to participate. Whether or not that is a historically accurate story, it is beside the point for me. The point is that we have that record. It corresponds with records from other texts that show that there was this tradition. [Drumming music begins to play]\nStephen Powell\tAnd it stands to reason that this is a society where you had long, dark evenings and plenty of alcoholic beverages distributed to you. What else were you going to do except tell stories? And of course, with a relatively low level of literacy, most of those stories would’ve been told orally.\n(19:11)\tStephen Yeager\tThat’s absolutely true. I mean, I guess I was just saying that we don’t really know much of the details about how that actually went forward or who it was who got to tell the story or how professionalized it was. Another key moment is a famous statement by, it’s Alcuin, right? Uh, “what has Ingeld to do with Christ?” Where he’s complaining about the monks who are obviously spending all their time listening to stories about guys like Ingal, who’s a, a hero who’s mentioned in Beowulf and when they should be listening to stories about Christ. But, you know, there’s only so many of those, I guess [Stephen Yeager laughs]\n(19:48)\tGhislaine Comeau\t[Music ends] Early in his answer, professor Yeager made reference to the scanned archeological evidence beyond the lyre. And I thought this a great place to turn the conversation back to sound and ideas of sound in early English works. [In interview]\nGhislaine Comeau\tOn that note, you mentioned the lyre, despite much discussion about orality, oral storytelling, oral tradition, oral-formulaic theory, alliterative verse, and so on, all of which are notions based on sound. We seem to rarely talk about sound or sounds in early English works, except of course, the occasional reference to a harp or a lyre. So what do we know about sounds in these performances or sounds in Old English poetry more generally?\n(20:33)\tStephen Powell\t[Soft string music begins to play] We know precious little, really. I mean, I think that Stephen’s point about the archeological evidence being slim is absolutely on point. And even the literary evidence that I’m harping on, no pun intended, is pretty scant on what these intertext interpolations, say in Beowulf, sound like. I think that’s really hard for us to recreate here.\n(21:00)\tStephen Yeager\tOf the many tragic losses of early medieval culture, one of the most tragic is the loss of any music, and I think it’s with the 10th, 11th century, there’s the Gregorian reform, which includes among other things, a standardization of devotional music all across Europe. And there’s no musical notation that I’m aware of before the Gregorian reform. And so it seems like all of whatever kind of local musical traditions would’ve predated that, are eliminated by it. And so it’s extremely difficult to try to reconstruct what the structure of a song was or how music worked before for this period.\n(21:38)\tGhislaine Comeau\tSo given that, you know, the scant evidence, to what level can we speculate about the place that sounds music or other, not necessarily just the harp. What place might they have had within these oral storytellings or these performances? You know, how can we imagine, can meaning like in the term of being allowed to speculate so far, how can we imagine the sounds of and surrounding sounds of an Early English text?\n(22:10)\tStephen Powell\tI think sound was important in the Old English period, and I think there’s good evidence just from the way that poetry is constructed in this period, suggests that the culture cared deeply about how things sounded. You don’t have the kind of alliterative verse that characterizes Old English poetry, where rather than rhyme poetry is connected with repeated sounds, initial sounds without being interested in sound. So I think that we shouldn’t overlook that internal evidence in thinking about the centrality of sound.\n(22:49)\tGhislaine Comeau\tCan you explain a bit or talk about alliterative verse and what it is and how it works?\n(22:54)\tStephen Powell\t[Music ends] When we think about poetry and how poetry is structured today, we tend to think of rhyme as the central feature of poetry, that we expect that the end of each line will rhyme with the next one, for example, as in a rhyming couplet. In the Old English period, rhyming was not something that was particularly important.\nStephen Powell\tIt’s not that they didn’t know about rhyme, because there’s a poem that we call the rhyming poem, which is all about rhyme and there’s some internal rhymes and other uses of rhyme. But the primary way in which Old English verse in each Old English line was structured, was around alliteration. [Soft electronic music begins]\nStephen Powell\tSo that in each line there was a key sound that was repeated, the beginning of the line or near the beginning of the line, and again, near the end of the line, and I’m oversimplifying here, but the important point is that a line of poetry was distinguishable in part by this alliteration. And that that pattern was incredibly important because the words whose initial sounds repeated were the words that were also stressed. And thus in many ways, probably the most important words for those poetic lines. [Electronic music ends]\nStephen Powell\tSo if you think about the reception of Old English poetry and you posit, that perhaps these poems were read or recited out loud, then having those repeated words that are so important within each line suggests that they were also a cue to the audience of what to pay attention to and what to listen to maybe within a noisy audience. But again, now we’re starting to drift well away from concrete evidence and making speculations.\n(24:46)\tStephen Yeager\tEverything that we know about alliterative verse comes from secondary philological work. There is not, to my knowledge, much information at the time about how to write, but I’m not aware of anything in Old English that lays out the rules of Old English verse. And what made it especially difficult to reconstruct is that Old English poetry is not lineated on the page as poetry. There are the four major poetic codices  in the Junius 11 manuscript.\nStephen Yeager\tThere is what appears to be punctuation, which kind of marks the half lines. The beginning of reconstructing Old English verse came from that manuscript. So it’s been all this, this work to reconstruct it, but this is, I think, an important point for what you were asking about how much sound mattered and the fact that they aren’t making those distinctions graphically meant that they were meant to be heard.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd probably, you know, it’s another reason to think about it as being queued to music because like in a hymnal or something, right, where it’s all just sort of continuous because you hear where the verses end or what have you. [Choral music swells and then ends] I think that there’s every reason to believe that something like that might be the explanation for why Old English verse is written in this continuous script as opposed to other forms of verse.\nStephen Yeager\tI mean, among other things, it’s important to emphasize the centrality of memorization to medieval education. And of course, you know, why does poetic verse exist in the first place, right? Like, what is the purpose of patterning sounds in such and such way? It’s mnemonic. The cultural authority of poetry proceeds from that original mnemonic function, in my own view at least, you know, that if it rhymes, it sounds true effect, rhyme as reason that-\n(26:28)\tStephen Powell\tOr in Old English alliteration-\n(26:31)\tStephen Yeager\tAs a reason.\n(26:33)\tStephen Powell\tI don’t disagree with you, I’m just thinking that in terms of thinking about sound, that, yeah, there is this memory assistance that’s provided by rhyme for us, or probably alliteration for the Old English people. But those sounds also do things for us and have an emotive effect.\n(26:58)\tStephen Yeager\tWell, I mean, so you take something that’s important and you really wanna make sure that it’s preserved for yourself for future generations. You write it down, in a verse form to help it stick in people’s minds. And then that strategy that you do then acquires the cultural authority of the important information that you use it to record.\nStephen Yeager\tI’ll go with Walter Wrong this far. Once you have your literate institutions of authority that really kind of take over that cultural mnemonic function, then the function of poetry changes dramatically. And so that, you know, what you can see is kind of the rise of poetry in the sense that we know it in kind of the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance into modernity, those two things are related. I think as poetry loses that mnemonic function, as it stops to be so important, then what poetry is changes as a result. [Drumming music begins to play]\n(27:52)\tGhislaine Comeau\tFollowing Professor Yeager and Professor Powell’s insightful answers on oral-formulaic theory, oral storytelling, and the possible place and importance that sound may have had in old English texts, thinking specifically about the mnemonic function of alliteration and sound, I came come back ideas on translation, come back to Magennis and ask about a certain point that he makes in his Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature.\nGhislaine Comeau\tMagennis states that old English poetry is inherently difficult to date given its character. He notes how another scholar, Elizabeth Tyler, refers to the quote “timelessness” of Old English poetry in that, “rather than seeking to relate their work to a specific time or place, Old English poets cultivated a quality of timelessness, a quality that is reflected, for example, in an attachment to archaic diction”. Alongside archaic diction, Magennis also notes how a “stylistic stability” ultimately lends itself to the adaptability and reappropriation of Old English poetry for quote “ideological purposes relevant to the time”. So, with my own translation task ahead, I wanted to hear Professor Powell and Professor Yeager’s comments on this idea of “timelessness” in Old English poetry…\n(29:18)\tStephen Yeager\tSo the timelessness of Old English poetry is, you know, that comment is predicated on an assumption about a formal conservatism in Old English poetry over a long period of time, begging the question, who knows what the date was that any Old English poem was written, like the best we have are conjectures about when the manuscripts were copied. Almost all of them post-date the Benedictine reform of the 10th century, right?\nStephen Yeager\tAnd then the end of old English poetry is, the written record really dries up around 1066. Edward the Confessor dies, and there’s a poem called “The Death of Edward the Confessor,” and there’s not a lot of Old English poetry that’s written after that date. So in terms of, you know, the record of the manuscripts, we’re really talking 100-150 years. But there’s good reason to believe that many of these poems predate the Benedictine reform perhaps by centuries. And if that’s the case, then what we’re looking at is an extremely conservative verse form over hundreds of years, because it’s very difficult to look at Old English poetry and say, this is the early stuff and this is the late stuff.\n(30:21)\tStephen Powell\tAll we can really do is look at, these are the early manuscripts and these are the late manuscripts.\n(30:26)\tStephen Yeager\tYes. And like, maybe some of them are older, maybe most of them, maybe even all of them. But again, like if we’re thinking of it from the perspective of scribal performance, who knows how radically these texts were reinterpreted by the scribes who copied them down. [Light string music begins to play]\nStephen Yeager\tSo if you’re gonna posit conservatism, you know, the evidence isn’t there necessarily. The quote that you read to me is like a nice way of saying we really have no idea when any of this stuff  was actually composed. And it doesn’t give us any internal clues that help us figure it out, but I guess this is a good example of what I understood you to be kind of asking, which is what do you do in the face of all that you don’t know?\nStephen Yeager\tIt’s like, well, why don’t you just work from the example of what they did, right? They didn’t understand Latin and Roman stuff that well. They definitely didn’t read any Greek. But nonetheless, there’s this, you sort of, you take it, you assimilate it, you do what you want with it. Like the spirit of Old English literature is very, as conservative as the verse forms are, it is actually extremely experimental as well, and very open to taking something and then trying to make sense of it in your own context. So there is a sense in which developing your own performance of the text in conversation with it is, you know, in continuity with the practices of scribal performance that we see in the tradition itself.\n(31:46)\tGhislaine Comeau\tWith the certainty that we can never be quite certain of when old English texts were produced. In other words, we can never know the exact context of the cultural reception or the zeitgeist of the poems as one YouTuber had mentioned. I was reminded, again of Smith’s point, that without sufficient appreciation of the context in which the sounds occurred, we warp our understanding of echoes to the point of intellectual sophistication.\nGhislaine Comeau\tThinking then of old English texts as echoes, or rather their translations through the time as echoes. It then became clear to me that I wanted to shift the conversation to specifically address this issue of how we translate and how we perform these texts. [Music ends]\n(32:38)\tStephen Powell\tWhen we translate into Old English. We have at our command the entirety of the English vocabulary, which is the largest vocabulary of any language that’s ever been spoken on Earth. In contrast, when Anglo-Saxon or Old English writers were translating from Latin, they had at their disposal a very small vocabulary. And there’s nothing wrong with a small vocabulary. The size of a vocabulary doesn’t really matter for a language, because any language by definition has to serve the needs of its community.\nStephen Powell\tBut what that meant was that one of the things that old English writers were tasked with when they were translating from Latin into English was creating words, finding ways to describe concepts from Latin, which had a much larger vocabulary than English did at that point. And so we don’t have to do that. And so when, you know, Seamus Heaney famously translated Beowulf, he had at his disposal all of the vocabulary of English and got in some, I would say, trouble for including in his translation parts of the English vocabulary that were not sort of English. They were more Irish, and that was sort of controversial, but it was possible for him.\n(34:06)\tStephen Yeager\tOn the most pragmatic level, that’s what translation does, is it expands and develops some language. I mean, and think about also how, I wonder how old English verse transformed by trying to translate the Psalms into Old English, for example, which there’s both prose and poetic translations of the Psalms, which are already, you know, in the Vulgate, Jerome did these like word for word translations of the Psalms that are kind of terrible Latin, but that then become the basis of Latin education throughout the Middle Ages. The other sort of bigger example I was thinking of with this question was about how the translations of scenarios and events and from the Bible and you know, from other Latin sources, change to fit the values of the culture that they’re in.\nStephen Yeager\t​​But then from the perspective of a literary critic, you know, you see how that transformation reflects those values. And so the great example of that being of gender, and so for example, the Old English poem of Judith, which introduces this, this really interesting compound word elfscin, beautiful as an elf, it’s like, what the hell does that mean? You know, why is Judith an elfscin? Which then sort of leads to, which doesn’t beg the question this time, I think, leads to the question of, what is an elf? Like, what did that mean? What sorts of cultural contexts are coming to bear and why are they useful for describing this character who’s, you know, quite troubling as a character in the original context of the Hebrew scriptures? And, you know, remains a troubling one to, you know, her reception in Christian theology.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd then all of which then reflects in this sort of thing about like, well, if we’re going to adapt this figure into old English, does she sort of turn into a kind of Valkyrie figure? You know, are we sort of drawing from other mythological cultural contexts to try to assimilate and make sense of this character? Lots of fascinating things happen around this question, not just at the level of vocabulary, though, also at the level of vocabulary, but at the level of what gets created and then how that then goes on to influence the future evolution of the literary conventions.\n(36:13)\tStephen Powell\tRight. I mean, you think about the Old English renditions of the Exodus story, for example, where what seems like a biblical text without much an Old English poet normally values gets put into the mode of Old English heroic poetry. [Harp music begins to play]\nStephen Powell\tAnd even if it doesn’t, to come back to sound, because I know sound is the basic building block here. If you think about putting these biblical stories into the sounds that are also associated with non-biblical stories, Beowulf or the Battle of Malden or something like that, then what is that doing to the biblical story? It is putting it into the cultural context in some way. And of course, we always do that, whether it’s a biblical story or heroic story, when we translate, we’re carrying it from one culture to the other, whether that culture is early medieval England or the American Midwest of the 1970s.\nStephen Powell\tThe funny thing is, not the funny thing, the complicated thing is that when we do that kind of translation, we can become more familiar with the story in a certain way, but we also, in some ways, I think, can lose understanding of the story. Putting it too much into our own cultural idiom means that we lose the original cultural idiom and we lose the sort of the original emphasis. [Music ends]\n(37:47)\tStephen Yeager\tIt kind of comes down to, it’s one of these choices that you don’t wanna make, I think. Cause you know when you’re doing this translation, what you’re trying to do is make a text more immediate to an audience that would otherwise not be able to access it. But the question is, what is that text that you’re trying to make immediate? Is it the content and the ideas that’s in the poem, “The Ruin,” for example? Or is it the original context of reception? Like, do you want to sort of feel like you’re in the hall and listening to “The Ruin” as it would’ve been listened to? And so you’re there with like the… [Dr. Yeager’s voice fades out]\n(38:16)\tGhislaine Comeau\tHere, Professor Yeager has circled back to my original question and pointed out how translation is a series of choices and how we translate will depend on what we want to prioritize for our audience, meaning rhyme, emotion, an at best, speculated socio historical context?\n(38:37)\tStephen Yeager\t[Dr. Yeager’s voice fades back in]…Was walking around and whatever. And so the rhythmic choice is the one that’s like, I’m going to bring you into a more alien unusual world. And then the one that’s this is the more direct translation is the more here’s the information that’s in the poem, or here are the ideas or feelings or expressions. One of the things that distinguishes is, who is this audience? So like, if we’re writing for a bunch of Midwestern seventh graders, we’re not gonna bring ’em into the meat hall necessarily, right? We’re gonna really just try and make it so that they can sort of understand it and enjoy it. Whereas a more specialist audience, or especially if you’re an avant-garde or like a musician from the seventies or whatever, then you’ll choose something maybe that’s a bit more challenging, but again, it’s like, it’s back to your point about aesthetic decisions, which are often audience decisions.\nStephen Yeager\tAnd again, you know, at a certain point you never want to choose just one thing. Obviously there’s gonna be a compromise, but at a certain point, something has to prevail. You’re gonna run up against something where you’re gonna have two choices, one of which is the more difficult but interesting one, and one of which is the more accessible one, and there’s gonna be a pattern in the choices that you make.\nStephen Yeager\tBut that’s basically what translation is. [Quiet Gregorian chant style music begins] So “The Ruin” is this poem, which is famous in part for the way it, the sort of serendipitous, you know, thing where it’s a poem that’s damaged and is ruined and it’s describing a ruin within the poem, right? It’s a completely accidental, like, there was no sort of authorial intent behind that, but it works so nicely to kind of encapsulate the mood, not only of Old English poetry, but of its reception, really the mode of especially 20th century scholarship in the wake of Tolkien and “The Monsters and The Critics” and this kind of melancholic mood that characterizes the field.\nStephen Yeager\tBut you know, I mean, there’s no question you can ask about trying to connect with Old English, even though it’s impossible that you couldn’t ask about literally every other attempted communication you’ve ever done in your entire life, right? Like, when has there ever been like the true melding of minds and the intention of the original person is fully communicated so that the other person completely understood it? There are varying degrees of historical distance, of cultural distance and what have you, which complicate that further, but it’s not as if there is some kind of achievable thing that isn’t achieved, it’s just that the thing isn’t achieved in multiple ways. So in fact, part of the value of studying something like “The Ruin,” to my mind is the reminder that it gives you of that sort of basic fact about all communication, that for all you may rely on your stereotypes or your shared cultural knowledge or your sort of sense of this person from whoever long you’ve known them, in fact, there’s always this effort. There’s always this, this thing that remains, and so therefore this constant need for humility and for care, in the way that you recognize the limitations of your own understanding.\nStephen Yeager\tArguably, there is no such thing as a written text that is not also a ruin in this sense, right? Because the author is remote, the person who wrote it down, like by the time it gets to you, that person has changed themselves, right? And so the person who wrote it is gone. So “The Ruin” is this kind of perfect poem, distillation, as we said, for these serendipitous reasons of what writing is. And so I think that the representation of those gaps, to my mind, the best will be just the ones that call attention to it. Whatever that choice is to make the listener aware of the gap or what’s missing is to make them aware of what this work is, which is, you know, powerful as a work of writing and sort of translating that into the other medium.\nStephen Yeager\tTo go back to my earlier point about Milman Parry, I wanted to make one final point about that, which is, you know, that he was able to do all of that work because of recording, right? He relied on the recordings of the Serbo-Croat oral poets, which he then transcribed and then identified all of the things. So, you know, you can’t have oral formulaic theory and all of the nostalgia for the oral performance and the immediacy of it. And you know, like, this is what the show really sounded like when he was strumming on the lyre or whatever. [Soft string music begins to play]\nStephen Yeager\tYou know, that nostalgia and that wish is a product of the recording technology that then makes it feel like that is an experience you could actually have because you can have it about somebody today. And there is an extent to which that desire or transparency for immediacy is the product of communications technology that promises that transparency and immediacy, but which in fact has never actually delivered on it. Because, you know, the recording then removes from the context, and then there’s suddenly a ton of stuff that you don’t know about it. And I think it’s how you represent your own relationship to the text and not about how you represent the text itself. Like, is Peter Hamill saying like, I have a PhD in old English? [“Imperial Walls” by Peter Hamill plays briefly]\n(43:33)\tGhislaine Comeau\tPeter Hamill adapted part of “The Ruin” poem into a song called “Imperial Walls.”\n(43:42)\tStephen Yeager\tYou know, he’s not, he’s not that, that representation is like, I’m an artist and I’m going to take this work of art from the past and I’m gonna do my own thing with it. And so that’s completely responsible because it’s transparent about what’s happening. [Soft drumming music begins] The irresponsible is when you claim an authority that you don’t have.\n(44:04)\tGhislaine Comeau\tI, as the translator and scop, am essentially deciding to impose what I think the poem should sound like onto you, the reader or the listener. It is impossible for me to represent it as it was, as I’m not part of its context of reception. I can only translate, interpret, and present it as it is to me now. Who do I want it to make sense for and what sense do I want it to make? And even then, how do I want the poem to sound? Sad, nostalgic, wistful, a touch of hiraeth? The impossible…\n[Music ends]\n“The Ruin” poem.\nThis wall Stone is wondrous/fate and fortune have broken/and shattered the city/the works of giants/decay/roofs ruined/towers toppled/spoke gates smashed/frost on mortar/cut and cleaved/The storm shelter has fallen/eaten through by time/an earthly grasp/a hard grip of ground/imprisons the dead and decayed master makers/Until 100 generations of nations have passed/the city’s red stained gray wall stood under storms/one kingdom after another/high and steep/it fell/Still, the wall stone remains/[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]num geheapen felon/grimly ground/It shone/skilled work/ancient work/lamrindum beag/mod mo … yne swiftne/[Sound effect of fire ends]The stout minded/firmly wove with wire threads/foundations, bound wondrously together/The city dwellings were radiant/Many bathhouses/a tall pinnacle of treasure/great rejoicing/many mead halls/days full of joy/until fate/it changed all that/the slain fell widely/Days of pestilence came/death devoured all the sword brave men/their rampart foundations became waste/The citadel perished/restorers yielded sacred places to the earth/So these dwellings became dreary/and the Vermilion buildings/wood work roofs thus separated from their tiles/A perishable place fell/where once many a glad- hearted/and gold-bright man/shone with war gear/wine flushed and brilliant/splendor adorned/a bright city of this far reaching realm/seen in silver and gold/blessed in curious gems/precious stone and power/broken like a heap of stones/where the baths were/stone houses stood/A wall surrounded all/brightened breast/hot in heart/surging from far with heat/stream erupted/That was advantageous/when they let poor forth hot streams over gray stone/\n[Sound effect of fire crackling swells and dissipates]\nUn…until the ring pool hotly/where the baths were/Then this/Re,that is a kingly thing/\n[Sound effect of fire crackling swells and grows]\na house/a city/\n[Fire crackling ends]\n(48:15)\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.\n(48:28)\tHannah McGregor\tOur producer this month is Ghislaine Comeau, a PhD student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Thanks to James Healey, our sound designer for the intro and outro, and Miranda Eastwood for the sound design on Ghislaine’s episode. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. Special thanks to Dr. Steven Yeager and Dr. Steven Powell for lending their voices and expertise to this episode.\n(48:55)\tKatherine McLeod\t[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 SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]"],"score":3.2550304},{"id":"9633","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 S5E2, Listening in Uncertainty, 6 November 2023, Paquette"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-in-uncertainty/"],"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":["Nadège Paquette"],"creator_names_search":["Nadège Paquette"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nadège Paquette\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/61a67aba-7902-445e-834a-7360ff36afd9/audio/886b9d5b-fe0b-439e-b083-1d8e46196a01/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-episode-2-full-master-oct-26-v12.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:22\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,557,106 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-episode-2-full-master-oct-26-v12\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-in-uncertainty/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"6 November 2023\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music:\\n\\nTom Bonheur https://www.instagram.com/dj.g3ntil/\\n\\nKovd, Kvelden, Tell What You Know, Ivory Pillow, and Fever Creep by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/\\n\\nPodcast:\\n\\n“The Wordless Place” Lulu Miller https://radiolab.org/podcast/wordless-place\\n\\n“Why Podcast?” Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html\\n\\nShort Film:\\n\\nAnointed, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Dan Lin https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/videos-featuring-kathy/\\n\\nFilm:\\n\\nPulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa\\n\\nAdditional sounds from:\\n\\n“Interview with Tanya Tagaq,” Alicia Atout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FupatQbcTeM\\n\\n“Open Dialogues: Daniel Heath Justice,” Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBN8_IGuuw\\n\\n“Monster 怪物,” United for Peace Film Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OJulGi1Rg\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nBouich, Abdenour. 2021. “Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words.” Transmotion 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.980.\\n\\nButler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (1): 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650409349213.\\n\\nChion, Michel. 2017. L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma. 4th Edition. Armand Colin.\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey, and Hannah McGregor. 2022. Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count. Vol. 27, no. 1. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html.\\n\\nEidsheim, Nina Sun. 2019. “Introduction: The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?” In The Race of Sound, 1–38. Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpntq.4.\\n\\nGoodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of lived abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=018751433&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.\\n\\nHaraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press.\\n\\nHudson, Seán. 2018. “A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Horror Films.” Film-Philosophy 22 (3): 448–64. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0089.\\n\\nJLiat. 1954. Bravo. Found Sounds. Bikini Atoll. http://jliat.com/.\\n\\nJustice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.\\n\\nKurosawa, Kiyoshi, dir. 2001. Pulse. Toho Co., Ltd.\\n\\nLamb, David Michael. 2015. “Clyde River, Nunavut, Takes on Oil Indsutry over Seismic Testing.” CBC. March 30, 2015. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/clyde-river-nunavut-takes-on-oil-industry-over-seismic-testing-1.3014742.\\n\\nLin, Dan, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dirs. 2018. Anointed. Pacific Storytellers Cooperative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVpExaY2Fs.\\n\\nMadwar, Samia. 2016. “Breaking The Silence.” Text/html. Up Here Publishing. uphere. Https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence. 2016. https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence.\\n\\nMiller, Lulu. 2022. “The Wordless Place.” Radiolab. https://radiolab.org/episodes/wordless-place.\\n\\nMorton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis (Minn.): University of Minnesota Press.\\n\\nRaza Kolb, Anjuli Fatima. 2022. “Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic.” Journal of Victorian Culture 27 (2): 292–301. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac017.\\n\\nRobinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. 1 online resource (319 pages) : illustrations vols. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6152353.\\n\\nSontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics.\\n\\nTagaq, Tanya. Split Tooth. Viking, Penguin Random House, 2018.\\n\\nTasker, John Paul. 2017. “Supreme Court Quashes Plans for Seismic Testing in Nunavut, but Gives Green Light to Enbridge Pipeline.” CBC. July 26, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-ruling-indigenous-rights-1.4221698.\\n\\nYamada, Marc. 2020. “Visualizing a post-bubble Japan in the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi.” In Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film : The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades, 60–81. Routledge contemporary Japan series. Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2279077.\\n\\nYusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549734031360,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this audio essay, Nadège Paquette adopts a posture of not-knowing as an alternative to the Western drive toward knowledge accumulation. Nadège asks: can not-knowing help us learn to live and die more justly in compromised worlds?\n\nThis episode navigates this question using an associative method which links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage. Listeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to end time stories including Lulu Miller’s podcast and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film, and stories of endurance, with Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. 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. [Spokeweb Podcast music ends] My name is Hannah McGregor.\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod and each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:50)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month our producer, Nadège Paquette sonically explores what not-knowing sounds like, and feels like, as an alternative to constantly accumulating knowledge. The episode enacts the possibilities of not-knowing, using an associative method that links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage.\n(01:13)\tKatherine McLeod\tListeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to works that dwell in the unknown, including a story shared by Lulu Miller on the podcast Radio Lab, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film Pulse, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Anointed,” and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook Split Tooth. Collectively, these works of art give us a language for experiences that, in fact, exceed language, and invite us to pause in the space of uncertainty.\n(01:42)\tHannah McGregor\tHere is the second episode of season five of the SpokenWeb podcast, “Listening in Uncertainty.” [SpokenWeb theme music swells briefly and then fades]\n(02:04)\tNadège Paquette\t[Pensive music begins] Hi, I’m Nadège. I’m speaking from Tiohtià:ke, also known as Montreal. I’m a white settler and a seeker of ways to live and die with other humans and non-humans on a damaged planet. [Music fades out] I find this process of naming my partial speaking and listening positionalities important.\nNadège Paquette\t[Sound effect of crickets singing at night followed by the call of a crow] Naming is the way we’ve been taught to apprehend the world, but it might also have the effect of making us fear what we can’t name. This sound work is about the potential of not naming things to linger in uncertainty. It’s about listening through discomfort, tuning in to fear and surrendering to silence. [Cricket sounds stop]\nNadège Paquette\tAttempting not to name things with spoken words is, however, a contradictory project. I can’t escape language, so I try to let it exceed the meaning I expect of it. [Light percussion music fades in] The question I’m asking throughout this episode in exploring the limits of my understanding is: can not-knowing help us learn to live more justly in compromised worlds? Since in Western sciences, the paradigm of knowledge accumulation is coming to its limits when facing the conditions of global warming, can a posture recognizing the bounds of our understanding be more fruitful?\nNadège Paquette\tBecause while we know a lot about climate change, we’re still unable to act and slow down its processes. This podcast is a sort of collage where I make associations between ideas, sounds and stories. Associations are the glue making sometimes seemingly disparate elements stick together. My hope in calling my process associative is to avoid the expectation that this podcast as a form of narrative should be linear: that is, made of a series of observations where one ideologically evolves into another to reveal a single, coherent meaning. Associations might be more about not knowing where the next idea will take us. [Music fades out]\n(04:20)\tNadège Paquette\tThe episode will be divided into two parts. The first section follows two stories where characters are faced with the unknown and react with fear.  [Ominous music begins] These are stories where a certain version of the world ends, a world where things can be known and mastered through language. There’s the story of a child’s night terror told by Lulu Miller in a podcast episode, as well as the story of people disappearing through computer circuits, which takes the form of the film Pulse by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  [Music ends]\nNadège Paquette\tI’ve associated both stories because of the effect of fear they describe and produce. I’ll talk about how fear can be created by acousmatic sounds and uncomfortable intimacy, as well as how we might attempt to tame fear through naming and interpretation.  [Calm electronic music begins]\nWhile the first section is about narratives we could call apocalyptic, the stories of the second section are about surviving and healing after yet another apocalypse, the first being the decolonization of the Americas and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. [Music ends]\n(05:37)\tNadège Paquette\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner recites a poem where the tale of a son playing with fire meets an account of living on the Marshall Islands, which have been used as sites for “testing” nuclear bombs. [Calm electronic music fades back in] Tanya Tagaq reads her novel where a daughter protects sea creatures from seismic testing. I want to think here about those things that Western science has called “tests” but which are in fact “the real thing” because they are actively destroying worlds. I want to reflect on the challenge that Indigenous knowledges pose to the notion of real versus fictional world and consider how certain worldviews which escape hegemonic frameworks have been deemed by colonial powers to be illegible and thus less real. [Music ends]\n(06:30)\tNadège Paquette\tBefore diving into stories of fear and stories offering healing, I want to talk about the form of podcasting, about sound’s particular ability to produce effective and embodied responses in listeners. [Dark pensive music begins] I also want to present my method in this episode, how I try to practice what Kaisa Kortekallio calls “becoming-instrument” in order to attend to different associations and what they mean. The medium of sound and the form of podcasting here allow me to invite you to experience effective engagement. [calm but ominous music begins] Sounds create moods and emotions; they can make us feel connected to each other or scared and wary. In both instances, the creative form of intimacy, the feeling of being close to someone or something, or the feeling of being too close. In their series…\n(07:25)\tStacey Copeland\t“Why Podcast? Podcasting as Publishing.”\n(07:28)\tHannah McGregor\t“Sound-based scholarship,” and…\n(07:30)\tStacey Copeland\t“Making Podcasts Count”\n(07:33)\tNadège Paquette\t…Academics and podcasters…\n(07:34)\tHannah McGregor\t“Hannah McGregor”\n(07:35)\tNadège Paquette\tand…\n(07:36)\tStacey Copeland\t“Stacy Copeland” [music ends]\n(07:37)\tNadège Paquette\tUnderstand podcasting to be a mode of affect transmission. That means that the affects produced by sound and voice through the quality of their pitch, timber volume and rhythm, stick to the listener and moves them in ways that written form might not accomplish. [Electronic pulsing evolving into soft ambient music] Sound and voice thus activate different ways of understanding and apprehending our academic research. While listening to this podcast, can you attend to your affective responses? Does the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps] Does walking allow you to listen intently? Is music your favorite mood altering method? But also, how do you affect those sounds? How might your listening bring you to identify the sounds in a way that limits them? Dylan Robinson, xwélmexw writer of the Stó:lō people and author of the book, Hungry Listening, teaches me to be attentive to the ways in which I listen with hunger for meaning.\n(08:48)\tNadège Paquette\tThis hunger I inherit from my French settler ancestors, who arrived on this continent starving for food, but also for Indigenous lands, knowledges, cultures, and labor. Robinson explains that the drive to satisfy that hunger makes one lose contact with their sense of relationality and reflexivity.  [Eerie music fades in and out]\nRather than holding on to the Western imperative that, as Robinson writes, “all knowledge should be accessible at all times,” I attempt to sit with the limits of my understanding of Indigenous intelligence, voice, song, and stories. My limits can be heard in my imperfect pronunciation of the word xwélmexw, meaning “first nation person” in Halq’eméylem, but also in the fact that I access Indigenous knowledges, not through relations with Indigenous people, communities, lands, and waters, but through texts, and texts that I read in English, which is a colonial language.\n(09:58)\tNadège Paquette\t[Dark pensive music begins] I hope that my engagement here with Indigenous thinkers and stories is respectful and fruitful, but I recognize that it might not always be the case. To tune into influences I might not usually perceive because of my positionality and training, I attempt a form of reconfiguration that literary scholar Kaisa Kortekallio calls “becoming-instrument.” Becoming means that one’s own self, body, and mind is always in the process of being done and undone. [Music fades out. Brief chords and sounds from a printer play]\nInstrument means that mind and body like musical instruments and scientific instruments can be calibrated to perform a creative outcome or attend to certain phenomena. [Soft ominous music begins] Kortekallio writes, “the self instrument is tuned and tweaked in order to become more impressionable, that is, more receptable to the various effects of textural ecologies.” Or, in this case, to the effects of sonic ecologies, to the effects of sounds, beings, and environments relating to each other.\nTo become-instrument, I actively calibrate myself to become more resectable to the associations that might arise between sounds, stories, and concepts. [Music fades] While their association might become apparent to me, my understanding doesn’t exhaust the potential of these relations. [Eerie music begins] The association I make between the two first stories I will discuss in this episode is their interest in the affect of fear. Naming things can be a way to manage our fear of the unknown, to make it less threatening and more familiar. But, what if this fear of the unknown was indeed acquired because of language, because what we can’t name then becomes threatening? [Music ends]\n(12:01)\tNadège Paquette\tI came across this idea when listening to Radiolab’s episode, “The Wordless Place” where co-host…\n(12:08)\tLulu Miller\t“Lulu Miller”\n(12:08)\tNadège Paquette\t…Relates the first months of navigating the uncertainties of COVID-19 with her wife while their year and a half old son was still peacefully dwelling in the uncertainties of the wordless place. Naming, Miller explains, is…\n(12:25)\tLulu Miller\t“…This thing we do all the time, which is to group things together that don’t belong under one word, to preserve a sense of order, or comfort, or control.”\n(12:33)\tNadège Paquette\t[Tense light percussion music begins] This also happens with sound. Most people think about sound by reducing it through naming. It is one of the central premises of The Race of Sound by music scholar Nina Eidsheim. When we hear a sound but can’t identify its cause, we may ask the acousmatic question, “What is this?” The term acousmatic signals this perceived rupture between the sound and its source. Asking the acousmatic question reveals the assumption that there can be an answer to it. That the thick event of a sound and especially in Eidsheim’s research, of a voice, can be captured by a word encompassing its source. [Music ends] This belief that by naming we come to know what we name is reassuring. [Eerie music begins] Miller believes it is what reassured her son after he had a particularly intense night terror. Miller’s wife was able to appease him only by bringing him in front of a photograph of a Coptic tapestry and naming the things she thought she could see.\n(13:39)\tLulu Miller\t“‘Goat,’ she said tapping the glass, ‘flower, snail.'”\n(13:44)\tNadège Paquette\tMiller suspects that her son’s night terror was linked to his recent inquisition of words, which suddenly made him feel that the unknown was a threat. [Music ends]Neurologists say we’re wired to fear the unknown, but, what if, Miller asks…\n(14:02)\tLulu Miller\t“What if that fear only starts with the advent of words?”\n(14:06)\tNadège Paquette\tWe could say that causal listening, that is listening for the cause of the sound, and then naming the source is a process that attempts to remedy our fear of the unknown.\n[Strange sounds rapidly rise and fall]\nFilm theorist and composer Michel Chion explains that we’re engaged in causal listening when we ask: what is making a sound? What is the thing, object, being, or phenomenon, producing the sound, and where is its source located? [Dense eerie music begins] Causal listening or the ability to interpret sounds and identify their possible causes is both learned culturally and wired to our survival instinct. Instinctively we understand that loud noises almost always mean danger. But culturally we also learn to identify some loud noises as coming from unthreatening sources, and we’re thus able to respond to them accordingly. Music and drone fade out]\nIf I hear loud noise and it triggers fear in me, identifying its cause might bring my fear to dissolve. Naming, once again, is a way to regain a sense of control. [Pensive percussion with sirens begins] The horror film genre is one that attempts to elicit fear in its audience by using unnerving sound effects, but also by playing with the process of revealing a monstrous or threatening force which previously remained partially hidden. In the Western branch of the horror genre, film plots are generally built around this process of making known the unknown.\n(15:48)\tNadège Paquette\tMany Japanese horror films, however, reject this framework. J-Horror films produced in the 1990s and 2000’s participate in an aesthetic movement centering non-symbolic or non-representative frameworks. It is not the meaning behind the film or the source behind acousmatic sound that is horrific, but the lack thereof. [Music fades out] The lack of source and lack of meaning are frightening. Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is an important figure in J-Horror. [Ominous soundscapes from Pulse begin] In his movie Pulse, released in 2001, the sources of fear are many and remain partially unknown. Sonic drones, acousmatic voices, and the sound of computer circuits exchanging information are dislocated from their sources which evade understanding and create fear.\n(16:49)\tNadège Paquette\tPulse is set in the 1990s posed-bubble Japan at the beginning of the Internet. [Ominous soundscapes continue, with sirens] People are disappearing in Tokyo, leaving only a dark stain on the wall, like the ones left after the Hiroshima nuclear bombing which had burned human silhouettes on stone walls. It seems that there’s a computer virus infecting users and turning them into ghosts. Or it could be that the realm of the spirit has attained its capacity and is now overflowing, through internet circuits, into the realm of the living. Soundscapes fade out] Pulse’s ghosts have been interpreted as symbols of the hikikomori. Hikikomori are young adults, mostly men in their 20’s and 30’s, withdrawing from society by refusing to leave their room for months or years at a time.  [Eerie music begins] The phenomenon has been described as an epidemic that Japan faces since the 1990s. Some explained the situation as a backlash to the strict demands of the Japanese conformist society, which hikikomori are unable or refuse to fulfill.\n(18:02)\tNadège Paquette\tNaming the fearful apparition of a ghost by a known phenomenon, that of hikikomori allows for the reestablishment of the boundaries of the known. Yet the symbolic interpretation leaves out many other possibilities. By focusing on the meaning of the film, it’s affective power is left out. In other words, fear and everything unspeakable in the movie are overlooked. What I’m trying to explain here echoes Susan Sontag’s argument in her essay “Against Interpretation.” She explains that interpretation, too often, favors content over form and thus centers meaning and neglects the work of art’s affective quality. Sontag writes that “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.” But this nervousness is avoided when the work of art is reduced to its content, and its content to our interpretation.\n(19:01)\tNadège Paquette\tIn this sense, a non-symbolic reading would allow for the work of art to retain its capacity to make us nervous, to make us feel the effect of fear which uncertainty creates. To perform a non-symbolic reading of the film, I have to decenter abstract meaning to focus on the film’s materiality and my embodied experience of it. [Music fades out]\nWhen I listen to Pulse’s sounds, I hear layers of complexity. [Birdsongs and sawing sounds overlaid begin] I hear layers of human, machine, element, and animal entanglements. I feel confusion and fear. So why do I like it so much? [Abrupt silence]  I tune into those entanglements and those feelings of discomfort, and I feel the excitement of knowing that there is more to the movie than what I understand, that there is more to the world than what I can experience. [Birdsongs and ominous music fade in and out] In Pulse, what travels both through circuits and through sounds are unsettling presences that exceed human understanding.\n[Ominous soundscape from Pulse play]\n(20:14)\tNadège Paquette\tWhat I like so much about the film might be that it makes me feel what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “intimacy.” According to Morton, intimacy is what best explains ecological awareness. Ecological awareness cannot be reduced to the profoundly confirming feeling that we belong to something bigger. [Strings rise and fall] The feeling of belonging is accompanied by the sentiment of intimacy, which is the sense of being close, even too close to non-human presences like ghosts, nuclear radiations, or global warming.\nIntimacy is the sense of having other presences “under one skin,” explains Morton. [Eerie strings continue] Global warming gets under my skin and in my lungs when I breathe the summer air in Montreal. An air heavy with the small particles from the smoke caused by forest fires intensified by global warming. In Pulse, Ryosuke, a university student, experiences intimacy when gesturing to put his hands on the shoulders of a ghost in the hope that they will encounter no resistance, that they will traverse the ghost’s body, that it’s immateriality will convince him that the ghost doesn’t exist. But Ryosuke’s hands stop when they touch the spectre’s shoulders, which they can’t traverse. [Sound bite of object shattering]\n(21:55)\tNadège Paquette\tThe spectre is material and it is too close to Ryosuke, who becomes infected by the virus and himself eventually becomes a ghost. [String music returns] Perhaps dwelling in uncertainty and living through the effects of fear, nervousness, and uncomfortable intimacy allow me not only to intellectually challenge the Western paradigm of knowledge accumulation, but also to embody this challenge, to feel it. [Music fades out]\n[Soundscapes from Pulse are superimposed with sirens] Pulse ends on an apocalyptic vision of Tokyo burning. The city is deserted by the protagonists and a few other humans that are leaving on a ship to try to find a place on earth the virus hasn’t infected yet. While the end of the film is also the end of the world, the story remains open because the film resists a single overarching interpretation. The story remains open because of the non-human presences traversing its soundtrack.\n(23:07)\tNadège Paquette\t[Soundscapes fade out and soft music begins] The stories in this second section, they too are about the end of the world. But they go further than just opening to a new one. They teach me how to survive in the aftermath, and how to live with others in damaged worlds.\nI have associated the following stories because they all offer a representation of a weapon which Western powers have called a “test.” [Music fades out] We could define a test as an experiment which is carried out to establish the performance of something before it is taken into its intended use. The word “test” can be used to sustain a binary between the fictional world, where the test is performed, and the real world, where the tested thing will be used. Following Morton, I tune into the materiality of nuclear bombing by listening to a recording of the Caste Bravo nuclear weapon “test” that was launched on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954 by the US Army. [Drone sound fades in and out] Timothy Morton writes, “Words fail to describe the horror with which I heard the first few seconds. I had to tear the headphones off my head.” [Sound effect of someone tearing their headphones off] [Silence] What is maybe even more horrific than the sound of the explosion itself is the seconds of silence preceding it.\n[Dense silence that lasts too long for comfort, from the recording of the Bravo “test” followed by the explosion]\n(25:41)\tNadège Paquette\tCan I tune into this silence to hear what is to be annihilated by the explosion? Can I hear the attempted silencing of the Marshallese people’s protests? Are the 26 seconds of relative silence before the detonation enough to remember the 72 hours the US army waited before gathering the islanders? Are the 26 seconds enough to remember the 236 Marshallese who were exposed to the atomic fallout and transported to the American military base where they were to be used as “test” subjects?\n[Eerie music fades in]\nInhuman geologist, Kathryn Yusoff writes, “The fallout coated Marshallese bodies, ground, trees, breadfruit, coconuts, crabs, fish, and water.” The islanders were returned to the islands to study them as what was called fallout “collectors.” Human and non-human islanders were taken to be instruments serving to record the effects of such “tests” on human life and Pacific Island ecologies. But Yusoff reminds me that there is no such thing as a nuclear “test.” [Music ends]\nThe Marshall Islands are not a laboratory and the islanders are not “test” subjects, but people still living in radioactive intimacies causing high rates of leukemia, neoplasm, and thyroid cancers. [Tense electronic music beings] When the US army describes the dropping of nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands as a form of “test,” the islands are constituted as a sort of fictional world whose destruction is not real. “Test” is a way of naming a form of nuclear colonialism and warfare. It derealizes the life of Pacific Islanders and constructs this ecosystem as a fictional world. The military can get a practice before having to perform in the real world. [Music ends] In her poem anointed…\n(27:52)\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner\t“Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner,”\n(27:54)\tNadège Paquette\t…Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, and educator returns to Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. She remembers it as a whole island with breadfruit trees and “women who could swim pregnant for miles.” [Sound of waves from  Anointed] She remembers the nuclear warfare waged against the island. She wonders if she will find an island with stories or a tomb.\n(28:24)\tKathy Jetñil-Kijiner\t[Tense orchestration begins] “I’m looking for more stories. I look and I look. There must be more to this than incinerated trees, a cracked dome, a rising sea, a leaking nuclear waste with no fence, there must be more to this than a concrete shell that houses death.”\n(28:46)\tNadège Paquette\t[Orchestration fades out] Jetñil-Kijiner is looking for stories that weave the relationships that matter to communities of humans and more than humans, but her story tells me that Morton’s account of the recording of the Bravo “test” and Yusoff’s account of “nuclear colonialism” don’t, is the story of ongoing life in cohabitation with disrupted landscapes. [Energized electronic music starts] Jetñil-Kijiner tells the story of a turtle goddess who gifted one of her sons, Letao, a piece of her shell anointed with power. Letao could use the shell to transform himself into anything he wanted and he became kindling to create the first fire that almost burned the islanders alive. [Energized music fades and soft music begins]\nThere’s another shell story. Made of concrete, this one is supposed to shield the islanders from the toxicity of nuclear waste collected and dumped in a crater two decades after the end of the “testing.” There’s another weapon that calls itself a “test” and needs stories to weave an alternative discourse to the one of warfare, conquest, and colonization.\n(29:59)\tTanya Tagaq\t“Wait, I need to talk to Sedna and tell her to keep her treasures. Humans have damned themselves and it has nothing to do with Satan. It has only to do with greed. What will Sedna do when she hears the seismic testing?\n(30:26)\tNadège Paquette\tThat was…\n(30:27)\tTanya Tagaq\t“Tanya Tagaq.”\n(30:28)\tNadège Paquette\tAn Inuit artist, improvisational singer, avante-garde composer, and author reading from her novel Split Tooth. [Tense percussion music begins mixed with the sound of ice melting]\nThe novel’s protagonist was telling Sedna’s story before being interrupted by the intrusive memory of seismic testing. “Sedna is the sea goddess that came before Christianity.” Seismic testing is the technique used by companies to survey the Arctic Ocean for oil. Airguns are fired into the water from a boat. How the sound waves bounce back up from the ocean floor is captured by the ship sensors to be analyzed for indications of possible oil layers. Airguns are blasted every 15 seconds every hour of the day for several months. [Eerie string music begins] They produce sounds that can reach 230 decibels at close range. That’s louder than a jumbo jet and sound travels faster and further on the water.\n[Dense electronic music starts] 150 decibels can rupture a human ear and anything over 80 decibels means reduced intellectual capacity, slow digestion, altered diction, accelerated breathing, and heartbeat, as well as symptoms of neurosis such as anxiety and depression. Music fades out]\nSo when those extremely loud sounds traverse the arctic ocean, they hit creatures living in the waters, including marine mammals that use sound to communicate such as narwhals, belugas, whales and seals. [Music with harsh percussion begins] Narwhals have been disoriented by disturbing sounds in an area where there was seismic testing going on. They changed their migration patterns and found themselves stuck under thick sea ice where they drowned. [Music ends]\n(32:24)\tNadège Paquette\tAround 2011, seismic testing companies approached Jerry Natanine, mayor of Clyde River, Nunavut. [Music with harsh percussion returns] When he told his father and uncles about the project, they were, like Tagaq’s protagonist, assailed by the intrusive memory of seismic testing. They remember when, in the 70’s, Panarctic Oils carried out similar tests without consulting the local Inuit communities. The next spring when they went hunting, they noticed the seals were displaying strange behaviors. They did not flee or even react when hunters would approach them. They had pus exuding out of their ears. They were deaf.  [Music and sounds fade out] [Silence]\nI couldn’t find sounds of seismic testing on the internet, so I tune into this silence and to what it means. Do narwhals belugas, whales and seals hear a deafening ringing in their ears after airgun shootings and before they can hear nothing else? Do the calves miss their parents’ voices? Are marine mammals deaf so that I can listen to silence induced by noise reduction on my oil soaked headphones connected to my oil soaked computer in a warm library, thanks to heating oil, rendered even more cozy by oil soaked noise absorbing carpets? [Silence]\n[Watery sounds and eerie ambient music begin] When Tagaq’s protagonist wants to tell Sedna to keep her treasures from greedy companies practicing seismic testing in the Arctic, the protagonist is not proposing a form of symbolic reading of Sedna’s story. Sedna is not a character in a fantasy world who would be valuable only if she symbolized a real person, event, or phenomenon in the real world. Sedna is an-other-than-human being living in the protagonist’s world. And the categories of real and fantasy here represent a Western rationalist reading that dismisses Indigenous ways of knowing. Tagaq’s protagonist interacts with Sedna’s story and other Inuit stories to remind us as writes…\n(34:57)\tDaniel Justice\t“Daniel Justice.”\n(34:58)\tNadège Paquette\tCitizen of the Cherokee nation and professor of Critical Indigenous Studies, “that there are other ways of being in the world and those we’ve been trained to accept as normal.” Split Tooth might be what Justice calls a “wonderwork,” a story that brings the past forward and integrates a possible future for Indigenous peoples. In Split Tooth’s possible future, Sedna might hear the seismic testing, and if she does, she might keep the sea creatures in her miles long hair to protect them from the sound, but then the human inhabitants of the Arctic would starve. [Music and sounds end] [silence]\nNatanine, Clyde River’s mayor, explains that the community needs seals, narwhals, whales, and fish. The community and its mayor took the seismic “testing” companies to court to oppose their activities on Inuit land. In 2017, they won their case in the Supreme Court of Canada, which forbade further testing underground that Inuit treaty rights were disregarded, Inuit people inadequately consulted, and their relationship to marine animals dismissed. [Pensive percussion music begins] When companies performing seismic “testing” fail to consider how it will affect seals and other marine animals, the colonial worldview where animals are subordinate forms of life, whose bodies are killable and available to human use is given priority.\n(36:39)\tNadège Paquette\tAn Inuit worldview where animals are essential partners in Inuit life, is positioned as a fictional world where “tests” can be performed for the benefit of the real world down south. For the human and animal inhabitants of Inuit lands and waters however, seismic testing is not a “test.” Seismic “testing” is already a form of violence that corporations owned by non-Indigenous interests perform. Tagaq’s novel refuses such binary separation between real and fictional world. I thus want to resist the urge to categorize Split Tooth by giving it the name of a particular genre like fiction, memoir, or poetry. Those categories of the Western literary tradition might not help me encounter the work on its own terms.\n[Eerie music fades in] Tagaq’s story is told through a web of Indigenous perspectives. It is a collaborative work that she weaves with her band, community, ancestors, animal and mineral neighbors, with Inuit songs and worldviews, and stories like Sedna’s story and that of Arqsarnic, the Northern Lights. It is what Justice would call “stories that heal.” They contrast those healing stories with the colonial story of “Indigenous deficiency,” which has been told too many times to mask settler’s guilt and shame. [Music ends] According to this colonial story, many Indigenous people are suffering from poverty, homelessness, and addiction, not because of intergenerational trauma caused by colonization and genocide, but because Indigenous individuals supposedly lack in “character or biology or intellect.”\n(38:33)\tNadège Paquette\t[Energetic electronic music begins]  Split Tooth is not a story of lack but of partial positions and fulfilling relationships. The protagonist is busy with collective reinvention and remembering. Her pain and fear come with pleasure, healing and cunning plans. I love how the novel brings dualities in uncomfortable proximity: humans are both hating and loving, harming and caring.\nHumans are also animals, animals take erotic forms and attract humans. Predators are also prey. Spirits leave and come back to their bodies; bodies are shapeshifters.  [Music fades] Listening to Tanya Tagaq’s amazing audiobook Split Tooth late at night, day after day, her soft rhythmic voice began to feel like a haunting. Her “S” sounds were encircling my limbs like tendrils and I started reading my own work with the cadence of her voice.[Dark pensive music begins] I’m even doing it now.\nTagaq reveals harsh realities and traumatic events with a soft voice and a juvenile tone. [Dark music ends followed by playful music] The voice that she shares with the protagonist seems to me at times childlike, and at times wise and old, and sometimes mischievous and even cruel. Her voice goes from one to the other with only the slightest variation in tone, rhythm, or pace. [Music stops]\nI can’t separate the hero from the villain in Tagaq’s story, and this brings me to reflect on my own position as a white settler. I too am neither simply innocent nor guilty in the ongoing colonial story. I am implicated in the conditions creating trauma and violence in Indigenous communities, and me and my ancestors have benefited from colonial systems. Attending to the discomfort I feel when faced with the ambiguity of Tagaq’s characters helps me sit with the discomfort I feel when reflecting on my own position. I hope that this emotional engagement can help me be more accountable.  [Pensive music fades out]\n(40:49)\tNadège Paquette\t[Soft energized  music begins] Letao’s story and Sedna’s story as told by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Tanya Tagaq are complex webs of situated Indigenous knowledges talking back to imperialists and colonial stories of man as maker and destroyer. Just as stories like Letao’s and Sedna’s have always been important to the Marshallese and Inuit people telling them, they will have to be important to non-Indigenous people like me who would like to cohabit with humans and non-humans within the conditions of global warming. Those stories make speculative leaps toward other worlds that have existed, exist now and might exist in the future. Rational knowledges and facts are not sufficient to live with others on a damaged planet, so the challenge Indigenous stories pose to Western understandings of what is real and what is fiction has to be taken seriously.\nStories might allow us to walk that thin line between knowing too much and knowing too little. While humans of the 21st century know a lot about global warming, we seem to be unable to act. If rational knowledges, facts don’t bring action, can I turn towards unknowing? [Music intensifies and ends] [Soundscape from Pulse fades in and out] Pulse’s strange sounds like Letao’s and Sedna’s story are not exhausted by any symbolic reading I might make of them. I manage, in the understanding I have of them, a space for feeling nervous, a space not to name things or to cultivate distrust in the names I give.  [Eerie music begins]\nThe sounds in Pulse like the stories in Anointed and Split Tooth are palimpsestic, layers sedimented one over the other, like the layers of soil saturated with plutonium on the Marshall Islands, like the strata of oil, gas, and sedimentary rock in the ocean bed, like the layers of bodies infiltrated by strontium90, like levels of memories, practices, and knowledges collected in stories. [ Nadège’s voice echoes] There must be more to this. [Music fades out]\n[Soft electronic music fades in] Thank you for listening. Voices are from Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, Lulu Miller, Daniel Justice, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Tanya Tagaq. Music is from Tom Bonheur, merci Tom, and from Blue Dot Sessions. Soundscapes are from Pulse directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa with music by Takefumi Haketa. The recording of the Castle Bravo “test” is from JLiat’s website. Additional sounds from RadioLab, and Anointed, a film by Dan Lin and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. Thank you. [Electronic music fades out]\n(44:20)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play quietly] 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.\n(44:34)\tHannah McGregor\tOur producer this month is Nadège Paquette, a master’s student in the English department at Concordia University. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n(44:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tTo 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 SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.  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This audio is part of  literature professor Linda M. Morra‘s podcast, Getting Lit with Linda – The Canadian Literature Podcast, hosted and written by Linda, produced by Linda and Marco Timpano.\n\nIn Episode 7 from Season 2, Linda begins with the sound of her father’s old espresso machine, to explain how she sees — or hears — sound working in Magnetic Equator (published by McClelland & Stewart) by international poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough. You can hear a sample of his sound poetry here. This episode includes a small excerpt read by Kellough himself (with permission by Kellough). In the “take-away” section, Linda talks about a biography she recently read by Sherrill Grace, about Canadian author Timothy Findley (published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press). If you’d like to know more about sound poetry, and about Kaie Kellough as a sound poet, check out Adam Sol’s blog post about Kellough on “How a Poem Moves.”\n\nGet this episode and more by following Getting Lit with Linda – The Canadian Literature Podcast on all major podcast platforms.\n\n(0:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Oh boy. 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]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor.\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod, and each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:50)\tHannah McGregor\tWe have a very special episode for you this month. We’re doing a crossover with friend of the podcast, Linda Morra. I call her ‘friend of the podcast’ because she’s friend of ours, Katherine.\n(01:03)\tKatherine McLeod\tShe is. Linda Morra is a Canadian literature scholar. She does research on Can Lit and archives. And the episode that we’ve chosen for this crossover episode is an early episode from her podcast called Getting Lit with Linda, the Canadian Literature podcast. And it’s an episode that really does a deep dive into a new work of Canadian literature. She does a deep dive into the book, Magnetic Equator, a book of poetry by the Montreal based poet Kaie Kellough. And on this podcast more recently, she’s been speaking with the authors and doing interviews with them and Getting Lit with Linda has become more live.\nBut here we really see her and hear her diving into the work itself and really listening to it, listening to the book, and listening to the sound of the language. When I spoke to Linda about which episode we might choose for this podcast, she recommended we take a listen to this one and I’m really glad that she did because it really is an episode that’s immersed in sound, not only in the sounds of Kaie Kellough’s book, but also in Linda Morra’s sonic world. And the episode actually starts with some terrific sounds of Linda’s coffee maker.\n(02:24)\tHannah McGregor\t[Hannah laughs] It does, and also with the gorgeous sound of Linda’s voice I was really struck when you pointed out to me, Katherine, that this, that Getting Lit with Linda started as a pandemic project. So the podcast started in 2020. As you said, it has grown and developed into conversations with authors about their books. But I really think you hear in this episode that sense of the role that podcasts played for so many of us in the pandemic of creating these threads of connection from our spaces of isolation.\nYou can hear how embedded Linda is in the domestic space from which she’s speaking and she invites you into the sonic landscape of that space with this kind of intimacy and this closeness for, you know, down to everything from the sound of the coffee maker to the sound of her voice, her proximity to the microphone. It feels so intimate, almost cozy, and then sets you up so beautifully to really come with her into this collection of poetry and into the kinds of sonic landscapes that Kaie Kellough is also navigating.\n(03:43)\tKatherine McLeod\tYes, I think that Linda would be terrific on the radio.\n(03:47)\tHannah McGregor\t[Hannah laughs] Absolutely.\n(03:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tI’m saying it on record right here and now. So, yeah, let’s have a listen to this crossover episode, an episode of Linda Morra’s podcast, Getting Lit with Linda, the Canadian literature podcast.\n(04:05)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd this is season two, episode seven, “The Languages and Sounds That are Home; Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator”. \n[SpokenWeb theme music swells and then fades quickly]\n(04:24)\tIntro to Getting Lit with Linda plays:\tLit! Canadian Lit, that is! Join Linda as she talks about authors in Canada and sometimes with them. Using her expertise to shed light on recent and not so recent writers. And now, get set for Getting Lit with Linda!\n(04:40)\tLinda Morra\tHi, this is Linda Mora, the host and writer of Getting Lit with Linda. I’m sipping an espresso this morning, one that was made from my father’s old espresso machine. It’s a fairly unwieldy, almost Victorian era piece of equipment that whistles and groans as it produces my morning coffee. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know what I’m talking about. There’s no reason to use or even to love this particular machine. I’m an espresso aficionado and therefore I have several contemporary machines from which I could choose, but I’m really partial to this one because it’s dialect and its rhythms, however clunky they may seem to others, remind me of when my Italian father was still alive and he loved this machine and he loved his espresso. So I do too. And by the way, in case you wanna know, I take my espresso with a teaspoon of raw sugar and a hint of cinnamon.\nThe machine used to take up a lot of space on his kitchen counter, the very house I also grew up in, although that house is gone now too. Still, the morning espresso wasn’t something we just shared. It provided us with a ritual, a context, meaning, a tacit understanding. So what I have now is the language of this machine, the memories it evokes as it grinds and moans and the comfort it offers me.\nThis story does actually have something to do with today’s poet Kaie Kellough, which I’ll return to by the end. I’m happy to let you know that I have an audio clip by Kellough too today. I’ve actually met him in person at a writer’s event in Montreal, Quebec. I had already heard about his work and I was sufficiently impressed by him as a person to invite him on the spot to come and speak to my students at Bishop’s University.\n(06:29)\tLinda Morra\tHe agreed. And so he came as part of this inaugural event for a Student Writing Weekend in the Eastern Townships, what we were calling SWEET, at which he would perform before about 60 students and faculty members.\nNow, I often have no idea what writers will be like when I invite them to the campus. I do love good writers, of course, but that doesn’t mean I know what to expect for events for the Morris House Reading Series, that’s a literary program that I’ve coordinated for over 14 years. I’ve even learned to be rather cautiously optimistic about which writers I invite because some past experiences were … well, to put it gently, underwhelming. Not all writers feel comfortable presenting their work in public venues – it simply requires a different skill set than, say, writing poetry or a novel in private.\nThe other thing is … well, Lennoxville has its own culture. It’s a fairly English speaking community in a French speaking city in a French-speaking province –Lennoxville is a borough of Sherbrooke – so I never know what I can expect on that side of things either. I just hope I’ve made the right choice and that everyone’s happy.\nSo: back to Kellough in Lennoxville. He apparently meandered about the town before the event and found himself near the train tracks just off campus. And so, at the event proper, he held up a discarded, misshapen steel peg that he found nearby the tracks – it was bent in such a way that it looked like the letter “J” – and then he riffed off that “J” in ways that were completely astounding. The students were mesmerized; the very instant Kellough completed his performance, the students were drawn up and out of their seats; they leapt up together as one and erupted into sustained applause.\n(08:20)\tLinda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it. Now anyone who has seen him perform the alphabet – yes you heard that right, the alphabet – will have a very good idea of what I’m talking about – if you’re out there wondering what I mean by that, I’ve included a link to one of his performances in the show notes. One of the comments on that page suggests that this particular video is “dope” – and it really IS pretty “lit.”\nThe moment documents the fact that Kellough is, among other things, a practitioner of sound poetry – an adaptation of the expression “word sound power” that comes from Jamaican dub poetry. Sound poetry relies upon the phonetic aspects of human speech, its acoustic properties, and it enjoys these lexical distortions and contortions that draw attention to the sounds of language rather than its meaning—it can, at times, take on singsong-like properties, sometimes sounding rather musical (think of nursery rhymes, but without the recognizable diction), and it certainly makes for a rather rhythmical and fascinating performance. In terms of the Canadian poets, the most famous of these include bp Nichol, Bill Bissett, and Steve McCaffery. Now I know I’m over-simplifying a rather vast body of work: I just want to allude to it briefly, because Kellough is one of its practitioners, although it’s not the focus of my discussion today.\nWhy? Because if we narrow our view to just this aspect of Kellough’s literary production, we’ll greatly limit our understanding of his accomplishments, and of his extraordinary talent and range. Kellough writes poetry and prose – and he’s already published three books of poetry, one novel, and one collection of short stories. Indeed, he sees these genres as informing each other. Even so, it’s not just the range of his output, but the real quality of it too – and  in all genres.\n(10:38)\tLinda Morra\tI’ve said it before in previous episodes that I don’t allow awards to determine what I think about works of literature, but I do think in this case the sheer number of awards that Kellough’s work has attracted are indeed merited. His novel, Accordéon, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and his short story collection Dominoes at the Crossroads won or was shortlisted for so many – include the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal and the Scotiabank Giller Prize – I just stopped counting.\nThe book I’m focusing on today, however, is Magnetic Equator (and in case you’re interested, It did actually win the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, but that’s not why I chose it). You’ll see why in a moment. Magnetic Equator is divided into 10 parts, which draw upon elements of Kellough’s life—it is at least semi-autobiographical. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, moved to Calgary, where he spent his adolescence, and in adulthood relocated to Montreal, Quebec, where he’s lived since 1998. But the collection doesn’t begin with Vancouver –it reaches back to his ancestral roots, to Guyana, South America, the place from which his maternal grandparents emigrated.\nThis shifting of geographical contexts matters, generally of course, but also specifically when we look at this collection. The multiplicity and complexity of geographical contexts, their respective cultures, at turns, impress and oppress their subjects—how much we take on the colours of our context, that then intermingle when we relocate and migrate, creating new palettes, new hues and tones. It means, of course, that questions of belonging also become more complicated – less easily resolved – and sometimes rendering one’s sense of place in more precarious ways that highlights one’s vulnerability.\nAs one might expect, the cultural influences of Guyana mark Kellough’s upbringing, so that, as he says in an interview with CBC books, he remembers how much it affected so many facets of his life.\n(12:53)\tLinda Morra\thow his grandparents in Canada, for example, prepared Guyanese meals – how “there were pictures and maps of Guyana. There were books by Guyanese authors. Guyana was something that was discussed. It was real, it was an important presence.” Within the collection, he thus speaks about being “inside a narration contrived / to read like non-fiction,” how “one word emigrat[es] from another’s vowels” (11).\nHe draws attention to the connection and intersections between people and language, their lineages and migratory patterns, how we are birthed, not only through biology, but also through inherited narratives and stories.\nThe title is in part a reference to the equator, above which Guyana is only marginally north. If you’re thinking right about now that the title magnetic equator is therefore somehow related to Guayan’s proximity toward the equator, you’d be right. Most of you will know about the earth’s magnetic field lines, the North Magnetic Pole and the South Magnetic Pole, and how the north end of a compass will point downward in the northern hemisphere – that’s called positive dip; when it points upward in the southern hemisphere, that’s called negative dip. However, when the locus of points have zero dip, it is called the magnetic equator. Guyana.\nThe title is suggestive, therefore – that pull towards that equator, toward Guyana, but metaphorically–toward finding one’s cultural lineage or one’s sense of home where the gravitational pull is zero. You won’t be pulled in any direction, when you’re at home. But how do you find home, when you’ve been displaced, or when its physical counterparts and markers have moved or removed?\nIn part, Kellough is reimagining Guyana as one source of his identity – and more broadly speaking, to apprehend those matrices that offer a deeper, richer understanding of identities because, as he observes in interview, “you had all these different cultural groups that came to Guyana and then mixed there.”\n(15:16)\tLinda Morra\tIn an interview about this particular collection, Kellough has said that he sees the multifaceted, complex language of the text itself as offering a kind of context: “language as landscape.” He remarks on its playfulness, its vastness, “a language that holds a variety of different registers at the same time — from more formal English, to slang, to bits of patois and to French.” The collection is above all else about language that’s been marked by diaspora, occasioned by different contexts and experiences, by different cultural lineages and identities.\nHe charts family histories, personal and political, and geography to show how the “density of times past” acts on and produces who we are: “the assemblages of others who are you, a being made of beings.” In reading this part, I immediately thought of the episode on Madeleine Thien and the means by which our bodies are an accumulation of memory, familial, cultural, and political. The interweaving, however, goes beyond that – he even remarks on how “nocturnal insects” intertwine with “our breathing, continuous and shifting, supple, they never stiffen into strict metre, but always evolve.” Of course, this is a reflexive remark that has a bearing on the shape of poetry, that also never stiffens into strict metre, but rather is fluid, allusive, and in flux.\nThe first section is a clear and direct reference to the country: the opening section, in fact, is titled “kaieteur falls,” a direct reference to the tallest single drop waterfall, 226 metres or 741 feet high (that’s about four times higher than Niagara Falls, if you want a point of comparison in Canada and the US). Located in Kaieteur National Park, and a section of the Amazon rainforest, it is clearly also related to Kellough by virtue of his first name – there is a fascinating link to be made here, between person and place, between Kellough and Guyana proper.\nIn the first few poems of the second section, titled “mantra of no return,” Kellough explores the legacies of slavery and of the human cargo carried in ships across the Atlantic, using the holds of these ships as a starting point for larger considerations (as a kind of aside, it made me think of Zong!, that’s the work of another poet whose work I love, M. NourbeSe Philip, and I’ll probably dedicate an entire episode to her in the future): So he observes, “The world is itself a cargo carried in the hold of this verse.” End quote.\n(18:14)\tLinda Morra\tHe suggests here how his verse is both a means of conveyance, and a means of communication—and his subject, not just Guyana, but the globe. His poetry is both indictment and tribute, both memory and  record, both personal and collective.\nThe next section, titled, “high school fever,” is poignant, tracing his adolescence experienced in the Canadian prairies, and the misery of the boy who contemplated suicide in the back seat of a car, quote “breathing carbon monoxide as exodus” end quote; he reminds us that, however much we may be “in” a place, we are not necessarily “of it,” no matter how long we might live there. This is a period that involves Desert Storm, and the Oka crisis, and apartheid, and dance me outside, and Yasser Arafat. It is a time of confusion, anger, experimentation; a time that is interspersed with racial, social ,and  political injustices. But it’s also a time when the poet becomes attentive to racial inequities and injustices, keenly listening to, quote “their black mouths [that] opened over my ears.” End quote.\nIn a section after this, titled “Zero”—strategically located in the centre of the collection—the poet has clearly made his way to Montreal, with its “babel” of voices, the “languages spilling out the summer windows,” although the section really takes a wider view—and not just a perspective that is personal, embracing the totality of experience from BC, to Calgary, to Montreal. No, the view is much wider than that. Here is Kellough, reading a small part from this section:\n(20:06)\tAudio clip of Kaie Kellough reading:\t“The Athabasca Glacier recedes into prehistory, dinosaur ice trickling into time’s crystal and wink, reception weakening the further we from the city, clear static between stations.”\n(20:22)\tLinda Morra\tListening to the mellifluous voice of Kellough is part of the pleasure, I think. The Athabasca glacier is part of the Columbia Icefield, located in the Rockies; and this is therefore an invitation for us to consider a much wider perspective, one that’s expansive, that invites us to go back in time, so that we may assume a broader view. The fact that this section is titled “zero” is pertinent, in view of the title of the collection. Remember: when the locus of points have a zero dip, we are at the magnetic equator. But how do we arrive there? How do we produce the “unity of worlds,” to quote the title of the last section of this book? How does Kellough arrive there – when there are multiple story lines and histories and contexts, geographical and otherwise? In the case of this collection, through his own language—the magnetic centre point.\n  And more broadly, through a language that is textured, that resonates and nudges at the conscious and unconscious mind, that provides us with story, history, lineage, context, a sense of belonging even in physical displacement, our magnetic equator—even if it does just happen to be, in my case, an old, clunky old espresso machine that whispers about a life and a memory that remain a part of who I am.\n[Upbeat jazz music fades in and fades out when Morra begins to talk]\nThis is the takeaway section of the episode. I want to recommend to you today a biography I’ve been reading. It’s about novelist Timothy Finley, and it’s titled Tiff by Cheryl Grace. I’ve been reading several biographies of late because of my own research to write the biography of Jane Rule.\nSo the first thing that I can tell you is that this book is beautifully researched and written. A good biography needs to tell a well-researched story, and so the second part of that equation, the story also needs to be well-crafted as it is in this case. The story’s well told because Grace clearly cared about her subject, not just about Finley’s work and contributions as a writer, although those are also foregrounded. She weaves in these great details about Finley’s life, his real love for the environment, his engagement with human rights and his own personal struggles with depression, which consistently held my attention.\nHope Against Despair was one of his mottoes, and it’s one that I’ve personally been carrying around with me ever since I read it. Generally, Grace has created this evocative portrait of Timothy Finley, a writer who’s left a legacy in literature in Canada. [Theme music begins to play quietly in background]\nThat’s it for today’s episode. Please join me in two weeks time when I speak about Lorena Gale’s, Je me souviens. Thanks for joining me.\n(23:16)\tOutro to Getting Lit with Linda plays:\tThat was Getting Lit with Linda, hosted by Linda Morra. If you have a topic you would like to see covered, write to us at gettinglitwithlinda@gmail.com. Until next time, we hope you continue to get lit!\n(23:43)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play and fades] 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.\n(23:57)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month we’ve featured episode seven from season two of Getting Lit with Linda, written and hosted by Linda Morra and co-produced by Marco Timpano. Our supervising producer is Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n(24:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tTo 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 SpokenWebCanada.\nStay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds out.\nSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[plays and fades out]"],"score":3.2550304},{"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":3.2550304},{"id":"9639","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E5, They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 1 April 2024, Hammond"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/voices-in-the-waste-land/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Adam Hammond"],"creator_names_search":["Adam Hammond"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/308766715\",\"name\":\"Adam Hammond\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/af327536-5076-40e0-83ef-a37528358ece/audio/636c6309-17a2-415c-855f-91d3f499cd9b/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-mix-sw-ep5-.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:41:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"39,878,229 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-mix-sw-ep5-\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/voices-in-the-waste-land/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-04-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23201562\",\"venue\":\"University of Toronto\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8\",\"latitude\":\"43.66773375\",\"longitude\":\"-79.40030507952156\"}]"],"Address":["170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8"],"Venue":["University of Toronto"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549748711424,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.\n\nIn this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Intro\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:17)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n(00:34)\tHannah McGregor\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and —\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tMy name is Katherine McLeod. And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n(00:49)\tKatherine McLeod\tFor many of us who have studied, taught, written, or simply enjoyed poetry, we know that some poets’s work comes alive in performance. I remember a professor in my undergraduate insisting that we read 17th century English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost aloud since that was how Milton wrote it. He was blind and composed it through dictation.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tIn this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Adam Hammond, associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, makes the same argument for T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” Elliot’s poem, he asserts, is written as a collection of voices thrown together, and it’s in the oral performance that these different voices can be heard depending, of course, on the performance decisions of the reader.\n(01:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tLuckily for us and for Hammond, a lot of people have read “The Wasteland” out loud, including Eliot himself. Even luckier new digital humanities tools, like “Drift” and “Gentle,” now add computational listening into the Modernist Scholars toolkit, allowing us to ask new questions about poetic performances, including the ones that frame this episode. Is Eliot’s reading as dry, monotonous and hopelessly formal as it might sound to a contemporary listener? Or can computational listening help us to hear it a little differently? Here is episode five of season five of the SpokenWeb Podcast: They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.\n(02:25)\tMusic\t[SpokenWeb theme song begins playing.]\n(02:35)\tAdam Hammond\tI will never forget the first time I heard T.S. Eliot’s voice, he was reading his poem “The Wasteland.”\n(02:41)\tBob Dylan, reading the first four lines of “The Waste Land” for his XM Radio show “Theme Time Radio Hour”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”\n(02:52)\tAdam Hammond\tOkay, I’m just messing with you. That’s not T.S. Eliot. That’s Bob Dylan. This is T.S. Eliot.\n(02:59)\tT.S. Eliot, reading the first few lines of “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.”\n(03:14)\tAdam Hammond\tI remember the exact thought I had the first time I heard T.S. Eliot’s voice. I thought he was American. I remember the second thought I had as well. I thought he was young. And I remember the third. I thought he was cool. I was 19 in Christian Lloyd’s first year English class at Queen’s University’s International Study Center in Herstmonceux Castle in England. I was supposed to study engineering, but I was able to convince my parents to let me defer my acceptance to Waterloo when I got a scholarship to live in a castle in England for a year and study English. It’s what I wanted to do more than anything. I was there because I loved modernism. I had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell in high school. They all seemed so badass — so free and brave and defiant.\n(04:06)\tAdam Hammond\tI’d also read T. S. Eliot. I loved “Prufrock.” Even though it spoke about old men with trousers rolled, it seemed like a young person’s poem, about young people’s problems. Like having the courage to be yourself, or rather about not having the courage to be yourself — about “putting on a face to meet the faces that you meet.” I felt like I had taken Eliot’s implicit message in deciding to follow my heart and study English. Prufrock was an unreliable narrator. You were supposed to resist his old-mannish ways; rolled-up trousers were bad. .\n(04:44)\tAdam Hammond\tBut then I was in first year, and we were reading “The Wasteland,” and it seemed infinitely more badass than “Prufrock.” Younger and freer and braver and more defiant. And then my roommate and I found a recording of Eliot reading “The Wasteland,” and he sounded pathetic. He sounded old and lame with a terrible fake British accent.\n(05:04)\tAdam Hammond\tIt was worse than that. He was Prufrock’s dad. It took me years to recover from this.\n(05:14)\tAdam Hammond\tMy name is Adam Hammond. I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. I never went to Waterloo. I continued to scam my parents all the way through undergrad, saying I would go to law school, that English was the perfect pre-law degree, but that a Master’s was useful prep for all the research lawyers were expected to do. I don’t even remember what excuse I used to justify doing a Ph.D, but I did one.\n(05:39)\tAdam Hammond\tI wrote my dissertation on three writers, one of whom was T. S. Eliot. I did this because he fit the idea, not because I loved him. I still hadn’t recovered from that experience of hearing his voice. Then, in 2011, right as I was finishing my Ph.D., something wild happened. The venerable printing house Faber and Faber — the very place where Eliot himself worked as poetry editor, serving as modernism’s ultimate gatekeeper — collaborated with an app developer called “TouchPress” to make an iPad app version of “The Wasteland.”\n(06:12)\tAdam Hammond\tIt sounds like this would be a bad thing. But it wasn’t. It was amazing. It completely changed the way I saw the poem. It made it cool again. It had interviews with celebrities, and I mean celebrities had not only heard of “The Wasteland” but they liked it! It had notes you could make disappear. You could swipe right on the words of the poem, and like magic, the thing that’s typescript would appear, scratched to smithereens by Eliot’s pal Ezra Pound. But the real killer feature — the best thing about “The Wasteland” app by far — the clear single reason that I started loving “The Wasteland” again — was that fact that the app included readings of the poem. You touched a line, and you heard it.\n(06:58)\tAdam Hammond\tThere were a bunch of readings. They were by actual celebrities. One of them was by Viggo Mortensen. One of them was by Alec Guiness. Another was by Fiona Shaw. Jeremy Irons was on there. You could hear the entire Wasteland, all 433 lines of it, read to you by Aragorn, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Aunt Petunia Dursley, or Scar! And some of these voices, let me tell you: they were cool. Check this out.\n(07:29)\tViggo Mortensen, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.”\n(07:47)\tAdam Hammond\tThat was exactly how I always wanted Eliot to sound. It was my fantasy of the poet’s voice. American, young, and tough. As I put it in an article I wrote for the Toronto Review of Books shortly after the app came out, Mortensen was the anti-Prufrock. It sounded like he was reading the poem from the seat of a Harley Davidson. There were reasons aplenty for nineteen-year-old me to get excited about “The Wasteland.” But there were also reasons for thirty-year-old me, as I then was, to be excited. I had just finished a dissertation about modernism and the phenomenon of dialogism. That was the word that Russian literary critic Mikhail’s Bakhtin used to describe literary texts made up of lots of genuinely competing voices. The characters in a dialogic novel — Bakhtin’s prime example being Dostoevsky — they got into real debates. They disagreed with one another. They disagreed with their author.\n(08:44)\tAdam Hammond\tThe outcome of their debates were totally unpredictable. It was like they were autonomous – independent of their creator. For Bakhtin, dialogic novels were little snow globe versions of healthy democracies — mini public squares. In my dissertation, I argued that modernist dialogism had a political edge: that in an era of rising authoritarianism and mass control, its purpose was to train its readers how to think for themselves, how to cut through all the bullshit, find their own voice in the maelstrom. .\n(09:17)\tAdam Hammond\tAlthough Bakhtin thought dialogism existed only in novels, one of my prime examples of a dialogic text was “The Wasteland.” I didn’t really see “The Wasteland” as a poem, you see. I saw it as a kind of novel without a narrator. It was an even more extreme form of dialogism than Dostoevsky. There were voices everywhere! But there weren’t even quotation marks. Everything was a voice, but unlike in a Dostoevskian novel, you couldn’t even say for sure where one voice stopped and where the other began.\n(09:47)\tAdam Hammond\tWhen one voice passed the mic to the other voice. This is what I wrote in my review for The Toronto Review of Books — the part where I was explaining why I was so excited about all the audio readings in “The Wasteland” app: “The focus on oral performance [in the app] works especially well with The Waste Land, because it is a poem that demands so emphatically to be read aloud—and indeed only really makes sense once you begin to consider it in the light of oral performance. As Eliot’s original title for the poem, He Do the Police in Different Voices, reminds us, the basic unit of The Waste Land is the voice. But though the poem is built from multiple distinct voices, it does not tell us where they begin or end, or what each is like, nor does it provide a dramatis personae or indicate its speakers. These voices thus only really become apparent in oral performance, where the reader must decide on their cast of characters, and give each one a recognizable personality. Every reading of the poem is thus an interpretation of some of its most fundamental questions.”\n(10:56)\tAdam Hammond\tYes, that’s right, Eliot’s working title for “The Wasteland” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices” — a reference to something someone says about a character in Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend,” who animates his reading of newspaper stories by giving the police men funny voices. And this is all more evidence — because it’s a very cool title — of Eliot’s fundamental and latent badassness. I’ll show you what I mean about the voices in the poem. This is Alex Guiness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, reading the opening of the poem. Listen carefully and you’ll hear him switching into the voice of “Marie.”\n(11:35)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(12:35)\tAdam Hammond\tNow listen to Fiona Shaw — aka Aunt Petunia Dursley — read the same part. She does the voice even more clearly.\n(12:44)\tFiona Shaw, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(13:38)\tAdam Hammond\tViggo Mortensen sure sounds cool, and I can’t help it if he’s still my favourite reader of the poem, but it’s pretty hard to tell if he’s doing a voice there.\n(13:45)\tViggo Mortensen\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(14:34)\tAdam Hammond\tBut hold on. Eliot wrote “The Wasteland.” He’s the one who called it “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” He knew all about the voices. So does he do them? For better or worse, that exact same recording that I heard way back when I was nineteen and living in a castle in southern England — it was on the app, too. So, does Eliot do Marie’s voice in the opening of the poem? I hate to do it to you, but let’s listen to it again.\n(15:04)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”\n(15:59)\tAdam Hammond\tMy answer is: I don’t know, sorta. Like he wants to, but he’s too shy. Too bad at performing, too much of a poet, not enough of an actor.\n(16:12)\tAdam Hammond\tAround the time the app came out, I finished my PhD and became obsessed with the so-called “Digital Humanities.” I started a couple of digital projects for exploring multi-voicedness in “The Wasteland” around this time. I made a website called “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” of course, that presented the poem as a play. Working with a big class of undergraduates, we decided on one way of dividing the poem up into characters and then we created a digital edition with names and special fonts for all the different voices. I also did a computational text analysis project with two computational linguists, Julian Brooke and Graeme Hirst. We used a variety of natural language processing techniques to see where a computer might detect voice switches in the poem. All those moments where the computer thought the mic was being handed from one character to another.\n(17:01)\tAdam Hammond\tThe results of this were really interesting. Approaching the poem with the mind of a machine, the algorithm we developed found switches in places I hadn’t ever imagined them. And on reflection, a lot of these seemed really on point. For instance, I had always heard a switch at “winter kept us warm,” but the computer didn’t see one there. It thought there was a switch at “summer surprised us,” where I personally had never seen a switch. But then listening back to Alec Guiness, that’s exactly where he goes into the voice of “Marie.”\n(17:33)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee / With a shower of rain;”\n(17:39)\tAdam Hammond\tThe algorithm had opinions and I found these opinions worthwhile.\n(17:45)\tAdam Hammond\tIn a 2005 article on computational analysis of literature, Julia Flanders wrote that we shouldn’t look at computers for objective answers about literary interpretation. As she put it, computers shouldn’t be seen as “factual substantiator whose observations are different in kind from our own — because more trustworthy and objective — but rather computers should be seen as a device that extends the range of our perceptions to phenomena too minutely disseminated for our ordinary reading.”.\n(18:18)\tAdam Hammond\tThey’re not there to confirm our subjective readings of a poem as objectively true. They’re there to challenge our readings with their own readings, which are no more objective than ours, but are definitely different based on things we humans don’t even notice when reading. What I couldn’t do at that time was analyze the audio recordings from the app. I could only look at text, but I was definitely curious about analyzing these audio recordings. I had my own human feelings about which readings on the app were the most dynamic or the most polyvocal or just the coolest. In other words, I had feelings about which reader did the police in different voices better than the others. What I didn’t have was any computational voice to bounce these ideas off of.\n(19:10)\tAdam Hammond\tIn the decade that followed the tools that I dreamed of were developed, many of them by teams led by a poetry scholar named Marit MacArthur. Working with scientists, programmers, humanists and students, she led the development of a set of computational and theoretical tools to analyze audio recordings of performances of poetry. MacArthur’s method works from only two data points: pitch and timing. To get the timing information, we used a program called “Gentle,” designed in collaboration with MacArthur. Basically, we fed the program all of our recordings of all of the app’s performances of “The Wasteland,” and it told us exactly when each word in the poem was spoken and how long the gaps were between these words. My research assistant Jonathan Dick, manually corrected the output of each of these, which was a huge job. This timing data allowed us to calculate how quickly each reader reads in words per minute. Are they fast or are they slow? It calculates the average length of their pauses. So how long do they wait between words? It tells us how often they pause, and it also tells us what kind of rhythms their pauses create. Are they monotonous or do they change like, like, that.\n(20:40)\tAdam Hammond\tLike a William Shatner kind of a complexity of pauses. We used another program called “Drift,” also designed in collaboration with MacArthur, to get pitch information. “Drift” divides the recording into segments of 100th of a second long and gives the fundamental frequency in Hertz for each of these segments. This data can tell us the pitch range in octaves of a given performance. So this just tells you how [Adam deepens his voice] low does the reader go and how [Adam hightens his voice] high. It gives you the pitch speed also in octaves, so this would be like [Adam exemplifies the pitch speed]: if you go from low to high steadily, there’s a speed. And then pitch acceleration, which is like [Adam mimics an engine-like sound] when the pitch changes in these kind of quickly accelerating fashions. All of these can be used as measures of like how dynamic or dramatic a performance is. In a path-breaking 2018 article, “Beyond Poet Voice” in the journal Cultural Analytics, MacArthur and her collaborators Georgia Zellou and Lee M. Miller proposed four dimensions of poetic performance, and argued that these can be described quantitatively using only this timing and pitch data.\n(22:01)\tAdam Hammond\tSo one dimension they called “formal,” that’s readings with predictable rhythms and slower speech. So that’s all from the timing data. They also had a dimension called “conversational.” This is someone who reads with less predictable rhythms and faster speech. So again, you can get all of this from the timing data. They had a dimension called “expressive.” This is someone with a wide pitch range and highly contrasting pitch – up and down, high speed, high acceleration. The final dimension they called “dramatic,” which features long unpredictable pauses, again, timing related. With these tools and theories in place, we were equipped to dig into exciting research questions about the performances on “The Wasteland” app. And to get answers to these questions, both from human readers and machine readers. Our broad questions were: number one, where do readers of “The Wasteland” do voices? Where do these voice switches occur? Where does one voice pass the mic to the other? Number two: how do readers of “The Wasteland” do voices? What aspects of timing and pitch do they alter to indicate voice switches? Number three, this is a big question: Is dialogism or multi-voice a property of texts or performances? Is it inherent in the text or is it something that is only brought out, even created, in performance?\n(23:34)\tAdam Hammond\tFor the digital tools in particular, we had two questions. Number one: can analysis of pitch and timing information capture the way that different readers do voices or is there something other than just pitch and timing that you need to really understand this? Can this data tell us more about the way that readers do these voices than regular human listening can? Can the computational analysis reveal features that humans, more specifically literary scholars who know “The Wasteland” really, really well, can’t notice? Can they, for instance, shake my long held belief that T.S. Eliot is a terrible reader of his own poem? Here’s what we did. Me and my research assistant, Jonathan Dick, each listened to every reading on “The Wasteland” app and wrote up detailed answers to a series of questions about our subjective impressions. Number one: using subjective criteria, place the reader along the dimensions, formal, conversational, expressive, dramatic, including hybrids of these that are identified in the article beyond poet voice.\n(24:37)\tAdam Hammond\tNumber two: come up with two to three moments or passages that you feel best exemplify the above analysis. Number three: note any cases where the four dimensions or the explanation of these dimensions seem inadequate. Number four: briefly described how well, and just “how,” each reader does the voices in the poem. Number five: pick out a couple of passages where the reader clearly does a voice or conversely remarkably fails to do a voice. So that was our questionnaire. I’ll give you a couple of examples we agreed on using a passage from the poem that really brought out the differences. For instance, we both thought that Fiona Shaw was an expressive, dramatic reader, using a wide pitch range, highly contrastive pitch and incorporating a bunch of dramatic pauses. Have a listen,\n(25:28)\tFiona Shaw, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d.”\n(26:05)\tAdam Hammond\tWe also both thought that Viggo Mortensen was a formal inexpressive reader. He speaks slowly. His rhythms are steady and predictable, and he doesn’t do much with pitch.\n(26:16)\tViggo Mortensen, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. / Tereu”\n(26:46)\tAdama Hammond\tBy the way, as a kind of control, we also had the old MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” read the poem, and we analyzed his reading, too. Subjectively, we called it “formal-inexpressive,” just the same as Viggo.\n(27:02)\tMacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading “The Wasteland”\t\n“Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! / Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d.”\n(27:16)\tAdam Hammond\tThen it was time to run the numbers and see how it all shook out computationally. Jonathan and I, and the computer, in many ways weren’t far off in our interpretations of the performances. The computer agreed that Shaw was expressive-dramatic, hardly a surprise. But the computer thought Viggo’s rhythms were a bit more varied that we’d given him credit for: the computer agreed he was inexpressive but, based on his timing data, called him conversational rather than formal. Notably, the computer saw Fred the same way, as conversational and inexpressive. But there was one reader where Jonathan and I just couldn’t agree: Eliot. Have a listen to Eliot reading that same passage. Where would you place him?\n(28:06)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu”\n(28:43)\tAdam Hammond\tJonathan thought that Eliot was formal and inexpressive. In his notes he said, “Eliot is a formal speaker. His tone is neutral and slow. He is also less expressive since his pitch range is rather narrow and non-contrasting. Indeed one might describe him as monotonous.” Jonathan’s impressions agree with what a lot of critics have thought about Eliot over the years. For example, Jason Camlot, in his 2019 book “Phonopoetics” speaks of Eliot’s “calculatedly numb or mechanical delivery”; his delivery, Camlot says, “is robotically liturgical, or […] mechanically oracular”. Now that’s exactly how 19-year-old me felt about Eliot’s reading, and that’s exactly what I hated about it. And yet when I listened to Eliot again to put my subjective responses together, I couldn’t help but disagree with my younger self. In my notes I wrote, “He’s all over the map. There is a lot of formal, but I get the sense that this happens when he’s in ‘formal’ voices. I almost always have the sense that he’s trying to ‘do’ a voice. He is conversational in several voices. One failing he seems to have is varying his rhythms, which are generally monotonous. Definitely, he is expressive in parts, but I get the sense that he is more trying than succeeding.”\n(29:47)\tAdam Hammond\tNow, I wasn’t alone in hearing voices in Eliot’s reading of “The Wasteland,” or at least the attempt to do these voices. For instance, to go back a century, when Eliot read “The Wasteland” to his friend Virginia Woolf at her house in 1922, she wrote up some subjective impressions of her own in her diary. She wrote, “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity.” “One was left,” Woolf said, “with some strong emotion.” Virginia Woolf seems to have considered Eliot an expressive-dramatic reader.\n(30:51)\tAdam Hammond\tAlas, the computer disagreed with Virginia and I. Even Mortensen and Fred got to be formal and conversational. Eliot’s reading was the only one the computer saw as formal and inexpressive. But maybe I just wasn’t running the numbers right. For all of the results I’ve talked about so far, the computer was giving us results for the whole performance. On average, it would look at timing and pitch data for the full poem, all 20 to 30 minutes of it. It’s a long poem. And then give us data like average pause, length, rhythmic complexity of pauses on average, average pitch acceleration for the whole 20 to 30 minute performance. But maybe that wasn’t what was most interesting or useful in terms of calculating the numbers because the poem is made up of lots of different voices after all. What did I care about average numbers for the whole poem?\n(31:53)\tAdam Hammond\tThat would only make sense if there was only one voice for the whole poem. It would be like putting the Norton Anthology in a text analysis algorithm and getting it to tell me what the average style of a hundred different writers was like. Useless, right? You wanna look at the style for each of the individual writers. Now, what we needed to do was compare the way that the different readers did particular voices. How are they reading here and how does that compare to how they’re reading over here? Do they vary the voice from passage to passage? So for the next stage of our analysis, we identified three passages in the poem that are clearly in different voices. We started with a very formal conventionally poetic passage. We call it the “burnished throne “passage. Then a very informal passage, the famous bar scene, and then a passage made up of a wide variety of voices all stuck together, the “Madame Sosostris” passage. Now we would expect a good reader, a reader who really does the voices, to make a huge contrast between the “burnished throne” voice and the “bar scene” voice. If they really get the poem, they’ll do everything they can to make these voices sound different from one another.\n(33:14)\tAdam Hammond\tWell, can you believe it? Analyzing all the performances of these three passages with our pitch and timing tools and then comparing the numbers between passages, Eliot is actually the one who varies his reading the most. In terms of words per minute, pitch speed, pause rate, average pitch, his readings are right up there as the most contrasting. Whereas someone like Fiona Shaw is varying her voice all the time all over the place, Eliot is the one, or one of the ones, who varies his voice the most from passage to passage. So have a listen for yourself. Here is Eliot reading the conventionally poetic “burnished throne” passage.\n(34:01)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)”\n(34:19)\tAdam Hammond\tAnd here he is reading the colloquial “bar scene.”\n(34:23)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can’t. But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”\n(34:42)\tAdam Hammond\tOkay, he’s not the best actor, but you see he’s really trying to do a cockney accent in the bar scene. The computer also placed Elliot among the most dynamic readers for the Madame Sosostris passage. That’s one where there are a lot of voices and we expect a lot of internal variation. This is one where the overall numbers for the passage might actually be interesting. Indeed, although the computer saw Eliot’s performance as overall formal and inexpressive, it actually interpreted his performance of this passage as dramatic and expressive. Let’s listen first to Alec Guinness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, reading this passage and you can really hear the way he does the voices. There’s a difference between a kind of a neutral and narrator like voice. A prophetic voice that speaks the lines “Those are pearls that were his eyes!”, and the Eastern European-accented voice of Madame Sosostris herself.\n(35:39)\tAlec Guinness, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.”\n(36:39)\tAdam Hammond\tThe computer saw Guinness as the most dramatic and expressive of all readers in this scene. But guess who it saw as the second most dramatic and expressive? Our friend T.S. Eliot. And really, if you listen, you can see why. Eliot does all the same voices as Guinness. He does that narrator at the start. He does the prophetic voice for the “pearl’s eyes” line, and he does Madame Sosostriswith that same accent.\n(37:06)\tT.S. Eliot, reading “The Wasteland”\t“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.”\n(38:09)\tAdam Hammond\tI think I may hear another voice right at the end there, a Cockney man that Guinness doesn’t do.\n(38:16)\tAdam Hammond\tSo where does all this leave us? Well, for one thing, thanks to MacArthur and our collaborators, we now have accessible and powerful computational tools for analyzing poetic performances. The computational analysis of pitch and timing data, permitted by tools like “Gentle” and “Drift,” produce results that correspond well to human listeners’s subjective impressions. In other words, to tools work, which is important. These subjective impressions vary between individual listeners or even between the same listener over time. When I heard Eliot when I was 19, all I heard was a fake English accent and the worst example of a monotonous formal poet’s voice. Jonathan listening today heard something similar, but the me of today disagreed with both, hearing a genuine attempt, however clumsy, however awkward, to really do all the different voices in the poem.\n(39:09)\tAdam Hammond\tAnd I mean, he was a poet, after all. He was not a famous actor. When they were casting “Star Wars” and the “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter,” no one was knocking on Eliot’s door. Okay, he was long dead by then, but you get my point. Maybe we need to cut Eliot a little bit of slack.\n(39:28)\tAdam Hammond\tI think this whole experiment shows why some of us are so drawn to computational analysis of literature and literary performance. Whether you’re working with text or audio, computational tools provide different ways of attending to the work of art, different ways of listening and reading. Computers just notice things that humans don’t, and sometimes those differences can be really interesting. They give us another voice, another perspective to bounce our ideas off of. I still don’t think Elliot was a good reader of his own work, but I do think that he was trying to be a good reader of his own work and the computer seems to agree with me.\n(40:11)\tAdam Hammond\tThanks so much for listening, and if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, please feel free to draw me a line.\n(40:16)\tMusic\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n(40:28)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n(40:40)\tHannah McGregor\tThis month’s episode was produced by Adam Hammond. The Spoken Web podcasting team is: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Katherine McLeod and me, Hannah McGregor.\n(40:58)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds."],"score":3.2550304},{"id":"9640","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 S5E6, Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, 6 May 2024, Fyfe"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ultimatumpoetry/"],"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":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creator_names_search":["Frances Grace Fyfe"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Frances Grace Fyfe\",\"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/075e405d-1616-4d26-9c4a-9e1e778fe290/audio/a4f35390-9169-4a4a-8feb-9448945d3207/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-master-spokenweb-notes-from-the-underground.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:44:48\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,018,357 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-master-spokenweb-notes-from-the-underground\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/ultimatumpoetry/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-05-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.\\n\\nFURTHER READING / LISTENING\\n\\nAubin, Mathieu. “Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.\\nLord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021.\\nStanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.\\n“What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival.” Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023,\\nhttps://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549750808576,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.\n\nUntil recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary  event from the margins.\n\nThis episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.\n\n00:00\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:18\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. [Music fades]\n00:34\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:35\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\n00:50\tKatherine McLeod:\tIn this month’s episode, our producer, Frances Grace Fyfe, takes us into the sounds of “Punk Poetry Archives.” The recordings are from the festival called “Ultimatum.” They constitute one collection that Concordia’s SpokenWeb team has been digitizing and cataloging. And at the same time, a SpokenWeb-affiliated and SSHRC-funded research team, led by Mathieu Aubin, has been working through research questions that emerge from these very same recordings.\n01:17\tKatherine McLeod:\tThat project, “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides,” decided that a sound-based format would be ideal for sharing their research.\nEnter Frances Grace Fyfe, who joined the team for the production of this episode and, in many ways, becomes a listener to all of the archival work that the “Listening Queerly” team has been doing.\n01:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAs Frances Grace tells us the story of “Ultimatum Through the Archives,” we hear stories of what “Listening Queerly” can do with archival audio. And we start to hear “queer listening” as a practice emerging from within and in relation to the research team members themselves.\n01:54\tHannah McGregor:\tLet’s get ready to listen to this month’s episode. And yep, it’s our first episode to come with a profanity warning, but it is an episode about a “punk poetry archive,” after all. Here is producer Frances Grace Fyfe with notes from the underground, sex, drugs, and rock and roll at the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”\n02:15\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental Music Overlapped With Feminine Voice]\n02:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\t[Audio Recording Begins] [Electronic Music Plays]\nWhat comes to mind when you think of a “poetry reading”? For most people, a poetry reading is a boring, stuffy event where you have to sit quietly and clap politely while a poet intones at length. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, it was the poetry reading that was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance.\nAt the “Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival,” which first took place in 1985, literary all-stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while revelling in drunkenness, doing cocaine, and sleeping with one another.\n03:11\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tThe event–which ultimately dissolved into financial difficulty and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors–broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have yet to be paralleled today.\nThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n03:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tUntil recently, most recordings from the “Ultimatum Festival” were predominantly kept in personal archives and often considered lost to many people who were part of the events. These recordings weren’t available for research until recently when a team at SpokenWeb began to digitize and archive them. In today’s episode, we’ll listen back to some of these recordings and learn about the unique approaches this team is taking to bring this event back to life.\nYou’re listening to: “Notes from the Underground: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll at the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival.”\n04:02\tMusic:\t[Electronic Music]\n04:06\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Announcer at the Ultimatum Festival speaking in French] musique de “Boys Du Sévère” qui vont jouer vendredi soir–\n04:06\tAlan Lord:\t[Audio Fades Away]\nIt was, you know: “blow our minds. You’ve got 15 minutes and get the fuck off stage.”\n04:21\tJerome Poynton:\tIt was like a huge show, you know, big, big show. But it was completely insane what we were trying to do.\n04:28\tFortner Anderso:\t[Overlapping] Overt sexual and bodily function of her (referring to Sheila Urbanoski) work, was like, whoah. You know, we’re not in Kansas anymore.\n04:38\tSheila Urbanoski:\tI remember at the end of it, somebody said, “how would you describe Ultimatum?” And I said two words: chaos, cocaine. [Background noise echoes “love”]\n04:47\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Background noise continues echoing “Love”]\n04:50\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Alan Lord presenting “The Ultimatum” in French/English] Nous allons faire l’inauguration, alors si je peux, uh, si je peux faire l’inauguration d’Ultimatum 2. Let’s, uh, well, je ne sais pas. Let’s go.\n05:09\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Upbeat music plays in the background]\n05:21\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tOK, so we’re here at Foufounes Électriques. Can you just describe the scene for us?\n05:26\tElla Jando-Saul:\tYeah, I mean, it’s a pretty spacious kind of place. Over here by the entrance, we have a bar. There’s, you know, an ATM machine. There are a couple of foosball tables sort of speckled around the room.\nAs I understand, the bar was smaller and there would’ve been sort of a clear performance stage. There was a lot of performance art happening at the time, and it wouldn’t have been as nicely decorated.\nIt was sort of like your typical run-of-the-mill, grimy bar, whereas it’s quite nice right now. Like it feels clean in a way where I don’t imagine that’s how it would’ve been.\n06:02\tFrances Grace Fyfe\tYou’re listening to Ella Jando-Saul, one of the researchers on the team who is digitizing and listening back to the tapes from Ultimatum. I asked her to bring me to the site where the festival originally took place. Les Foufounes Électriques–literally, “The Electric Buttocks”–a punk bar on Montreal’s Saint-Catherines Street.\n06:20\tFrances Grace Fyfe\tWhat I want to know is, how did this grimy punk bar—which only a few years after the festival ended would go on to host “Nirvana” to a sold-out crowd—become the site of one of the most avant-garde, performance events in Canadian literary history? Well, to understand Ultimatum, we have to go back to one man, Alan Lord.\nLegend has it, Alan, then a young engineer, had a vision to put together a festival that would bring together poets as well as artists and musicians from across Canada and the US with one goal: to break boundaries in poetic performance. So who is Alan Lord, exactly?\n06:57\tElla Jando-Saul:\tHe’s just a guy in engineering. And he gets into the punk scene, and then he gets into the poetry scene. And then he uses his funds from engineering to put together a festival, because, like a guy suggests it, one day. And then it sort of snowballs from there. And he starts dedicating basically all of his time and money to creating this series of festivals because punk is what gives him life and [Ella laughs] engineering is what gives him the funds to do this. And, when I say it gives him the funds, like sometimes he’s not paying his rent so that he can fly in some New Yorker for an evening.\nSo, that’s Alan Lord. Basically just a guy with motivation. And money.\n07:37\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIt just seems a bit bizarre to me that somebody would become so obsessed with putting on a poetry event that they would get nearly bankrupt themselves doing it.\nCan you speak to what was going on in his head at the time?\n07:53\tElla Jando-Saul:\tWell, let me go into the long version, and again, this is mostly pulled from his book. But you know, he’s in classes at McGill, and he sees this guy who has a Ramones badge, and he’s like, “oh my God, someone else in engineering is also into punk.” He starts getting into the Montreal punk scene, which is developing at about exactly this time, mostly in Old Port and mostly in Anglophone scene.\nThe Francophone bands that do exist are often singing in English, and punk becomes like the thing that really matters to him and the thing that’s taking up all of his time. And so he loses his full-time job that he had, and he also drops out of school, like right before his final semester. I think around, it’s around this time, he probably like starts a band and stuff. And then he meets Lucien Francoeur. Lucien Francoeur really teaches him about poetry. So he comes to him through the punk scene. But Francoeur is mainly a poet who’s got folded into this punk scene.\nAnd so he teaches Alan Lord about all of the great poets, Rimbaud and Burroughs [Ella laughs]. And then Alan Lord sort of digs deeper into this whole poetry thing. Meanwhile, he also goes from Rimbaud to learning about William Burroughs to learning about Herbert Hunke and John Giorno and the whole like, Beat scene.\n09:09\tAlan Lord:\tThe Toronto Research Group and also the “Antar gang” we used to call them “La Revue Antar” gang. There was the, uh, Pierre-Andre Arcand, he was called. His nickname was (). He did interesting stuff with machines and altering his voice like a vocoder and stuff. So yeah, that contingent from Quebec was really interesting.\nThey were this little clique of four or five guys, they were doing avant-garde stuff. Yeah, they were a fun bunch. And also the people from “Sound Poet,” people from Toronto for avant-garde literary stuff.\n09:48\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tHere’s Alan today, talking about some of the performers he invited to the first “Ultimatum Poetry Festival.”\n09:54\tAlan Lord:\tAnd there was this one guy talking about sound poetry. This guy, it was actually just sound, Jean-Paul Curté. He was like a professional sound sculptor and artist, and I have no idea how he got there… I have no idea who gave me the idea to invite him? Or maybe he called me up or something. I don’t know. But he was very interesting.\n10:21\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tOne thing you have to understand is that, before the first Ultimatum festival, the poetry scene in Montreal was divided pretty clearly along English and French lines.\n10:30\tFortner Anderson:\tIt was an odd time, you know in the early early 80s and late 70s. I mean you could still find very many people in Montreal, English people who would absolutely refuse to speak French. Lived their entire lives, but couldn’t say “hello.” And were extremely upset that they might now have to start saying “hello” because of the circumstances. And also, at the same, time was the palpably revolutionary feelings or, impetus of Quebec’s society the two communities, there was a big, big gulf between them.\n11:12\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Fortner Anderson, who came to Montreal from the United States and became involved in the Anglophone performance poetry scene. He was hired by Alan Lord to handle grant applications and other organizational tasks for the second Ultimatum festival, which took place two years after the first, in 1987.\n11:29\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnglophones and francophones were sort of doing different things in say the 60s and 70s. Anglophones had the Vehicle Art Gallery, and there were some francophones involved there, but it was mainly Anglophone space that was a space for like, experimental performance art kimd of stuff. And, on the Francophone side, you had this, like, very heated political moment. A lot of performance of poetry was related to politics at the time, so you have the “Nuit de la poesie,” become a recurring event around the Quebec separatist movement, and it’s a place where you can show that Quebec has an identity, that Quebec has a culture. Here I mean this is Francophone Quebecois people thinking of Quebec as a Francophone nation.\n12:21\tRené Lévesque, Archival Audio\t[René Lévesque talking about the separatist movement]\n…un grand parti souverainiste Quebecois.\nNous pouvons même devenir un peuple qui va s’étonner lui-même de ce dont il est capable…\n12:29\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnd so bringing in, like, Quebec’s own francophone literature and performing it, sort of using poetry to express your political idea to a large audience.\n12:39\tAlan Lord:\tI always found the Anglo crowd of Montreal very insular. And they sort of weren’t interested or whatever in what was happening on the French side. Through thinking about all this, I realized, I was happier and felt more at ease and comfortable and also challenged by the French language people here, seemed to be more open. And also there was the “Joie de Vivre,” and they were a pretty rambunctious bunch. I mean, including fistfights between poets. I mean [Alan laughs] poetry was rough on the French side. It was literally blood on the floor. The “sound des poets,” crazy stuff.\n13:27\tElla Jando-Saul:\tYou know, Toronto had this whole established literary community, all of the big literary magazines. A lot of the stuff that’s happening is in Toronto. So it seems like from the anglophone perspective like Montreal has its place sort of outside of the hub of the main tangents of Canadian poetry.\n13:46\tFortner Anderson:\tIt was a group of close-knit friends and at the time, and there was a number of interesting things about it. One of  them was of course, that Alan was mostly engaged within the French community. And the English community, of course, had, by that time, left.\nIt was a mass exodus of English reactionaries to Toronto. And so the city for the few English poets who remain was kind of left to ourselves. Their Quebec culture was focused on the independence issue, the English community had lost its relevance within the time, and so it was a remarkable kind of freedom which developed.\n14:30\tAlan Lord:\tWe were interested in the exploration of culture and experimentation. It was basically to entertain, to keep the attention of the public because usually, it was like “Don’t drag me to another boring poetry reading. I’m sick of those blah blah blah.”\nI remember boring poetry reading as much on the English side as the French; they’d be going on for half an hour on a poem. On the Anglo side, after every sentence of a poem they take 15 minutes to explain the line. I mean, that’s exactly what I didn’t want and in my little contract of the first festival; “you’ve got 15 minutes. Blow our minds, you’ve got 15 minutes, and get the fuck off the stage.”\nSo, I was kind of insisting that they keep everyone’s attention and do something interesting, and not, don’t bore the public and that worked out. I mean anybody who was there was certainly not bored.\n15:38\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh”]\n15:44\tFortner Anderson:\tI mean, Ian Stephens was an extraordinary poet. But then he had a big band, for the time. So there, too, it became apparent that one could take the power of the pop band and, as a poet and literary performer, use it to create something that had a big impact on the stage.\n16:17\tSheila Urbanoski:\tIt was dark, scattered chairs, people stumbling around. Everybody was smoking because you could smoke back then. No one sat there and listened. No one did that. It was very much like constant milling around and talking. A lot of the performances had to be quite captivating in order for people to shut the fuck up and listen.\n16:40\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Sheila Urbanoski, who lived in Saskatchewan before moving to Montreal, where she became involved in the art scene and the crowd at the Foufounes Électriques right around the corner from her apartment. Like Fortner, she also worked on “Ultimatum II” staff, as the office manager.\n16:55\tFortner Anderson:\tWith “Ultimatum,” there was work that was exciting, vibrant, and pushing the limits. You know, you would go in, and you would get confronted with images which you could not escape from because the performer was embodying them, incarnating them in such a way that the audience was touched and invigorated by that work.\n17:20\tElla Jando-Saul:\tI think it really comes down to the idea of an urban poetry festival relevant to a young urban audience in Montreal. Bringing in an experimental technology angle really gives some extra spice to the performances. I mean, Alan Lord himself had been experimenting with computers and what you can do artistically with them.\n17:43\tFortner Anderson:\tOne of the things that he did, which I thought was quite extraordinary, was to arrange for the 3-camera video recording of the festival. That was a lot of money. They didn’t get paid, but [Fortner laughs], beside from that, that took a lot of organization.\nAnd it was quite intelligent in that not very many people knew that it was only with a 3-camera video recording; that you could make something that could be edited into something usable in the future.\n18:23\tElla Jando-Saul:\tFor some of them, I think this was the first poetry event they had recorded, and they were like “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s cool. It’s interesting. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” And that was the goal. It was like when he says “urban poetry,” he’s really talking about making poetry relevant to a young, urban audience. A lot of that is like, do something they don’t expect.\n18:47\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Tape of experimental computer performance at “Ultimatum” festival, followed by cheering and clapping.]\n18:58\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tAn underground culture usually needs distinct places and spaces where people with shared interests can gather. For the avant-garde underground scene that clustered around Alan Lord, that place was the Foufounes Électriques.\n19:09\tElla Jando-Saul:\tIt opened up, I think in ’83. It was a punk bar. It did all sorts of artistic events. They did I think weekly events where artists would paint live, and you could watch them paint live. At the end of the night, you could buy the painting. So that was sort of their thing. They were doing all sorts of different types of performance, and it became a place where Alan Lord and his friends were hanging out, and it seemed like the logical place. I think he knew the owners and the managers and whatnot. So it was sort of obvious that they would do it there because that’s where they were spending time.\n19:44\tSheila Urbanoski:\tNow, I got involved with that whole mess because I knew all those guys. I was hanging out with [inaudible], [inaudible] were very good friends of mine. And Alan was always around as well. So I kind of just got sucked into the vortex.\n20:05\tAlan Lord:\tThe Foufounes Électriques was interesting from ’84 to 1990—a countercultural, interesting, bubbling milieu of the alternate arts.\n20:19\tSheila Urbanoski:\tYeah. There was a lack of direction, so we made it up, and that’s fine. But the vibe at the time of having a club-like atmosphere, that was very common in the city. It was probably in the Foufounes Électriques or Poodles or Les Lézards to have this – what they used to call it, literature – it’s was more like a performance or a spoken word thing, and very much, we’re at a club, people may listen, they may not.\n20:55\tJerome Poynton:\tMontreal probably had more than a Food electric, but that was the main one. Smaller basement venues. They’re not even necessarily venues, but people working on stuff and having fun with stuff because it was about having fun. It’s like playing dress-up. Theatre productions at that time were like a more glamorized version of “Let’s play dress-up.” But it was like, okay, let’s put on a play, let’s do this.\n21:19\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re hearing from Jerome Poynton, who accompanied the poet Herbert Huncke from New York to Montreal. Huncke was one of the few poets associated with the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and John Giorno, that Alan Lord invited to participate in the festival. But Alan Lord wasn’t exactly a famous poet himself. How is it that he got all these people to come perform in the first place?\n21:41\tElla Jando-Saul:\tSo he ended up, through a series of events, personally meeting Herbert Huncke, then William Burroughs, and then John Giorno.\nJohn Giorno, it seems, sort of had a hand in giving him the idea for “Ultimatum I.” From that point on, it seemed only natural to have him perform there, and once you know one beat poet, you can connect yourself to other beat poets through personal connections. Invite these people, who then become big headliner names. It wasn’t like “I had this event; it’s got Montreal people; can I maybe reach out to this more famous person.” It’s like, “I know this really famous person. Maybe I can make an event that fits them inside it.”\n22:22\tFortner Anderson:\tThe the cultural elements of New York City. That’s where Alan and the rest of us looked at for inspiration at the time. And this is where the extraordinary work was taking place. So there was that, but there was also an intermingling of that with the avant-garde Quebec culture. And so that was quite a heady mix at the time.\n22:47\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIt seems this heady mix of celebrities and laypeople, Montrealers and New Yorkers, and Anglophones and Francophones wasn’t without its tension.\n22:56\tSheila Urbanoski:\tWell, my favourite anecdotes of all time was I got asked, I can’t remember the guy’s name, Louis, at Foufounes Électrique, because Burroughs didn’t speak any French. He said, “Oh, could you help out because Louis didn’t speak any English? Could you help out with this old guy?” And I went, “That’s William fucking Burroughs.”\n23:15\tAlan Lord:\tGinsburg and Francoeur were reciting from memory the opening passage of “A Season in Hell,” and that blew me away. Ginsburg was doing it in French, so they probably had an understanding of French. But there’s a difference between France French and Quebecois. Maybe with the Quebecois, I think, they probably understood.\n24:07\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Presenter speaking in French]\nJ’espère qu’un jour on pourra dire ‘Herbert Huncke’ sans sans avoir faire de reference à la Beat Generation, avec ses rois Ginsberg, Burroughs, tout ça. Maintenant, j’ai fait un dernier vol. À la prochaine fois, c’est Herbert Huncke tout seul.\n[Herbert Huncke performing at “Ultimatum” festival]\nOkay. Well, lemme just say first, Paul, what has happened this evening in the past week? It’s kind of a hard act to follow. Oh, well, alright. In the mic, he says. Okay. Can you hear now? Yes. See, I have a problem with this lighting situation here.\nRegardless of all that, I lost my place. How do you like that? (“Look into the mic”) I will in just a minute. Some people can already go. Are you satisfied now? Okay. I really wanna start off with one particular story here because I feel that it will fit into the general theme of the so-called gathering or festival, whatever group of creative people doing things, trying to do things, young people, it’s very, very encouraging for an old man like me. You know, I want to think that things have progressed–\n25:29\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tPoetry, just like the underground scenes that clustered around “Ultimatum” and the Foufounes, also thrives on a tension between exclusion and inclusion. Poets can decide to omit certain words to build drama or generate certain feelings in their readers. People who study poetry have words for these kinds of omissions: “metaphors,” for example, can imply something without saying it outright, while “ellipsis” omits words that the reader is meant to glean from context.\nSimilarly, people doing literary audio studies are developing new techniques to “listen” for what is implied, but not necessarily heard, in recordings from poetry events. For the team at Concordia’s Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project, listening back to the tapes from “Ultimatum” also means listening back to what is unsaid.\n26:25\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Jean Paul Daoust performing “Numbers” in French]\n[Rough transcription] À côté, sans arbres, jeans, veste en cuir, bouche d’élève bâillée,les mains sur ses cuisses, un dérangement.\n26:25\tMisha Solomon:\tMy name is Misha Solomon, I’m a queer listener for the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides project.\n26:31\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tMisha is here to demonstrate this particular listening technique in the recording at “Ultimatum” by the poet Jean Paul Daoust.\n26:37\tMisha Solomon:\t“Numbers” is a poem about three men having an anonymous sexual encounter in Parkland Fountain at 4:00 in the morning, and that sexual encounter being essentially broken up by police as dawn comes. I think there would even be an argument that this poem is an aubade, maybe even a dawn poem, in that it’s about lovers being separated by the coming of dawn. I think queer listening could be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. I think that my approach to queer listening is just listening to content with my ears perked to the potential of queer content or queer angle. And I think that can, sometimes, be as simple as this poem, where a couple of lines in, it becomes very clear that this is about a gay male cruising in the park being read by a gay man.\n27:33\tMisha Solomon:\tAnd those are both also relatively explicit instances of queer listening that they’re textual, but I think that one could engage in queer listening in even the non-textual elements. And the nonverbal elements of trying to find the queerness within. Within the sound texture, within the recording, within the audience, even, based on their reaction.\nI think the poem’s approach to sex is somewhat summed up by a line at 10:15 on the tape, the line being “sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it.” I think that is sort of a thesis statement in terms of the poem’s approach to sex.\n28:16\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[From Jean-Paul Daoust’s “Numbers” performance: Sex is to throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it]\n28:24\tMisha Solomon:\tOne thing I’m noticing is that the three characters in the poem are not numero un, numero deux, numero trois. They’re number one, number two, number three; that they’re referred to only in English. And I think there is a sort of distancing that English allows for and that he (Jean-Paul Daoust) also uses English just to express these more poetic concepts, even if they’re sort of expressed in a kind of maybe “campy” or maybe overtly aphoristic way.\nBut, like the idea of sex that I talked about earlier is, “sex is throwing your soul into someone else, laughing about it.” To throw your soul into another body and to laugh about it. Or when you’re born, you’re gonna die like it or not, like you and I; these big ideas are presented in English. And I think it is sometimes easier to present those big ideas in a language that doesn’t feel as much your own.\nI mean, I think that we talk…you know, we think about liminality, we think about queerness at the margins, we think about bringing things together, therefore a mix of languages is in some ways queer, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t know that I’m that engaged in the relationship here between bilingualism and queerness in terms of the content of the poem, but I will say that obviously both things are challenging norms of writing and poetry.\n29:43\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo, listening happens in at least three major ways.\n29:49\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tYou’re listening to Mathieu Aubin, who heads up the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides Project and oversees the team of researchers who engage in the practice of queer listening.\n29:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tOne is listening to the audio materials in the collections that we’ve been engaging with. The second is activating that kind of dialogue, that happened at that time through oral literary history, to use, which is a more contemporary but retrospective form of listening. The third is listening within the project’s team. And I think that that’s what I hoped for from the beginning. I imagined and hoped that it could provide an opportunity for hopefully LGBTQ plus identifying students to be part of the dialogue. And get to learn something by listening.\nWhat led to this project was finding out about a box of tapes that existed tied to a couple of literary festivals that happened in Montreal that were bilingual. There were festivals held in 1985 and 1987. The first one happened at Foufounes Electriques , and as someone who loves hardcore punk metal music, I’ve been to Foufounes a few times well before I ever heard about “Ultimatum.”\n31:16\tMathieu Aubin:\tIn fact, I remember going there the first time and going to a particular room and there was no band actually playing, but the music was really good. And I could see people actually “throwing down,” which is a specific form of dancing that’s part of the post-hardcore scene, and I think, needless to say, I also participated in that dance. So for me, it was really exciting, and I knew that Bill Bissett, who I had studied and also, you know, gone to know a lot over my PhD, was part of it. So I was interested in learning more about what the series of festivals had to offer.\n31:58\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tCan you just say a little bit about what it was about representations of queerness in this particular poetry series that felt like a useful or important avenue to look at from a scholarly perspective?\n32:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think that when I say listening queerly, I’m saying listening from my queer positionality to events and performances that may or may not be by LGBTQI-plus folks, but with that critical and lived experience lens. I’m listening from that positionality. You’re invited to listen from that positionality, I think that everyone on our team is listening from their positionality, which is why I thought the project would be really interesting to see, is what each member brings to it, and what they hear.\nAnd that’s more the focus, knowing very well that the two festivals were not identified as queer events but that queerness was still manifesting itself and part of the creative communities. And that’s sort of like bumping up against each other that was happening. And so I think looking for those things rather than just saying, “yeah, we had this reading series without thinking about queerness” is ignoring that aspect of that history. I’m careful to differentiate identity politics from the concept of queerness. Which the term (“queer”) historically, was used in very derogatory terms and was, of course, reclaimed and whatnot. But a queering of something is to push against the boundaries of normativity, and following that thread, I think that what the events of “Ultimatum” were doing was indeed pushing the envelope, like pushing against normativity.\n34:09\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tI see this emphasis on celebrating what’s marginal in the way some of the participants recall the event. Here’s Jerome poin on his own definition of queerness.\n34:19\tJerome Poynton:\tWell, just openness, openness to the illusion of normalcy [Jerome laughs], just to use non-judgmental. That’s the direction you strive for anyway.\n34:33\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tSheila Urbanovsky also talks about how performers were playing with gender expression at the festival\n34:39\tSheila Urbanoski:\tWith Patrice [inaudible], we were known as the country partners at the time, and we did a lot of performance work together as drag acts. So Patrice is, you know, a male presenting gay man, and I am a cis woman, and so it was a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body. So we did a lot of drag acts together as twins.\n35:06\tMisha Solomon:\tRemember that queerness isn’t new, even if it didn’t used to be called queerness, and obviously, we’re dealing with queerness from a time where it’s not like it’s hard for us to believe that people were gay in 1980, whatever. But to remember that this isn’t new, and also that you have that there are these queer foreparents, I think specifically in a sort of gay male genealogy, that there is this whole missing generation of gay men and queer people, broadly due to their deaths from HIV, AIDS. And so for me as a gay man living in a sort of quote-un-quote post-AIDS world (and I mean that it’s only a post-AIDS world for the very privileged) to sort of be reminded of a gay experience before my time is, I think, essential.\n35:58\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think that within cultural scenes at the time in which, and now I’m using it in the sense of sexuality and gender here, queer poets were a part of it. I think that those people, you know, had a sort of coolness to them. I don’t think that they were ostracized whatsoever. I think they were very much members of those communities and that, you know, the people didn’t care. But what does that mean at that time outside of those communities or scenes? You have policing; you have fashing, you have surveillance, you have larger media, mainstream media discourse, and vilifying people because of their sexuality during the AIDS crisis. Right, those things are incongruent with each other but coexist.\n36:51\tArchival Audio from a news report on the AIDS crisis\t[Clips from new reports reporting on the AIDS crisis, Ronald Reagan’s response to the AIDS crisis] “Lifestyle of some homosexual men has triggered an epidemic of some sort of rare form of cancer–” [Sound fades]\n37:09\tJerome Poynton:\tLarry Rosenthal built a tremendous collection of books in San Francisco during these times because so many houses were being emptied. It was so you could see it in New York, you know, and thrift stores. There were just things in them that were just too good, you know? You know too too much. Too much, too fast. Because people were dying, and so their apartments were emptied out. I don’t think I was the only person that was aware of that. Other people saw that, so that changed the performance scene and also, so many of the great performers didn’t make it.\n37:56\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens performing “Underflesh” at Ultimatum festival] “Crying, won’t do any good, crying won’t do any good–”\n38:06\tFrances Grace Fyfe:\tIn taking part in queer listening, the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team is drawing attention to something implied but not made explicit in the “Ultimatum” recordings: the way queerness was central to underground scenes at a time when queer people were often oppressed in overt and vulgar ways by larger society.\n“The oppression of queer people,” Sarah Schulman writes, “goes hand in hand with the larger process of cultural homogenization that was occurring around this time.” “Although AIDS,” she writes, “devastated a wealthy subculture of gay white males, many of the gay men who died of AIDS were individuals who are living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art, and social justice.”\nTheir devastation from AIDS in the 1980s occurred alongside gentrification in major cities like New York, where apartments left behind by those who had died of AIDS were often privatized or subject to dramatic rent increases. Schulman argues that a vibrant downtown scene requires diverse, dynamic cities in which queer people can hide, flaunt, learn, or influence. The underground scenes for whom ideas of queerness were so central relied on cheap rents and access to space is no longer guaranteed today.\n39:20\tElla Jando-Saul:\tI think it was David Sapin or something who said “Oh, I lived in a four-bedroom apartment in the Plateau, and we each paid $20 a month.” I think now they’ve subdivided the apartment into a couple of different apartments, each of which costs $600 a month. You know you do the numbers with inflation, and that doesn’t make sense. Montreal was a really cheap city to live in, and spaces were very cheap. “Ultimatum I” had like a $15,000 budget to put together an event that lasts four or five days with 50 artists, and you want to fly in Herbert Huncke from New York and put them up in a hotel to be able to do that, and then also have all of these marginal poets who are not going to draw a huge audience. So you can’t rely on ticket sales like, yes, you’ve brought in John Giorno and Herbert Huncke, but you’ve also got these nights with almost unknown francophone Montreal poets who are unpublished. To be able to make that happen, you need a cheap city.\n40:16\tAlan Lord:\tThe Foufounes Électriques was interesting from 84 to 1990. After that, they sold, the original owners sold it at a certain point in the early nineties, I think.\n40:30\tElla Jando-Saul:\tAnd when it was bought by someone else, that person was like, “I wanna make money off of this property I just bought.” And you know, what doesn’t make money, is experimental performance poetry. So goodbye. And then, like two years later, “Nirvana” was playing there.\n40:47\tSheila Urbanoski:\tAs much as I remember, sort of made up as we went, just ’cause we didn’t know any better. And I am a little disappointed. I don’t know what it’s like in Montreal now, but I personally find a lot of literature events now to be quite dull because people just kind of sit there. They don’t assume because there was an element of engaging, even if you weren’t actively listening. I mean, everybody in Foufounes Électriques saw you hit the floor when Karen Finley started putting you up as okay. I mean, that’s just like everybody just went, “What the… [Laughs]?”\n41:26\tAlan Lord:\tAnd now there’s just nothing special there. There’s no ambiance. There used to be something in the air. You know, when my buddies and I were hanging around there, there was nothing. Not really.\n41:49\tArchival Audio from Ultimatum Festival, 1985\t[Ian Stephens’s “Underflesh” performance continues playing] “Don’t talk anymore. We don’t love anymore. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t fuck anymore. We don’t–”\n[Stephens vocalizes, and instrumental music continues]\n[Audience cheers and someone thanks Alan Lord for organizing the event]\n43:17\tHannah McGregor:\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the Spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n43:30\tKatherine McLeod:\tThis month’s episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Past and present team members include Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and Misha Solomon.\n43:48\tKatherine McLeod:\tA special thanks to the entire team for their appearances on this episode and their help in sourcing audio clips. And finally, a big thanks to Scott Gerard for mastering and for the original sound compositions for this episode. The Spoken Web podcasting team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\n44:13\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Spokenweb Podcast outro music begins playing] To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say “hi” on our social media at Spoken Web Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts with me, Katherine McLeod, short stories about how literature sounds.\n "],"score":3.2550304},{"id":"9641","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 S5E7, ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon, 3 June 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/"],"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":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c9448971-5d6f-4edc-8389-6965f8c8fcd1/audio/cd747ce4-9bf8-4436-a9e9-a0a6013b5185/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"(52,728,937 bytes)\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-06-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SHOW NOTES \\n\\nTRACE at Theatre Passe Muraille\\n\\nSteve Roach, Quiet Music 1\\n\\nFalse Knees, Montreal-based graphic artist drawing birds talking\\n\\nÉliane Radigue\\n\\nKishi Bashi, “Manchester.” (Did you catch that this song is about writing a novel and Erica had just talked about novels? Not to mention the bird references. There are many more Kishi Bashi songs to listen to, but linking this since we played a clip from this one in the episode for these serendipitous reasons!)\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549755002880,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this month’s episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts is taking over the airwaves.\n\nShortCuts is the monthly minisode that takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a short ‘cut’ of audio. In this fifth season, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been presenting a series of live conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium – and in this full episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moynan King, Erica Isomura and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of our then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt and our then-sound designer Miranda Eastwood, who was there behind-the-scenes recording the audio and who joins in the conversations too.\n\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with the question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite an eclectic playlist and do check the Show Notes below for links.\n\nIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of Season Five of ShortCuts for conversations with Jennifer Waits, Brian Fauteaux, and XiaoXuan Huang. And, of course, this month’s episode with the longest ShortCuts yet: “ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.”\n\n00:01\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan 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.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersection of sound, poetry, literature, and history, created by scholars, poets, and students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this month’s episode, Shortcuts is taking over the airwaves. Shortcuts is a monthly minisode, or short episode, distributed on the same podcast feed. Produced by me, Katherine McLeod, Shortcuts takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a shortcut of audio.\nAnd it wouldn’t quite be Shortcuts without the Shortcuts intro. So, let’s press play on the music and begin.\n01:23\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to Shortcuts. In season five of Shortcuts, you’ve been hearing Shortcuts Live, conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium.\nFor this episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moyen King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of Kate Moffatt, our then-supervising producer. And you’ll hear Miranda Eastwood, who is there behind the scenes recording the audio. Miranda even jumps into the conversation from time to time.\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with a question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite a playlist and do check the show notes for those links.\n02:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of this season five of Shortcuts. There, you’ll find the other Shortcuts live conversations from that same symposium. You’ll hear Jennifer Waits talking about the magic in the archives of college radio stations and Brian Fauteux on widescreen radio. Yes, widescreen radio. And Xiaoxuan Huang speaking about “hybrid poetics” and much more in that conversation.\nSo, without further ado, here is the longest Shortcuts episode yet: Shortcuts Live, Talking About Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.\n03:04\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Music fades away.]\n03:10\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, hello and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. I am recording this with Moynan King at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta.\nMoynan, thank you so much for joining us today.\n03:26\tMoynan King:\tOh my gosh, thank you for having me.\n03:28\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah! Um, oh, and I should introduce myself quickly because this is not the voice people usually hear on SpokenWeb Shortcuts. I am Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer, stepping in for our intrepid usual host, Katherine McLeod.\nSo, to get us going here, Moynan, would you just introduce yourself for us briefly?\n03:47\tMoynan King:\tYeah. My name is Moynan King. I’m a theater artist, performance artist, writer, you know, sometimes academic. I’m doing a postdoc at Western University, and the subject of my postdoctoral studies is “Queer Resonance.” So, I’m exploring the concept of sound as queer, queerness as sound, within communities and also within performance practices and art in general.\n04:24\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Yeah. I cannot wait to chat and hear more about this. But I think we’ll kick off by listening to what you’ve brought for us today.\n04:33\tMoynan King:\tSounds good. So, for the listeners, it’s about a minute and 20 seconds. [Overlap from Kate: Perfect.] So, we’ll just have a listen.\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio of harmonizing voices starts playing]\n06:09\tMoynan King:\tI guess that’s where it stops. There’s just a bit of dead air at the end.\n06:14\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. The listeners won’t be able to see this, but I had to literally put my hand on my chest. I was feeling that in my chest while I was listening. That was so fantastic.\n06:26\tMoynan King:\tThank you.\n06:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, I was gonna say, tell us, what we were just listening to?\n06:29\tMoynan King:\tOkay. So, this is a track called “Ghosts,” and it’s a composition by Tristan R Whiston from a show that Tristan and I co-created called “Trace,” that we started to develop back in, oh my gosh, 2012.\nIt started as an installation performance. We toured it across Canada. So we went to Regina; I know you’re from Saskatchewan. [Overlap from Kate: I am]. In 2015, we went to Regina, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, and Montreal. There’s someone else in our booth from Montreal. [Miranda Eastwood laughs]\nAnd then we put it away, put it in its massive storage cases, and then Theatre Passe Muraille just asked us to remount it. And when we did that, we turned it from being an installation into a play. So, we tore it apart and put it forward. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nAnd, so, what you’re listening to here is a track composed by Tristan Wiston; composed by him and of him.\n07:32\tMoynan King:\tSo, Tristan is a trans singer, performer, community activist. And over the course of his transition – that is over the course of the period during which he started taking “T” [Referring to Testosterone] – he recorded his voice almost every day, repeatedly singing the same songs and, you know, talking and singing and kind of expressing himself into this recorder and then also singing repeatedly over and over these songs.\nAnd one important thing to know about Tristan is that prior to transition, he was an incredible soprano singer. And so had one of those perfect high-pitched voices. And for many, many years, Tristan and I worked together in a group, Toronto-based group called “The Boy Choir of Lesbos.”\nAnd, so, we used to, there were a bunch of us, and we would dress as boys and we would sing in, you know, the harmonies of an Anglican boy choir. [Overlap from Kate: Right.] And so, we would sing and that was just sort of part of the collaborative history of Tristan and I. [Overlap from Kate: Incredible.]\nSo, Tristan came to me, and I think it was around 2011, and said, “I really wanna do something with these tracks. I wanna do something with all this material that I have.” And he’d already, then at that point, done a podcast. Well, you know, I guess at that time we didn’t call it a podcast. I think it had a different name, right? [Laughs]\n08:57\tKate Moffatt:\tAn audio essay. A piece–\n9:00\tMoynan King:\tYes, yes. An audio essay. Thank you.\n9:03\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, you’re welcome.\n09:03\tMoynan King:\t–called “Middle C,” and that was with the CBC [The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] – I mentioned that because I believe it’s still in the CBC archives. But he brought it to me because he wanted to do something more experimental with it, something less linear.\nSo, we started to work with all these tracks. And so, we did like tons of listening over, you know, a long period of time and kind of compartmentalize things. So, the important thing to know about that track, and in fact about “Trace” the show, is that all of the sound is made from Tristan’s voice–\n09:38\tKate Moffatt:\tWow–\n09:38\tMoynan King:\tAnd so a lot of the sounds that you hear in this track are fragments taken from different periods, different stages of his transition. And one of the big discoveries we made with, originally working with these tracks – and to be clear, Trey Justin is the composer. [Overlap from Kate: Okay.] So, but in a way maybe I, you could kind of call me a “doctor.” A “compositional dramaturg,” you know, because we worked so much together on the creation of the show, and those compositions were being created at that time. But so just to be clear, this is Tristan’s composition, but that I was involved in the process of it. And so yeah, that’s what you were listening to.\n10:21\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. That’s fantastic. And I’ve already got so many questions around things like the amount of audio that you end up with, like the recordings that become almost like an archive of sorts, that you’re then kind of like working with and engaging with, you know.\nI just think that’s so, so interesting. Wow. Okay. I don’t even know where to start with this. I feel so delighted. So I guess, and I would love to kind of tap into a little bit of that kind of collaboration that you were talking about. I’d love to hear more about that and maybe to think a little bit too about kind of like the role that listening is playing in that I feel like, you know, when it’s multiple people, at multiple ears, and especially working with that much audio. Anyway, I, anything there, that you would like to kind of speak to? I feel like that’s so rich.\n11:13\tMoynan King:\tYeah. It’s so interesting because I think just to address the topic of collaboration, you know, that it’s a collaboration. This piece, “Trace,” is a collaboration, you know, first of all for Tristan with himself [Laughs], you know–\n11:30\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, yeah, yeah, yeah–\n11:31\tMoynan King:\t–With all of his selves, you know, over time. [Overlap from Kate: Totally.]\nAnd then of course with me and, also thinking about collaboration and, artistic collaborations, Tristan and I like to say we’ve been working together since the late 19 hundreds. And because I think saying it that way gives you a sense of the depth of our collaboration and the amount of time and how much we have both changed in many, many ways. And also, how we have not changed in many other ways. You know?\n12:06\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n12:08\tMoynan King:\tSo, when we, and so when we were, when we created the first piece and, so it’s, again, it’s called “Trace.” And we are the co-creators of it. He kind of takes up certain roles and I take up other roles, but we always developed the thing together. You know, we really had a vision of creating this very immersive piece. And I still love that style, and I’m really committed to that style, like immersive installation, performance, that sort of stuff.\nBut when Theater Passe Muraille, which is a theatre in Toronto, it’s a very old theatre. It’s been around since I think the 1960s. And the space is certainly conducive to certain kinds of performance, but it’s very much a, like theatre, you know, with an audience and a playing space–\n12:56\tKate Moffatt:\tYes–\n12:56\tMoynan King:\tAnd so, what was exciting for us as collaborators was when Theater Passe Muraille approached us to remount – and you can’t see the air quotes, but I’m doing them [Laughs] – remount “Trace,” we just said “Yes.”\nBecause, you know, coming outta the pandemic, we’re like, “Oh God, great. Yes. Like, let’s just do a show. Oh, yeah.” You know, everything has been so crazy, and you all know what I mean.\nSo we just said “yes.” And then of course, at our first meeting, we were both like, “Yeah, but we’re not gonna do the same show” [Laughs]. We’re not even [Laughs], we’re not even gonna tell Theater Passe Muraille because we don’t want any questions. We just wanna do what we wanna do. But the important thing to understand, I think, about this piece, in terms of its like thematic, and this is very much connected to the topic of collaboration and community and the concept of becoming, this is something we were working with a lot that it’s an ongoing process of inventing and reinventing yourself, you know?\n13:57\tMoynan King:\tAnd this idea of like coming out, which is something we do over and over and over again, you know. And there’s a line in the new “Trace” where Tristan’s talking about his sister’s gender reveal party for a child, and then he says “I, nobody ever threw me a gender reveal party. I have to do it myself all the time.” [Laughs]. You know, kind of…And so this idea, it says, connected to this. And so these themes of, these taking the themes of Tristan’s unique experience as a performer and as a singer, and then kind of applying them to broader experiences and to the idea that, to ideas that are familiar to everyone, then that is that non…that stasis is counter to life. That, as long as we are alive, we are changing, and we are becoming. We–\n14:54\tKate Moffatt:\tNever stay the same–\n14:54\tMoynan King:\tYeah. And so the piece had to change too, because the last time we had performed it prior to this was 2015, and we had changed.\n15:02\tKate Moffatt:\tAbsolutely. [Overlap from Moynan: You know?] Okay. And actually, that was the next question that I wanted to take up was you talked about changing it from an “installation” into something.\nAnd it was interesting ’cause as you were, as you were telling us, you even were using your hands to indicate how you had to kind of “break it down,” and you moved your hands in a sweeping motion, and then you were like, and then you pushed away from yourself. You said we had to put it forward, right? [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.]\nYou had to really reorient yourself [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.] for the piece. And I thought that was so interesting ’cause to go back, even to my own, like my hand going directly to my chest, like a couple of seconds in, I was like, I could feel it in my chest and then I could feel it in my mouth and it was somehow just this extremely embodied listening experience.\nSo I would love to hear more about what that was like, having to think about the ways in which this piece and the show itself even like that, it’s just the embodiment of the archive that’s creating it. And the process that it was. And anything I did this last time, I very, I’m good at asking twisty questions. So anything there that you’d like to take up? I’d love to hear more about.\n16:07\tMoynan King:\tWell, I think there are a couple of key things that you brought up there. And one of them is that shape, changing the shape of a piece. And, for the listener that, yes, when I was talking about the installation, I kind of moved my fingers into sort of circular motion to sort of indicate like a space within which…And then when I talked about the theatre as Kate said, I put my hands and pushed away. So it’s like putting something out towards the audience so much, and I’m directly addressing you.\nAnd so changing the shape of a piece changes the fundamental quality and essence of the piece. Right? [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.] And then I’ll, I’d like to also talk about the archive a little bit more after that. [Overlap from Kate: Please. Yeah.]\nBut when we decided to do that, just to sort of give you a bit more information, there is some stuff online, which I can give you a link to some of these sounds, are online if anybody wants to listen to more of them.\n17:09\tMoynan King:\tBut, the idea we started with was this idea kind of an idea of Tristan walking through a forest of his own voices. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nYou know, you have in your studio here the YSM5s [Yorkville Sound YSM5 are compact powered studio monitors] beautiful speakers. We had 10 of those. When we created the piece, you know, we first showed it in the summer of 2012 and then toured it in 2015.\nWhen we did that, we had to hire someone to create custom software for us in order to channel the 12 different tracks to 12 different speakers. Sorry, 10, 10, sorry, my numbers come from another iteration. But anyway, so the 10, the 10 speakers, and of course now you can just do that on QLab [QLab is a cue-based multimedia playback software], right? Like, it’s like, and so interesting just in terms of change and time and how the technology has changed along with us, and how in 2012 we were so cutting edge, you know?\n18:09\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right–\n18:10\tMoynan King:\tAnd now basically it’s something anybody can do if you can have 12 if you can own the 10 speakers [Overlap from Kate: Right, right.] [Laughter] and the cable to get them, not a small thing to do. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah, yeah.]\nNot a small thing to have access to those things. So we were really working with this idea of change and, a lot of the key songs that Tristan was singing over and over as his voice changed were very water-related. Okay. So one of those, the “Waters Wide,” and the other one is called, I think, called “I Am Sailing.” And so interesting. And so we used that theme, and we created kind of a beach scenario, and we had these three huts, and one of them was sort of Tristan’s “Command Central,” and he operated the entire show.\n18:56\tMoynan King:\tAt some point in our development rehearsal process, I remember coming into rehearsal one day and just saying to Tristan, “You have to do everything.” So it’s like, it was like, I, you know, we were creating the piece together, but then when it actually came to the performance, he had to control everything.\nAnd I feel like that was really connected to the thematic of it, that it was, everything was coming out of his body and that this environment represented his whole body. And then he was kind of like the homunculus, if you know, that you would know that term as someone who studies that era. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.]\nAnyway, that’s what that was. And then we also recorded, set up booths, and had an interactive element where the audience recorded their voices, too.\n19:44\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s very cool.\n19:45\tMoynan King:\tSo trying to share with the audience this experience that Tristan had of sitting and recording your own voice. And so we set it up with like fragment sentence fragments and ask people to finish them. So we have this incredible archive segue. Here I go segue.\n19:59\tKate Moffatt:\tYes, segue. That was beautifully done.\n20:02\tMoynan King:\tVoices from across the country of people completing the same sentences. And it’s a massive archive. And we use it, we use it in Toronto at the end of the show, so we finish the show with it.\nBut I feel like there’s another thing there. It’s, and I don’t know, [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.] it’s untapped. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.]\nI don’t know what it is. So then when we went to do the second iteration, or no, sorry, the latest iteration, because really even in 12 to 15, there were a number of iterations and turn the show out. So again, I’m pushing my hands out in front of me to, for an audience. Early on in our developmental discussions, we started thinking about a lot, about time and change and how much we’ve changed and our archive. So then we reached back further into history prior to, you know, Tristan’s transition in the end of the “Boy Choir” into the deep, into the “Boy Choir” archives.\n20:53\tMoynan King:\tSo we used that material.\nAnd so in 1997, we had done a production, the “Boy Choir of Lesbos and Lord of the Flies.” So we did a production of “Lord of the Flies.” [Overlap from Kate: Oh, wow.]\nAnd we luckily have this incredible VHS [Video Home System] tape of it. So, you know, I mean, back when we were doing VHS, we were like, “Oh my God, it’s not film,” [Laughs]. And now we’re like, “Oh my God, it’s VHS, it’s a VHS,” [Laughs].\nSo that’s really exciting. And so we brought in these archives of the “Boy Choir” and integrated these images with this new material. And then in the process of that, at some point, once we decided to bring in the “Boy Choir,” we thought, “Oh, we need a new choir. We need to make a new choir.” And we need to make a choir that both Tristan and I could be in. So we created this non-binary choir that we then called the “Epic Choir of Trace Land.” [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so the show, our show in Toronto ends with the “Epic Choir of Trace Land,” and we plan to keep the “Epic Choir” going, actually. So–\n21:58\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m obsessed with this. I love that so much. This is incredible. And just, you’re talking and I’m like, I’m almost getting, I’m getting goosebumps. Because this is like, you’ve got so many different kinds of archives happening here. And like, intersecting and almost like creating a new one. And I just think this is, it’s so rich, it’s so the possibility, everything here. Oh, wow. And the embodiment and the, oh, all of it. It’s so good. Okay. Last question to wrap up here. [Overlap from Moynan: Okay.] I wanna ask [Overlap from Moynan: Yes.]: What you’re listening to now, like either at the conference or just kind of generally what’s, what are you listening to?\n22:34\tMoynan King:\tSo interesting, because that was the question you asked me. And the reason I brought this was because our show just closed on Sunday. [Overlap from Kate: Oh, yeah.] So all I’ve been listening to is “Trace,” right? Like, we just closed. So I’ve been listening to that.\nAnd then of course, you know, I don’t, I presented at the conference yesterday, and right now I’m engaged in a process of creating what I call “meditations.” And so other than “Trace,” I’ve been listening to meditations and to meditative music. And of course, working on my own material with that. But like last night when I went to bed, I listened to Steve Roach’s “Quiet Music 1.” Highly recommend it [Laughs[, go on YouTube, “Quiet Music 1,” play it quietly. Yep. 1970s experimental electronica. Yep. So that’s it.\n23:38\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Moynan, thank you so much for sitting down and talking to us about this today and for playing the clip. This has just been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you again.\n23:48\tMoynan King:\tThank you very much, Kate. Thanks for listening and thanks for inviting me. It’s wonderful to be here.\n23:53\tKate Moffatt:\t[Background ambient music starts playing] Yeah. This was so good. Thank you. Alright. Yay.\n23:58\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n23:58\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I’m gonna hit stop, which I did last time.\n24:00\tMusic:\t[Ambient music plays faintly]\n24:10\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. So, hi and welcome back to Shortcuts. This is another episode of Shortcuts Live at the University of Alberta.\nWe are here for the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium, and we are actually sitting outside if you can hear [Laughs] if you can hear some of our wonderful ambient sounds right now.\nIt has been so insanely beautiful and hot this week. I think it’s about, what do we say, 27 degrees right now? It’s warm.\nMy name is Kate Moffitt. I’m the project manager and supervising producer of the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And I am so excited to be joined by Erica Isomura today. Erica, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?\n24:52\tErica Isomura:\tSure. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Erica, and I am a writer, a poet, and currently an MFA [Master of Fine Arts] student, actually at the University of Guelf. I like drawing, gardening, being outside. I currently live in Toronto, but I was born and raised in New Westminster in Vancouver.\n25:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI love New West [Laughs].\n25:20\tErica Isomura:\tYeah, and it’s really great to be here in Edmonton in Treaty Six Territory. I’ve been really enjoying being here.\n25:25\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s been so, so lovely. It’s been a great week. Amazing. Okay. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. I don’t know if you wanna say a couple words or if you wanna just, are we gonna jump in?\n25:33\tErica Isomura:\tLet’s just jump into it, and we can chat about it afterwards. So hopefully the volume is up on this. [Wrong audio plays] Oh, sorry. That’s the wrong audio [Laughs].\n25:45\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s okay.\n25:48\tErica Isomura:\tThat was cool, though, [Laughs]. [Overlap: That was it.]\n25:52\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio recording of chirping and nature sounds]\n26:39\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. Thank you so much. Please tell me what we were just listening to. I feel like there are so many cool layers here because we’re currently sitting outside. What was that?\n26:45\tErica Isomura:\tThat was recorded on a road trip that I took with my sibling to Prince Rupert. We drove from our hometown all the way up north to a three-and-a-half-day drive to Prince Rupert, which is on the northwest coast.\nAnd that audio was of a group of European starlings that were gathered on this, under this dock, on this building where I think a ferry comes in. And so there were so many birds. I hadn’t seen so many like European starlings gathered together before. And it was really cool to see a bird that was also familiar.\nSince being here in Edmonton, I’ve actually seen magpies for the first time. I definitely took some video footage of them on my way to the campus, and I hadn’t seen them before. So it’s always exciting to see new birds and also cool to see birds that you’re familiar with.\n27:44\tKate Moffatt:\tI wanted to ask, ’cause I know I attended your fantastic plenary panel yesterday. And thinking about the ways in which I guess I just, I’ve been thinking about kind of like nature and nature sounds all week and how we listen to it and how we re-listen to it after when we record it, and kind of how we end up being these sort of like mediators between that sound as it’s originally happening and then, and listening to it later.\nSo, can you speak a little bit more, maybe just about listening generally? It could also be the role of listening in what you pick, choose to record, pick up, and how you plan to revisit it or your research.\n28:22\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, it’s interesting ’cause I don’t really, it’s interesting being at this conference ’cause I don’t really consider myself a sound artist. So I haven’t considered myself in that way before. Although I did this, this sound project that, you know, we brought to the conference this week. But then when I stopped to think about it, there’s such a sonic, important sonic quality to poetry and to writing and storytelling. Which is much more, you know, I do identify with those things as a writer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about non-visual ways of engaging with stories this past semester, I was TA-ing [Working as a “teacher assistant”] an “Intro to Storytelling,” “Intro to Creative Writing” class for first-year students. And a lot of new writers are really focused on visual cues in their work. [Overlap from Kate: Interesting.]\nLike, “so-and-so” sees this, it’s green, it’s round, you know like they’re not, there’s like a textural element that sometimes it’s a bit flat. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so that was a big part of revising with students who were learning how to engage with creative writing was bringing in sonic qualities, bringing in texture and touch, and you know, feeling–\n29:40\tKate Moffatt:\tThat there’s more than just looking–\n29:41\tErica Isomura:\tThere’s more than just looking. I was thinking about that while I was listening to this sound and trying to think about what sound I’d want to share because I’m trying to work on a project that engages with drawings and writing.\nSo it’s a graphic project that follows the road trip that my sibling and I took and engaged with a lot of the land-based history. And I was thinking, “Okay, how will I, how will sound be part of this visual project, in a book?”\nA book is so, it’s just, it’s just different, you know? Like, people sometimes will include “SoundCloud” links to listen to “spoken word” in their books or, you know, “QR codes.” But sometimes I find myself not, it’s not necessarily the most organic of processes to pull your phone and scan it or a hundred percent. You know, even if you go on a CD with the book, sometimes you just kind of ignore it. Right–\n30:35\tKate Moffatt:\tEspecially now you’re like, where’s the closest CD player?\n30:37\tErica Isomura:\tTotally. Right. So I’m not an audiobook person. I do listen to podcasts, but yeah. So it’s interesting to think about it. Like just different qualities that bring us into place and space and that interests me.\nSo most of my sound recordings in my phone are probably more nature-based, though I do find the intersections of, like urban landscape noises really interesting. Just the mixture of things that you’ll hear on the street. [Overlap from Kate: Absolutely.] Or even, you know, the crunching of footsteps when you’re out in the forest. There is, you know, thinking about our relationship like I guess the Anthropocene or our imprint on the land. And, you know, the sounds that we make, too.\n31:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. A hundred percent. And it’s so interesting, as you were talking about that, it started to make me think about like, how we capture things. Because yeah, I guess my question is kind of like having that recording from that trip, like how does that take you back as opposed to a picture of you or like a picture of those birds under that underpass. Yeah. Anything there that you would like to respond to? Please Go ahead.\n31:50\tMiranda Eastwood:\tActually, could I jump in? [Overlap: Yeah. Oh yeah.]\nJust because you’re talking about, you know, you get a CD in a book, and you’re not, you’re not probably gonna listen to that or a link or a QR code. It disrupts the relationship that you have with reading because that’s what people agree to when they open a piece they’re reading.\nSo the, even the idea of bringing in a different form of media is almost not, well, you break that relationship, I think, and the idea of sound and going to listen to something like specifically for sound, you’re engaging in a different relationship to whatever text you’re exploring. Right. Which I feel like that kind of pulled into your question about materiality and how like, I guess what your, what your general thoughts on those different types of relationships are.\n32:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, I think that what I was thinking about when we, when I, when you made that comment, Kate, and this relates to this too, is thinking about how do you represent sound on the page. Right. You know, like I think in poetry, there’s such interesting things you can do with white space, like… [Overlap: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.]\nWriters and poets just talk about staring at a blank page. Just the possibilities of form and prose are typically like nonfiction prose, and fiction prose. It’s very blocky and chunky and there isn’t a lot of space for that creativity necessarily. Maybe there is, and maybe I’m not thinking about it. We did have a presentation with Jordan Abel a few nights ago, and I think he’s doing some interesting work with novels and space on the page for sure.\n33:28\tErica Isomura:\tLike disrupting the genre. But yeah, I think there’s so much opportunity for that in poetry. And I think as I’m drawing more and thinking about graphic forms there is the opportunities to visually kind of represent sounds and sound effects on the page, through shapes and through visual cues and kind of blending things in a way that’s really interesting.\nThere’s a comic artist I love on Instagram who actually lives in Montreal. I’m not really, I’m blanking on his handle, but he draws a lot of birds and like, they’re very funny comics. And bird, I think–\n34:11\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI know who you’re talking about ’cause I think I’ve seen these bird comics before of these birds just kind of doing their own thing–\n34:18\tErica Isomura:\tDo you know their name?\n34:19\tMiranda Eastwood:\tHis name? No, I don’t.\n34:19\tErica Isomura:\tHe was just at TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival], but I didn’t make it to his table. But they’re funny, they’re hilarious. They’re great conversations. Like the birds are talking about us.\n34:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, I have seen this. Oh. And I can’t remember the handle either. Oh, wow. How many grad students does it take?\n34:33\tErica Isomura:\t[Overlap] End of the, end of the–\n34:35\tKate Moffatt:\tWe’ll put it in the blog post for the episode.\n34:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. But yeah, thinking about representations of sound on a page, you know, and Yeah. The non-human kind of elements. And it’s just so funny to think about what the birds are; the birds are watching us too, you know? Right. We’re not just watching them.\n34:50\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right. Yeah. Which even I think absolutely a hundred percent goes all the way back to Spy’s keynote on the first day. Right. Like, talking about that kind of like awareness of what’s around you, and not just your awareness of it, but it’s awareness of you, and how that’s informed and what it’s been informed by. Incredible.\n35:05\tErica Isomura:\tSo I think that the first sound that I actually accidentally played was, it was water from up north, from probably from the Skeena River ’cause I was, I think the previous audio was a clip from a cannery that I had visited.\nI was trying to record some sounds from a tour I did at the North Pacific Cannery, but also, I can’t remember if they had turned on the machine, of the canning machine that was supposed to be on display there, but wow. I didn’t want it to go into the spoken-like tour part [Laughs] for the audio.\nI’m actually really glad that I have some of those clips and I forgot about them until you prompted me to bring a sound clip. Amazing. So it was cool. And I’ll have to definitely re-listen to all those.\n35:46\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that. Okay. Speaking of listening, I think a last little question here to wrap up this amazing conversation is: what are you listening to right now? Like in your research or just more generally, what are you, what are you listening to?\n36:00\tErica Isomura:\tI’m listening to, like, kind of these like non, like a lot of music without vocals as I’m writing. [Overlap: Ooh.] I call them my “coworking,” like my “writing working” playlists. [Overlap: Yeah.]\nI was listening to Kishi Bashi earlier today in my hotel room, and he’s a violinist, kind of like a pop violin. So he loops his violin and sings, and he has a band, and he’s an amazing live performer. Thinking about sound–\n36:34\t[Sound of Kishi Bashi’s song “Manchester” starts to play]\t[Vocals]\nI wrote me a book. I hid the last page. I didn’t look. I think I locked it in a cage. I wrote a novel because everybody likes to read a novel…\n36:54\tKate Moffatt:\tErica, thank you so much for sitting and chatting with us today outside in this insanely warm weather. Thank you again.\n37:01\tErica Isomura:\tThank you, for, to both of you for hosting me.\n37:05\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect. Yeah, we got a little windy. [Overlap] I liked our little what was going on there.\n37:11\tErica Isomura:\t[Voices fading] Do you think it’ll be okay?\n37:13\tMusic:\t[Musical Interlude]\n37:17\tKate Moffatt:\tReally just gonna be a conversation where we chat about what we listen to. Did you have any questions before we start?\n37:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tNo, I think I just go with it.\n37:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Has it been recording this whole time?\n37:31\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYeah.\n37:31\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I love that because, at one point, we need to capture that little recording where I’m like, “Here’s like a quick and dirty version of what Shortcuts is. I’m gonna say hello, and I’m gonna be like, Hey, I Kate, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be great…\n[Voice fades]\n37:49\tKate Moffatt:\t[Music fades]\nHello, and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. We are at the University of Alberta for the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium, which we’re at the, we’re on the last day. And it’s been super incredible. We are very excited to have been here. But this is Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer and project manager for the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And today, we’re sitting down with Rémy Bocquillon. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Beautiful. can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Rémy?\n38:19\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Well, thank you for this podcast. And I mean, the whole symposium has been amazing. So that’s, that’s a great experience. I’m so tired, but [Laughter] yeah. So, I am not in sound studies at all. I’m in sociology and sociology theory based in Germany. I work with sound quite a bit as kind of how to use sound, and sound art in my methods of how to do research. So not an analysis of sound, but more like how to do it. And for the SpokenWeb, I have been the artist in residence. So I’ve been very fortunate to prepare a sound installation, which is just across here.\n39:01\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, yeah. Yeah. We’re currently sitting in a big room in the, I think it’s the Cameron Library. We’re right beside the Digital Scholarship Center where the institute is taking place.\nAmazing. Thank you so much. We’re so excited to chat. We’re gonna listen to something. Did you wanna, did you wanna play that for us? Do you wanna say anything about it first?\n39:17\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, so just pay it, and then we can chat about it.\n39:21\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect.\n39:24\tAudio of Êliane Radigue\t[Audio of Êliane Radigue speaking in an interview: Il est tiré le temps prolongé, le temps ralenti, pour étirer le temps, il faut le ralentir. Et c’est sans doute ce qui permet de mieux saisir ce qu’il contient dans le présent. En fait, la grande vérité du temps, je crois, est celle de s ‘inscrire aussi totalement que possible dans le présent.\nEt la meilleure façon de bien pénétrer le présent, c’est de s’y installer. Et forcément une autre durée intérieure à ce moment -là s’établit, une durée qui est presque sans limite. Et on tente de faire cela avec les sons, c’est un petit peu un artific, parce que le son a son discours, son mode de déroulement temporel.\nMais là, effectivement, je triche sans doute un peu en étirant les choses. En fait, une pièce ou une œuvre, quelle que ce soit le nom que vous lui donniez, peut -être une mesure serait peut -être une seule mesure, mais une mesure en l ‘occurrence de 80 minutes, puisque c’est la durée de Psi 847.\nLe refus de l’anecdotique, je crois que c’est très simple, ça ne m’amuse pas. L’anecdote ne m’amuse pas. Et en fait, je fais des choses pour mon plaisir. Merci d ‘avoir regardé cette vidéo.]\n40:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah.\n40:51\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Tell us like, what was that, what were we, what were we just hearing?\n40:54\tRémy Bocquillon:\tSo, it’s an interview from Êliane Radigue who was, she’s still active, is a composer, an electronic musician. She’s one of the pioneers in electronic music and drone music. She’s done a lot of music with synthesizers.\nThis recording is from the 70s, 76, 77. It was broadcast on French radio back then, and today it came out as a record. So that’s, that’s actually–\n41:27\tKate Moffatt:\tLike today, today? [Overlap from Rémy: Today, today. Yeah.]\nLike May 5th, 2023, today. [Overlap from Rémy: Exactly. Yes.] Wonderful. That’s so cool\n41:32\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat was perfect. Like on point for this kind of event. And in this particular recording, she’s talking about time and her perception of time and how, in the stretching of sound, in drone music and electronic music, she has the feeling to manipulate time or to be in time to be in the present. So that’s, that was, yeah. Yeah. It’s, and I love her voice. I love how, how she, she talks about sounds. That’s fascinating. Yeah.\n42:00\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. I’ve kind of got goosebumps from that. That’s, that’s amazing. That sounds so cool.\nCan you give us a bit of, is that kind of what she’s talking about in the interview? I was gonna ask like, is she very much discussing kind of like this, that idea of like stretching time, this is that what’s in the interview?\n42:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, exactly. So she starts out by saying like, that to stretch out time and to play with time, you have to slow it down. And this idea of “slow down” and like that’s at the heart of what we do drone music, for instance.\nBut she did it in the seventies. She was really working with a synthesizer and very meticulously and had this kind of hard work and technique of trying out and having the pieces go on for hours. And a bit later in the interview, she even says, well, one piece can, it’s like one measure, one meter, but it’s like one that lasts 80 minutes. And so that’s, so that’s how long she takes to unfold the sounds.\n43:01\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so wonderful. For the listeners, you can’t see, but Rémy likes using his hands just to stretch, to stretch out time, to stretch out the measures. It’s, it’s been, it’s very, it’s very wonderful.\n43:10\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Sorry, it’s not very radiophonic [Laughs].\n43:12\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, it’s fantastic. That’s so wonderful. And I guess I would love to hear more about how, I guess how this, maybe these ideas that you’re, that are in the interview are intersecting with like your own research and kind of your own work, but also maybe in particular like this interview and like listening to this interview.\nLike, does that intersect too kind of with, ’cause obviously you’re very excited about it, and that’s fantastic. I’d like to just kind of hear more about how it maybe intersects with your own work.\n43:40\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. So that’s a very interesting question and very compelling on certainly many levels because there’s this personal – yeah, I mean, as I said, a lot of her voice –  and I think she because she’s such a pioneer in electronic music… I mean, she has been, in the fifties, working with people like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, who were in France and beyond the first to do musique concrete and this kind of stuff, to integrate different sounds into music – and she was with them and then continued to work on longer forms. And then from the 2000s actually moving away from this synthesizer and doing more acoustic stuff. And that’s where probably it resonates more with my own work because she works a lot with this kind of connection between the instruments, the bodies, and how, in the unfolding of a piece of the music, you have this kind of network happening. A combination of different actors and bodies crafting the sound and crafting the music together how gives you a different sense of experience and of the feeling of space of time. That’s what she’s talking about actually, but really in the performance – how to do this on the spot.\n44:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd that’s what I found very interesting in how, through sound, you have this kind of connection between different bodies… And I call this as kinda modulating this kind of spacetimes through sound. You can just, yeah. Stretch it out and have this kind of very particular moment in time.\n45:24\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s fantastic. And it’s so interesting to me too that you brought this interview where she’s talking about it rather than potentially bringing a piece like you were mentioning, like there’s that piece that’s 80 minutes long, but it’s one measure. Is that what you were saying? [Overlap: Yes, yes. Yeah.]\nObviously, we’re not going to play an 80-minute coupon shortcut, but yeah, I think it’s. I love that you brought this interview clip. So I guess, and you can take this kind of as metaphorically or as literally as you’d like, but when you listen to this clip, what do you hear?\n45:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh, I hear a tremendous artist talking about the practice. And that’s something rich is very interesting because so often you don’t talk about the practice that much. And she’s doing that in such a way that you can see how she’s, or you can hear, how she’s working and how she’s very much like going into the material, really going into the synthesizer, into the sound. And, and I think that’s why these kinds of interviews are very interesting.\nBecause she – and I mean, that was on, so it’s in France culture, which is public radio, and this kind of experimental composer. So that’s interesting as well back in the seventies to have this kind of composer talk about their practice, and to have this person in a very maned world, like experimental music, like talk about her practice and having her practice also recognized and acknowledged. So that’s very important as well.\n46:54\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. And what do you think, like, would it be different to read about the process versus hear this interview where she’s talking about it? Like, is it different to listen to it than to read it?\n47:07\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat’s probably where you could actually tell me that because you, you maybe don’t understand that much. You said you don’t speak French, but you hear a voice–\n47:18\tKate Moffatt:\tWhat did I hear? [Laughs] –\n47:20\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI could jump in on that actually ’cause I was thinking just the way, the way she was speaking slow, not “ma” [The speaker uses the sound “ma” as a vocal filler], that kind of… I haven’t listened to her music obviously, but like to me, it almost sounded like she was mirroring, echoing, paralleling the process of that music and the way she was speaking about it, which I thought was very like, now I wanna listen to that music because of the way she spoke about it. And the process was like in the way she was vocalizing the process almost that, sorry that was my thought–\n47:55\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, that’s lovely. And for, for listeners, that’s Miranda who’s been hopping in occasionally on these Shortcuts conversations, and I’m so, so, so glad they are. Miranda is our audio engineer and sound designer for the podcast. Yeah.\nAnd I guess for me too, like Miranda, you have some French, well, lots of French; you know French. Whereas, whereas I don’t, and I feel, but I feel like I, I did hear very much the same, the same thing, like it, I I don’t think I’d realized beforehand that, that they were a composer or a musician.\nBut you do kind of get that, that sense. It did also feel very – I’m trying to think of the right word – rich, but also almost very like, internalized. Like it was something that I could just felt. So almost intense I guess, about the way that she’s speaking and, and the way that, that she was describing, I guess her, her process. It did sound very musical somehow.\n48:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYes. The pace, I mean. as you said, intense. And towards the end of that clip she’s very opinionated. She says the anecdote doesn’t amuse me, so just don’t do it. So that’s why she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the way she has this kind of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:02\tKate Moffatt:\tJust don’t do it [Laughs].\n49:03\tRémy Bocquillon:\tInteresting. So that’s why she, she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the, the way she, she has this kind of, of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:16\tKate Moffatt:\tI could feel it in my mouth while she was talking. Yeah. Like I could feel it in my own mouth. Yeah. There’s like a, when she was speaking a musical quality. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something very embodied about it.\n49:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd I don’t know if it’s, because back then in radio you had a different kind of rhythm in interviews as well. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because nowadays it’s very fast-paced and you have this kind of difference. So maybe it plays as well. But you see on YouTube you have this kind of documentary where she shows what she’s doing and that’s interesting because of this kind of modular synthesizer and she has this kind of stop clock. And so she’s very much in tune with this idea of time keeping time, but also letting time unfold. And that’s, so in a way that’s totally embodied in her practice, but also how she talks.\n50:02\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s in the interview. Fascinating. I was gonna say, there’s this taking of space of time to, to give it that rhythm, which as you say might be radio conventions kind of changing and then shifting, but regardless that it’s, that it’s there and we hear it and respond to it. Right?\n50:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, totally.\n50:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI’ve got two, two kind of final questions. And they’re very much related.\nOne of them is to just, I’d love to hear like a little bit more about how listening both to things like interviews, like process or this, but even in like your own work ’cause you were saying that you’re a sociologist more than like a sound study scholar, but that obviously sound is there. So like, I’d love to hear about the role of listening in your own, your own research, in your own work.\nAnd then maybe just finish off with like, you know, what you’re listening to right now, whether that’s research related or, or otherwise\n50:50\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh yeah, [Laughs]. Okay. Yeah. So listening in the work is, I think, central in different kinds of different aspects. I mean, in this kind of symposium we have been listening to a lot of things, to a lot of people, to a lot of sounds. And that’s the main aspect of it. Just to listen to each other, I think. And, but in sociology, more directly, it’s also about how to listen and how to actually leave space again to different voices and to different actors and maybe actors we don’t actually hear. So how to work with that.\nAnd how to leave space to those voices, to work with them in different ways. And that bridges to a kind of different way of doing sociology, which is making those kinds of new associations through sound, and which is also a different relation to knowledge and how knowledge production and distribution which is political, which is critical, which is ethical, I think, as well in how to bring this kind of multiplicity of actors, whatever you want to call them, in sounds, and having them like inhabit and then like move, move around.\n52:05\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd what I’ve been listening to, oh, that’s a hard question–\n52:08\tKate Moffatt:\t[Laughs].\n52:09\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. I mean, on my way here, I’ve been listening to a very well renowned French rapper called Orelsan, it’s one of his albums, like last year, two years ago, is very popular, so it’s not like “underground dark things,” [Laughs], but there’s this one song, I don’t know, it just like lift my mood and I love it. So [Laughs], yeah. Taking the bus. That’s what I was listening to.\n52:34\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. I love it so much. We’ve, we’ve collected quite the little, little almost like a little playlist as we’ve been asking folks what they’ve been listening to. I think we’re gonna have to try and put something together at some point here. This has been so wonderful, Rémy. Thank you so much for bringing, bringing this wonderful clip that I love that it got released today. That feels very serendipitous.\n52:53\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThank you. [Overlappinhg] Thank you very much for having and for coming to chat with us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.\n52:56\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n52:57\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n53:02\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Low electronic music plays] You’ve been listening to Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast. This episode featured conversations with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. Thank you for all of your sounds and your time. Thank you to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for putting such care and energy into recording these interviews onsite at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium.\n \nIf you’re at this year’s SpokenWeb symposium, there will be a live recording of an episode coming up as part of the symposium events. So if you’re there, do attend and be part of the audience. Either way, stay tuned, and we’ll look forward to hearing that episode on this feed next month.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast team is: supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\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 social media. Stay tuned to your podcast feed, and as always, thanks for listening.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n "],"score":3.2550304},{"id":"9642","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 S5E8, Algo-Rhythms, 1 July 2024, Miya and Beauchesne "],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/algo-rhythms/"],"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":["Chelsea Miya","Nicholas Beauchesne"],"creator_names_search":["Chelsea Miya","Nicholas Beauchesne"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nicholas Beauchesne\",\"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/audio/3bb27e3c-35f3-4c40-8683-92081ab60ff5/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v2-mix-spokenweb-june-21-2024-algo-rhythms.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:42:01\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"40,345,225 byte\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v2-mix-spokenweb-june-21-2024-algo-rhythms\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/algo-rhythms/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-07-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SOUNDFX & MUSIC\\n\\nThe score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. “Elegia.” On Remembrance. Created with the Murmurator software in collaboration with Eli Stine. SoundCloud audio, 5:25, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/elegia.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. “From “From ‘David’”” From Three PFR-3 Poems by Jackon Mac Low for percussion quartet and speaker; performance by UVA percussion quartet. SoundCloud audio, 4:13, 2017, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/from-from-david.\\n\\nPixabay. “Crane load at construction site.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crane-load-at-construction-site-57551/.\\n\\nSherfey, John, and Congregation. “Nothing but the Blood.” Powerhouse for God (CD SFS60006), Smithsonian Folkways Special Series, 2014. Recorded by Jeff Titon and Ken George. Reproduced with permission of Jeff Titon.\\n\\nSicchio, Kate. “Amelia and the Machine.” Dancer Amelia Virtue. Robotics: Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo. Music: Melody Loveless, Kate Sicchio. Vimeo, uploaded by Kate Sicchio, 2022, https://vimeo.com/678480077.\\n\\nARCHIVAL AUDIO & INTERVIEWS\\n\\nAltmann, Anna. “Popular Poetics” [segment]. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 25 Oct. 2022.\\n\\nJackson, Mac Low. “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin.” Performed by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, bpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974. PennSound, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mac-Low/CDs/Doings/Mac-Low-Jackson_09_Vocabulary-for-Mattlin_Doings_1982.mp3.\\n\\nO’Driscoll, Michael. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 23 Aug. 2022.\\n\\nOnufrijchuk, Roman. Performing “Tape Mark I,” a computer poem by Nanni Balestrini. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.\\n\\nSicchio, Kate. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 4 Nov. 2023.\\n\\nWORKS CITED\\n\\nBalestrini, Nanni. “Tape Mark I.” Translated by Edwin Morgan. Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts. Studio International, 1968.\\n\\nDavis, Kevin William. From “From ‘David’” [score]. 2017. http://kevindavismusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/From-From-David.pdf.\\n\\nDean, R. T., and Alex McLean, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Oxford University Press, 2018.\\n\\nHiggins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. University of California Press, 2002.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 23 January 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.c, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 19 September 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.d, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.\\n\\nJohnston, David Jhave. “1969: Jackson Mac Low: PFR-3” [blogpost] Digital Poetics Prehistoric. https://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/26/1969-jackson-mac-low-pfr-3-poems/.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. 1973. Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, CC-47567-68576.\\n\\nMac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty, edited by Anne Tardos. University of California Press, 2008. https://doi-org.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/10.1525/9780520933293.\\n\\nO’Driscoll, Michael. “By the Numbers: Jackson Mac Low’s Light Poems and Algorithmic Digraphism.” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008, edited by J. Mark Smith. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013, pp. 109-131.\\n\\nRusso, Emiliano, Gabriele Zaverio and Vittorio Bellanich. “TAPE MARK 1 by Nanni Balestrini: Research and Historical Reconstruction.” The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, June 2017. https://zkm.de/en/tape-mark-1-by-nanni-balestrini-research-and-historical-reconstruction.\\n\\nStine, Eli, and Kevin William Davis. “The Murmurator: A Flocking Simulation-Driven Multi-Channel Software Instrument for Collaborative Improvisation.” International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2018. https://elistine.com/writing-blog/2018/4/14/the-murmurator.\\n\\nFURTHER READING / LISTENING\\n\\nHiggins, Hannah, and Douglas Kahn, eds. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. University of California Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520953734.\\n\\nNoll, Michael. “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated,” LEONARDO, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55-65.\\n\\nReichardt, Jasia, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity. 1968. 2nd edition. Studio International, 1968.\\n\\nRockman, A, and L. Mezei. “The Electronic Computer as an Artist.” Canadian Art, vol. 11, 1964, pp. 365–67.\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549758148608,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["How can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?\n\nIn this live episode recorded during June’s 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium, producers Nicholas Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.\n\nThank you to interviewees Michael O’Driscoll, Kevin William Davis, and Kate Sicchio, as well as the live studio audience.\n\n00:04\tSpokenWeb Podcast Intro\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:17\tMaia Harris:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive?\nWelcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n00:31\tMaia Harris:\tMy name is Maia Harris, subbing in for our usual hosts for a very special edition of the SpokenWeb podcast, recorded live at the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium here on Treaty Seven Land.\nEach month, we bring you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada.\nHow can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?\nIn this episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, we will venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.\n01:18\tChelsea Miya:\tThanks, Maia. Hi everyone. I am Chelsea Miya.\n01:22\tNicholas Beauchesne:\tAnd I’m Nick Beauchesne. And this is our live studio audience. . .\n01:28\tLive Studio Audience:\t[Cheers and applause]\n01:36\tChelsea Miya:\t[Beat music plays and fades]\nThanks to the “algos,” or algorithms, used in social media to curate content and drive engagements. Most people have at least heard the term, even if they have little understanding of what it means.\nThe concept of an “algorithm” predates computers, originating back in the ninth century. An “algorithm” is understood to mean a set of rules for executing a particular task or a set of operations. You can create an algorithm for getting ready in the morning, baking a cake, or driving to work. As we’ll see later in the episode, algorithms can even be used to generate poetry, compose music and choreograph dances.\n02:14\tNicholas Beauchesne:\tThe clip you’re about to hear is from the University of Alberta campus radio show “Voice Print.” You can learn more about the series and its early contributions to experimental literary radio on the SpokenWeb podcast episode: “Academics on Air.”\nThis particular voice-print episode was themed “Printing and Poetry in the Computing Era,” and it aired in 1981. The archival recording anticipated the hopes and fears for automated computer-generated art that, in some ways, have come to be realized in the present.\n02:45\tAudio from the “Popular Poetics” segment of The Voiceprint episode “Printing And Poetry In The Computer Era,” 20 May 1981; Read By Anna Altmann.\tAlthough documentation is lacking, it is probable that computer poetry was invented simultaneously at various locations in the 1950s by engineers occupied in such language tasks as mechanical translation during the 1960s. However, these developments came to the attention of poets and literary scholars, who then began to explore the literary possibilities of computer technology.\nAlthough somewhat disturbed by the implications of such activity, these pioneers were more fascinated by the superhuman inventiveness of the computer and by the inability of the reader to distinguish with certainty between machine and human products. Although no recognized masterpieces of cybernetic literature have yet been produced, it seems only a matter of time before computer poetry becomes a respected form of verse in its own right. Indeed, the possibility exists that a future Milton or Shakespeare is at this very moment studying computer science at a technical school or university.\n03:44\tNicholas Beauchesne\tThe Milton or Shakespeare of computer poetry may not have arisen yet, but one contender could be open: AI’s ChatGPT, which debuted in 2022. Other AI chatbots entered the mix soon after. Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Co-pilot, and even Adobe Photoshop have an AI-assisted editor mode. These technologies raise fundamental, ethical and existential questions about what constitutes art.\nCan a programmer or a program be a poet? They can certainly try. As ChatGPT told us in the form of haiku:\ncraft with words untold\nChatGPT offers aid\npoetry unfolds\n04:26\tChelsea Miya:\tOur first guest is Mike O’Driscoll, and he’s the Director of SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta. He’s an authority on early experiments in procedural or algorithmic poetry as he explains the “Dada” movement—and that’s “Dada” with a “d,” not a “t” as in “data”—was an anti-art movement. These early coders became infamous for their avant-garde performance pieces. The instructions were generated randomly, not with digital tech since this was before bits and bytes, but with everyday analog tools: paper, a pen, and, oddly, a hat.\n05:04\tMike O’Driscoll:\tTristan Zara, one of the leaders of the “Dadaist” Movement, would pass a hat around the room—think about a Vienna Cafe 1916—and invite audience members to put a word into the hat and then the hat would be gathered and as the words came out of the hat that would construct the poem. That’s a “procedural” poetic. That is a way of making a poem according to a particular rule-driven methodology that might or might not be modified before, during, or after, in terms of human intention and other creative roles that the human participants might play.\n05:48\tChelsea Miya:\tFast-forward to the 1960s. IBM [“International Business Machines”] had just debuted powerful new computing machines, and almost from the get-go, the company founders imagined using these machines to create art. They invited a number of artists to their laboratories, including Jackson Mac Low.\n06:08\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIn Southern California in 1969, Jackson was invited to participate alongside computer technologists in the production of some poetry, which he dubbed the “PFR-3 Poems” [PFR: Phonemic Face Realizations]. These were using film readers that could be read automatically by a computer program that would essentially take the inputs that he produced and randomize them in different ways so he could enter up to a hundred lines of text with up to 48 characters per line. The program would identify units of that text, whether words or sentences and then randomize those and produce poems by displaying on a screen every 10th line produced through that algorithmic procedure. So, that was a very early instance of Jackson Mac Low engaging computer technology to produce a poem.\n07:09\tChelsea Miya:\tAs Michael O’Driscoll explains, this was not Mac Low’s first experiment with computational art, as described by a poet who worked like a computer before computers. Mac Loew had been experimenting with rule-based language games for years.\n07:25\tMike O’Driscoll:\tJackson had already been working by hand for six years before that on what he called his “diastic writing through” method, which was essentially an algorithmic procedure that uses source texts and seed texts or index text to determine which words are pulled out of the source text and displayed on the page of the poem. That procedure depends specifically on the very exacting rule of matching letter positions in words in the seed text to letter positions in words in the source text to determine the material that becomes the poem. That’s a process that Jackson was doing by hand from 1963 and did for the next 26 years by hand. And if anyone wants to try this, I welcome them to try it. But the manic patience it takes to do this is astounding and impressive.\n08:25\tNicholas Beauchesne\tJackson Mac Low was not the only artist who experimented with algorithmic methods. He was part of an experimental art movement called “Fluxus.” Like the “Dadaists” who came before, the Fluxus of the 1960s was more interested in the process of making art than the finished piece. In fact, the art was never finished.\n08:46\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIt’s important to note that much of that performance work was done through collaborative processes that demanded or asked of the performers and the artists a certain level of attentiveness and attunement to each other in terms of what was going on in the moment. So there’s this deeply relational aspect to what’s going on there. There is also a modelling of certain kinds of social or political formations. And so what Jackson is doing there is bringing the procedural into contact with human agency and with human community.\n09:25\tNicholas Beauchesne\tOne of the best examples of Mac’s process in action is a vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Here’s a clip of a live performance featuring an all-star cast of readers, including Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Hagan, and the unmatchable BpNichol.\n09:46\tAudio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\tShare name, nation share name, nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat. Tell them tell us anymore. Tell them Stare, stare. Helen, stare. Tell stare. Stare hen. Be lamb eel. Tell, tell them. Tell them laws tell them rain eel brain reliable metal la, reliable trash, reliable trash, reliable trash, stellar trash, reliable trash, termination. See, stellar trash. She Athens, taste me, taste me.\n10:55\tChelsea Miya:\tAs our live audience can see projected above us, here is the “score” for the performance. The page, as I’ll describe it for our listeners, is a jumble of words, some written in tiny, cramped font, other larger, some angled in different directions, or flipped upside down. Each word is a variation or riff on the name of the person the poem is dedicated to: Sharon Belle Mattlin. Some configurations of letters from her name morphed into elation, emanation, mint, share, shame, and so on. The performers were free to interpret, explore, and respond to these freewheeling scores at the moment of the performance. But always within the bounds of agreed-upon rules.\n11:42\tMike O’Driscoll:\tIt’s a brilliant field of text in which what Jackson has done, is written in by hand all of the words derived from the dedicatee of the piece. The performers that can then move across that page in ways that they are inclined to do, whether they are articulating work words or singing or in the case of instrumentalists that you could hear the flute music. In that case, they are transposing the letters to particular notes that Jackson has determined for them in advance. And so, what you’re getting, in that case, is, again, quite a rule-bound production of the text and its performance. But also, that opportunity for the performers themselves to move across and through that work in ways that they intuit and that they conduct in response to their fellow performers.\n12:46\tChelsea Miya:\tAlgorithmic processes are increasingly reshaping our world. So, we asked Mike what Mac’s work can teach us about the role of human decision makers in our data-driven society.\n13:00\tMike O’Driscoll:\tJackson works deliberately at the limit between “chance” and “choice,” between “procedure” and “intention.” He does so in part to trouble that boundary, to disturb or even deconstruct the boundary between the machine and the human, between the automatic and the “age-gentle.” And he does so for very deliberate political reasons.\nIn part one, I contend that Jackson draws attention to what I’ve been calling the ideology of machine agency. That notion that machines that algorithms, that computers are somehow themselves operative, are somehow themselves “age-gentle.”\nBut this is, in many ways, a kind of illusion that the presumption of machine agency is itself ideological, is itself something about which we should beware.\n14:02\tNicholas Beauchesne\tMike O’Driscoll is editing a new collection of Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems, which will feature over 100 never-before-published poems. This new version by MIT Press will hit the shelves in Fall 2025\n14:17\tAudio from “Tape Mark I” by Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint episode “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; performed by Roman Onufrijchuk.\tAeons deep in the ice. I paint all time in a whirl bang. The sludge has cracked aeons deep in the ice. I see gelled time in a whirl. The sludge has cracked all green in the leaves. I smell dark pools in the trees crash. The moon has fled all white in the buds. I flash snow peaks in the spring bang, the sun has fogged\n14:52\tChelsea Miya:\tMac Low’s computer poems continue to be performed and encoded in new ways. Next, we’ll hear from Kevin William Davis, a contemporary composer and cellist based at the University of Virginia. Davis is a big fan of Jackson Mac Low, and he was particularly captivated by his computer poems.\n15:12\tKevin Davis:\tYeah, poetry is actually a really big inspiration of mine. I mean to me, I can read orchestral scores, I can kind of like see them and imagine them in the way that one might sit with a book of poetry maybe sound some of it out, on a score on the piano, maybe you would actually read some of the poetry out loud.\n15:34\tChelsea Miya:\tDavis’ Musicology students didn’t at first share his enthusiasm for poetry and they were kind of baffled when he brought a book of poems to practise. But when they started scoring Mac Low’s computer poems, working line by line to transform the words into sounds, something clicked.\n15:51\tKevin Davis:\tAs a music teacher, I see people struggle with notation constantly. It’s a very difficult thing to turn symbols into movements, in time. And when they were doing these, this Mac Low stuff, it was effortless. That directly, I think, inspired my thinking about, “OK, what if I then turned speech back into music?” Can I get these . . . can I get these uh [laughs] percussionists to execute rhythms that are more complex than they could with actual musical notation?\n16:29\tNicholas Beauchesne\tMac Low not only adopted methods from computing, also music theory. He studied with composer John Cage and sound, as we heard, was integral to the performance of his work. The Fluxus movement itself spanned multiple countries and multiple fields of practice—not just poetry, but also sculpture, dance, and music.\nSo, when Davis and his students decided to remake Mac Low’s PFR (Permutation, Replacement, and Form) poems in a different genre, creating music from the printed words, it was a very Fluxus thing to do.\nInstead of transcribing the words into notes, they created a series of sonic doodles. The new, re-created score looks on the page like a series of loops and squiggles, each shape corresponding to lines from the poem.\n17:15\tKevin Davis:\tMy concept of this was transformation of elements of the poem into movement, which then would result in sound. And so for literally like the drums are tracing out the letters of the poem on the surface of their instruments. And so just different ways, some of them almost silly, just different ways of transforming this movement into sound in that process. Yeah, I spent a lot of time with the words like saying the words. The four poems that were in the collection that I have were each very different. They were very much like movements of a musical work.\nAre we allowed to pause for a second? I think this would be an easier discussion to have with the book, which I was like, I should have grabbed that book.\nHold on just a second. So Know it’s around here somewhere.\n18:06\tChelsea Miya:\tSo behind me are stills from the interview that I did with Kevin over Zoom. And at this point in the interview, Davis left the frame and rummaged around in the background.\n18:18\tKevin Davis:\tOh, here it is.\n18:20\tChelsea Miya:\tAnd he pulled out a copy of Jackson Mac Low’s Collected Works: Thing of Beauty (2008). The pages are scribbled with notes for his performance, just like he would do for a score. Davis’s favourite poem, the one with a lot of annotations, is “From from David.” He confesses he was more than a little nervous about performing the speaking parts. But for this particular poem, he felt it was important to read the actual text.\n18:48\tKevin Davis:\tI’m so much more comfortable playing a musical instrument than speaking. And especially speaking as performance. There are things you find in the experience of reading one of those kinds of texts over and over. It seems like in a lot of ways more about language itself more than just any kind of emotional idea he’s trying to get across. It’s a kind of anti narrative really.\nWhile like I said before, in the reading. I tried to strike a tone. The funniness is just being like kind of pummelled by this absurdity of, you know, just these different transformations of this very simple idea of like is this is David asking what happened. [laughs]\n19:26\t[Audio From From “From ‘David’” Composed By Kevin Davis From Three PFR-3 Poems By Jackson Mac Low For Percussion Quartet And Speaker, 2017; Performance By UVA Percussion Quartet.]\tWhere did David ask what happened? How did David ask? Where did David happen to have asked me? Asking what had been, happened. David asks, had anything happened when David asked who was there? When David asked, how did David ask what happened, what had been happening when David was asking what had been happening, what was happening when David was asking happened? How had David been asked what had happened? When did David ask what had happened? Whom—\n20:08\tKevin Davis:\t[Live reading from the interview] It’s from David. David asked whether anything had been happening. Whom did David ask? What happened?\nWell, it’s like I messed up a couple times. I really, when I did it, especially in the recording and performance, I had to practise some to be ready. It’s not a tongue twister exactly, but it almost gets in that territory. There’s just so much repetition, it can get a little difficult. This one more than any of them is really a lot like reading music. Even the most notated classical piece involves improvisation on the part of the performer. It may be just in small ways.\n20:44\tKevin Davis:\tAnd it made me think about that. This feels like the kind of improvising you do when you play Mozart or Bach or something. And then you kind of like put little ends of phrases that you’re you. But in the moment, if you know it well enough, you’re able to play with it. You’ll all do this end this way this time.\nAnd what I love about this one is that some of the lines have question marks and some don’t. And so you can play around with this thing that’s often unconscious that we do, where we indicate a question through raising the pitch.\n21:23\tNicholas Beauchesne\tDavis’s reading of Mac Low’s computer scores was, in part, inspired by his experiences growing up in Appalachia. One of his first experiences with the live performance of music and voice was at his Baptist Church. When he read Mac Low’s poems, he imagined the relationship between instruments and the voice, the way the spoken text echoes the sounds, as a kind of congregation.\n21:47\tKevin Davis:\tWe did these things, called responsive readings. Have you ever heard of these? So there’ll be whatever text or sometimes Bible verses, and then the pastor will talk and then the congregation, the words will be in bold and you’ll go back and forth. And there are all these hetero-phonic artifacts of like people sort of speaking together. I found them compellingly odd, and it was. It’s such a different way of interacting than singing.\nMe, as a little kid, I thought it was really interesting. Well, it’s just this sound of like 200 people’s voices of all ages kind of like having this resonance together. But like it’s all soft on the edges because of the different ways that people are speaking. And whenever they hit like a “tee” then it’s like “tuh-tuh-tuh.” Right. It’s kind of like dancing around the room, whereas the vowels will all be kind of like these kinds of flowing singing things, you know, like sounds.\n22:51\tChelsea Miya:\tDavis doesn’t just perform computer poems. He also, on occasion, helps write computer programs. Interactive sonic events, people sounding together, have always intrigued him. After reflecting on the parallel practices of church congregations and Fluxus artists, he got to thinking: could these social dynamics of sonic performance be captured and re-created computationally?\n23:20\tAudio from “Elegia” from On Remembrance, 2020; composed by Kevin William Davis using the Murmuration software in collaboration with Eli Stine.\tI worked with a friend, Eli Stein, who’s a fantastic programmer. We came up something that’s a flocking algorithm, a bird flocking algorithm. Fifty little particles of sound, and then they just kind of flock around. You just use that flocking as kind of like a starting point. An agent of kind of chaos to spread things out and then you can stop them, freeze them.\n23:56\tChelsea Miya:\tHave you ever seen flocks of starlings? They move together in this hypnotic way, dancing across the sky, almost like jellyfish or giant misshapen bubbles, stretching and contracting. That behaviour is called Murmuration. And that’s what Davis and his partner dubbed the software: The Murmurator.\nIt’s a tool for creating interactive, multi-channel sound installations. In developing the software, they experimented with increasingly elaborate speaker set-ups, bigger “flocks” so to speak: 50 speakers, then 100, in various configurations.\nOnce you execute the program and the flock takes flight, the particles of sound will move, seemingly independently. The human user, however, is working behind the scenes, “conducting” the performance as it happens by adjusting the settings and creating different flocking patterns.\n24:57\tNicholas Beauchesne\tThere are echoes of these sonic dances in the Jackson Mac Low performances we’ve been hearing. Lately, Davis has been thinking more and more about human-computer interaction and its implications for art and creativity. He’s particularly fascinated by watching computers play games.\n25:16\tKevin Davis:\tI think a lot about chess and how, you know, people were at first very disturbed that no human could beat a computer at chess anymore. But there’s been this evolution of chess playing computers, especially through machine learning, where they’re starting to come up with chess ideas that are coming from an alien planet or something. It’s not things that anybody would have thought of.\nKevin Davis: I would wind up watching these games on YouTube that were like computers playing computers. And first of all, that’s existentially weird, like watching, right? But it’s a strange alien kind of beauty that’s coming out of these games.\n[START MUSIC]\nSo what has happened is now those ideas have reintroduced all kinds of like openings that people maybe had forgotten. There are these ways that like technologies can inspire creativity and actually give people ideas solutions to artistic or creative ideas that they hadn’t considered. Maybe find a part of yourself that you were not able to access.\n26:43\tAudio From “Tape Mark I” By Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint Episode “Printing And Poetry In The Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; Performed By Roman Onufrijchuk.\tThe landscape of your clay mitigates me coldly by your recognizable shape. I am wronged the perspective of your frog feeds me dimly by your wet love. I am raked.\n26:59\tChelsea Miya:\tOur last guest is a choreographer and performer, Kate Sicchio, Associate Professor of Dance and Media Technology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Sicchio explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real-time systems (“About”). We asked her how she made the leap from dancing in her own human body to dancing virtually with technology.\n27:27\tKate Sicchio:\tWay back when I was a high schooler, I had this internship, it was the nineties of the.com boom. So, I worked at what was then a web start-up. It’s so different than what web start-ups are now. [Laughs] But basically, I had this internship where I had taught myself some HTML to make my own geo-cities page. And so they’d give me giant Photoshop files and I would code them into HTML. So that was like my after-school job. And then I also was a dancer. So I would go for my after-school job to dance class and um did a lot of ballet and modern. And then went to do a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in dance and was like, I don’t, I’m not interested in this technology thing, whatever. I’m just gonna be a dancer. And then about halfway through my undergraduate degree, I got injured and I had a bunch of knee surgeries\n28:20\tKate Sicchio:\tI still have knee problems. My knee is really swollen right now as we speak. Um but I had to take six months off from dancing. So I went to my school’s multimedia department. I was like, I know HTML. Do you have any classes I can take? And they were like, take anything. [Laughs] So I started doing actually a lot of video work at the time and then these other sorts of different interactive classes and then when I was well enough to dance, someone kind of mentioned kind of offhand to me like, oh, well, why don’t you combine the dance courses and the multimedia courses? Why don’t these two things come together? And that was my epiphany moment. Like oh yeah, these things could come together. I really started, yeah, working a lot with um in particular video projections and making them interactive in real time. From there I went to the UK to do a master’s degree in digital performance. I kind of kept going on that trajectory and now I’m still doing it like 20 years later.\n29:30\tChelsea Miya:\tCan you describe some of the collaborations that you’ve done with robots and the things that are exciting but also challenging about working with robot collaborators and duetting with them in a sense?\n29:43\tKate Sicchio:\tI work a lot with um Dr. Patrick Martin who’s now at University of Richmond, who is a roboticist. We created our first piece together, it was performed in 2022, called Amelia and the Machine.\n[Audio starts playing. From “Amelia and the Machine,” 2022; danced by Amelia Virtue; robotics by Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo; music by Melody Loveless and Kate Sicchio.]\nSo, that was a duet for a small manipulator robot, which is basically a Rumba with an arm. [Laughs]. And it’s not very tall, it’s under 2 ft tall. Um And then Amelia is the dancer, Amelia Virtue. So, the aim of that piece was just to like, can we do this, can we put a robot and a person on stage together and what will that mean?\nSo, we’re really interested in the idea of human-robot teams. And a big part of that for me is I want them to improvise together. How can they like inform each other’s decision-making about movement together? We actually created this machine learning algorithm where Amelia could teach the robot a new gesture on stage by manipulating its arm.\n30:48\tKate Sicchio:\tSo she literally like grabs the arm, there’s sensors on the motors that can see where she’s put it. She only has to do that three times and then it’s learned it, it stored it, it can call it back later in the performance. So that was our small moment of improv in that piece.\nBut actually to do that became its own engineering accomplishment and that actually became like a new machine learning algorithm, which we call dancing from demonstration algorithm. So, so we had this like small like discovery of this algorithm in the process of making this piece.\n31:26\tChelsea Miya:\tThe role of empathy seems to come up in your design process in terms of imagining how these robots and robot bodies would move differently and perceive the world differently and us differently.\n31:43\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah, I think that’s part of it. Well, I guess you just realize so quickly that they’re not human. [Laughs] And like it’s a thing that comes up a lot. I’m asked like, why don’t you put costumes on your robots? And I’m like, they’re not people, they shouldn’t be seen as people. Let’s not like make them cute little characters. [Laughs]\nEven like the moving of the robot arm, we call it an arm, but it’s nothing like our arm, it doesn’t have the same joints or the same movement pathways. So, even when you’re choreographing the robot arm, you’re just moving five motors. And you become very aware of that very quickly. Like, it’s not an arm.\n32:24\tNicholas Beauchesne\tKate explains that audiences connect to the robot performers in surprising ways. Often, the people who come to her shows will respond in emotional, affective ways to the machines on stage.\n32:36\tKate Sicchio:\tSo, I think because Amelia and the machine start with her physically touching the robot, it really sets up this like very intimate relationship with the robot. And she’s very careful. She’s like is very intentional, right, in teaching it the gesture. She wants to get it just right. So here’s this person touching and teaching this robot. And it does become this like, yeah, they clearly have established this relationship together, Amelia and the robot. And people have read this in all kinds of ways. So, I have a young son. So, um he was a toddler when that piece came out. So everyone was like, this is about you and your son because the robot’s the size of a toddler. And I was like, no, it’s not! But [laughs] But um, but yeah, they just saw a woman and this toddler-sized machine and this intimate thing of teaching a toddler-sized thing. So it automatically read like that to a lot of people. And then also this, um, yeah, this clear thing where they’re dancing together but not like, um, often not in unison that sets up this relationship that they’re different but working together, um, that people really read into as well, yeah.\n33:49\tChelsea Miya:\tHow does being a choreographer give you different insights into technology and code that might not occur to a traditional coder?\n33:57\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah, there are a few ways, I think. One is just expert movers. So I try to teach this to my dance students all the time. You’re an expert mover. People need you to share your insights on the body. So there’s a lot of like systems that are being made now. Even our phones, right? Like we carry around a computer on our body all the time. We have all these gestures that we do to make it work. But these aren’t necessarily being come-up with by people who are very into using their body, right? They might be computer scientists or if you’re lucky, they’re UX designer who’s interested in the body. But usually they’re a UX designer who’s more like, oh, well, if it takes more than three clicks, people get bored. [Laughs] Right? But our interfaces are becoming more and more about the body.\n34:55\tKate Sicchio:\tAnd so there’s this place where dancers’ knowledge really could feed into how we design our technologies. Also, how we understand them. So um I’m really interested in things like how gestures hold meaning or even like an emotion, right?\nSo like if I’m like doing something really heavy and sudden it’s gonna look like a punch, right? So like if I’m gonna design like a gesture on my phone that’s heavy and sudden it’s like I’m angry. That has a whole yeah, design approach to it, right? Or I love to pick on the gesture of Tinder, right?\nSo you’re constantly flicking just like light and indirect and kind of careless. When we say, oh yeah, yeah, I’m swiping. There is a carelessness to that. This isn’t how you’re gonna find a spouse [laughs]. Because you’re just throwing people away. [Laughs]\nSo, yeah, I think about dancers as being able to bring that knowledge to tech and design.\n35:56\tChelsea Miya:\tI was curious too about like, whether your work changes the way you observe and perceive like technology in the, in the world. Do you ever, like, see machines, machines or tech and be like, wow, that’s a beautiful dance?\n36:06\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. Yeah. Actually I do all the time. [Laughs] Yeah, I’m trying to think of something I’ve seen recently where I was like, oh I love this. But yeah, I have. I see these like machine choreography everywhere.\n[Audio from crane loading at the construction site.]\nOh, I saw some really beautiful—they’re always building. Oh, I guess in every city now. But in Richmond we have a lot of building going on. So these cranes were moving, um, and sort of like shifting. They were like counterpoint cranes on the skyline. [Laughs] And I was like, oh look at that dance. [Laughs] Yeah.\n36:39\tChelsea Miya:\tThere is something hypnotic about technology and the way that it moves and this sort of kinetic aspect.\n36:46\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. I think that’s like a draw as a choreographer for me for sure. Because you, you say robot and everyone assumes these kinds of like sudden jerky movements, but they’re so smooth and they do have dynamics and they do have potential for like moving in different ways. That’s what gets exciting as a choreographer. It’s not like just sequencing. You can make a range of dynamics and all the stuff that gets exciting as a mover. Yeah.\n37:18\tNicholas Beauchesne\tKate performs live coated dances where the code itself is projected in real time on the walls ceiling. Even the performer’s bodies. She’s sometimes seated at the side of the stage at a desk with her laptop. Yet even when she decentres herself, her embodied interactions with the computer program, her finger strikes on the keys, even sips of water she takes are a crucial extension of the dance in this nexus of performer performance and audience of process and product. We again, think of the Fluxus movement. We asked her about that movement enduring legacy today.\n37:57\tKate Sicchio:\tYeah. And I was also talking about Fluxus prompts the other day in terms of like people talking about AI prompts, like oh, for Midjourney or whatever, giving it a prompt. And I was like, is this just a new way of doing Fluxus art? Like that’s only what they did. They just wrote prompts, right? [Laugha[\nAre we all just Fluxus artists now? Yeah [Laughs].\n38:19\tNicholas Beauchesne\tWhether used for poetry, music, or dance, or any other creative medium, algorithms have such generative potential. Algorithmic art is so peculiar in that it is seemingly chaotic, random, and illogical, yet intensely rule-bound and orderly.\nWe would like to leave the last word to another computer artist, the Italian poet and programmer Nanni Balestrini. The following poem, entitled “Tape Mark I,” is a computer-generated remix of three source texts: Michihito Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, Paul Goldwin’s The Mystery of the Elevator, and the philosophical treatise attributed to the sage Lao Tzu’s, the Tao Te Ching (Balestrini 55). The original “experiment” was performed on an IBM 7070 computer at the Electronic Centre of the Lombard Provinces Savings Bank in Milan in October, 1961 (55). The reader is Voiceprint producer Roman Onufrijchuk, who also read the previous two interludes of computer poetry. Onufrijchuk has an admirable knack for mimicking the monotone, mechanical voice of an imagined computer author and reader.\n39:28\tAudio from “Tape Mark I” by Nanni Balestrini [Voiceprint episode “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era,” 20 May 1981]; performed by Roman Onufrijchuk.\tWhile the multitude of things comes into being in the blinding fireball, they all returned to their roots. They expand rapidly until he moved his fingers slowly when it reached the stratosphere and lay motionless without speaking 30 times brighter than the sun endeavouring to grasp. I envisaged their return until he moved his fingers slowly in the blinding fireball, they all returned to their roots, hair between lips and 30 times brighter than the sun lay motionless. Without speaking, they expand rapidly. Endeavouring to grasp the summit.\n40:08\tSpokenWeb Theme Song\tCan you hear me?\n40:11\tMaia Harris:\tThe 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. Our producers this month are Chelsea Miya, a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University’s Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Nicholas Beauchesne, a musician and instructor at the University of Alberta, who also engineered this episode’s audio. The score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.\nNick Beauchesne engineered this episode’s audio and the 2024 SpokenWeb symposium.\nParticipants are our live studio audience.\n41:08\tLive Audience\t[Cheers and applause]\n41:11\tMaia Harris:\tOur usual hosts are Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod, our supervising producer is me, Maia Harris. Our sound designer is James Healy, and our transcriptionist is Yara Ajeeb.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb 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 at SpokenWeb Canada.\nStay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for Shortcuts, with the amazing Katherine McLoed, short stories about how literature sounds.\nYou were a wonderful audience.\n41:52\tLive Audience\t[Cheers and applause]"],"score":3.2550304},{"id":"9649","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 S5 Trailer, Welcome to Season 5!, 18 September 2023, Harris, Healy, McGregor, McLeod and Mix"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/"],"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":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","James Healy","Hannah Mcgregor","Katherine McLeod","Zoe Mix"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah Mcgregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Zoe Mix\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/6511fd80-29e0-41f2-8ad9-dda3420119fd/audio/a6369593-95d4-46c0-a56e-c005845f0179/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"trailer-v5-master.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,675,682 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"trailer-v5-master\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-5/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-09-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"contents":["The SpokenWeb Podcast is back for another season as we continue our quest to uncover “what literature sounds like.”\n\nWith a whole new line-up of episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network, we’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing, voice, and poetics, and much much more.\n\nOur fearless host Katherine McLeod is back and will be joined by Hannah McGregor, host of Seasons 1-3. Welcome back Hannah!\n\nWe have something for everyone curious about the affordances of literature, sound, history, and the amorphous “archive,” so join us for monthly episodes of innovative audio scholarship.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout! Cheers to Season 5 ~\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Soft strummed guitar music plays and ends]\nWhat does the SpokenWeb podcast sound like?\n\n(00:10)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Quiet percussion music begins to play] In the fourth season of the SpokenWeb podcast, we conversed with a living archive.\n(00:15)\tComputerized Voice\tHello, and welcome to the Fred Wah Digital Archive.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe listened to firsthand perspectives on living with wildfires in the Okanagan Valley.\n(00:24)\tSharon Thesen\tBy the time, I think, they started trying to put it out, it was out of control.\n(00:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe dove deeper into the sounds of data.\n(00:32)\tAdegbola\tHow much more a role will language play in the information age?\n(00:36)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe asked, what is sound design?\n(00:40)\tMiranda\tText, forms, travel, forms constrained, various forms overlap and intersect.\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe explored the impact of recording technology on how poetry finds its audiences.\n(00:53)\tFred Wah\tIn those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(01:01)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe considered the stakes of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n(01:06)\tJentery\tWe might want to, for good reason, debunk the idea that listening is cheating or that, you know, books are not meant to be listened to.\n(01:12)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd we heard what libraries actually sound like.\n(01:15)\tDan Hackborn\tLike [Dan makes a nasally “wah” sound with his mouth] and like a [Dan makes a continuous “thunk” sound with his mouth].\n(01:20)\tKatherine McLeod\tOh, and we also went to talk therapy. [Percussion music ends abruptly]\n(01:25)\tPhone Voice 2\tOkay, well, why don’t you start by telling me how long you’ve been feeling this way.\n(01:30)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Percussion music begins again] My name is Katherine McLeod and I’m the voice behind Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast feed. And I’ve been the solo host of the SpokenWeb podcast for this past season. This season I’ll be joined by Hannah McGregor, who is back. Yes, you might recognize her voice as the host of seasons one through three. Welcome back, Hannah.\n(01:51)\tHannah McGregor\tThank you, Katherine. It’s great to be back. And I am so excited to co-host season five with you and to work with our new production team: supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healey, and returning transcriber Zoe Mix.\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season we’ll continue exploring what literature sounds like with all news stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb Network. We’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing voice and poetics, and much more. Subscribe to The SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And join us for season five. [Percussion music ends and guitar strumming music plays and then ends]\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549763391488,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":3.2550304}]